CAST Gallery

Iteration: Again is a series of new art commissions that focus on the idea of public art as something that might transform our experience of place over a period of time. Specifically, it addresses how temporary interventions or responses by artists to public sites, environments and buildings can serve to open up new ways of understanding the places we share and inhabit. When we consider the idea of public art, we often think of permanent objects that mark or commemorate a specific site. Yet increasingly international and local artists have sought to find new ways to engage with the public that emphasise the temporary, the fleeting and the historical uniqueness of sites outside of the gallery or museum. This project will bring together leading artists and curators with a view to prompting a reconsideration of our understanding of Hobart and Launceston as cities with very particular cultural, social and spatial resonances. Working across the mediums of sculpture, installation, video, photography, inter-media and performance, the series will seek to both delight and challenge audiences in its examination of how contemporary art might function to re-vision the unique public spheres of Tasmania's largest urban centres.

The second and related curatorial premise involves the idea of transforming or changing an artwork over the course of its existence. Iteration:Again examines the possibility of actually reconfiguring or transforming public artworks over time by asking the artist to make four different chapters or ‘iterations’ over the course of a four week period. This idea of incorporating change into the work highlights a recent interest by artists in emphasising art as a potentially theatrical or even fictive medium with the audience experiencing different moments or stages of encounter over a number of weeks. The idea provides for the possibility of narrative sequences, formal investigations or temporal shifts that may be add or subtract key aspects over time. The work may begin as something modest and have additions over time or conversely may begin as a complete entity and then have components subtracted over time. The proposal would seek to recast our understanding of temporary projects from a discrete event or viewing experience to a suite of experiences. Such a model challenges artists to think about the idea of a work of art shifting over four weeks and how audiences might make sense of these changes.