SOLO EXHIBITIONS. 2005. The Outsider, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University
of .... set there: L'étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. This book, one of the ...
Emily Floyd 1972
Born Melbourne, Australia
EDUCATION 1999 1992
Bachelor of Fine Art, Sculpture, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne Bachelor of Arts, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
2001 2000 1998
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Studio Residence, Melbourne New Work, Creation, Arts Victoria Cinemedia Digital Arts Fund A Constructed World, Truck Project
COLLECTIONS Bendigo Art Gallery
BIBLIOGRAPHY SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2005
2004 2003 2002 2001
The Outsider, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth A strategy to infiltrate the homes of the bourgeoisie, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Art School, Anna Schwartz Gallery at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne Thank You, Oh Beneficent One, Anna Schwartz Gallery at The Depot Gallery, Sydney It's because I talk too much that I do nothing, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 1st Floor, Melbourne Studio 12, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne
GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
Instinct, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, curator: Liza Vasiliou Cycle Tracks Will Abound in Utopia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, curator: Juliana Engberg Fraught Tales: Four Contemporary Narratives, The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria Australia, Melbourne, curator: Anonda Bell Still Life: The Inaugural Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, curator: Wayne Tunnicliffe NEW 03 Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, curator: Juliana Engberg ARCO, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Madrid, Spain Possible Worlds, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand, curator: Juliana Engberg Travels in Time, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne Present/Future, a special project of Artissima 2001, Turin, Italy, curator: Max Delany Artissima, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Turin, Italy Gertrude Studio Artists 2001, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne Studio Artists Exhibition 2000, 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne Rubik #11 Pan Pacific, a satellite event of the 'Use By' project, 1st Floor, Melbourne The Tyranny of Feelings, TCB Inc, Melbourne Fascination, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne One Night in the Real World, Laundry, Next Wave 2000, Melbourne www.oneeleven.au, Collaboration with Mecamedialight, Next Wave 2000, Melbourne RMIT Sculpture Graduate Exhibition, RMIT Sculpture Studio, Melbourne RMIT Sculpture, Stripp, Melbourne Emily Floyd, Lara Stanovic and Starlie Geikie, Talk Artists Initiative, Melbourne
AWARDS / RESIDENCIES 2005
2004
2002
Residency, Curtin University of Technology and Central TAFE, Perth New Work, Visual Arts/Craft Board, Australia Council for the Arts Signature Work, Watergate Apartment Complex, Docklands Precinct, Melbourne (sculpture installation) Important Emerging Artist, The 2004 Gertrude Edition, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne The University of Melbourne Asialink Residency, Sankriti Kendra Foundation, New Delhi, India
2004 Liza Vasiliou, Instinct, exhibition catalogue, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Ashley Crawford, 'Instinct', The Sunday Age Agenda, 19 September, p.19 Edward Colless, 'Emily Floyd's Alphabetical Artistry', Australian Art Collector, Issue 27 January - March, Sydney, pp.66-69 2003 Patricia Anderson, "A different light on the world", The Weekend Australian, 20 - 21 September Anne Loxley, "Laudable heavyweight kick-off", The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 -7 September Anonda Bell, Fraught Tales: Four Contemporary Narratives, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Wayne Tunnicliffe, Still Life: Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Mark Gnomes, "New03", Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture, vol 32, no 2, June, July, August Ashley Crawford, 'Melbourne Gothic', Australian Art Collector, Issue 24, April - June Samantha Compte, 'Emily Floyd', Art & Australia, Vol. 40, No. 3, Autumn Gabriella Coslovich, 'Kafka and the bunnies', The Age, 18-19 April Juliana Engberg, 'New 03', NEW 03, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Justin Clemens, 'This door was only ever meant for you', NEW 03, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Gabriella Coslovich, 'ACCA show a testimony to diversity of young artists', The Age, 21 March Lucinda Strahan, 'Hello Art!', Gallery Highlights, Melbourne Magazine, Issue 003, December - January 2002 Georgina Safe, 'An Inquiring Mind', The Australian, February Megan Backhouse, 'Around the galleries', The Age, 8 June Robert Nelson, 'Onions elevated on a horizontal plane', The Age, 6 July Alexie Glass, 'Emily Floyd', Smart Art, Australian Art Collector, Issue 22, October - December 2001 Damiano Bertoli, 'Emily Floyd 1st Floor Melbourne', Like; Art Magazine, #15, Winter Damiano Bertoli, 'In The Before Time', Present Future, Artissima, Torino, Italy Samantha Compte, Travels in Time, 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy Max Delany, Gertrude Studio Artists 2001, 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy Robert Nelson, 'An Investigation of Time and Space', The Age, 23 February Robert Nelson, 'A cheap shot or exquisite artwork?', The Age, 14 July Eliza Williams, Zoo, Edition 11, December 2000 Charlotte Day, Final Fantasies, Centre for Contemporary Photography Publication, Melbourne Bianca Hester, an example of an exhibition, (part of Longevity) Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne 1998 Emily Floyd, 'Truck Project', Art Fan 9, Autumn Larry Schwartz, 'Love's Labours Not', The Age, 6 June
Emily Floyd
THE OUTSIDER John Curtin Gallery Curtin University of Technology 16 September - 9 December 2005
