Robert Mangion
Vicarious/Object: Star Die Cast
27.11.19 – 14.12.19

Vicarious/Object: Star Die Cast explores a transitive installation model, surveying the passage between art object, semblance and events. The work draws on a formalist post-conceptual language that situates the nominal behavior of disparate visual elements within viewing registers that are at once improvisational, transitive and manifold in structure.

Mangion employs a process of materialisation in which various points in time conjoin, directing his work toward ways forms of connections occur. His practice of material layering activates a manifold chain of associations in which autonomous things relate to one another in deeply structured ways. The point of interest for him is how the subject/object relation reconstitutes itself repeatedly within the boundary flanked by conscious and subliminal viewing process.

Robert Mangion works across performance, installation, painting and drawing. His trans-disciplinary practice makes use of an automatist process that separates verbal thought from cognitive operations such as emotional affect and mental images. His work incorporates multiple registers of signification, in which perception is rendered fractured and split. His inquiries are interwoven across key visual and textual frameworks – the aftermath of conceptualism and its techniques, psychoanalytic theory and practice, performativity and object/subject relationships. Mangion exhibits his work extensively and received a travel award from RMIT University to work at the Freud Museum in London in 2014. He was awarded his Doctorate from RMIT University in 2016.