Dog Show, Montion Sensor, Plimsoll Gallery
Hobart, Tasmania 2023
Gallery installation, video & performance.

Live art duo Pony Express was eponymously named after the greyhound Pony, a pet and retired racer who was 13 years old at the time of exhibiting. Pony Express nearing their 10-year anniversary as an experimental art collaboration attempted to recreate their first artist portrait. A triptych with the retired racer.

In Dog Show, the elder greyhound Pony rested in the gallery while Pony Express held a live, improvised ‘dog day afternoon’ of strategic planning and company visioning day to best prepare for a decade of collaborative and global uncertainty and insecurity.

The gallery was transformed into a ‘break out room’ of abstracted mind maps, corporatised arts industry slogans and dog bowl truisms.

Pony Express, Dog Show considers labour and care-across community, family & our chosen pack.

At its bone, Dog Show speaks for the care for family and non-human chosen family members.

This presentation of DOG SHOW was part of MOTION SENSOR, a new multi-year creative laboratory series of experimental visual art and performance programs, exploring how artists navigate the complexities of fixed domains.

Each year, we invite artists and creative practitioners to present current work in development, experimenting across art forms, revealing to us their practices of code-switching and navigating the complexities of containers that simultaneously hold us but also contain us. Through a series of cross-art form investigations, artists in this iteration of MOTION SENSOR interrogate institutional inertias, invisibilities of certain labour and care, nurture, and nostalgia.

Curators: Jane Barlow and Caine Chennatt