Return the weights is an exhibition developed in conversation between Waverley Studio Artist JD Reforma and collaborator Lauren Brincat. Influenced by the recreation and leisure activities of Bondi beach, and the performative nature of popular coastal sites like Bondi, the exhibition adapts the symbolic and visual languages of outdoor gymnasiums, public baths and changing rooms, and transcribes them to the interior of Bondi Pavilion.

Gathering a broad array of materials associated with these sites – including reflective steel mirrors, improvised cement weights, rubber flooring, and sea sponges – the artists have synthesised a set-like installation of performance instruments, sculptures and props that invite movement and manipulation. Return the weights is an evolving composition that maps the performance of daily life at the beach – bodies bear weight, weight builds form, and form shapes desire.

JD Reforma is an artist, writer and curator. Across these practices he employs collage and quotation broadly, recontextualising elements of contemporary visual culture – pop music, film, fashion, celebrity, media and advertising – to articulate their influence on our personal, political and emotional topographies. His work spans video, sculpture, performance, and installation, and often reveals the inequities of race and class that intersect across our relations, cultures, institutions, and society.

Lauren Brincat is an artist working with performance, video, installation and sculpture to explore movement, music, and rhythm.  She often creates site responsive work that probes his­tor­i­cal rup­tures and fail­ures of lan­guage, integrating local communities while exploring non-ver­bal modes of expres­sion through the use of sound sculptures and performance instruments. In Brincat’s videos, she often per­forms in rel­a­tive soli­tude. In such works, she push­es her phys­i­cal and cog­ni­tive lim­its, fol­low­ing rule-based actions. 

 

Return the Weights is open to the public from 10am - 5pm daily, 23 August-22 September, 2024.