Project draws on audience participation to create collaborative art

A new exhibition, Based on a true story spans almost 40 years, surveying the work of Melbourne-born, Paris-based artist Geoff Lowe, along with his collaborative practice with Jacqueline Riva as an art collaboration called A Constructed World.

The Ian Potter Museum of Art exhibition brings together for the first time paintings and drawings produced by Lowe from the 1970s to the late 1990s, along with work in a variety of media including video, paintings, works on paper, installations and editioned prints, magazines and books by A Constructed World.

Lowe and Riva make art together and in collaboration with artist-peers as well as amateurs.

Mr Lowe says the focus of Based on a true story is artwork that brings the audiences’ perceptions and participation to the forefront

“It presents familiar art media but extends into performance, documentation, the written word, workshops, social situations and contextual works made entirely by others,” he says. 

Featuring a two-hour improvisational performance, the exhibition concentrates on ‘the viewer,’ and explores the many ways the viewer interacts with the artworks.

“People are not fixed, there’s nothing that they’re meant to think. Based on a true story challenges and involves the audience, and this joint relationship between performer and the audience is the driving force of the exhibition,” Mr Lowe says.

“The audience supports the performer and that becomes the artwork.”

Having lived and worked in New York, Turin and now Paris, Lowe and Riva represent a new kind of Australian artist, internationally connected and responsive to the fluid dialogue between local experiences and global mobility.

“Lowe and Riva make the artist one of the players rather than the director,” says Ian Potter Museum of Art Director, Dr Chris McAuliffe.

“Their welcoming of collaboration, improvisation and amateurism suggests an approach to art that is both sceptical and idealistic.”

Lowe held his first solo exhibition in 1975 at the age of 23, at Powell Street Gallery in Melbourne. Based on a true story includes more than 20 major works from the period between 1972 and 1990.

Collaborating as A Constructed World, Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe have been working together since 1993 in a multi-modal practice, producing paintings, video works, performances and publications. Their publications include 10 issues of the magazine Artfan (1993–2002), posters, prints and books. They have had solo exhibitions in museums and art centres including Basekamp, Philadelphia, PA (2002); Artists Space, New York (2003); Careof, Milan (2003); CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2008); and CNEAI, Chatou, France (2008). There have been two major surveys of the work of A Constructed World, the first at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 1997, and the second at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2007.

This new Potter exhibition of over 100 works, curated by Bala Starr, represents the second in the series of Vizard Foundation Contemporary Art Projects, a creative initiative of the Vizard Foundation designed to encourage senior artists to take risks and explore new directions in their practice.

Geoff Lowe and A Constructed World follow Jenny Watson, who was the first recipient of the three Vizard Foundation Contemporary Artists in the series. A commissioning grant of $30,000 has enabled A Constructed World to pursue new ideas and create a new work for this exhibition. This project is also supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Based on a true story and A Constructed World are on show at the Ian Potter Museum of Art until 24 February 2013.

The Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Swanston Street (betwn Elgin & Faraday sts), is open Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm: Saturday and Sunday 12–5pm

www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions/future-exhibitions