Sarah McEwan: Unbind Me @ Western Plains Cultural Centre

Narrandera-based artist Sarah McEwan is holding a solo exhibition, Unbind Me, at the Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, opening on Saturday 30th June. 

Unbind Me is a fractured and questioning wrestle with historical Western philosophy and how it has created myths about the ‘right’ and ‘true’ and ‘natural’ properties of the world and how, still today, these legacies have dangerous and real consequences in our contemporary society. In creating feminist time travel from Perictione 1 (c425 - 300 BCE) through to Elizabeth Grosz (1952), Unbind Me seeks to illuminate the long running depth of cultural beliefs to particular concepts that have shaped dominate patriarchal and colonial strategies in the West, that critical theory and counter-narrative ‘radicals’ throughout time and era’s have been trying to unsettle, shake moderately, or completely rip apart and reconfigure into something that accepts difference within a non-binary and non-hierarchical structure. There has always been a narrative challenging the dominate discourse of the day and Unbind Me is highlighting some of these voices. Each artwork is informed by writings from significant culturally defining philosophers, poets, writers, historians, artists or activists who have set the agenda and informed wider beliefs in their lifetime and beyond about how to make sense of the chaotic, random and uncontrollable world we live in. From paintings spilling with fabric, to more intimate works on paper, these artworks are searching for a deeper meaning of our reality and the source of what motivates us to arrive at our personal belief systems that we enact through our practices of thought and action. The writing and artworks together in Unbind Me create this material-discursive feminist time travel through the Western world into a form called an ‘installation essay’, where both text and image are enmeshed, entangled and entwined in an intra-connected web of the past and present.

This work was made possible by funding provided through Create NSW which enabled McEwan to undertake an artistic residency at Duke University in North Carolina.

The exhibition opening will be held on Saturday 30th June at 2pm, it will be on show until Sunday 2nd September 2018. 

For more information contact the Western Plains Cultural Centre on 02 6801 4444

Image credit: Sarah McEwan, I am the background (foreground/background/denial), 2017, ink and fabric on paper. Image courtesy the artist