Edition Office and Trent Jansen

THE GREY ZONE

 
 
 
 
 

Words by Dr Oliver Watts, Senior Curator Photography by Ben Hosking

 

The Grey Zone: Collecting and Collaboration in Contemporary Art and Design is an exhibition that responds to the Artbank collection as a cultural repository of ideas, objects and memories.

 

Curators/designers: Kim Bridgland, Aaron Roberts, Trent Jansen

 
 
 
 

The Grey Zone was an exhibition, curated by Edition Office and Trent Jansen, that blurred the boundaries between Art and Design. In collaboration with Edition Office and Trent Jansen, The Grey Zone drew together artworks from the ArtBank collection and a selection of objects and design pieces to refocus how we engage with our everyday world and the items we encounter in it.

As various national collections shift the focus of its acquisition to include design, The Grey Zone was commissioned to challenge the definition of design both as noun and verb, scrambling these preconceptions in order to recalibrate the ways that we assign value to material culture of all kinds.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“ Kim Bridgland and Aaron Roberts of Edition Office worked with Trent Jansen to curate a collection of ‘designed’ artefacts from pre-colonial Indigenous Australian tools, to out-sider vernacular design and high-end functional art. ”

 

Each designed object was carefully positioned metaphorically and physically within the frame of an artwork from the ArtBank collection, creating a dialogue between designed artefact and artwork, and questioning the values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions that manifest in both pieces of material culture.

 

The exhibition design was based around a set of purpose-crafted armatures that built a structural connection between the selected objects and their corresponding artworks, however, the connection between the 8 loaned objects and the ArtBank collection works went much deeper.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Each coupling drew on the experience of the curators – Trent Jansen and Edition Office as well as the history and cultural significance of each object. The viewer became an active collaborator too, bringing their own experience to their interpretation of each pairing.

The exhibition was launched for Melbourne Design week 2020, and closed one day after opening in March of that year, due to the COVID 19 lockdown in Melbourne, and as such the exhibition sat unwitnessed by the public until it was taken down, and now exists only as a documented exhibition in exile.