Presented by ReadingRoom and Maggie Brink
Reading here is a kind of awkward exchange. The simultaneous and seemingly contradictory capacity for opacity and transparency within language, meaning and knowledge make it so. It is an exchange with oneself as well as between oneself and other/s, with the world – the negotiation of images, texts, environments, other bodies – all of which necessitate an awareness and negotiation of boundaries – psychic, spiritual, physical, porous.
The installation marks a literal space of my deliberate engagement with this, underlining what is already happening invisibly within the book fair but also in ever broader contexts and environments beyond it.
— Maggie Brink
Find this at ReadingRoom’s Melbourne Art Book Fair stall.
Maggie Brink works predominantly with oil painting, using fragmented and banal images to build ambiguous, layered and ghost like representations of inanimate objects, landscapes and figures. Her expanded practice includes sculptural work, utilising a wide range of found materials including studio detritus.
Processes of collecting, archiving and editing images that she uses as the sources for her work, are integral to her practice. These images, selected on a largely intuitive basis, reference and engage with tv shows, slogans, generic branding, science, popular culture, history and mythology, as well as a growing archive of her own photographs. Brink uses painting and sculpture to transform these images, trading in subjective associative responses to produce open ended and multiple meanings through her work.
Maggie Brink (b. 1983, Brisbane, Australia) currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. She received a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, (2014) and an MFA from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (2018).
ReadingRoom is an independent gallery based in Melbourne, established in January 2018. The gallery both represents and collaborates with, a small group of artists, developing a program of exhibitions both in and outside of the gallery space. A focus of the gallery is supporting artist-led projects, along with experimental modes of exhibition making. The gallery also provides a platform for discussions, publications and printed matter, film screenings and conversations to support contemporary art practice.