Projects
2024 Hannah Halle. Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore. N.S.W
2023 The Flutterbye Mansion. Art SG Marina Bay Sands Singapore (for Art Porters)
Thine Shrine, Divine. Braving Time: Contemporary Art From Queer Australia
The National Art School, Sydney. Curated by Richard Perram. OAM
Parlour Parlëur. Penrith Regional Gallery. N.S.W.
2022 The Illawarra Pavilion. Wollongong Art Gallery. Wollongong
2021 The Brick Veneer Belvedere Cross Arts Projects. Sydney.
2020 Arbour Ardour. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Terra inFirma. Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney
2019 The Pavilion of Clear Memory When Scene From Waverley. Bondi Pavilion
About the ArtHitects
The ArtHitects reinterpret building and gardening typologies to confabulate large scale, immersive environments produced at the intersection of their diasporic Chinese and European cultural backgrounds, generational outlooks and the confluence of their distinct lineages as artist and architect. They engage with communities, other artists and makers, collection items and objects from daily life to create new works that respond to contemporary concerns, reflecting the lived experiences of an increasingly blended world. Historical and modern furniture is particularly important to them because its design and utility expresses everyday human movement and some of our body’s most frequently repeated gestures.
Established in 2019 as a forum for their collusion, the ArtHitects (artist Gary Carsley and Architect Renjie Teoh) position their practice within a temporally fluid multiverse; before art was cleaved from its originating, intimate entanglement with interiority, beginning with those first realised on cave walls. They are alert to the potential of an integrated image, like those preceding its rupture with the sacred and its transformation, linked to the ascendency of Western capitalism, into an artefact made primarily for sale. In the super-fictional worlds, the ArtHitects construct art and architecture did not separate, or further bifurcate to produce the hierarchies of art and artisan, architect and builder, replicating the economic priorities and inequalities of the current world order. They want art and architecture connected to each other and life; just not in that way.
The ArtHitects author their vast, critically acclaimed, multi-perspectival, wall-based illusions using only an ordinary office copier and responsibly sourced, 80 gsm A4 paper. To fabricate these, they share an alpha-numerical grid and a common digital file which they think of circumstantially as either, a picnic blanket or a dance floor and sometimes both concurrently. Conceptualising the weeks of patient labour required to realise their optically dazzling spatial environments as the reintroduction of ceremony and ritual into institutional spaces. Activating galleries as sites for celebrating a commitment to the belief in an equivalence between global cultures.
The ArtHitects are interested in exploring the divergent agency of the term “regional” when applied domestically within Australia and internationally in the context of South and East Asia. Since 2019 they have colluded on numerous, critically acclaimed Artist Initiated Projects in Australia and elsewhere. In 2021 they were awarded a Carriageworks Artist Residency and since 2023 they established a studio on Wiradyuri Country in Bathurst and in 2024 in Singapore, dividing their time between the two.
The ArtHitects believe that complexity and the arcane are what might be characterised as “opaque” discourses, ones that naturally resist the reduction of difference to the transparent and the transactional. They distinguish between enactment and representation and therefore between the politics of the image and the political image. They identify as queer, for them a mode of disobedience to the requirement to reproduce and multiply that are economic and political considerations as much as they are sexual and embodied.