Bacchanalia

Exhibited at the Banquet exhibition, Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 1 September - 8 October 2022.

Bacchanalia is an architectural installation included in the BANQUET exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery 2022. Bacchanalia is a soft form furniture assemblage which references Nero Germanicus' Roman Dining Hall, and plays off the Roman ‘recline’, to instigate the euphoria of descent, accent and repose. The intention of the piece is to challenge public intimacy, voyeurism and the status of the body in space, and to encourage inhabitation and personal adaptation of creative works within the gallery setting. Bacchanalia contraposes the formal geometry of archetypal architectural elements; the column, frieze and dais, against the materiality of the soft fold and drape – a defining characteristic of early roman dress. The assemblage is bound together by the presence of a leather yoke lit from above by a temporal animation of an early horologe – suggestive of the vestiges of roman slavery alive and well in contemporary capitalist society.