The New Visual Playground of BalletLab

31/01/14

We are excited to announce that Phillip and architect Matthew Bird, principal of Studiobird, will commence their latest collaboration EMBASSY as artists in residency at Pin-up Project Space in Melbourne during the months February to March 2014. EMBASSY brings together a visual playground of experimental architecture, visual design/performance research and practice in the hands of curator Fleur Watson, co-founder of Pin-up Project Space. Phillip and Matthew have engaged in interdisciplinary practice since 2010 including the award-winning Aviary presented at the Melbourne Festival (2011) & MONA FOMA (2012) and more recently And All Things Return To Nature Tomorrow presented at The Lawler, Melbourne Theatre Company (2013). 

Over a few short years, Matthew and Phillip have formed a collaborative practice of experimental and unconventional projects straddling multiple disciplines of architecture, installation art, performing art and choreography. Their work is bizarrely intriguing and has attracted a loyal following of admirers and more recently have attracted global interest around their work. Now we see BalletLab and Studiobird evolving their practice into a gallery context with inquisitive minds ready to construct a whole other experience. Have your passports ready…

The residency will result in the physical construction of a large and speculative embassy ‘foundation’ structure; experimenting with ready-made materials in a complex formation, testing possible future notions of embassy groundwork, blueprint, form and aesthetic. What inspires the collaborators is the object itself and how it can be deposited outside its usual static context. They are interested in arousing public curiosity and engagement of speculative embassy environments by placing unusual constructs in populated civic environments as experiential refuge space. 

An underlying philosophy to EMBASSY is a research interest in unpredictability, experimentalism and to a degree, ‘unreasonable’ collective practice. Concepts are bold, broad and universal with references to popular culture, science fiction, high art, modernism and participatory art. An exhibition of the outcome of the Pin-up residency will be announced shorty. 

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