James Angus

Venue: Art Gallery of NSW

Dates: August 7 - October 4, 2004

Cost: Free

Keep on truckin'

Whatever you think about modern art, you have to admire the audacity of James Angus. The artist, whose previous projects have included a soccer ball dropped from 35,000 feet and a fluorescent yellow perpendicular rhinoceros, has (for his latest project) squeezed a Mack truck into the Art Gallery of NSW.

Whether animal, building or balloon, Angus' assorted discursions are factored around implausibility. Of course we’ll never really observe a yellow rhinoceros, for example, but there it was. Angus’ point is to ask us to question what we know (or at least, think we know), to look from a different vantage point or perspective. His objects provoke questions, are information to be sorted through, or perhaps even intuited or marvelled at – like the improbability of positioning a truck in a small gallery space.

So why has Angus chosen a truck? The artist has apparently been thinking about trucks for over a decade and this exhibition provides the impetus and the environment in which to realise his idea. Trucks are laden with metaphor and association, occupying a noteworthy place in the contemporary popular imagination, not to mention the notion of 'truck' culture in Australian society. The most distinguishing characteristic of a truck, though, is that it moves and transports vast amounts of produce or materials from one place to another.

Yet Angus' simulated truck can’t go anywhere. It's literally stuck between the space of two entrances, slotted in and therefore defunct, stripped of its purpose. The truck is sculpture; placed in a gallery context, yet it is at the same time, a “real” object that occupies time and space. Yet in this manufactured environment and in our interaction with it, the truck becomes an object, an immoveable conglomeration of bright colours and shiny metal that is at once familiar but through shifts in time and space becomes uncanny and misplaced.

Angus' sculptures play around with the nebulous categories of fact and fiction, in the spaces between what we know to be true and what is really there. His practice is an illusionist’s ploy, teasing possibilities from seemingly unlikely scenarios and playing tricks with the eyes by employing disorientating visual strategies to do with scale, space, form and colour.

Angus has been exhibiting his work since 1991. In 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, completing a Master of Fine Arts (sculpture) at Yale University School of Art in the United States. In addition to solo exhibitions at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery New Plymouth, New Zealand, Angus' work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003), Still Life: Inaugural Balnaves Foundation Sculpture Project, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2003), Biennale of Sydney (2003) and The Age of Influence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003).

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