June 13th – July 5th 2008
For its third exhibition of 2009 Supplement presents new work by Luke McCreadie.
McCreadie’s exhibition takes the form of an index of his practice. The show consists of a diverse and divergent body of work produced in the last year. Although disparate in medium and approach McCreadie’s work is linked through enigmatic visual and conceptual associations. The indexical nature of the presentation of the works allows for unexpected connections and links to be made and highlights the heterogeneous, and multifaceted nature of McCreadies’ practice.
McCreadie practice is defined through a complex and shifting set of interests and engagements with the world. It is influenced by the minutiae of daily life and the moments of possibility that lie in the often unobserved details. It is underpinned by a constant process of making that attempts to make sense of the multifarious network of associations and relationships that exist all around us.
The motif of hands often appears in different formulations. In With These Hands McCreadie takes an iconic poster of Jimmie Hendrix and sands off the entire image leaving only the hands oddly suspended in space. This idea of hands as symbols of labour recurs throughout McCreadies practice.
Language and its representation is also a recurrent theme in the work. McCreadie is interested in the way words exist in the world and how through their saturation, there is a point where they become nonsense. On one wall of the gallery a noticeboard covered in photographs, observations and bits of found text is a work that functions as an examination into the way words exist all around us. This is also developed in Untitled (Boulder), which is a large sculpture of a boulder peppered with three-dimensional letters.
The title of the exhibition comes from the story of Pinochio and it is this sense of objects becoming animated that pervades the work. Though artistic gestures McCreadie vivifies everyday objects in a way that takes away their traditional function and renders them strange and enigmatic. In doing this he poses questions about the way we navigate and respond to the world around us.
