About

Dispatch is a visual art exchange project between seven window gallery spaces across Australia. The project comprises a series of exchanges in which one space selects an artist to dispatch artwork to be exhibited in another space, and in return hosts an artist from another participating space. For each exhibition the host space will select a local writer to respond to the work. All artworks will simultaneously be exhibited on this dedicated website, along with this written response, to encourage engagement with every Dispatch exhibition around the country.

Dispatch runs from April 2013 to mid 2014, and the participating spaces are Current Projects @ Ryan Renshaw Windowbox, SLOT, BRANCH3D, Seventh Gallery’s Workers Window, NCCA's Box Set, Shopfront Gallery and Melbourne Projection Space.

Dispatch aims to embrace and explore its numerous inherent challenges and contingencies. It is not the goal of the project to send artists to install artworks into the different window galleries spaces, but rather for them to find creative solutions to transfer, transport or transmit their work to another space.

Today we have the ability to dispatch information almost instantaneously around the world, yet reconstituting such information into an artwork remains a challenge. The tyranny of distance—a quintessential Australian challenge, given distances such as the 3140km separating the two furthest spaces in Dispatch—poses the alternative challenge of physically transporting artwork to another space. Further, window galleries themselves provide another spectrum of challenges with the awkwardness of their space and its relationship to the large spaces they front, not to mention the variability of viewer interactions and details such as lighting. These are the very challenges that Dispatch encourages artists to engage with in their work for the project.

Dispatch exhibitions have now been completed. Please stay tuned for the publishing of more written responses to the exhibitions.