Shifting Ground exhibition

​Midsumma launched over the weekend with a blistering hot day at Carnival and T-Dance during the evening - and by all reports (and my own sunburnt accounts) it went off spectacularly! Congratulations to everyone involved in creating Midsumma and the various events that go with it. Last year I was lucky enough to be the premier artist for Midsumma, and exhibited a new body of work, my WABI-SABI series at RED Gallery. The opening was amazing - it was the biggest exhibition opening I have ever exhibited in. Great energy, amazing turnout with people spilling out of the gallery onto the street, fantastic response to my own work as well as the other artists exhibiting alongside me as well and just a generally fantastic exhibition. This year, I am happy to invite you to Dark Horse Experiment on Friday the 24th of Jan at 6pm for SHIFTING GROUND - a group show in which I will be performing a new work, my installation piece, THE EDITOR. Here is the Facebook event. In order to find ourselves and to find meaning we as a community and as individuals travel far. This distance traveled is only limited to the physical constraints of this world, or how deep we wish to venture within ourselves. This exhibition shows how the journey changes us more than our destination, which we may never reach. The projection space will be operated on three screens every night during the exhibition period, between 8:30pm and midnight. Artists: Alexander Edwards, Gillian Fletcher, Matto Lucas, Khue Nguyen, KN Rodriguez and Rat Simpson. OPENING NIGHT: Friday 24th Jan ***special opening night performance of Matto Lucas Artist The Editor*** EXHIBITION DATES:15 January – 1 February GALLERY OPENING HOURS: Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm ADDRESS: Dark Horse Experiment - 110 Franklin St, Melbourn ***MELBOURNE PROJECTION SPACE: running 15 January – 1 February from 8pm - Midnight daily A part of Queer City 2014, supported by City of Melbourne. More info available at http://www.midsumma.org.au/program/visual-arts/shifting-ground

THE EDITOR

MATTO LUCAS | PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION 2014 “Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles.” -Susan Sontag, “On Photography” Matto Lucas Visual Artist uses Artist’s flesh as medium in the performance installation “The Editor.” Taking his experiences as a photo editor and retoucher, Lucas aims to expose the values of a society obsessed, influenced and deceived by the manipulated photograph –or ‘false icon’ Can we still recognize ourselves in the hybrid identities that new technologies impose upon us? Does a photograph, in this pixel-mashed, instagram-fed, hyper image-saturated world hold any value, authenticity or truth anymore? “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.” -Susan Sontag, “On Photography” The performance installation will see the organic, unedited human, male form of the artist, perform the photo retouching process over multiple images of the subject; himself. A type of self-mutilation, or horrible meditation. Through this process, we see the silent, slow and tragic mutilation of the ‘truth’ of the photograph into it’s transformed False Icon, and within this transformation, Lucas asks the viewer to participate in the questioning of what is true, and what is false, what is real and what is not, what is beautiful and what is ugly. Just as evil and sin are the opposites of good, whose hell they represent, so is ugliness, the ‘hell of beauty.’ Is ugliness the opposite of beauty? A kind of possible error that beauty holds within itself? “Contact with the deformed has conferred something greater, more sublime. Beauty has only one type, ugliness has thousands.” -Victor Hugo, “The Twilight of Beauty”  I will also be presenting three new video works of mine as a part of Melbourne Projection Space, projected on the front of Dark Horse Experiment from 8pm until midnight during the course of the exhibition - starting from tonight! “Phobia As Abortive Metaphor of Want,” “I Am Afraid Of Being Bitten Or I Am Afraid Of Biting” and “The Two Sided Sacred.”