Parramatta Artist's Studio, Granville Studios
7 August 2024
Beyoncé wasn’t built in a day, 2024
Site-specific installation, computer-cut vinyl, paint, crystals (rainbow quartz, quartz), custom brass armatures, digital prints on mirror-polished stainless steel, ceramic planter, plants (Philodendron hederaceum, Rhipsalis baccifera). Photography by Katherine Lu.
The studio is sacred – a space where art is gestated and takes form. Fitting, then, that it should have its own birth chart, which artist Min Wong has interpolated into an immersive installation spanning the PAS Granville staircase: a threshold between spaces. Sampling materials and texts in equal measure – astrology, crystals, plants, song lyrics by Britney Spears and Beyoncé, and even the brass hardware of the building – Wong’s constellation of references offers us a new way of divining meaning from the everyday.
At its core, Min Wong’s practice traces the evolution and shared origins of various belief systems – from Christian religions to the counter-cultural fervour of the 1960s and 1970s that birthed New Age spiritualism, to relational modes within collectivism and the natural world, through to contemporary social media and individualistic wellness culture. Through a methodology of appropriation, Wong recontextualises historic and esoteric material cultures to reveal emergent systems of ethical care and propose alternative paradigms for speculative futures.
Commissioned by Parramatta Artists Studios.
Curated by JD Reformer.
