| ↩ | Back |
#INSTAGRAMRESIDENCY
(Solo)
The Residency / Instagram
22 - 28 February 2018
The Residency welcomes you all to the first ever solo exhibition ever of Adonis Archontides’ groundbreaking work, titled #instagramresidency, directly as a result of his residency with The Residency!
The Residency is a community-driven artist-in-residence program funding and promoting emerging artists with its purpose to transform and diversify the production of contemporary visual art. The program encourages autonomy and the artist’s individual mode of making, contributing significant monetary and immeasurable emotional support through the provision of an uninhibited, uninterrupted and directionless space for creative labour. Additionally, the artist in residence receives a fully-funded leisure stipend to relieve the stress of art-making, with the hopes of spiking creativity and facilitating even more artistic production. Hence, The Residency’s self-approved ethos of peer-to-peer artist commendation innovates the means of such production and invites the artists for a solo show priming the artist for future institutional opportunities.
Archontides (b. 1991) has been an artist in residence with The Residency since December 2017, whereby his body of work has only continued to gain momentum with 758 (and rising) followers on Instagram observing his real-time documentation. By utilising these bestowed resources, he has managed to remarkably expand his oeuvre for his first solo show ever titled #instagramresidency. For #instagramresidency, Archontides relies on the themes of post-painting, conducts subtle yet meaningful alterations to his existing work titled Garden, and further explores his performative discourse through the lens of photographic and experiential documentation.
Over the three months of his stay, he has produced one singular series of three paintings, titled #triptych, all unique in style and approach as they reinvent modes of painterly repetitious gestures. Utilising his temporarily-donated studio as his primary inspiration, the work evokes a discourse of stagnation within the practice of post-painterly still life painting as portrayed within an environment of relentless labour.
Still life painting traditionally includes all kinds of man-made or natural objects including cut flowers, fruit, vegetable, fish, game, wine and so on and so on. Archontides, consistently conveying competence within his #triptych, inserts his viewer within a frame of a frame, reflecting on the brevity of creative labour and addressing the timeless rhetorical query of “Is my work any good?”. The obvious answer to such a retort inevitably being the reassuring embrace into a program like The Residency. Respectively, all three paintings forming #triptych, retain their rarity of expression with all seriousness/utmost gravity.
For his forthcoming rendition of Garden, humbly titled #Garden, Archontides continues to toy with his namesake and his makeshift gardens transforming his residency studio’s garden into a monument of labour – a labour of love.
In the past, Garden has surveyed the failures of humanity in various sociopolitical aspects of self-important and self-indulgent existence. Now, with The Residency’s support, Garden adopts a more #hopeful outlook on failure. Archontides adapted #Garden to relay itself through the natural cycle of art production where the materials used to construct the primary structure are composed of recycled paintings dismissed after the making of #triptych. By assembling materials that were taken out of context and stripped of conventional function, Archontides reclaims their position as being an authentic artwork, fulfilling their purpose as an ode to the structure that allowed them and himself to continue their existence, The Residency itself.
Such an action of craft transforms #Garden into a monument of artist-making and institutional appreciation where no clear message is built into the work conceptually, but instead is built into the work physically. Finally, through shifting the use of ordinarily submerged objects, such as the pool ladder, Archontides contemplates and creates a parable between the object and the opportunity presenting itself as a means of rising to stardom.
Towards the final two weeks of the residency, the resident is allowed a generous stipend to undertake a journey as a way of #meditating on what they’ve produced and motivating their ideas forward after The Residency. Archontides took the opportunity to escape to the otherworldly kingdom of Lucis, making stops at enchanted and mythical landscapes such as the Rock of Ravatogh in Cleigne. Through the hardships of his endeavours, the experiences of being trapped and anchored in swamps and within-the-budget hostels, the artist’s experiences are transcribed into images depicting multiple ephemeral narratives of multifarious realities. The photographic series, titled #roadtrip, undertaken solely through the curatorial medium of Instagram, provides a sense of escapism from the hardships of daily life and the labouring landscape of artistic production. #roadtrip, premiered on Instagram before gracing the walls of The Residency, framing itself as art-as-experience - the artist inviting the public to follow his journey into uncharted domains.
Archontides received an impressive first set of Instagram reviews from renowned London based PR agent, strawbst, featuring phrases such as “🌿🌿💚 I LIVE FOR THIS SHIT”. We are confident that through The Residency, Archontides will now be considered for entry into the databases of ArtFacts.net as an officially recognised and ranked global artist.
– Exhibition text by Chloe Stavrou
Works included:
Related tags: solo shows, The Sims, video games, sculpture, photography