Congratulations to Hayden Fowler, whose video work ‘New World Order’ was recently acquired for RMIT’s art collection. Hayden’s work can be seen later this year in an upcoming exhibition ‘Chaos & Order’ which opens at RMIT gallery on 13 April and runs until 9 June 2018.
Drawn from the University Art Collection, Chaos & Order: 120 Years of Collecting at RMIT, is an ambitious survey of artwork collected by RMIT over the last century. A riot of painting, sculpture, photography, sound and new media, the exhibition will embrace the contradictions inherent in public art collections and will explore the uses to which they are put. Public collections can be paradoxical beasts. They strive to adhere to strict criteria (chronology, style or taxonomy; art history, theory and criticism) or be encyclopaedic in their holdings, but are as frequently defined by what they have failed to acquire. Just as often, the curiosities, outsiders and novelties that fall outside the stated ambit of a collection prove to be its great successes: serendipity uncovers many hidden treasures. Chaos underlies the myth of order.
This exhibition demonstrates the impossibility of a definitive narrative that accurately traces the evolution of artistic style, thought and technique across decades and generations. Instead, it suggests visual, poetic, thematic, and emotional relationships between works created over the past 100 years, and dispenses with the restrictive dictates of historical, technical or stylistic categories.