Tangent Projects

Project 2

That Time You Held My Hand In The Glow Of A Burning City - Katy B Plummer & Kuba Dorabialski

Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen and Laura Tammen.
August 5th - September 4th 2016 - Borderline Art Space, Iasi, Romania

For our second exhibition, Tangent Projects presented selected video works by Australian artists Katy B Plummer and Kuba Dorabialski.

Katy B Plummer and Kuba Dorabialski's artistic tangent is to create collaborative works. That Time You Held My Hand In The Glow Of A Burning City, examined the parallelisms within the body of individual works and collaborative work of the artist couple. The centre piece of this exhibition, The Jaguar Sleeps, is a joint work, commissioned by Tangent Projects, to be screened for the first time at Borderline Art Space.

The Jaguar Sleeps is a work that alludes to transformation through struggle - something that could be seen as a recurring theme in the artists' works. Evocative of The Theatre of the Absurd, there is contention between a sincere sense of hopeful belief (in a philosophy, ideology or even perhaps the sublime) and the comicality of grotesque irreverence.

As precedents to the collaborative work, we are able to observe individual video works by the artists. Although distinct in execution, they nevertheless maintain strong parallelisms to the work by the other half; in the poetical and sometimes spiritual text work or the reflection about a broader sense of life and art, which is reminiscent of vanguardistic and retro-vanguardistic ideas from last century. 

These key works by Katy and Kuba show the importance of art as narration and a transcendental power, and makes us reflect on our interpretation of the world.

Katy B. Plummer (1972, Denver, Colorado) lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She is a multi-media artist, working in video, textile, sculpture and installation. She looks for the moment that fervent conviction and striving either ascends to glory, or tips into bathos. Basically, she likes high drama with its pants around its ankles. Her work has been exhibited in Australia, New York and LA. 

Kuba Dorabialski (1979, Wroclaw, Poland) is video artist and writer, based in Sydney, Australia. His work attempts to reconcile Modernism with mysticism, and radical leftist politics with the personal poetic. In his spare time he harbours a deep, melancholy nostalgia for soviet aesthetics. His work has been exhibited in Australia and New York.