Lobby, Fold, Spin
Lobby: 14 March – 5 May 2007Fold: 14 March – 14 April 2007 Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts Gallery and Peter Fingesten Gallery, Pace University, New York
Spin: 22 March – 21 April 2007 Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York
Artist Fiona MacDonald and curator Ricky Subritzky have worked together since 1995 when Subritzky commissioned work from MacDonald as part of the inauguration of the Museum of Sydney. Since then the two have collaborated with Fiona Hall on Strangely Familiar, an installation which combined work by MacDonald and Hall with ornithological specimens from Sydney University’s MacLeay Museum. Shown at ‘Culture Fix’, the 2005 Cultural Studies of Australasia conference, Strangely Familiar mulled the consequences of collection and consumption in a domestic environment haunted by what Subritzky called ‘the complicated folds of capitalism’. A year later, MacDonald and Subritzky collaborated with Susan Norrie on ‘Dream Home’, an exhibition predicated on ideas of possession and dispossession, in Washington, DC. ‘Dream Home’ comprised work by MacDonald along with Norrie’s ‘Twilight’, a video of the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra, and it took place while ‘Dreaming Their Way: Aboriginal Women Painters’, the largest show of Australian art to take place in the United States since Australia’s bicentennial, was on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Lobby, Fold, Spin is a three-part project which acknowledges some of this earlier territory—several of MacDonald’s works reappear—while the three installations are linked by a single overarching idea: liberty. Here Subritzky took the text of President Bush’s second inaugural address, where the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ occurred more than forty times in connection with the defence of American