“Tyger! Tyger! Project 3”
David Chesworth and Katie Lee
20 Apr → 12 May 2012

All Who Occupy This Great Space is a sound and sculpture installation by David Chesworth and Katie Lee with performances by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Carolyn Connors.

David Chesworth’s practice involves several diverse areas of installation art and music. Together with collaborator Sonia Leber, Chesworth works across sound, video and installation art, using the human voice as a principal medium. Recent solo exhibitions include The Way You Move Me (Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 2012) and Space-Shifter (Detached, Hobart 2012). Recent group exhibitions include Spaced: Art Out of Place (Fremantle Arts Centre 2012), Stealing the Senses (Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand 2011) and the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2011). Their large sound and structure project, Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, was a major solo exhibition at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2007. Chesworth’s Richter/Meinhof-Opera, performed at ACCA in 2010 and forthcoming at AGNSW in 2012, presents a set of overlapping frozen ‘scenes’ juxtaposing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof’s and painter Gerhard Richter’s experiences in relation to Meinhof’s imprisonment and their thinking about ideology and public action. Chesworth received an Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for his sound-based installation Southgate. In 2012, Chesworth was MONA FOMA’s artist in residence which resulted in a survey of his recent works. David Chesworth is represented by Fehily Contemporary.

Working with installation and sculptural form, Katie Lee’s practice is an exploration of the physical and psychological consequences of the built environment and our negotiations within it. Her materials — wood, rubber, steel, interrupted space, light, video, performative gesture, repetition, resistance, elasticity, fixed form — may be arranged sparsely, inducing agoraphobic sensations, or at other times they exhaust the available space, airlessly, suffocatingly. These affects, these sensations, act as the husk for the political context of the work, for underneath sit larger questions about governance, control, the arrangement and restrictions of public space, of accepted architectural design, of legislation, and of dominance.

All Who Occupy This Great Space is the third in the Tyger! Tyger! series, comprising six projects mounted across 2011 and 2012. Ian Haig, Philip Brophy, Constanze Zikos, Maria Kozic, Lyndal Walker and David Chesworth were invited to nominate a collaborator and to present a work at West Space. Each resulting project interrogates models for collaboration and challenges notions of ‘established’ and ‘emerging’ practice.