ALEX DARBY

GUEST CURATOR : NEW MEDIA ART

ABOUT ALEX DARBY

Alexandra Darby is a Sydney-born, New York-based cultural producer, curator and contemporary jeweler. She is currently Head of Operations & Production at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, technology, and design. Darby’s curatorial projects & events, which are guided by critical theory and digital culture, count exhibitions, conferences and site-specific installations in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She holds an MA in Art History, and a BVA (Hons) in Jewellery and Object Design from the University of Sydney.

ABOUT HER COLLECTION FOR ARTJAWS: “DIFFICULT OBJECTS”

Andrea Wolf is a multimedia artist, Katie Ann-Houghton is a glass artist. This collection highlights two artists whose works don’t align with the art historical status quo, and embody the numerous complexities of difficult objects. From craft, which struggles to be taken seriously in the art market and remains ghettoized on the border of ethnography and design, to digital media, which has failed to solidify a collection model that satisfies the conservation needs of the medium, to works that deal with controversial content, this collection brings to the fore issues that are not easy to reconcile. When objects assume a conceptual nature, they can be expanded beyond what is tangible to encompass ideas, memories, and experiences. These considerations contextualize and complicate the object, and comprise the criteria that determines the object’s value. Objects are abstract, and demand new languages with which to be discussed. These are difficult objects.

THE ARTISTS OF “DIFFICULT OBJECTS”

THE ARTWORKS OF “DIFFICULT OBJECTS”