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Out, Damned Spot is an Artist book and accompanying soundtrack made alongside the exhibition at Articulate Project Space, Sydney (June 2-18, 2022). Due to the nature of these past years, with multiple postponed dates, the book has become a reflection of a drawn out process of communication (by any means possible, most notably, a shared Google drive) between 6 Artists (3 artist duos) spanning Budapest, Sydney and Melbourne.
The phrase ‘out, damned spot’ comes from the insanity descending upon Lady Macbeth, when prophesy, control, destiny and free will cannot be made sense of anymore. We thought a lot about this famed moment for Lady Macbeth, and in the early stages of the pandemic, this exhibition concept began. It was first realised in a show at PINCE Projects, Budapest, in early 2021.
Following this exhibition we reached out to two other artist duos; Joe WIlson & Chanelle Collier and Skelton&Conway (Amelia Skelton and Tango Conway), to propose a second iteration of the exhibition in Sydney and an invitation to take the theme into their own hands.
Perhaps due to the nature of already working collaboratively, the conversations between the duos not only shared the progress and ideas for artworks, but became self-aware interrogations into the nature of collaborative work, and the Out, Damned Spot exhibition as a collaborative process.
The publication contains the ideas traced, shared, expanded, cut-up, redacted, reshuffled, forgotten (and remembered) of this incidentally extended project. This book and the exhibition developed over time with the growth that collaboration and friendship offers.
