Curated by Eleen Deprez
29 April – 3 June 2023
Koen Broucke (Belgium)
Jingwei Bu (SA)
Kristian Burford (USA)
Bridget Currie (SA)
Samantha Faehrmann (SA)
Louise Haselton (SA)
Reniere&Depla (Belgium)
Shirley Wu 吴建珍 (SA)
Read the catalogue essay here
Love Object Object Love is an exhibition of artworks and objects that hold traces, manifest images or act as symbols of love. The artists reflect on the various positive and negative affective states of this powerful and familiar emotion, from ecstatic or contemplative pleasure to felt experiences of anguish, trauma, and consolation. They consider love as a personal, private emotion with its roots in memory, as a public, shared source of pleasure and community, as devotional or intellectual, and as passionate or erotic. The artists work in a wide range of media, spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, video, ceramics, textiles and kinetic art. There is little conventional beauty here – instead, pleasure is found in everyday moments and objects, in substances and surfaces pregnant with meaning. The human body appears too. Sometimes unidealized and fragmentary, and sometimes grotesque and abject, it intimates vulnerability and resilience, and conveys powerful embodied emotions. Altogether, Love Object Object Love shows the flotsam and jetsam of the broader narratives of human life and love in its diverse forms, and it shows how, through a language of objects, artists retrieve and construct meaning and value from those narratives.
Photography: Sam Roberts
Koen Broucke (Belgium) is an artist, historian, and musician. He is a research fellow at the Glasgow School of Art (2005) and has a PhD in the Arts from KU Leuven (Belgium). His works have been exhibited at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana Roma (Italy), Art Autun Biennale for Contemporary Art (France), SMAK (Belgium), Haus der Niederlande (Germany), and Stedelijk Museum Breda (The Netherlands). He has undertaken residencies at Academica Belgica (Italy), Van Gogh House (The Netherlands), Cité des Arts (France), and Raumars (Finland).
Jingwei Bu (SA) is a visual artist working across media and disciplines. She is a recent graduate from the Adelaide Central School of Art (2021) and has exhibited at Nexus Arts, FELTspace, the Adelaide FilmFestival, and The Mill Adelaide. She was the recipient of the Nexus Arts Residence in 2022 for her Pouring Tea until it is All Evaporated, which is travelling to the Woollahra Gallery (NSW) winter 2023.
Kristian Burford (USA) is a hyper-realist sculptor. His work was shown in Divided Worlds, the 2018 Adelaide Biennale. He is a former Samstag Scholarship recipient (1998) and lives and works in California.
Bridget Currie (SA) is an artist working in a wide range of materials and techniques. She is a former Samstag Scholarship recipient (2011) and has spent time working abroad in Japan, Belgium, Spain, the UK, and Lithuania. Her Message from the Meadow was the inaugural Porter Street Commission at ACE Open.
Samantha Faehrmann (SA) is an artist and arts worker. She runs the Butter and Gravy Studio and makes both functional ceramics (under the name I AM SAM) and creative work. She is the Program Producer at Guidlhouse and previously studied architecture at the University of South Australia.
Louise Haselton (SA) is an artist making sculptural works using found materials. She taught at the University of South Australia. In 2019 she was the featured artist of the SALA festival, held a solo exhibition at the The Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum, and was awarded the SALA/Wakefield Press monograph publication.
Reniere&Depla (Belgium) are artists and curators who live and work together. Their painting practice draws and abstracts from photographic material, sometimes found footage, sometimes self-made. They have curated multiple exhibitions in Belgium and France, including the two first editions of Art Autun Biennale of Contemporary Art (France), The Apocryphal Cabinet of the Adornes (Belgium), La Part Des Anges (Belgium), and the upcoming The World Beyond the House (Belgium). Their growing oeuvre is documented in three monographs.
Shirley Wu 吴建珍 (SA) is an emerging visual artist, jeweller, and object designer. She graduated from the University of South Australia and previously studied the BA Jewellery and Accessories (Middlesex University, UK) and at the Fleur International College of Professional Aromatherapy (Hong Kong). She was the recipient of the Graduate in Residence at Canberra Glassworks in 2022, Artist in Residence at Nexus Arts (2023) and the Sauerbier House Artist in Residence (2023).