The Medium is the Medium || Agatha Gothe-Snape Material is Gothe-Snape’s first exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia and is situated across three of its levels. It focuses on several key wall works made between 2015 and 2024, a form that represents just one aspect of Gothe-Snape’s output that also includes performance, installation, sculpture and drawing. Nonetheless, these wall paintings each engage with the central concerns of an extended practice that is consistently involved with shaping dynamic occasions to experience how we materially (and immaterially) negotiate pathways through contingent and persistent frameworks of belief, experience and knowledge.
Here, Gothe-Snape activates these inquiries in works that by combine phrases from spirit medium Jane Roberts (who channelled the words of the entity, Seth), with meditations on representation and its limits, with the provocations of minimalism and concrete poetry. In dialogue with specific architectural elements of this outwardly severe 1979 Brutalist building (the internal ‘void’, the foyer, toilet doorways, gallery dividing walls) each of Gothe Snape’s work offers a different kind of question about where art comes from, what personal and social transformative labour it might e/invoke, and what imaginative rights we might have over it. Conjuring portals out of doorways, skies out of walls, dreams out of facts, and spirit from matter…and then…in Gothe-Snape’s inimitably reflexive style, affectively folding these positions back over themselves…the result is a subtly and dramatically altered experience of how this space performs itself, and us in concert with it, and a bold demonstration of the robust pliability of her performative approach to creation itself.