Katthy Cavaliere: Loved

Overview

Having premiered at Hobart's MONA earlier this year, Katthy Cavaliere: loved is now bunkering down at Carriageworks for five weeks. And you can check it out for free.

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the exhibition is a retrospective, covering the Sydney artist's career between 1998 and 2011. Fifteen major pieces, including videos, photographs and mixed media installations, explore the relationship between objects, love and trauma. Cavaliere died of cancer in 2012 at just 39 — three years after losing her mother to the same disease.

Among them, you'll find loved — a video performance that made the 2011 Venice Biennale — as well as empty stockings: full of love (2010), a performance installation made up of Cavaliere's mother's stockings, clothing and other objects, and featuring a recorded song from the family archive. Meanwhile, afterlife (2011) is a photograph of a massive hourglass containing her ashes, over which Cavaliere's shadow looms.

"The story of Katthy's work is the story of the eye," Cunningham said. "Fixated on life as seen through a peephole or lens, Katthy presented the world – her world – as an inverted looking glass, reflecting back a life lived inside out, back to front and upside down."

Image: Katthy Cavaliere, untitled home 2007. C-type photo (detail). Artbank collection.