THRESHOLDS: recent collaborative works by Julia Davis and Lisa Jones

Exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

21 January - 19 February 2021

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Curated by Claire Taylor

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Thresholds presents recent collaborative work by Sydney-based artists Julia Davis and Lisa Jones made between 2016 and 2019. The exhibition, curated by Claire Taylor, explores ideas of transience and place. Thresholds invites visitors to reimagine layers of the built environment under Sydney’s CBD and contemplate the passing of time in both human and geological time-scales.

The main components of the exhibition are a series of large-scale drawings and photographs, and a multi-channel video installation. The immersive installation draws the viewer into an enveloping darkness from which details of tunnels and chambers beneath the city are glimpsed in torchlight. The imagery reveals ethereal, liminal spaces that exist just beyond the brightly-lit, bustling, familiar city. Experientially, the installation gives visitors an opportunity to slow down, reflect and be immersed in a unique subterranean landscape where there is a very different sense of time.

The installation and photographs explores details of remnant and orphaned infrastructure sites. Once vital to the evolving city, successively repurposed and now abandoned, these sites appear in a state of suspended animation, as if waiting for the next phase of redevelopment. Torchlight tracks across surfaces and finishes to reveal material histories of this unique built environment—jagged and twisted metal formwork, dynamite-blasted rubble, old graffiti, woodgrain cast marks in concrete, chisel marks in excavated sandstone—and the deep ecology of the city that persists in spite of it. This is a layer of the city being reclaimed by its waterways and latent geology: walls glisten with the crystalline mineralisation from constant seepage; roots reach down through cracks, seeking out water; chambers filled with pooled water, others completely flooded to form artificial lakes. The large-scale drawings in the exhibition were created by submerging sheets of paper in the flooded chambers and then fixing the sediments that were deposited on them. They register the actions of the artists and capture the materiality of a particular time and place in the underground chambers: accretions of rock dust, city pollution, and traces of thousands of journeys in the particulate brake dust and dirt from the trains passing through adjacent live tunnels.

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Program:

• Exhibition opening
  6-8pm Thurs 21 Jan
  The exhibition was officially launched by Professor Robyn Dowling, Dean of The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning; Kate Goodwin, Professor of Practice (Architecture) at The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Head of Architecture and Heinz Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Rachel Kent, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art.
  
• Subterranean Imaginaries
  1:30pm for 2pm start - Sat 23 Jan
  Vanessa Berry, Dr Marilu Melo Zurita and Eugenia Zoubtchenko
  What is so compelling about underground spaces? Why are we interested in what is hidden under the surface of the city? What does it taste, smell and feel like to explore the underground?
• Liminal Landscapes
  5:30pm for 6pm start Thurs 28 Jan
  Elise Edmonds, Dr Lisa Murray and Joni Taylor
  This panel reflects on transformation of the urban environment, liminal spaces within the city, and the forgotten/hidden city.
• Marking Time
  5:30pm for a 6pm start Thurs 4 Feb 
  Nina Miall and Nina Stromqvist, moderated by Donna Brett
  In this discussion, these curators introduce some of their thinking around slowness and deep time, and their interest in artistic practices that explore ecological, geological and cosmological perspectives on time.
• Barry Keldoulis in conversation with Julia Davis and Lisa Jones
  1:30 for a 2pm start Sat 13 Feb 
  In 2019 Barry Keldoulis went down into the St. James tunnels with Julia Davis and Lisa Jones while they were working on some of the drawings in this exhibition. In this talk Keldoulis, Davis and Jones discuss the exhibition, the making of the artworks, and the role of site within the artists’ collaborative practice.

The works in this exhibition were created with the support of the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund, Sydney Trains and GREYSPACE. Exhibition documentation and catalogue partner: This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.