Gemma Smith / Loop 2010 / Synthetic polymer paint on board / 34 x 27.5cm / Image courtesy of the artistFrom the utopian ambitions of the modernist movement through pop culture piss-take and the confusion of life in the 21st century, each artist in ‘Three Moves’ engages with a dizzying spectrum of forms and ideas. Works by Arlo Mountford, Gemma Smith, and Francis Alÿs all muck around with Marcel Duchamp’s famous maxim that ‘art is a game’,variously poking fun at, reconfiguring, or playing with a vast array of visual referents, from the familiar to the foreign. Rather than breaking free from the past, each artist meets it head on, mining the annals of art history in order to make it new - to ham it up, break it open, and take it out to the streets. Three artists, three moves: It’s a nonsensical game between irony and intellect where art wins handsdown.
Melbourne-based artist Arlo Mountford employs a witty and often sardonic approach to explore the contextual relationship between contemporary art practice and its perceived past, working primarily with interactive installation paired with sound, video and animation.Mountford has exhibited regularly since 2002, and his work been shownin a number of significant group exhibitions including: ‘NEW010’,Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2010);‘Contemporary Australia: Optimism’, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane(2008); and ‘21st Century Modern: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2006). Mountford’s most recent solo exhibitions have been at Centre of ContemporaryPhotography, Melbourne (2009); Grantpirrie, Sydney (2010); The Art Centre Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, (2009); Conical, Melbourne(2008) and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2007).
Gemma Smith is well known for exuberantly coloured sculptures and paintings that play with pictorial depth and geometric abstraction. Smith's work has been shown extensively throughout Australia, featuring in major group exhibitions including: 'Cubism & Australian Art', Heide Museum of Modern Art (2010); 'Temperature 2', Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane (2009); 'Contemporary Australia: Optimism', Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008); 'Primavera', Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2008). Smith has recently held solo shows at Sarah Cottier, Sydney (2008,2010), Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2008,2010) and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2009).
Born in Belgium and now based in Mexico City, Francis Alÿs has produced a complex body of work that uses allegorical and poeticmethods to address social and political realities. A simple action isoften the starting point for his practice, either by the artist orothers, which is then documented in a range of media spanning video,painting, performance and drawing. Alys’s has been the subject ofseveral major solo exhibitions at the WIELS Centre d'art contempora in,Belgium (2010), UCLA Hammer, Los Angeles (2007), Tate Modern, London,(2010); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2004); and Museum of ModernArt, New York (2002). Alÿs has also been included in major biennales including São Paulo (1998, 2005), Istanbul (1999, 2001) and Venice(1999, 2001, 2007); as well as numerous international group exhibitions.
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