Blair Trethowan

On March 3rd Melbourne gallerist Blair Trethowan passed away. Blair was a director of Uplands Gallery, a skateboarder, an artist and a big personality around Melbourne. There are few words to express the loss that his passing leaves with his family, friends and colleagues. Blair was a great patron in his generation.

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Uplands Gallery will re-open on Saturday 1st of April with its new program for 2006. The gallery invites you to attend the opening and pay respect to Blair Trethowan. Business as Unusual is an Uplands Team Show. Opening: 2:00 - 5:00 pm. The exhibition will run until Thursday April 13.

installation: ACW, Sharon Goodwin, Julia Gorman

+Plus Factors

curated by Juliana Engberg as part of the Melbourne Festival

in locations around the streets, laneways and cafes of Melbourne
March 2006

installation view ACCA Inverted Topology Justin Andrews Anna Finlayson Danny Lacy Kyle Jenkins Quentin Sprague Masato Takasaka Mimi Tong

Something was seeping stealthily from a fissure in the northern cliff-face of ACCA this March. The building appeared to have burst its seams, vomiting forth abstract geometric entrails. Or was it a rare angular orchid taken root in a crack in a ruin's edifice? Or were we looking at a sucker on the side of the mothership, once symbiotic, now a mutating, proliferating, parasitic outgrowth?
Presenting a model of teamwork unconcerned with medals, time trials or finishing lines, Inverted Topology was invited to participate in +Plus Factor, ACCA's response to the Commonwealth Games. Scraps raided from ACCA's store–room were stacked, leaned, balanced and propped against its rusty side in a composition of layered elements that transversed the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. An internal logic infused the work, it obeyed a set of strict but mutable conditions set up by the interplay of material, site and the space of negotiation between the artists.
"The motivating insight behind topology is that some geometric problems depend not on the exact shape of the objects involved, but rather on the way they are connected together."[1] Inverted Topology applies this relational emphasis to the material elements in their projects and to the human elements of the group. As a model of collaboration, it offers the freedom of subsumption into the group dynamic, relinquishing authorship and sole responsibility, facilitating creative spontaneity.
With the subversive presence of a circus camped at the city's edge, I.T.'s temporary construction teased its host, ACCA, and its neighbour, Vault whose creator, Ron Robertson–Swann complained in 2002, "There's too many committees. The great works of art created in the past were (by) individuals who were cultivated, who exercised their taste and judgment and conviction. And had a vision."[2] This cult of genius has no place on I.T.'s committee.

Helen Walter
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology
2. The Age, October 03 2002