ZOË CROGGON
PALE HORSE PALE RIDER
21 APRIL - 22 MAY 2021
OPENING 2-4pm SATURDAY 24th April 2021
Pale Horse Pale Rider is a new collection of handmade collages, named after Katherine Anne Porter’s eponymous novel about the 1918 influenza pandemic. Porter’s novel is a fictionalised account of her own experience contracting influenza during the epidemic. Porter lost her fiancé to the disease during her own illness and her own case was so severe that the newspaper prepared her obituary. The disease famously turned her black curls white, and decades later she recalled the experience as cleanly splitting her life in two. “It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready”. This series of collages works with divisions, ruptures and dislocations, looking at art as a form of collective memory and reflecting on the present in the long shadow of history.
This exhibition is shown concurrently with a companion exhibition presented digitally by Silver Eye Centre for Photography, Pittsburgh USA.
Kate Kelley, Assistant Curator of Silver Eye, has contributed the catalogue essay.
Melbourne-based artist Zoë Croggon works with video, found materials, photomontage and 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 the National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Peckham 24 (London), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Perth Centre for Photography, Daine Singer and the Melbourne Art Fair and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 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.
Croggon has been awarded the Maddocks Art Prize (2019), Art Gallery of New South Wales Studio Scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2018), 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 National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, MUMA, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Horsham Regional Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery and Artbank.
