Informed by studies in philosophy and choreography, Helen Grogan uses sculptural, photographic, and filmic means to approach space and spatial concepts as material(s). Her works directly engage exhibition sites as situations to be expanded and opened in material, ontological, and political ways. With a particular interest in framing what is already occurring, Grogan works from the perspective that the gallery exhibition is itself performative and viewers are implicated through the physical and intellectual act of observation. Grogan’s practice operates critically and dynamically with exhibition formats and institutional conditions. Works often incorporate explicit processes of flux, drift, layering, and reconfiguration as means to push or stretch potential temporalities and spatialities. By employing devices that resist fixed or prioritised points of view or points in time, her works seek an embodied attention within the present.
Grogan’s works have been exhibited at: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; Art Gallery of New South Wales; 20th Biennale of Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria International; Gertrude Contemporary; 2nd Tbilisi Triennial; Liquid Architecture; Alaska Projects; Gertrude Glasshouse; Slopes; West Space; Rijksakademie; Stockholm Kulturhuset; Kontext Festival Berlin; VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery; C3; amongst others. Recent solo exhibitions: STUDIO WORK (COMPRESSION WITH OPENING PLANE), Gertrude Contemporary Studio 10, 2016; THREE ADJOINING SPACES WITH MANIFOLD EDGES, Westspace, 2015; POEM (with insistence on plurality), Gertrude Glasshouse, 2015; PERFORMATIVE STRUCTURES FOR SLOPES, Slopes, 2014. Curatorial projects include: SPECIFIC IN-BETWEEN (the choreographic negotiated in six parts) in ‘Framed Movement’, ACCA, 2014. Grogan undertook the Gertrude Contemporary studio artist residency 2014-2016.
