BLACK BOX : SUZIE IDIENS | PJ HICKMAN | CRAIG EASTON | PETER ADSETT

[April 27 – May 14]

In choosing cardboard as a common starting point these four abstract artists each celebrate their material as affordable, everyday, yet infinitely flexible. Prosaic, [concrete?] cardboard calls up a kind of old school modernism yet it has been, and remains, a favoured prototyping material for architects and designers. Of course prototypes have real world outcomes; think the cardboard cathedral in Christchurch. And then there’s the title of this exhibition, Black Box. Somewhere there’s an allusion surely to Malevich’s Black Square and recognizing it for its role as a kind of multi-dimensional container. But whether it’s a lineage of minimalism or the ordered trajectories and disorderly disasters of the black box flight recorder, what you pull out of its dark recesses is up to you the viewer. Maybe, in the end, abstraction is just like cardboard. It’s all a matter of how you fold it.

Five Walls is pleased to announce that Black Box is our second curated group exhibition for 2016, made possible by our Support for Artists Program (SAP).