"MODEL CITIZENS and MY SUN"
2001-10-04 until 2001-10-27
ArtSpace
Woolloomooloo, Sydney, NS, AU

Model Citizens is a pragmatic and playful project focusing on this path that promotes cultural agency. Brisbane-based Archimedia [David Cox and Molly Hankwicz] use a bricolage of technology to enable a playful and tactical engagement with urban space in search of meaningful uses of the city beyond mere consumption. My Sun is a three screen panoramic work that poetically investigates depictions of society and the individual, using digitally rendered traditional Chinese icons. The work achieves an operatic overload with O Solo Mio as its sound track. Wang was born and lives in Beijing, but has spent nearly eight years working in New York.

Model Citizens: Their Urban Strechnology Kit and info-mercials illustrate broader issues of d.i.y activism, access, personhood, and the changing climate towards technology and identity. Distributive Justice, created by a Croatian team of artists, writers, and social theorists, led by net.artist Andreja Kuluncic, is a game in which participants distribute material and non-material goods, building societies based on the participant's intuitive set of principles of what is just and unjust. The process and end result of the project is an open forum on the Internet for the exchange of information and opinions. Using the devices found in computer languages and applying them meaningfully to natural language, Mez [Mary Anne Breeze] employs a polysemic use of language in net-based textual works that highlight the potentialities of language play and identity swapping in communicating alternative meanings and responding to world events.

My Sun: While trained in Beijing in the traditional arts a move to the United States provoked a shift in his practice to an investigation of codes of translation and visual representation. While younger generations of artists in China are literally colliding with the challenge to define the new role and meaning of the individual as capitalism smashes through society, Wang has been gently investigating these issues armed with his western experience. His work is intensely  intimate and its poetry enables the work to be read with a disquieting openness.

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