Deborah Kelly
Make More Monsters

Make More Monsters consists of two interrelated components that use the gallery space as a site of both presentation and production. The exhibition is an exhortation and an open-ended proposition: let us work, what can we make?  In the form of an evolving month-long workshop, interested participants are invited to come and engage in a collective collage, using the vast array of sources and elements Deborah Kelly has collected since adolescence. 

Dedicated in part to marking twenty years since the publication of Donna Haraway’s 1991 Cyborg Manifesto, the workshops consist of shared readings of this seminal work, and other texts suggested by participants, informal discussions thereof, as well as the collaborative creation of a large-scale collective collage. Make More Monsters is intended to prefigure optimised social relations; to rehearse, in the words of Sydney collective Squatspace, a brief utopia.

Kelly also presents her most recent work Beastliness (2011), an animation based upon a series of analogue paper collages completed over the past three years, having worked with animators Christian Heinrich and Chris Wilson, as well as The Brutal Poodles who have produced the original soundtrack. Beastliness manifests and exemplifies a number of the central concerns within Kelly’s collage practice: the vigour of hybridity and the representation and mythologizing of the feminine.

The workshops are held at Artspace on Sundays 2-4pm for the duration of the exhibition, with a final session 2-4pm Saturday 20 August in which participants will decide the fate of the collective work.