EXHIBITIONS / HOMELESSNESS

23.04.2009 to 16.05.2009

HOMELESSNESS
is a wordplay. It was first developed as part of a larger project called An Index of Kindness. Already this enigmatic work named An Index for The Homeless has continuously appeared on the streets of Sydney at four out-of-gallery locations over the past 9 months. HOMELESSNESS is a remarkable word that contains numerous sub-words. For instance, contained within it's 7 primary characters H.O.M.E.L.S.N. are some 58 variant expressions. The current study developed for Peloton gallery is an experimental meditation based on the circumstances of the wanderer. Each of the letters of the main word have been fused onto canvas banners using layers of aerosol pigments. It's mobile appearance refers to the nomadic nature which ephemeral artworks operate by. The artist is interested in rendering communication by it's most rudimentary forms. The home, the house, the hut and the internal politik of the vessel, that is considered being both concrete and transitory. The 'hut' is where the traveller rests beside a temporary sense of being in movement and in space. Here the itinerant, the wanderer, the (un)-homely travel between the soundings of solidity and permanence, the city and disintegration. Partly the form and reforming of the word/s echo nostalgically our own sense of mortality and transience through time place and memory. As wordplay it questions what is worthy and what is worthless? The experiment examines those values inherent in one single character and those that group in couplets to form quartets of false phonemes. Such curious words the perpetual traveller is marked down by; itinerant nomad vagabond vagrant hobo tramp: these are all ambiguous terms for those so external to the solidness of haus. In the Poems for The Homeless the ridiculopathologist has scored a group of miniature recital cards in the hope that they might be sung on the ground and in the streets. That this musical nonsense might develop into a folkloric form set out as counterpoint to the consumptive network of urban life is in reality designed to give us all a sense of insecurity through that which can no longer be surveyed. In the final phase Lewis continues with his formalist strategy called "disguisement" by embedding the text in it's entirety, one letter on top of the other. This is a kind of transparency or palimpsest. Through the process of enacting language the artist builds the elements of his philosophical index of kinds, taking up the silence that surrounds the subject (everyday) endeavouring to perform it in what he says are, "the ecstatic gesture/s of our poïesis". Here it is set as a chamber work -- and scored are silent.

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