Zoë Croggon
Kiri
16 November - 16 December 2016
Kiri is a suite of new photocollages examining the individual obsession with the body. Drawing from Japanese author Yukio Mishima’s obsession with the masculine body, and the ambiguity of his relationship to his own femininity, Kiri considers the divisions between mind/body, masculine/feminine and reality/representation.
Mishima despised the culture of nurturing the mind at the expense of the body, seeing the physical and intellectual condition as one. The “cultivation” of his body through kendo and bodybuilding became a means of further expression beyond writing, through the “language of the body”, while the medium of photography offered a visual language with the potential for the culmination of the written, fantastical self and the physical, visceral self.
Mishima asserted that a photograph, before it is able to exist, must choose whether it is to be “a record or a testimony”. Observing portraits of Mishima by photographers such as Eikoh Hosoe and Tamotsu Yato, the sense of testimony over record is potent; these images appear to be an assertion of fantasy, ambiguous virility and above all, legacy.
This collection of new work focuses on the materiality of the collage process; the sensuality of the decisive cut. Kiri is a collection of monochrome, handmade collages, drawing on complex relationships to the photographic medium and abstractions of corporeality.
Melbourne-based artist Zoë Croggon works with sculpture, video, drawing and primarily, collage. Her practice considers the relationship between the kinetic body and its surroundings, contemplating the role we play in our environment and how deeply our surroundings inform the cadence of our lives. The body has long been the focus of Croggon’s work, presenting the trained body and modern architecture as fascinating counterparts; each unyielding, severe, and rigorously functional in form. Created primarily from found photographs, her works study texture, light, and form, examining the possibilities and limits of pictorial abstraction and metamorphosis.
Zoë Croggon has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts with First Class Honours. She has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer and the Melbourne Art Fair and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Monash University Museum of Art, NGV Studio, Samstag Museum of Art, Ian Potter Museum of Art and the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery.
In 2017 she will hold solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and Gertrude Contemporary and her work will also be exhibited at Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Croggon is the recipient of an ARTAND Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award (2014), the Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize (2015) and the ACACIA Art Award (2010). She has also been shortlisted for the Churchie Art Prize, Basil Sellers Art Prize at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Wallara Travelling Scholarship. Her work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, MUMA, Gippsland Art Gallery and Artbank.
