ROAD TO BOURKE - Alex Selenitsch
ROAD TO BOURKE - exhibition by Alex Selenitsch, grahame galleries + editions, Brisbane, November/December 2017.
Alex Selenitsch
ROAD TO BOURKE
drawings, objects, books
grahame galleries + editions, Brisbane
November/December 2017
In 2011, I drove from Coff’s Harbour to Bourke, over the border to Cunnamulla, and then back to Brisbane. While the coastal parts of the journey were across hills and undulations, most of the territory we drove through was flat: very flat, and with very few features.
Most of the time, I sat in my car, looking towards a horizon with little shapes scattered across it. Whenever I stopped at the side of the road, I saw small bushes, bits of road-kill and lots of cotton bits. Dots at my feet, dots up ahead. In between these was the vast space of the country, land and sky.
As an architect, I am very familiar with the combination of plan and profile (or elevation) drawings, which are then to be imagined as an object or space. And here it was in the landscape. Back in Melbourne, I began to draw and make objects using a trapezium shape as a starting point, with the top edge as the horizon in profile, and the sloping edge for the road edge, in plan, leading to that horizon. The drawings led to objects, and to sketchbooks and a hand-made book. In the book, the lines and edges that are in the drawings are given by the alphabet or by single-line texts.
AS
October2017
artist’s notes to the exhibition
View the exhibition page at grahame galleries + editions.
