The Second Charade
Katie Paine
1
January 2020
1
January
2020
31
January 2020
Gallery 2
The installation The Second Charade adopts the structure of a board game to explore the methods we use to record and understand history and time. For this exhibition, Katie Paine seeks to trouble the power structures inherent within the institutions that preserve and disseminate information. During the early Middle Ages, the Church acted as a gatekeeper for the majority of printed material. The advent of book–binding and the birth of illuminated manuscripts led to the amassing of transcribed texts that formed a cornerstone of the canon of Western knowledge. This project references the theological reforms now known as The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541): an occurrence during which the Crown destroyed monastic libraries, purging written material it considered deviant or blasphemous. This exhibition imagines a space in which the accepted linear narrative of history can be unpacked and possibly reconfigured.
Exhibition documented by Aaron Rees.
The installation The Second Charade adopts the structure of a board game to explore the methods we use to record and understand history and time. For this exhibition, Katie Paine seeks to trouble the power structures inherent within the institutions that preserve and disseminate information. During the early Middle Ages, the Church acted as a gatekeeper for the majority of printed material. The advent of book–binding and the birth of illuminated manuscripts led to the amassing of transcribed texts that formed a cornerstone of the canon of Western knowledge. This project references the theological reforms now known as The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541): an occurrence during which the Crown destroyed monastic libraries, purging written material it considered deviant or blasphemous. This exhibition imagines a space in which the accepted linear narrative of history can be unpacked and possibly reconfigured.
Katie Paine
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer. Her practice spans installation, video, narrative fiction, drawing, photography and occasionally performance. Her practice concerns itself with the serpentine trajectories of ideas and information across time, and the ways that we encounter and understand the world through the collection of information and the construction of knowledge. She is interested in the fallacies of institutionalised knowledge and the spectral and poetic spaces that open up during instances of miscommunication, failure and misunderstanding. Recent work has explored such ideas across the fields of semiotics, hauntology, archival politics, magical realism and science fiction.
Paine recently completed her MFA at the University of Melbourne in 2022. She has exhibited at First Draft, Spring 1883, Gertrude Contemporary, Kingston Art Centre, Metro Arts, Bundoora Homestead Footscray Community Arts Centre, Burnie Regional Gallery, Composite Moving Image, Lon Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, CAVES, TCB, ACMI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings ARI, La Trobe Art Institute, Blindside, George Paton Gallery, VOID Gallery, Seventh Gallery and Bus Projects. She has upcoming exhibitions at Seventh Gallery and Counihan Gallery and was recently shortlisted for the Darebin Art Prize. She writes for publications such as Performance Review, Vault Magazine, Art + Australia, un-Magazine, Running Dog, Runway Journal and Art Almanac alongside a variety of art galleries.