Exhibition documentation photography by Matt Henry

TORBEN TILLY

NOBODY BUT YOU

Imagining both a poetic portal and impasse of communication across time and space, Nobody But You brings together a distilled combination of photographic, filmic, sonic, radiophonic and material elements, proposing the spatialisation of an event as a successive unfolding of time, portrayed as a spatial simultaneity.

Taking as its starting point two album cover images – John Cale’s Slow Dazzle (1975) and Lou Reed’s Street Hassle (1978) – an impossible yet poetic path of communication is played out between two strangely symmetrical events in musical history.

The works in this installation address the direction of time as it embeds itself in material and reveals itself in the traces of contingency, unraveling a dialogical relation between thing and event that is engendered in the performative nature of art-objects. Expanding upon the illusory quality of a perceived now of the present moment, this suggests a time between A and B, a moment of indeterminacy in which something special happens, a manifold of experience in the duration of perception that incorporates a constituted sense of past, present and future.

Torben Tilly (1972 Wellington, New Zealand) graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts MFA program in 2012. His practice has predominantly been sound and music-based, but also traverses the fields of film, video, performance, object-making and installation. His recent work addresses aspects of visual and auditory perception in relation to time, place and memory, and explores ways in which media and material represent, embody or manipulate the passing of time.

Notable exhibitions and performances include: Droszkhi [solo performance], The Commercial, Sydney (2013); Sound Full: Sound In Contemporary Australian & New Zealand Art [with Robin Watkins], Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2012); Droszkhi [solo performance], Altmusic, Audio Foundation, Auckland (2012); Broken Fall (Organic) [with Robin Watkins], Astuni Public Studio/Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna 2011; Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction [with Robin Watkins], Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (2010); Full Fucking Moon: I Am A Strange Loop, Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin (2010); Menschheit, Mothers Tankstation [with Robin Watkins], Dublin (2008); Full Fucking Moon, Schiller Theater, Berlin (2008); Tomorrow, again, Artspace, Sydney (2007); High-Tide: New Currents In Art From Australia & New Zealand, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius and Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw (2006).

Selected audio publications include: Eyes Rind As If Beggars, (The Garbage & The Flowers, 2xLP/CD, Fire Records, re-issue, 2013; Still Life With Black Light (Full Fucking Moon, LP, Edition Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, 2009); Fig.3: Infinity-created Hollow Spaces (Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, LP, edition of one, 2008); Static (Bad Statistics, LP, K-raa-k 2007); eponymous (Organ Eye, CD/LP, Staubgold 2007); Now Right Here (Minit, CD/LP, Staubgold 2004); cc/bb (Minit, LP, Sigma Editions 2000); music, (Minit, CD, Sigma Editions 1999); Eyesrindasifbeggars, (The Garbage & The Flowers, 2xLP, The Now Sound 1997); Catnip/Carousel, (The Garbage & The Flowers, 7”, Twisted Village 1992).

Special thanks to Coopers and CNZ for their continued support

Opening Thursday 4 July, 5.30pm start

Runs until Saturday 3 August 2013