TROY-ANTHONY BAYLIS
JORDANA BRAGG
KARENA KEYS
ANGUS McGRATH
NATHAN NHAN
SUZANNE TREISTER

curated by DAVID BROKER

16 August - 12 October 2019 @ CCAS: Gorman Arts Centre

Someone once said that, “Love is a many splendored thing”. Tainted Love brings together six artists who beg to differ. It’s not that they are necessarily cynical or even anti the notion of Love but rather they offer atypical and confronting perspectives that exist outside the clichés that millions of love songs, movies and books have fashioned. However we personally feel about Love, its rituals; birth, courtship, marriage and death, tend to define our cultures and determine the diverse ways we engage with what is undoubtedly one of humanity’s most challenging and obsessive desires. Numerous attempts by Church and State to control the ways we love have not left anyone better prepared for the emotional roller coaster ride of their lives.

Jordana Bragg (Wellington/Melbourne), Suzanne Treister (London), Troy-Anthony Baylis (Adelaide), Nathan Nhan (Canberra), Angus McGrath (Canberra) and Karena Keys (Canberra) have delved into the darker side of love with works that cover a broad sweep of viewpoints from the metaphysics of love and longing, euphoria, dispossession, fandom, semiotics, surveillance and abstraction. Tainted Love is both an exhibition and a series of performances that reflect each artist’s unique position. It is a show with little sentiment, no romance, a spectacle of “grunge aesthetics”, a celebration of banal popular culture and prickly passions.

Curator David Broker said, “Tainted Love is the third in a series of exhibitions that explore the ways common disorders manifest in current contemporary art practices. After HYPERactive, Obsessive Impulsion comes Love, the most confounding of all. Following Australia’s same sex marriage debate in 2018 and general acceptance of the idea that, “love is love”, I asked myself – is it really - or is it something else? Tainted Love embraces artists in whose work I see the metaphors of love that reflect my own distorted attitudes.”

Image: Angus McGrath Semiotics Club performance documentation, courtesy of the artist and PhotoAccess. Photograph: Rory King.