ARTICULATE: Room To Move opens Friday 11 March 6-8pm

8.3.16

Room To Move opens Friday 11 March 6-8pm

Articulate Directors Show

Open Friday - Sunday 12 -27 March, 11am-5pm

Artists talks: Saturdays at 2pm

Saturday 12 March: Gary Warner, Margaret Roberts, Jenny Brown

Saturday 19 March: Fiona Kemp, Virginia Hilyard, Linden Braye

Saturday 26 March: Emma Wise, Sue Callanan, Lesley Giovanelli, Julian Woods

Room to Move ROOMSHEET

Room to Move includes work by Linden Braye, Jenny Brown, Sue Callanan, Lesley Giovanelli, Virginia Hilyard, Fiona Kemp, Francesca Mataraga, Margaret Roberts, Gary Warner, Emma Wise and Julian Woods - artists who, in 2016, are either Directors of, or in other ways work to run Articulate .

Articulate began five years ago when a group of artists with a common background in the Sculpture Studio at Sydney College of the Arts found an opportunity to fill a gap in the Sydney art scene that had long effected them and other installation artists. The gap was caused by the increasingly institutional nature of otherwise sympathetic exhibition spaces, that might welcome installations but then expect them to be constructed within a few days. Twenty-four-hour access to devise and construct work in situ had become harder to find. We wanted a place where artists are welcome to work with the relationships that can be formed between artwork and location by actually devising and making artwork in it.

These frustrations and enthusiasms brought us to accept an opportunity to rent a newly renovated space on the ground floor of 497 Parramatta Road Leichhardt. The name 'articulate' was proposed, to emphasise our intention to give voice to space— to 'articulate the space'. We called it a 'project space' rather than 'gallery' to signal our interest in the open-ended and process-oriented nature of experimentation and live art, to invite artists to experiment with exhibition-practice as much as art-practice, and to remind ourselves that an exhibition space is also a live space that is not contained by the building walls.

We described our agenda as spatial, experimental, critical, cross-disciplinary and artist-centred. We wanted to suggest that, as much as possible, Articulate is a place where artists and our practices are respected and where the lateral thinking of art practice is standard; where content is sought in form, material, action and construction, etc., as much as in representation; where critique and reflection are taken seriously; and where art conventions are questioned—especially the conventions of spatial autonomy (eg through installation practices) and of art speciality (eg through ‘idea dictates form’, where people see themselves as artists first, and think of their art-disciplines as part of their toolkit). Underlying it all however was a desire to also show what we think is the most interesting artwork available.

In the five years since then, there have been over 120 projects and exhibitions showing the work of the 350 artists currently listed on the index of both Articulate blogs. Collectively they represent a variety of practices that either overlap with Articulate's spatial and experimental focus, or form part of their wider sympathetic context. And we plan to continue for a while longer.

Over this time the group running Articulate has also expanded to now include 12 artists, and Room to Move shows examples of their work. Artist talks will be held in the project space each Saturday at 2pm.