Just because Australian artist Emily Floyd was invited to exhibit in this year's Venice Biennale headline art exhibition, All the World's Futures, doesn't mean she's going to forget the people back home. To coincide with the prestigious Biennale, Floyd is showing at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne with an expansion of her sculptural library project, Labour Garden, now on show in Venice.
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Titled Field Libraries, the Melbourne exhibition builds on Floyd's Biennale works, spanning 12 freestanding painted aluminium sculptures stacked with a Fair Use library of booklets about left-of-centre work practices, from Zombie Marxism to Feminist Autonomism. So far, so arty. Each work incorporates utilitarian paperweights, including a bronze cast facsimile of the final volume of Maxim Gorky's childhood memories My University (1922).
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Made a Fellow of the Australia Council for the Arts in 2013, Floyd lectures in the Fine Art Program at Monash Art Design & Architecture and uses her art as a platform to explore pedagogical play, drawing parallels between educational models throughout history and contemporary art. She has exhibited across Australia, as well as Scotland, New Delhi and now Venice.
Field Libraries runs from June 5 to July 11 at the Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne, 185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Visit annaschartzgallery.com.
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