Jo Darbyshire and Rox de Luca
In their project, 25 Reasons, artists Jo Darbyshire from Perth and Sydney-based Rox De Luca presented a group of works dealing with issues of identity, location, culture and home. They describe the project as a collaboration. It could be argued that this description is, in some senses, a misnomer. A collaboration often implies a relationship in which artists intervene in each other's processes to produce something which neither would have arrived at individually. In 25 Reasons, the artists produced the works independently of each other and each work is complete in itself. Darbyshire presented a group of still lifes, and De Luca a group of aluminium sheet panels, embossed and painted with the iconography of her Italian background. The only governing rules of the collaboration were the shared concerns of the subject matter and the regulation size: each panel measures 25 x 25 cm.
Most collaborations are designed to interrogate notions of authorship. It therefore seems paradoxical that the processes entailed in this project submitted to the most conventional assumptions of authorship: for example, the autonomy of the production of the works and the insistence that the individual voices of the artists would appear to establish their authorship as being central to the project. However, whilst it was possible to read the works as individual units, their mode of installation cut short that possibility. Works were hung in groupings: a triptych in which a De Luca panel was flanked edge-to-edge by two Darbyshire still lifes, for example. This configuration of the works in relation to each other refused completion, either of meaning or of authorial status. The catalogue reinforced this refusal further by simply listing the works by name in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline