MADA Curators-in-Residence Isabella Hone-Saunders and Paul Boyé.

Exhibition two featuring:

P. STAFF
Liv Moriarty,
Aleks Danko,
Danielle Freakley,
Michael Cook,
George Watson,
Tamara Marrington.

This project takes place across this continent, on unceded sovereign Country, under skies and along waterways. We, the curators, acknowledge the nations of these lands: on Whadjuk boodja, the people of the Noongar nation; on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong lands, the people of the Eastern Kulin nations. Our respects are placed with the Elders, past and present.


Inter-narratives of hope: Stay away from nothing, the second exhibition by 2026 MADA Curators-in-Residence Isabella Hone-Saunders and Paul Boye, remains in the middle of hope as a theme and a provocation. The nature of the social - how we hope together - is the threshold for contingent perspectives on and against hope. On this threshold, directions are dowsed with unexpected compasses.

Through several works and an ongoing instructional performance by Danielle Freakley, conflict and agreement are taken as navigational principles, complicating further into questions on responsibility and causation. The diagram is taken as an interface to stage such navigation, but also as a means to record growth, frustration; lapses and voids.

Stay away from nothing stages several systems of pathos, plotted on nodes of cause. Through eventual consensus grows a garden-path of
effects.

Our thanks and gratitude to:

Melanie Flynn and MADA for the opportunity and space and to the broader MADA team; Emma Neale, Zoe Priest and Simon McGlinn of the Monash University Art Collection team; Kate McHugh at Auspicious Arts; Hannah Mathews, Robert Cook, Darren Jorgensen, Jeremy Eaton, Charlotte Day, Stephanie Berlangieri for letters of support; Nicholas Mangan for his generous loan of the Whole Earth Catalog, Simon Gardam / Stray Pages for the printing of these publications; Dennis Grauel for his attentive and collaborative design of this publication and other exhibition ephemera; Audrey Jo Pfister and Elizabeth Smith for the hopium in the form of deeply engaged catalogue essays; and to all the artists for their conversations, encouragement and collaboration.

Read the exhibition catalogue here.

Installation documentation, Andrew Curtis and Amy May Stuart.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body and the WA Government (CITS)..