Art and the Age of Accountancy, solo exhibition, Factory49, Sydney, 2007.
Art in the Age of Accountancy is a formal development of a previous work notes on the castle (2005) at Tin Sheds Gallery, the University of Sydney. Elizabeth Day used a range of media including cardboard boxes reminiscent of sandstone blocks in constructions which address the architectural links and attendant colonial attitudes inherent in the Australian prisons that draw their forms from the European castle…flying buttresses, crenellations, turrets and so on. She made links between current institutional technologies of surveillance (the proliferation of quality assurance processes of the current economic regime) and the earlier colonial import at Port Arthur (Tasmania) the panopticon of the model prison, in a work titled micro-management. Art in the Age of Accountancy (Edifice) continues in the vein of this earlier project.
Day has worked as a teacher in Corrections for a number of years, and has frequently drawn on the Foucauldian perception of the prison as a figure persisting beyond the walls of the prison. No more than now than in our age of accountancy. Day’s work is characterised by its inventiveness and playful means. Fluxus has been one of the early sources for her work that though indebted to late modernist abstraction is characterised by its poetic use of everyday materials.
See also notes on the castle, solo exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, 2004.
ELIZABETH DAY 