Disorder Gallery continues Art Month Sydney 2022 with multidisciplinary artist Gareth Jenkins.

Gareth’s first poetry collection, Recipes for the Disaster, won the 2019 Anne Elder award. His poetry short-films have screened at festivals around the world and he makes text-based art at SQ1 studios. In 2020 Gareth founded the small press Apothecary Archive. In 2021 he took over the running of one of Australia’s most enduring poetry publishers, Five Islands Press. For the last 15 years Gareth has been building The Atomic Book - an online digital archive of the work of Australia’s greatest Outlier Artist, Anthony Mannix. Gareth’s next collection, The Inclination Compass, will be out in 2022 with Puncher and Wattmann.

“This artwork, 'The Great Metaphor', combines treated/stiffened cloth, perspex, painted bone, film-font, photographic negatives and ping-pong balls, all backlit with LEDs. I've been thinking and writing quite a bit about Malevish's Black Square over the last few years and will be showing a number of square works during D/O.56 Inaccessible Archive at Disorder, this being one of them. Recently, collaborator Kathryn Cowen and I were announced as finalists in the North Sydney Art Prize where we will create a 9 meter high installation in the Coal Loader chambers in May where I will be adapting this treated/stiffened cloth technique for part of that work.

All the works in my upcoming exhibition continue my fascination with text. Many years ago I was given roles of film-font (the material they used to use to make the credits in feature films) and I use it in a lot of my work. Here there is a single character inset into a ping-pong ball in the central black square. By taking letters out of their conventional contexts I like to draw into question the relationship between the letter as a shape and the meanings / sounds we have attributed to them.

I will also be showing works from my ‘Inaccessible Archive’ series. Each take, as their starting point, photocopies of articles and books I used when I was doing my doctorate on creativity and schizophrenia. These articles and books explore the occult nature of language, literary theory, shamanism, psychiatric and anti-psychiatric views on schizophrenia as well as including a wide range of creative works. Here I stitch them all together so they are whole but inaccessible. Then again, are they actually whole or just stacks of blank paper with covers? And what does their (possibly) whole inclusion like this mean for copyright, if anything? I've also included all the materials and tools used to make it as part of the work - needle, blade, thread - in case someone wants to continue the work one day or needs to access a text but wants to stitch it back up again.” - Gareth Jenkins

‘What is Speaking? Why do we speak?’ Gareth Jenkins

Join us for opening night of D/O.56 Inaccessible Archive

Thursday March 17th from 6pm-8pm

RSVP for Opening Night

Inaccessible Archive will be on display from

March 17th through April 2nd at Disorder Gallery

Inaccessible Archive - Gareth Jenkins