Out of Place

Publication Details Softcover, 25.5 x 18 cm, 104 pages total (Image Catalogue 60 pp., Text Supplement 44 pp.), 56 image plates, Edition of 200. ISBN: 978-0-6485534-7-2

Author and/or Editor name/s Oscar Capezio (curator, author, editor). With texts from Terence Maloon, Helen Ennis and Tom Melick

Author and/or Editor bio/s Oscar Capezio (1988) is an artist/curator and painter. He completed a Bachelor of Art History & Curatorship (Honours, First Class) at ANU’s Centre for Art History and Art Theory in 2015, receiving the Janet Wilke Prize for Art History. Oscar is Founding-Director of Al Fresco, Fine Arts Outdoors (2022), and curator of the ANU Art Collection, Drill Hall Gallery.

Helen Ennis is one of Australia’s leading photography curators, historians and writers. She was formerly Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia (1985-1992), joining the ANU School of Art & Design in 1995 and was Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory and the Sir William Dobell Chair of Art History from 2014-18.

Tom Melick is a writer and editor. He co-edits Slug and publishes small books and pamphlets with Stolon Press.

Terence Maloon is Director, Drill Hall Gallery, ANU. Former Senior Curator at the AGNSW, and previously the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Year of Publication 2021

Publisher Drill Hall Gallery Publishing, Canberra

Abstract Reflecting on our increasingly precarious notions of place and belonging, ‘Out of Place’ examines ways in which contemporary artworks embody, transpose and reconfigure a sense of locality in a globalised world.

Through dislocated fragments and figures, re-materialised objects and textures, stains and other obscure impressions, artists in this exhibition – Hany Armanious, Bonita Bub, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, Fiona Connor, Thomas Demand, Dale Harding, Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, and Anna Kristensen – map specific relationships of adjacency and imbalance, tracking the uneven conditions that assemble and define distances, to highlight the powerful dissonance between site and identity, place and authority.

Together with the exhibition, the catalogue provides critical analysis of the artists’ work, marking out the exchanges across generations of artists and audiences. Terence Maloon prefaces the exhibition through the concept of ‘less-ness’, curator Oscar Capezio provides an extended analysis of the exhibition’s themes in relation to a historical and conceptual rationale for being ‘out of place’, followed by a reprint of Helen Ennis’ 1994 response to Burchill/McCamley’s ‘Freiland’ series, encouraging a consideration of persistent tensions and differences across time, while Tom Melick poetically proposes that a ‘window is a verb’ in a letter to Anna Kristensen, and lastly, an earlier essay by the curator on Fiona Connor’s sculpture is also reproduced.

‘Out of Place’ was curated by Oscar Capezio.

The publication was generously supported by the ANU Visual Arts Endowment.