The Turn: Kym Maxwell / Ali McCann staged at Boadle Hall at Incinerator Gallery, April 2nd - May 12th, 2019
The Turn is a collaborative installation by Melbourne based artists and educators, Kym Maxwell and Ali McCann. Their readymade life-sized tableaux takes the form of a hypothetical education interior that emotes the exterior. The use of school furniture, didactics, and photographs culminate in a project that explores the education system through its aesthetics. The works are a culmination of verbal and visual exchanges between the artists over a three month period, which traversed ideas surrounding institutional interiors, Australian educational theories and the functions and dysfunctions of teaching and learning. The project is informed by a shared interest in the progressive educational reform in the 1970s and the educational turn proposed by contemporary theorist, Irit Rogoff (2007). Utilising their respective artistic practices as points of departure; strategic placements of photographs, video, found objects, and furniture reference an imagined psychological landscape representing the personal and collective educational experience.