Bronze. bronze,5 x 26 x 14cm.
Plaster, 51cm x 5cm. Edition of 3.
Plywood, Masonite, brass found objects, dimensions variable.
Framed photographs, 53 x 70 cm. Edition of 2.
Copper rod, silver solder, found coins and concrete object. 70 x 30 x 40 cm.
PhD Examination held at MADA Faculty Gallery, March, 2021.
Abstract for the Exegesis, Market Values
Taking as its site a second-hand market in the outer Western suburbs of Melbourne, but with origins in a Chor Bazaar market in Bangalore India, my doctoral project, Market Values, asks how art records an engagement with the world, through encounters with the materials and objects that can be found in a second hand-market. Market Values presents this engagement with the world in the materiality of objects I have explored, investigations of the places in which they can be found, and their transformation through sculptural processes that highlights how these objects circulate in the world within various systems of exchange.
Through practice-led research, the project considers the changing values of used objects and the apparatus that displays them. These considerations of value take into account the connections and differences between an object as base material and its symbolic or semiotic value. A focus on the technical processes involved in reproducing objects allows me to mobilise used objects into new assemblages that re-evaluate their past and future potential.
In this process, a series of key questions arise: What are the chronologies and passages of objects? Can we use them to imagine different spaces and times that extend beyond their immediate location? How does the journey of objects originate, end or continue, and how does the market (and later, the artist) assemble and gather them in a fashion that may allow us to picture this journey? Do these objects also reveal a similar passage and rhythm to the movement of people on a global scale?
In a globalised epoch where general markets of exchange are increasingly delocalised, the second-hand market presents an alternative, seemingly uncomplicated and simple display of commerce and trade where goods and materials are temporarily gathered and dispersed, exchanged and circulated for cash, as both trash and treasure. People gather, while objects accumulate in a passage between use and dereliction. The marketplace – a site where the arrangement of many things, objects and materials points to elsewhere and some other time – sits at an interface or meeting place, between what is local, and what lies beyond that immediate location.