today

Last year I was asked to write a catalogue essay for an exhibition by Mira Gojak at CLUBSproject in Melbourne. The exhibition was the first of what CLUBS calls "peer productions" - it's a commission of sorts, but in the CLUBS spirit, the activity of commissioning a project by an admired artist and partly funding it is, in actual fact, the provision of a permission for the artist to realise a project in a space free of the usual constraints.



Mira's show featured a work from 1998 titled herd of unending blue and a work made for the exhibition titled ruin. The juxtaposition of these two works made something mysterious and beautiful, and pointed tantalisingly towards a meaning to be made out of it; and a meaning to be made from the artist’s decision to show works encompassing that period of time. But the thing that is really wonderful about Mira’s work is that eludes easy interpretation and definition.

Saying this now sounds as simplistic as when I tried to say it then - writing about an artist whose work and practice you admire deeply is difficult, so my essay became about that difficulty, amongst other things. I still don't know how to feel about the text, but it is published and it is available online, at the CLUBSproject website, which is here