Treadler

‘The Act (2019 – 2021)’

Alex Chalmers

19 Mar 26 – 18 Apr 26

‘The Act (2019 – 2021)’, 2026

mixed-media, inkjet prints on copy paper, binder sleeves,
used studio tables from Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts
dimensions variable

Installation view: Treadler, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

‘The Act (2019–2021)’ consists of 189 mixed-media drawings on A4 printout pages of the New Zealand Insolvency Act. Each page is enclosed in a clear plastic ring-binder sleeve and ordered consecutively in two contiguous horizontally arranged rows over each wall of the gallery. Additionally, eight used student work tables acquired from Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts have been mounted horizontally in pairs on the walls of the main gallery space, over which the two rows of pages run until completion.

Chalmers finished his undergraduate study at Elam, where like most students pursuing a university education he accrued significant debt. Subsequently living in Germany and pursuing his Masters at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, he was forced to deal with overseas borrower repayment obligations and compounding interest. Chalmers opted to pursue bankruptcy as a way to avoid these onerous consequences, which for students in German institutions of higher education, simply do not exist.

These drawings present an immediately legible form of art-making over the ground of a legal text which the artist had to practically negotiate in filing for and obtaining bankruptcy. Through the formal integration of the New Zealand Insolvency Act, each page literally marks the legal basis for his continued practice as a New Zealand artist based overseas. The symbolic result of the artist’s practical confrontation with the neo-liberal financial architecture of higher-education in New Zealand, they are an invitation for the audience to consider bankruptcy as both an aesthetic and political act.

‘The Act (2019 – 2021)’
published in 2022
297 x 210 mm, 380 pages
edition of 250