Offcuts

Curated by Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke (group show)

Main Gallery - 07.03.24 - 18.04.24

Artists: Daniel Tucker, Emily Rae Smith Labuschagne, Luca Evans, Sandy Harris, Dale Washkansky, Robyn Freeman, Kirstie Pietersen, Ana-Jose Riley, Pia Truscott, Joelle Joubert, Gina van der Ploeg

‘Offcuts’ draws heavily on Barad’s diffractive practice used to describe a critical practice of engagement, which emphasizes material objects and encounters. These matters are constituted, produced, and shifted through their relation to each other. Through exhibiting work-in-progress alongside text excerpts of conversations had with the artists, I intend to extend the work beyond the exhibition space, to loop the studio/place of making into the exhibition space, and to emphasize material encounters and intra-actions. In this way to complicate, make messier, and make more uncertain entry points, points of departure, and relationships to the work from the artists, curator, and public.

I am interested in the artist's relationship to their practice, processes, and materials. I want to give language, structure, and space to work so as for it to have its own logic and concerns. Too often, work is given too little of its own world in the exhibition space. My key concern with the inclusion of text in the exhibition is to build an ‘unmonumental backstory’.

‘Offcuts’ is concerned with the production of value and understands that this is a value that is placed and produced through structures of intra-actions in order to make a thing significant. Works in progress, the other component of this exhibition, actively include/move against constituted value and side-steps signification or pretense of grandeur. This is not work with an answer, or with a clear directive. These are offcuts, things made meaningful through the artist’s practice and process, but things (by definition without a name) nonetheless.

The text and the offcut of practice-process would ask of the viewer to make a leap from one to the other. To enact what happens in studios and hands. I considered the exhibition through a spatial concern with movement. I thought of the work and text as a set of converging paths, drawing artists, viewers, and me closer or farther away. I intend for this exhibition to present those to you; in scraps; in fragments; and in wayward-piecemeal - my earnest appeal to make an exhibition backwards or sideways; movement helmed.

1 -Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Curator Bio

Xanthe Scout Lardner-Burke (b. 1998, South Africa) is an artist primarily and newly a curator. Her practice is process-based and expressive of [her] interest in materials, structures, language and value production.

Scout Lardner-Burke graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art (2021). She has exhibited with 99 Loop Gallery (Cape Town) in Artsy’s Foundations, Untitled 9.99, Elemental, and With Feeling; the Association for Visual Arts in Together; Marvol Gallery in Beyond the Canvas and various independent curatorial projects since her graduation in 2021. In 2023, she participated in Sessions, an eight-month program, culminating in the exhibition Pomegranate (2023). Most recently she exhibited with 99 Loop Gallery at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

As a curator ‘Offcuts’ forms her debut project. Scout Lardner-Burke works and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

CATALOGUE

Offcuts

Curator Bio

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