macro-stuffed-supper by Truc Truong / Horizonites by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse

Truc Troung

Truc Truong (b. 1987) is an artist living and working on the traditional lands of the Peramangk and Kaurna people, South Australia. Working with assemblage and sculpture, her practice often draws influence from post-colonialism, using a range of materials and processes to explore the human condition. Truong’s work is a fine line between rage and humour, convoluted memories and spaces, and the critique of power structures she attempts to escape from.

In its purest form, art as power begins with the ability of art to reflect both our individual and collective selves, to explore and to interrogate through that reflection, and to leave the viewer irrevocably changed. However, explorations of power through art also remind us of the flawed nature of such phenomena as power imbalance and power structure.

In macro-stuffed-supper Truc Truong brings forth such discussions of power, across many of its various forms. Here play and playfulness become the material realisation to explorations of power that are complex and multilayered. Non-Vietnamese viewers, especially White/Western/European audiences, are presented with soft toys, slowly spinning and burning atop a large table – a rotisserie to be eaten by other soft toys. In this way, Truong uses play, colour, and movement to create a disarming sense of mischievousness that belies a more serious critique of maximalist capitalism, narcissism, colonisation, truth telling, life and death, time and reality, religion as part of imperialism, classism, and more.

Importantly, Vietnamese viewers of macro-stuffed-supper are afforded an aesthetic that draws upon the everyday of Vietnamese life, whether within Vietnam itself or among the Vietnamese diaspora across Australia and the world. Truong’s use of these everyday objects within a staged and playful tableau provides Vietnamese audiences with the opportunity for introspective interrogation. With the soft toy rotisserie spinning above a bed of burning incense, similar to an ancestral altar, Truong’s most serious critique of the role of religion within colonisation and imperialism is amplified to expose such issues as internalised racism and classism. Truong is able to bring into sharp focus multilayered critiques of the way in which power manifests to become imbalanced and weighted through systems, institutions and structures, all to favour the privileged few. Truths related to colonisation’s impact on such matters as religion, time and reality, food culture, skin colour and more are uncomfortably amplified through the juxtaposition of Vietnamese religious objects with soft toys and the sass of play.

Due to its aesthetics, viewers may initially consider macro-stuffed-supper to be fun and playful only, missing the exploration of more serious themes. White/Western/ European viewers may even view macro-stuffed-supper as exotic, different, or ‘multicultural’, given the exhibition’s use of everyday objects from Vietnamese life. However, Truong draws in viewers of macro-stuffed-supper through the work’s lively aesthetic to critique the many racist and classist power structures that exist throughout the world. In this way, it is Truong who demonstrates power through macro-stuffed-supper in what becomes the ultimate power play.

Power Play by Dr Eugenia Flynn

Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse

Our collaborative research practice extends across medium and form, between academic and contemporary arts contexts. The work we undertake is broadly united by considerations of human/environmental relationships, spanning extraction, industry, representation and containment, for example. Our work considers the vital agency of matter and more-than-human actants, with an attentiveness to intimate and extended temporalities and the complexities of place.
We utilise sculptural and installation based practice, archival methodologies, documentation, collaboration and text in the realisation of our work. Our work has been exhibited across so-called Australia and internationally across artist-run and institutional spaces. 2023 sees further exhibition outcomes across Australia, and our appointment as Monash University’s MADA Gallery Curators-in-Residence.

It is said that there was once a poem that divided a people. Whilst it was nothing special, although certainly nothing derivative, the verse cleaved a community in two. For some who heard it, the poem instilled a sense of awe or wonderment at the horizon — the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance. They saw in this woozy line a new land, a plain of potentiality. Their critics, however, decried them for their rejection of the actual plains in favour of a land that was illusory. It is said that this schism continues to reverberate, and is the basis of the distrust those who live in the interior of the continent have for those who occupy the edges.

Horizonites emerges from our interest in the devotion that underpinned this conflict and the way in which time, planetarity and connectivity tangle themselves about the horizon line - that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. The Horizonites are a fictional faction, brought to life by author Gerald Murnane in The Plains (1982). This novel unfurls amidst the oppressive heat of the inland and the rustle of yellowing brush spreading out across paddocks and landscapes. Murnane’s prose captures the diffuse, shifting and obsessive qualities of the horizon, telling the story of those who seek some way in which to understand, and capture the horizon. This exhibition brings together works submitted by photographers from across the globe, realising an archive from a multiplicity of horizons distributed across time and space. Horizonites is an attempt to manifest the horizon; inviting, inscrutable and ineffable.