The Boy Diver continues Alex Pyren’s interest in playfully reflecting on lived experiences, reconstructing and transforming encounters from their childhood and moments from their daily life.
Here, the artist returns to their tenth birthday party, where they would find a treasure at the bottom of a public pool: a $1 coin. The exhibition focuses, not on obtaining the coin, but on reaching for it and the potentiality of this moment of endeavour and expectation. As the coin’s glint is followed through the water, the uncertainty of the moment suggests a flow of energies, yet to be regulated, that have unrestricted potential.
The artist’s body is implied in this recreation of a memory but is not made concrete, and also inhabits this shifting ground of potential, rather than certainty. The exhibition’s traces do not monumentalise the event. Instead, the distorted lens of the water emphasises the shifting ground of memory, and the work inhabits the uncertain interstice between the real and imagined.
The Boy Diver Exhibition
26 June – 13 July
Metro Arts
www.metroarts.com.au
