Catalogue Essay | David & | Five Walls Gallery

David Sequiera, Lou Hubbard, Uday Arts Group, Eugene Carchesio, August 29 - September 15th

As an art student, very often I would look to an artist such as Tom Nicholson and wish so desperately to have a practice like his. A practice with political acuity, clarity, formal restraint and a sensibility for ethical negotiation across difficult subjects, places and people. In willing this desire to eventuate you learn quite quickly how difficult it is to pre-emptively shape ones working methodology, to bend it to mirror someone else’s without having benefitted from their particular experiences. What often results from the attempted emulation is a dissatisfying, impoverished facsimile. As an art practice derives from an accumulation of predilections, experiences and influences that are unique to the individual artist—that in many ways cannot just be rejigged at will.

A practice (even when it seems like it’s not) is very personal and is most valuable as a form of self-mobilisation, a tuning-in to different frequencies of the self and following the various tracts offered via this tuning. That’s not to say that a practice is immutable, unchangeable—a fixed fate-like entity foretold for an individual—as praxis is also a highly social thing. As artists, we are required to have public outcomes, to share what we do with our peers, discuss our work, to receive both acknowledgement and critique. This socialisation of practice forms junctures where major shifts in practice occur, as the various voices we absorb are folded into the process of our works’ becoming.

Many artists understand this process and form specific communities to challenge and expand what it is that they do. I remember Nathan Coley, in a talk given at the VCA in 2011, stating that he made his work for a small group of people—such as Martin Boyce and Douglas Gordon—and that they were the only opinions he cared about. Felix Gonzalez-Torres in several interviews reiterated that he made his work for an audience of one, his partner Ross Laycock. These particularly significant relationships and conversations allow for an oblique form of agency, to experience the world through another, as an attempt to extend beyond the restrictions we place upon, and can feel, within ourselves.

Whilst I could talk about David Sequeira's exhibition David & within the lineage of mail art and conceptualist practices, I think there is something more interesting in discussing the work as a personal challenge to one’s own methods through the dialogues forged through artistic exchange. In the past David has worked with the vocabularies of formalism, and the discursive and visual capacities of colour and ground. In the instance of David & he has sought to expose an aspect of his practice that is aimed at 'freeing up' his established tracts of enquiry. Whilst David’s flair for colour and love of art history, collecting, fashion, formalism and the aesthetic sensibility, is still evident throughout David &, facets of his expression have shifted in relation to gestures enacted by his peers; bringing in different histories, artistic voices, and unexpected juxtapositions.

Through a process of mailing out small cards to Eugene Carchesio and Uday Arts Group and having them send back drawings, paintings and collages, he has created an artistic space constructed through these gestures. A space for people to respond to what each other’s inferences and compositions have given as creative opportunities. The process of exchange marks a shift from working with a void, a blank canvas or ground, instead graciously offering collaged colour and linear drawings as propositions that can be elaborated on by friends and colleagues.

This space created by David has allowed for the artists to indulge in frivolity, to play, to ornament, and to elaborate on what elements are offered by the gestures that have come before. It is through these works that the ground is not just the self, the blank slate that one must draw something from but that the ground is already populated, filled with relations allowing a different form of agency, a compositional derive; David, Eugene, Lou and the Uday Arts Group are walking along new desire lines paths made by the movement of friends.

The late reply:

Perhaps set in the aftermath of this walking, as if joining a discussion already almost resolved, Lou Hubbard has contributed two sculptural works—one a deflated fitness ball and the other comprised of a rotund, inflated fitness ball—both atop colourful jumpers from David’s monochrome jumper collection. Thinking about the assemblages one can’t help but think about how the derive and desire lines presupposed by this process also infer the act of walking as a form of exercise. And that is the other side of David & that, whilst playful and wistful, friendly gestures towards freeing up, the works also act as a way of improving the creative dexterity and vocabulary of an artistic practice through a social exercise. As the works reach out and fold in allowing one to loosen up allowing one to become artistically fitter. As isolation, being stuck with the self, can begin to tighten, restrict and as Lou’s work by namesake and deflated form suggests, will, if unchecked, leave you looking and feeling a little Unfit.