Past Exhibition

what should I do now, with my hands? takes on the form of a collaged Epyllion or "little epic" poem through video and text layering fictional and biographical stories of grief, loss and discontinuation of familial events. Epyllion poems were created in Ancient Roman times, a time beyond living memory, and not formalised by the common language until the 19 Century. The poem narrates the doings of those who have passed, who gave shape to the moralities that their descendants (the poet and audience) must interpret to fully understand themselves as living beings.

Constructed over the course of three years using footage from various alpine regions throughout Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this exhibition brings together Caird's continuation of a focus on grief processes and life-after-death experiences, self-made myths and the truth buried under fabrications. The exhibition features a kind-of prologue by Canadian-based, New Zealand artist Faith Wilson, developed during her time of relocation, from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington to Fernie, Canada, on the land of the Ktunaxa people, one place of remoteness to another.

Do we care for anything but mystery? And does anything matter more than its apprehension? During our days, we try so hard to find and hold it; at night, we find it then can't remember. Though our nights and days begin, unfold and end, soaked in it, we want schedules, agendas, and appointments to give mystery dumb order. A birthday does that. A supermarket. A handgun. A phone book. A driver's permit. These form the diary of our days.

- Bill Wagner on William Eggleston's 2 and 1/4.

“What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an imitation, a thing that is said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point - in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms - it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me" (Renata Adler, Speedboat, New York Review of Books, 1972).