Output details

Museums in the Incident

This output comprises two key elements, both related international group exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia. The artworks presented by Spencer develop underlying concerns examining the relation between contemporary fine art practice and architecture, with a clear sub-theme established within each exhibition - a romanticised approach to representing modernist decay in exhibition one, and language and iconography within architecture in exhibition two.

In the first group exhibition, ‘World’s End, Future Perfect’, 2008, Spencer created an installation of five works on paper featuring poetic images of decaying modernist architecture. Each building was adorned with elements of graffiti, as well as evidence of entropy and decay, acknowledging the ageing process and the evolutionary life of modernist buildings, beyond its initial design and construction. Both projects were curated by Stephen Rendell. The first exhibition, curated by Steven Rendall and Meredith Turnbull at the Carlton Hotel Gallery, Melbourne, required artist’s to respond to William Hogarth’s last etching: ‘The Bathos’.

The second exhibition – ‘Museums in the Incident’, 2012, curated by Steven Rendall and Alicia Renew at the Monash University Faculty Gallery, Melbourne – developed a critique of the institutional framework for contemporary art exhibitions, through the 10 selected artists presenting an artwork of their own alongside a work chosen from the Monash University Collection. Spencer selected a black and white photograph of an architectural detail by Wolfgang Sievers: 'Leonard House’, 1976. Alongside he exhibited his large, architectonic painting ‘Untitled City 1’, 2012.

Both artworks are reproduced in the supporting catalogue, alongside a text by Spencer discussing their relationship through an analysis of contrasting presentations of architectural form and their interpretation within a Fine Art context. In both the exhibition and text, Spencer examines the nature of surface within each image, with particular reference to pattern as an encoded aspect of an architectural relief, and the corresponding use of pattern within the construction of a painting.