SNO

An exhibition and performances by contemporary writers and artists that explores numerous methods of experimental writing.

SNO Contemporary Art Projects has developed survey style exhibiting models to create opportunities to study contemporary trends and historical trajectories in contemporary abstract art and photography, dance, music, sound, video, new media arts and writing.

Taking up a contemporary art practice at this point, it can be observed that the changing environment has made artists more aware of the scenario of the multidisciplinary arts. As the spectator society takes up the space in-between the new multidimensionality, and the traditional practice of art (once contained in their respective fields), the outcomes are shifting the forms rapidly and morphing into a hybridised result.

In what has been referred to as the maximising effect of variant codes, we find the antistatic approach to art and literature is produced in a more fractured, discontinuous, fluid, allegorical and increasingly mechanised field. If this point in history marks the summation of the linear modernist project, at the same time this change in the codex opens-up the subjects in a relational sense. The new nature of subject, practice and performance in turn has been made more porous and dynamic. Through these expansive woven fields that are dictated by these cross-overs, historians are now faced by continuously shifting multiple conceptual frames.

SNO has identified a group of Australian contemporary experimental writers and visual artists – who have developed bodies of works that can be acknowledged as part of the international conceptual language style. This is a style characterised as being external from expression and other more traditional modes of representation or expression and who have a practice that demonstrates the qualities and tendencies traced back to the early European avant-garde.

Without overdetermining the specific manner that such writers and language-artists are developing within the artistic pluralism of conceptual art, this exhibition and the associated performances, are designed to form a loose anthology of a group of artists and writers that spans 3 generations in Australia.

Following the thought-lines mapped out in SNO's earlier exhibitions of non-objective art, our curatorial conversation has shifted toward a new cross-art disciplinary approach. Given the earlier orthodoxy of post-conceptual art that focused on abstract constructivist developments, the curatorial framework of SNO has undergone renewal. Given the core role that SNO projects have taken up, to research the history of non-objective Australian art, our research now reflects a wider and expanded field. For a fuller understanding of formalism SNO has successfully drawn comparisons between visual art and dance and choreography, various styles of experimental music, and experimental writing. In this exhibition, the range and diversity of approach found in the various types of non-objective writing and language art has been startling. Audiences who visited SNO 120 language exhibition and those who attended the various performances, spent unusually long periods of time scrutinising the work, listening to audio recording and studying the website interactive works.