Jamie North: Concrete


Jamie North was supported by Asialink Arts to be part of the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) group exhibition Concrete in Istanbul at Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.  The exhibition was a key event in the Cultural Festival associated with the '2015 Year of Australia in Turkey' (developed by the Federal Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade | DFAT) and was timed to overlap with the opening of the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. An earlier version of Concrete was presented by Monash University Museum of Art in 2014 programmed to coincide with centenary of the First World War.

Jamie North, Spoils (Tophane-i Amire), 2015

Curator: Geraldine Barlow

Artist: Jamie North

Partner: Monash University of Modern Art

Tour:  29 August - 26 September 2015. Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University

Processes of construction and destruction, growth and decay, are at the heart of Sydney based artist Jamie North's practice. North works with cast concrete, aggregate, ash, and living plants. It is never clear whether we are looking at natural processes or the results of man-made catastrophe. His works often suggest ruins, symbolic fragments of a larger, now-absent building.  They also evoke the rise and fall of cities, states and cultures. North dramatises the inherent tension between building and decay, between the built form and nature, between ideas of progress and the potential for collapse. North's works are cast from industrial leftovers. To create Spoils (Tophane-i Amire) 2015 in Istanbul he has chosen to work with marble dust, assembling a pyramid of ruined spheres, each the scale of a cannon ball. Drawing upon the history of the exhibition space as a cannon foundry as well as rubble and plants from the site itself, the spheres are planted with species such as Purslane, Ailanthus and the vine Parthenocissus. Growth, the potential for destruction, the perpetual cycle of reuse and adaptation all meet in these somewhat imperfect versions of the sphere and the pyramid. – Geraldine Barlow, Curator of Concrete



The Asialink Visual Arts Touring Exhibition Program is supported by the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Asialink Arts is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

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