When I walked into the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne three years ago I wasn't sure what to expect. I’d heard of Emily Floyd but never seen her work other than in reproduction. The impact of encountering It's because I talk too much that I do nothing literally stopped me in my tracks. Occupying the entire floor space of the very spare white gallery was a re-construction of St Petersburg, complete with the cupolas of an orthodox cathedral and with text from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment scampering across the floor, defining the topography, road and rail networks and the architecture that makes up the city. Roskolnikov's’ name kept appearing as my eyes scanned the work, then other words and phrases asserted themselves as Floyd cleverly employed the author’s text, ‘to speak out from inside them in the voice of the artist’, as Christine Morrow explains in her catalogue essay to this exhibition. The blackness of the images was in stark contrast to the whiteness of the gallery, leaving after-images on the walls when you moved your eyes after staring at one section for a few minutes. The city grew and then faded as you refocused. It was exhilarating. My immediate reaction was to wonder how I could convince the artist and her gallerist to let me show it in Perth. Fortunately, my overtures were welcomed by both and we began the process of identifying when Emily would be available to come over for a residency at Curtin University and Central TAFE, how possible it would be to show the Dostoevsky work, or maybe Cultural Studies Reader or perhaps a series of works that might occupy the whole Gallery. We met whenever I was in Melbourne, had lunch and talked and followed up with numerous emails until the date was set. Then to my great delight Emily announced that rather than show an existing work she was planning to show a new project based on Albert Camus’ L'étranger, a massive installation that would occupy one gallery and re-create the city of Algiers from text and wooden forms in much the same way she had conjure up St Petersburg from Dostoevsky’s novel. When finally installed in the John Curtin Gallery it was the result of many hours of work from many people and most particularly from Emily herself, whose dedication and commitment to this project has been extraordinary. I would also like to thank Anna Schwartz and Margaret Moore for their support and Gail Cameron from Central TAFE who has been a wonderful collaborator in organising the residency. My gratitude also to the Curtin University Artist-In-Residence Committee and my colleagues in the Faculty of Built Environment Art and Design (BEAD) who have cosponsored Emily’s residency at Curtin and worked with her on the production of a website and this catalogue to document her time on campus. Professor Ted Snell Dean of Art, John Curtin Centre
Surrounding the sea and the buildings are strings of erect alphabet letters arranged to spell out whole sentences and fragments from the novel. The strands of text provide strange egress between the various components of the installation and the city spaces they represent. Yet they peel away from the water and the buildings like winding streets leading nowhere. One of the phrases, FIFTY MILES FROM ALGIERS, designates a place only by its distance from somewhere else. This heightens our impression that while the sentences lead away from something concrete they head towards nothing in particular. The city is conceived in terms of separation, dissociation and displacement.
It’s because I talk too much that I do nothing, 2002 Image courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery
The Outsider by Emily Floyd is a floor-based installation that creates - in alphabet letters and simple architectural components - an analogue representation of the city of Algiers and fragments of text from one of the great novels set there: L'étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. This book, one of the 20th Century's most celebrated literary works, is usually understood as a novel of ideas whose broad themes include social conformity, alienation, morality, justice, truth, freedom and the inevitability of death. In Floyd's installation alphabet letters have been cut to resemble large pieces of moveable type and are strewn in a flat expanse representing the sea. Rising up a slope from the water is the city of Algiers, its buildings created by the artist from modules of richly coloured blocks, some surmounted by polished domes or gilded minarets. Between the water and the buildings lies the beach, the setting for the novel's climax in which the protagonist, Meursault, kills a man designated to the reader only as 'an Arab'.
If the aimless spatial meanders of the text create an atmosphere of futility, this is reinforced by its content: I COULDN’T BE BOTHERED, THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ME, IT WAS ALL REALLY A BIT POINTLESS. Together, these fragments and sentences seem noncommittal, nihilistic, irrational and absurd. They also communicate the narrator's neutrality of observation and emotional disengagement. There is a predominance of the subjective personal pronoun among the phrases - I STAYED IN BED..., I HAD NO PLACE IN SOCIETY, I WAS CAUGHT IN THE MECHANISM AGAIN, I FELT COMPLETELY EMPTY - that creates the impression of an amplified individual, an ego writ large. The alienated individual may be seen to represent the figure of the artist and the following references to visual perception support this interpretation: SEEING THE LINES OF CYPRESSES LEADING AWAY TO THE HILLS AGAINST THE SKY..., WE COULD SEE THE MOTIONLESS SURFACE OF THE SEA. By recreating the quotations from The Outsider as strings of meandering type Floyd seems to cut them loose from their original meanings. She takes them out of Camus' text, assembles them in large letters and gives them back to us ostensibly unchanged. But in truth they are utterly transformed, having grown formidable with handling. For the act of selective quotation is to impose new frames or borders around sections of a text where previously none existed.
