Untitled (98 vacancies), for Cementa_13
The inaugural Cementa Festival of Contemporary Australian Art took place in February 2013 in the rural-industrial town of Kandos, NSW. 40 artists were invited to undertake a residency and develop a site-specific project for exhibition. Untitled (98 vacancies) is a sculptural installation exploring the economics of loss, using materials native to the town of Kandos: discarded domestic objects, concrete and vacant space.
Orphaned domestic objects were purchased in bulk from the Kandos rubbish tip, and then put to new use as molds for casting concrete examples of the spaces they contained. The original object was then destroyed in the process of releasing the cast void, instantly transforming the mass-produced and unwanted into “one-of-a-kind’s”. This process of repurchasing, memorialising and destroying each object constitutes a strange second life; echoing the more pervasive ways that people and their time/skills are purchased, utilised and terminated in a “company town”.
The resulting collection was installed in a grid formation of 98 objects in one of the many vacant residential lots in the town centre. Untitled (98 vacancies) stands as a temporary memorial to the locals who lost their jobs when the Kandos Cement Works closed in 2012.
