Roy Ananda

Born in Adelaide, Ananda is a graduate of Adelaide Central School of Art where he received a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) in 2001. Ananda has exhibited widely around Australia and more recently overseas. Selected group shows include: Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004); the Australian Drawing Biennale, the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra (2004); and Flipside, The Substation, Singapore (2008). Major solo exhibitions include: Put a sock in it, 2008 and Terraformer, 2009 (both at Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects); A is for Anvil, West Space, Melbourne (2006); Big Racket, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2008); and Permission Slip, Gallery 4a, Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Sydney (2008). His work has been collected by Artbank and subsequently exhibited in the 2008 Melbourne Art Fair. In 2010, Ananda was the South Australian recipient of the Qantas Foundation Art Award. Ananda is also active as a writer and lecturer; he is currently Acting Head of Sculpture at Adelaide Central School of Art.

Exhibitions

Terraformer - 2009

Over the past seven or eight years I have been developing an on-going series of process-based sculptures. Evolving through a series of rules, strategies and filters, the works are frequently constructed from the components of previous ones, recording layers of decision and evidence of furious human endeavour. These objects are often much bigger than me and in various ways record my physicality and my struggle with them. While each new state is frequently contingent on the destruction of the previous one, the character of the work and the process is essentially optimistic, ever driven by a burning desire to see what will happen next. Despite being motivated ostensibly by elemental, formal concerns, the work frequently has an air of slapstick and absurdity. In its raucous, overstated physicality it owes as much to Star Wars, Warner Brothers cartoons and the films of Buster Keaton as it does to process-based, materially-driven sculptors such as Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. More recently, I have attempted to re-imagine this work at a much smaller scale. My impetus for doing this was an exhibition opportunity in Singapore in late 2008 (as part of The Flipside, presented at The Substation by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA). The necessity to send the work by post and to have it constructed and set up by someone other than me forced me to rethink certain elements. It was important to me that these considerations were not to act as impediments or liabilities, but rather as filters for the work - useful problems whose solutions are intricately tied up in the poetic language of the piece. Suddenly, the work became modular, accompanied by instructions and drastically scaled down. The qualities of architectural models crept in as my material vocabulary expanded to include balsa and foam. As I write this, the new body of work is still in a developmental stage, but a few things are clear. In continuing to work at this smaller scale I am keen that the works do not become mere replicas of their larger forerunners, but instead grow out of similarly rigorous processes and tasks. Indeed, this has been the most exciting and challenging aspect of the new investigation: finding analogous methodologies at this smaller scale. In working with structures much larger than me, a certain unwieldiness and unpredictability is at play. I have attempted to simulate this unpredictability in the small works in a number of ways Through the use of materials such as expanding foam, the works have acquired strange growths and eruptions, which balsa structures struggle to contain. Similar balsa frameworks may be required to supported oversized amalgams of timber and plaster, leftover from previous large scale works; in doing this, the frameworks become wildly overcomplicated, endlessly braced and reinforced. Works too small and intricate to be painted with a brush are dipped in buckets of paint; under the resultant thick skin of paint, the objects are transformed, becoming softened and muted. This on-going material play is gradually giving rise to more defined strategies and a curious internal logic which will guide the work toward its resolution.

Put a sock in it - 2008

"The new work I am developing for my 2008 exhibition at Dianne Tanzer Gallery expands on my interest in speculative, process-based sculptural practice. Like writing a poem about one's pen, the work becomes a reflection on the very act of making, yet is far from introspective. It lurches forth into the world with the larger-than-life physicality of comic book adventure and slapstick. Inevitably, the practical considerations of working with structures much larger than me drive the work as much as the strategies and 'game rules' I apply to it. Being too heavy to lift, the work is levered, chocked and augmented with wheels. Being too big to fit through the studio door, the work must subdivide, fragment or compress. These truncations, sutures, props and crutches, despite being generated out of a practical necessity, immediately become absorbed into the poetic language of the work. In this constant flow of action and reaction, I imagine the work as a piece of imaginary architecture for which no plans exist, with the 'architect' carrying out all his thinking through the material itself. The resulting structure records traces of every decision, both the triumphs and the failures."

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