Cate Consandine
Candy Cane

Following on from her acclaimed exhibition Cold cut, eye-stalk, exhibited at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine presented one of her most ambitious projects in Gertrude Contemporary’s Main Gallery. Comprising of a series of sculptural objects and videos, Candy Cane explored the collapse of desire into artifice. Traversing the complex territory of desire – from gesture-laden surfaces and artefacts, to internal subconscious yearnings, to the spaces in between – Consandine’s erotically charged exhibition combined an assortment of theatrical, stylised objects that could potentially “adorn, entice, mutate, illuminate, deceive and destroy.”

Employing sculptural processes such as casting to elucidate psychological experiences of memory and longing, Consandine’s exhibition aimed to destabilize boundaries between the organic and the virtual; materiality and language; nature and artifice; and reality and illusion. As Kit Wise has written in the Candy Cane exhibition catalogue: “Consandine seems drawn to these dangerous, erogenous zones of our imagination, achieved through heightened (although ambiguous) moments of theatre. The ‘wilful suspension of disbelief’ required in this is made explicit...”

During the exhibition Cate was a Masters Candidate at Monash University, had received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2000, and a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the Sydney College of the Arts in 2001. Selected solo exhibitions include Cold cut, eye-stalk, Project Gallery, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne 2006; in the land of ice-cream, CLUBSproject, Melbourne 2005; edging still, West Space, Melbourne 2004 and window lash, Bus Gallery, Melbourne 2004. Selected group exhibitions include A portable model of … , Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell 2006; Selekta, Westspace, Melbourne 2005; A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 1985 – 2005, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne 2005; Skinned, Yarra array, City of Melbourne, Birrarung Marr, Melbourne 2004; and Consandine, Fulton, Geike, Hester, Huang, MIR 11, Melbourne 2004. Consandine was also recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Emerging Artist New Work Grant in 2006.