Alanah Dair and Tiana Jefferies

5 — 7 June 2020

{dys} functional is the intersection of two interdisciplinary practices where the disruption of functionality provides opportunity for new embodied relationships and experiences. Artists, Alannah Dair and Tiana Jefferies, view this loss of prescribed function as an opportunity for tender reacquaintance. Behind a body’s prescribed function lies a site for being, thinking and becoming. Within each practice, material negotiations are approached on a flat ontology to form sincere relationships beyond functionality, expectation or superficial understanding. Dair and Jefferies seek to undermine the subject/object distinction to express these new relations alongside one another.

Tiana Jefferies is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist working with projected moving image, photogrammetry and casting techniques to form sculptural installations. Their practice offers a framing of affective thresholds through an object-oriented lens. Spaces between body and object are engaged with through movement practice and casting processes in an attempt to enter into playful dialogue with lingering affective qualities. Original and cast objects are then intertwined in installations to form playful, interconnected relationships with the aim to communicate a meshy ecosystem of with no centre, periphery or hierarchy.

Alannah Dair is an interdisciplinary artist based in Djubuguli (Sydney). Her current practice exists at the intersection between painting, sculpture and installation; exploring issues regarding health and chronic illness in order to challenge the societal and cultural systems that govern our bodies. To convey the experiences had through her lived body, Dair approaches her practice through the lens of expanded painting as she equates this medium’s self-reflexivity and hybridised nature to that of her own chronically ill body, as they both exist in liminal states between health and illness, and painting/sculpture/object.

Accompanying text by Emmalyn Hawthorne.