About
One Vast Library was a series of three exhibitions and accompanying events presented across 2022 at MADA Gallery, Monash University, Naarm Melbourne. This platform supplements this program, collating the curatorial essays for each of the exhibitions A Diachronic Wind, Impermanent Shelter and All That Is Solid, as well as presenting three new written responses to the project’s thematic by artists Lauren Burrow, James Nguyen and Anna Madeleine Raupach.
The project’s title is drawn from the writings of the 19th century English mathematician and early innovator of machine computing Charles Babbage who described the atmosphere as a shared repository of human memory, “one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said”. The project aims to articulate a changing relationship with the atmosphere in the context of climate crisis by demonstrating its fluctuating representation across late 20th and early 21st century Australian and international art. By placing both recent and historical works in dialogue, the project describes the air as an increasingly precarious space, thick with social, political, economic, and cultural frictions and machinations.
Curator
Tim Riley Walsh
Tim Riley Walsh is an art historian and curator based in Sydney. Riley Walsh is currently Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Recent projects include Gordon Bennett: This World Is Not My Home, Sutton Gallery, and One Vast Library, MADA Gallery, both Melbourne; the exhibition and publication On Fire: Climate & Crisis Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and the co-edited publication Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings (2020, Power Publications, Sydney, and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane). He is a previous contributor to Frieze, Art Monthly Australasia, Art + Australia, Apollo, Runway, and Artlink.
Contributors
Artist & Lecturer
Anna Madeleine Raupach
Dr Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist based on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land, and a Lecturer at the ANU School of Art & Design. Her practice engages with science and technology to address socio-political issues enmeshed with climate change. Anna has a PhD in Media Arts from UNSW Art & Design (2014), a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from ANU School of Art & Design (2007), and in 2024 is a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California’s Expanded Animation program. Recent projects include an ANAT Synapse Residency (2022) and a Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences research fellowship (2019–2020). She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Bandung, and has been awarded international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, through the Art Gallery of NSW (2018); and Common Room Network Foundation, Indonesia, with Asialink Arts.
Artist
James Nguyen
James Nguyen was born in Bảo Lộc, Việt Nam in 1982. He currently lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne. Nguyen’s work engages with decolonial practice and minoritarian language-brokering. This is explored in how ethnic poetry, performance, cinema, sculpture and cinematography can trouble settler-colonialism, the diasporic absurd, and of course, gambling. Nguyen has presented work throughout Australia and abroad since 2013, regularly doing performances for local and international exhibitions, festivals and community events. Notable presentations include Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou, 2014; Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney, 2014; the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government at Sàn Art, Hồ Chí Minh City, 2018; alongside collaborative projects including Sentient: Murray River with Abigail Moncrief at the Murry Art Museum Albury, 2018; CONNECT with Victoria Pham, curated by Tamsen Hopkinson at Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2021; Re-Tuning in collaboration with Victoria Pham, curated by Michael Do at the Sydney Opera House, 2022. Nguyen's 2018 project Pure Water, a collaboration with Eben Kirksey and Jessamine Chen, expanded on the artist's interest in dioxin presence in the Parramatta River.
Artist & Educator
Lauren Burrow
Lauren Burrow is an artist and educator who graduated with a Masters of Fine Art (Sculpture) from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York, in 2019. Through sculpture and installation, Burrow uses scrap materials including glass, plastic and water to investigate flows between the urban and the rural, the individual and the collective, the social and the ecological. She has held exhibitions at PLI, Munich (2022), Holden Garage, Berlin (2021), and TCB Art Inc, Melbourne (2019) and her work has been included in group exhibitions at LaTrobe Art Institute (2023), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2023), the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2021), and Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2021). In 2023, Burrow was awarded an Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, enabling her candidacy in the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Credits
Installation Photography
Christian Capurro
Website Design
Studio Bland
MADA Gallery Manager
Melanie Flynn
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.