The phrases emerge here as personalised utterances communicated to us by a new narrator, the artist, who inserts herself as an intermediary between the text's hypothetical original narrator and the viewer. In so doing Floyd reinvests these quotations with private, encoded and portentous meanings beyond those present in the novel. The thoughts and observations they spell out no longer seem to be those of Meursault. Or perhaps it is that Floyd and Meursault have merged into one.
meaningless, representing something pre-sentient or pre-verbal. Alternatively, they may even represent something post-verbal or apocalyptic: language and meaning stretched beyond the point of exhaustion, or the aftermath of a text that has collapsed or been destroyed.
Other installations created by Floyd have been based on the novels Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Trial by Franz Kafka. These texts share with The Outsider their themes of freedom, truth, crime, justice and death. Each novel tells of an alienated individual who struggles against an authority that is legal, societal, bureaucratic or all three simultaneously. So too does each relate in suffocating detail the psychological observations of the accused before or after arrest. Similar to the way Floyd used the texts of Crime and Punishment and The Trial, to 'speak out from inside them' in the voice of the artist, in this new work she harnesses some of Meursault's individual struggle and appropriates it for the figure of the artist, popularly cast by romanticism in the role of hero, loner, observer and seer, always alienated or misunderstood.
The beach is a liminal zone between water and land but in Floyd's installation it is also a symbolic boundary between verbal meaning - expressed by the coherent sentences - and the non-verbal morass of formless letters with which she creates the sea. This concept of boundary or threshold is vital to understanding the work. The title of Camus' novel is often translated as The Stranger in English, in preference to The Outsider, but it is both deliberate and necessary that Floyd adopts the latter translation. While the two alternative titles equally express the concept of social exclusion and alienation, 'outsider' conveys additional meanings of exteriority and spatial segregation. ‘Outsider' and 'insider' are relative terms in a closed system that requires the acceptance of a boundary between them that is both clearly defined, and clearly defensible. The concept of an 'outsider' collapses when such a boundary dissolves. By peeling open the text, Floyd breaches its limits, and brings the concept of exteriority, and of outsider status, into doubt.
While the artwork shares its intense mood of anxiety and alienation with the book, its purpose is neither to summarise the novel's themes nor to illustrate them. Rather, Floyd's strategy seems to be to peel the text apart, stretch it and flex it this way and that, and see what new forms and meanings can emerge. We imagine that these sentences snaking around the city of Algiers have somehow broken free from their strict rectilinear presentation in Camus' book. They have clattered off the page and variously melted and pooled, or swirled in irrational swerves and spirals, each one of This door was only ever meant for you, 2003 Image courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery their winding forms a playful demonstration of the text's pliability in the hands of the artist.
If Floyd's conception of Algiers has no distinct Casbah, the name given to the fortress or citadel that overlooks the city, it is because her artwork stages a series of conceptual incursions into Camus' text and the city it produces or is produced by: invading and occupying it, breaching its boundaries, collapsing its defences and hence its a u t h o r i t y. I n F l o y d ' s installation, the text occupies the city as if taking it by siege but so too does the artist overrun, occupy and colonise the text in turn, co-opting one of its citizens, Meursault, as a mouthpiece. Without changing a single one of those words she quotes from Camus, Emily Floyd gives the text of The Outsider back to us turned inside out, foreign, marginal and alienated unto itself.
The entire installation seems to be the product of Floyd's secret play time. She has furled and unfurled the phrases, inserting glissades between some of the letters like little Floydian slips. This theme of play is also suggested by the way the installation's components resemble toys. Its letters and blocks are reminiscent of children's building blocks and alphabet shapes. And the city looks like a fairytale illustration with its intense colours, stylised contours and repetitive forms. The blend of Berber blocks, Arab domes and Ottoman minarets layers the architecture according to certain patterns of colonisation Algiers has experienced over centuries. Yet the installation is not intended as a literal representation of the city. Instead it is imagined as a make-believe town that does not strive for authenticity but stands in for 'fictional' space. Its strong elements of fantasy demonstrate the power of imagination that fiction allows. If the textual components of the artwork are formed from what appear to be large pieces of moveable type it is because the work addresses the very movements (spatial as well as linguistic) that the recombinatory potential of printers type permits: the random and eruptive bursts of energy in the arrangement of letters that make up the words, and their various meanderings, digressions and transitions. Where the letters are scattered in a chaotic horizontal expanse to form the sea, they are shapeless and hence deliberately
Christine Morrow
ISBN 1 74067 420 0 © Copyright the artist, authors and Curtin University of Technology, Perth 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publishers. The copyright of all artworks reproduced remains with the artist.
The John Curtin Gallery would like to acknowledge the support of The West Australian, our major media sponsor, the Curtin University of Technology Artist-in-Residence Committee, the Faculty of Built Environment, Art and Design and the Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.
