Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

Overview

We've all been disappointed by express post services at one time or another. But your own bureaucratic blip falls into perspective when you see Sameday Service or Sooner (2008), a life-size TARDIS flat-packed for shipping. The mobility of the Doctor Who police box, capable of travelling anywhere in time and space, has been absurdly inverted upon contact with our current best method of conveyance. Like so much of the work of Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, it makes you laugh, then it makes you think, and then it makes your brain hurt a little.

This is the first major museum survey of the two Sydney-based artists, who have developed a rich catalogue of work since starting their collaboration in 2001, while fresh out of art school. It's one room that captures their probing spirit and insists on the relevance of contemporary art to our everyday lives. You don't need to have written or even read a thesis on conceptual art to relate to their playful works, which commonly use found objects that have iconic status in ways that render the items foreign, ridiculous, or redundant.

Typical is Future Remnant (2011), an arrangement of IKEA furniture assembled beneath the bones of a replica dinosaur fossil. The colourful tower is suggestive of our culture of disposability and impermanence as well as of the potentially bizarre archaeological legacy we will leave for someone to one day dig up. The idea of archaeologising the present, and so viewing it from a distant perspective, recurs in Healy and Cordeiro's work, starting with their very first, Cordial Home Project (2003), which took apart a whole suburban house and rearranged it into layers of like materials reminiscent of geological strata. The looming family home, it turns out, is surprisingly small.

IKEA is a constant source of inspiration and materials here, but the duo's most impressive works are the large-scale installations that defy the allen key. Don't miss Stasis (2012), the new commission on the quayside lawn that points an orange aircraft at the MCA.

This review was written about this exhibition's installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney in October-December 2012.