Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Suspended Moment contextualises key works by Italian-born, Australian artist Katthy Cavaliere (1972–2012) alongside new works by the three recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, who benefited from her enduring legacy.
All three recipients, Frances Barrett, Giselle Stanborough and Sally Rees, will be in conversation with curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham on Sunday 29 May. It’s the first time since 2018 that the artists have come together.
“Suspended Moment was the name of a seminal Katthy Cavaliere installation that won the artist a major travelling fellowship in 2000, supporting her to travel back to Italy for the first time since she had migrated to Australia from her homeland as a child. Following Cavaliere’s return to Australia, an early career survey named Suspended Moment was organised through Museums and Galleries NSW in 2004-05, seeing her work touring Goulburn, Bathurst and Campbelltown. Naming the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship after this exhilarating ‘moment’ in Cavaliere’s career references the life and career-defining potential that a major fellowship offers an artist. For the recipients of this Fellowship, Cavaliere’s gift has enabled significant institutional support and exposure, which through this touring exhibition will extend to the regions and beyond”. Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Exhibition Curator
Curated to tour by Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Director of Programs, Carriageworks), the exhibition will showcase formative works by Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012) loaned from her estate, alongside newly commissioned works by three women artists Giselle Stanborough, Frances Barrett and Sally Rees, who each received $100,000 from the Fellowship. Major presentations of each artist’s new commissions were shown at Carriageworks (Giselle Stanborough, 7 August – 26 September 2020), at Mona (Sally Rees, 2021) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (Frances Barrett, 2022), before coming together for presentation in this exhibition curated especially for tour.
About the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship
This major new artist fellowship invited women artists or artist collectives to propose ambitious new projects that focus on the intersection of installation and performance art practice.
In April 2019, artists Frances Barrett (NSW), Giselle Stanborough (NSW) and Sally Rees (TAS) were announced as the recipients of the Fellowship. Each artist received $100,000 to realise an ambitious new work that will be presented in three individual exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (Frances Barrett), Carriageworks (Giselle Stanborough) and MONA (Sally Rees) in 2020-2021.
About the Artists
FRANCES BARRETT (b 1983, Sydney) is an artist who lives and works on Kaurna land, Adelaide. Her recent projects pivot around the modalities of listening and touch, taking the form of immersive sound installation, live performances and performances with Museum collections. Such projects include: Meatus, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Forthcoming; All Ears: A Listening Party, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 2018; Into My Arms, Ace Open, Adelaide, 2018; and Handle, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2018.
In 2019 she was one of the recipients of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship. She is one member of the collective Barbara Cleveland (with Diana Baker Smith, Kate Blackmore and Kelly Doley) who have presented projects at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Biennale of Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art and Hayward Gallery. In 2020 Barbara Cleveland presented their first survey exhibition, Thinking Business, at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery. In 2021 Frances completed a PhD at Monash Art Design and Architecture and was appointed Lecturer of Contemporary Art at University of South Australia. She is Chair of the Curatorial Advisory Board for VERS, a forthcoming event focused on queer practices presented by Monash University Museum of Art.
GISELLE STANBOROUGH (b 1986, Waratah, NSW) is an intermedia artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. Her works combine online and offline elements to address how user generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, Stanborough’s work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences in relation to technology, feminism and consumer capitalism. Her work has featured in the Washington Post’s Pictures of the Day and has been shown at major venues such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2018; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2017; Gertrude Contemporary, 2015 and Next Wave Festival, 2014.
Giselle Stanborough’s Cinopticon contemporises Foucault’s theory of the ‘panopticon’. Instead of the few watching the many, today we watch each other and the few. With an affinity for Katthy Cavaliere’s performance of self, Stanborough works with her own personal online archive to create an immersive performance installation where audiences see their reflection in unpredictable ways.
SALLY REES (b 1970, Burnie, TAS) is an artist based in nipaluna/Hobart. Working across time-based, static and experimental forms, Rees’ work explores human frailty and revelation, looking to operate as an agent for social, cultural, political and personal change. Rees holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania and has exhibited widely including at the Australian Centre for Photography, 2010; Artspace, Richmond, VA, USA, 2012 and Contemporary Art Tasmania, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018.
Crone
Sally Rees’ Crone, a series of works comprising animations, prints and actions. Rees creates a crone identity as an antidote to the perceived invisibility of ageing women in contemporary society. Through the crone, the artist seeks to redefine the female elder as a powerful and transgressive figure.
About Katthy Cavaliere
Born in Sarteano, Tuscany in 1972, Katthy Cavaliere migrated from Italy to Australia with her family when she was four years old. She attended University of NSW Art & Design (then known as College of Fine Arts) in Sydney and was a recipient of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2000, enabling her studies in Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera, Milano. During this time in Italy she studied under Marina Abramović. Upon returning to Australia in 2004, Cavaliere staged a survey exhibition called Suspended Moment, which toured to regional galleries in NSW. The fellowship has been named to honour Cavaliere’s practice and this landmark exhibition. Created at Artspace Sydney, her video performance, Loved, was included in the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. Presently, Cavaliere’s work has been included in the landmark exhibition Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia.
It was Cavaliere’s desire to bring to light what she did not remember of her early years in Sarteano that motivated her lifelong project of packing, storing and transporting the wreckage of her personal possessions, and transforming it into performance installation works that have been exhibited in solo and group shows internationally. Following her death in January 2012, Mona presented her retrospective survey Loved in 2015-16. Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the exhibition toured to Carriageworks in 2016 and was accompanied by an extensive career-spanning monograph.
Cavaliere’s work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Old and New Art, Artbank, University of Queensland Art Museum, Monash Gallery of Art and numerous regional galleries. Katthy Cavaliere’s archive is held in the National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
EXHIBITION: 6 May – 19 June 2022, Manly Art Gallery & Museum
OPENING: Fri 6 May 2022, 6 – 8pm by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
TALK and PERFORMANCE: Sun 29 May, 2 – 3pm with Curator and Artists, and performance by Giselle Stanborough
A Carriageworks and Museums & Galleries of NSW touring exhibition, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, developed in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne and the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.