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What It Means to be Me, Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, 26 July 2015

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Kaldor Public Art Project’s pilot regional engagement program wrapped up last weekend. I’m elated, exhausted, proud and a bit overwhelmed by its success and all the very positive feedback we’ve received from the participants and various stakeholders.

Below are some images from the final exhibition, held last weekend at the Dubbo Regional Gallery, Western Plains Cultural Centre. The exhibition was opened by the Hon. Troy Grant, NSW Minister for the Arts and John Kaldor, director of Kaldor Public Art Projects.

Photos: Alex Wisser / Kaldor Public Art Projects


WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ME.

There’s an immediacy and honesty to performance art that lends itself, perhaps more than any other form of art, to an exploration of what it means to exist in any one particular moment in time.

Over the last 10 weeks, seven rather extraordinary local teenagers have pioneered their own understanding of performance art as part of Kaldor Public Art Project’s Pilot Regional Engagement Program. This pilot, which has formed a central part of the wider education and public program for the recent Project 30 – Marina Abramovic: In Residence at Sydney’s Pier 2/3, culminates today in this very special one-day exhibition, What It Means to be Me.

Throughout the program, the participants have explored and tested ideas of presence, movement, the role of the body in art and how we interrogate and construct ideas about ourselves and about the world around us.

The seven works presented here express their very personal experiences and enquiries about love, misunderstanding, imagination, disconnection, social expectation, empathy and something of the magic of Marina.

In presenting these beautifully deft explorations of what it means to be them at this moment in time, they hope also to ask, what it does it mean to be you?

Artists:

Justen Beehag

Caitlyn Coman-Sargent

Grace Farmilo

Shanae Gosper

Kate Hagan

Clare Noonan

Sam Read

  

The Kaldor Public Art Project Pilot Regional Engagement Program has been supported by Arts NSW and the Federal Ministry for the Arts in partnership with Western Plains Cultural Centre and Orana Arts.

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I acknowledge the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the unceded land on which I live and work and I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.