LUCRECCIA QUINTANILLA AUS/El Salvador/US
A Steady Backbeat
28 Jun 2017—15 Jul 2017
“When I was a child I believed stars were tiny windows into light. Like a mantle, the night was pierced to let the light on the other side come through.” Banff Canada, 2017
This work was partly developed while I found myself in the Rocky Mountains of Banff, Canada, during an artist residency where I began reading ‘The Parable Of The Sower’ by Octavia Butler during the height of an all consuming bout of altitude sickness, which I was warned by a local would bring on a transformative experience. Something I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. It was much later when I realise that there may be something in that. I also became acutely aware that I was in the Americas. The continent where I spent my childhood.
And so, it was through a series of strange synchronicities between life and analogies present within the book that things took an otherworldly turn for the work.
The work makes reference to sound and its multilayeredness and the stories that may be contained within it and I approach it through the use of clay, sand, sequin and other materials through with which I construct an environment within the space at TCB.
At the core of Lucreccia Quintanilla’s project is sound as a mode of knowledge transference, as a sensorial conduit for multiple senses of time and place and as a carrier of past and future and as an amplifier of collective mythologies and cultural complexities. In recent years she has been exploring amplification through Soundsystem culture as a point of departure for thinking through cultural difference, collaboration, feminism and the deep importance of music/sound in collectivity.
Lucreccia Quintanilla is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, sometimes DJ and researcher at Monash University currently undertaking a PhD. Her most recent exhibitions include Rhythmic Traces at Bus Projects, If People Powered Radio celebrating the 40th anniversary of Community radio station 3CR at Gertrude Contemporary and Liquid Architecture’s Fem(X) series at Westspace. Quintanilla has received grants from Arts Victoria, the Australia Indonesia institute the National Gallery Women’s Encouragement Award and the Australian Postgraduate Award. Most recently she has been awarded the 2016 NAVA Sainsbury Sculpture grant to travel to Banff for the BAIR Spring Intensive Residency. She has presented her work in Auckland, Chicago, New York, Berlin, Yogyakarta, Sydney, Canada and Melbourne.
Documentation by Christo Crocker.
These exhibitions are part of TCB’s Prolegomenon series supported by the City of Melbourne’s Arts Grants Program, Creative Victoria and Hells Kitchen, which encourages intergenerational exchange between emerging and established artist.