Contemporary Art Projects SA 2006: Project III WHERE ANGELS TREAD Shaun Gladwell [Sydney] Julie Rrap [Melbourne] Tony Schwensen [Sydney] Judith Wright [Brisbane] Darren Siwes [Adelaide] Nicola Loder [Melbourne] Curator: Blair French 28 APRIL - 4 JUNE 2006
	Shaun Gladwell Woolloomooloo Night (Her Hair) [2004] [production still] photo courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney	Julie Rrap, Yaw from the series Soft Targets [2004] photo courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and ARC ONE, Melbourne
	CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS PROJECTS SA 2006 Project 3 After the abstract and minimalist paintings of John Nixon's EPW for the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, Project 3 of CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ART PROJECTS SA 2006 - Where Angels Tread presents work at the other end of the visual spectrum - photographic and moving image media by Australian artists connected by a form of critical energy in the performative body - the body used as an expressive vehicle in and of itself (both primarily personal and aimed at or conceived within a social field); the body as a socially symbolic form; the body as site of both psychic and cultural displacement. None of these 'appearances' of the body in art are in any way new or even unexpected within contemporary art, however they find particular inflections within the present day - in light of new relationships between performative acts and recording/delivery technologies; in the context of a critical re-exploration of both personal and social corporeality in the wake of body-as-text post-structuralism; and in response to a social/political scenario in which body is simultaneously treated as a form of proof of self-identity, and as a sphere through which we sense the pressures and threats to, even the fragility of, our being. Commissioned by the CACSA for this project, Blair French is Executive Director, Artspace Visual Art Centre, Sydney. He has worked in art galleries and museums in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and in Sydney since arriving from New Zealand in 1995. As Curator, Australian Centre for Photography in the late 1990s and recently as Associate Director, Performance Space, Sydney, he helped develop and bring to the fore the work of a range of exciting artists working in the fields of photo and video-based practice. In addition to his work as a curator, as writer and editor he has lectured in New Zealand Art History at the University of Waikato, in Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, and in Visual Communications at the University of Western Sydney. Catalogue Essay The Artist, The Body by Blair French (1.2MB pdf)