Susan Jacobs and Nicholas Mangan respond to Simon Starling: In Speculum, discussing their own research-based practices with a focus on their shared concerns and engagement with materiality, scientific enquiry, site-specificity, the studio/workshop, research, scale, technology, and sculptural process.
Susan Jacobs’s art encompasses drawing, sculpture, video and sitespecific installations. Whatever the media, she has a consistent focus on the properties of materials and spaces, directed by the processes involved in drawing. Jacobs works with a diverse array of materials, referencing the invisible and often indecipherable ‘stuff’ of the world that surrounds us – atomic and sub-atomic particles, metals, physical forces and environments. She is also fascinated by ‘the latent potential of sites’ and the metaphorical possibilities inherent in them. Jacobs’s practice is an extended exercise in problem-solving: using an intuitive sense of logic, she suggests that while matter may be mundane, it also carries transformative potential.
Alert to both history and science, Nicholas Mangan is a multi-disciplinary artist known for interrogating narratives embedded in a diverse range of objects. With a keen interest in the processes of forming meaning from objects, culture and natural phenomena, Mangan creates unnerving drawings, montages, sculptures and installations. His work addresses a wide range of themes, including the ongoing impacts of colonialism, humanity’s fraught relationship with the natural environment, contemporary consumptive cultures and the complex dynamics of the global political economy.
Date: Tuesday 13 August
Time: 12.30-1.30pm
Venue: Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield campus
Free event
More information and RSVP: http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/events/2013/jacobs-mangan.html
