Walking into the exhibition I could immediately feel that this was not going to be a regular exhibition that I’d been to before. With stark white walls and sparse artworks, the gallery really lent itself to the idea of recycled waste with no extra ‘unnecessary’ aesthetics which could potentially distract from the intended subject of the viewers gaze, the artworks. Upon entry to the exhibition we were greeted by a woman named Jordan who ran us through the ins and outs of the space and the works that inhabited it, we were told that a total of 31 artists, both men and women, were asked to participate in the exhibit and were allowed to work with anything under the sun with the one prerequisite being that it was in fact recycled. Materials within the exhibition ranged quite dramatically, from more standard materials such as timber and metal to far more abstract materials such as pigs blood, and everything in between. In our culture today we view ‘waste’ as something that is a by product of another that can simply be burnt or buried then forgotten, and yet there are much better ways of dealing with waste as this group of artists are displaying. Inside the exhibition the artworks were all laid out around the circumference of the square room all facing towards the one central work in the middle of the room which in my opinion epitomised what ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ was all about; the central work was a large pile of debris and waste collected and placed in the centre by all the individual artists. The Waste itself was all of their (the individual artists) respective waste that was created whilst making their works of art, so not a single scrap was wasted.
As I mentioned briefly above, The bland stark white walls of the exhibition which aides the idea of recycled waste with no extra aesthetic is also helped by the dispersion of the works as well as the quiet nature of the space. These combined attributes, I found anyway, gave the viewer an experience that saw them really connect with the idea behind the exhibition itself because it, in a way, made you feel at one with the works themselves; made you feel that the exhibition space wasn’t only for holding the artworks but was itself a work of ark too. The one artwork which really drew my eye for the entirety of my stay at ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ was, as I have briefly already mentioned, the centre piece of the gallery. With no visible name for the piece surrounding it, the artwork really did stand out as being some sort of ‘open work’ which Pierre Bourdieu talks about in his work ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ as being a work open to interpretation, having many different meanings and allowing the audience to view and interpret as they wish. As previously said as well, the piece is a combined work of all 31 artists from many different walks of life, both male and female, bringing in the important topic of gender equality within design which hasn’t always been the case historically, as Jane Connory talks about in her 2017 document ‘Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design’ in which she says “a woman’s freedom to pursue a graphic design career has been a struggle against the established social order and its gendered expectations.” ‘Welcome to Wasteland’ displays, as well as many other ideas, equality of all sorts through the exhibition and the different artists displaying their respective talents within the gallery.
Bibliography
P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, introduction, pg 4, 1984
J. Connory, Plotting the Historical Pipeline of Women in Graphic Design, pg 2, 2017
Welcome to Wasteland, 2019
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/welcome-to-wasteland/
G. Keulemans, Welcome to Wasteland exhibition, catalogue essay, 2019
http://solar.friendsand.associates/manifesto
Design Methods 