Bibliography
Keys Melissa,
‘Gail Hastings: Sculptural Situations’,
Sculptural Situations: Gail Hastings,
exhibition catalogue,
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art,
Perth
2008.
Excerpt
As ‘the artist’ Hastings eschews a central position in her work in order to vacate this space for the viewer.
McNamara Andrew,
‘Making space for the invisible architecture of the social’,
Sculptural Situations: Gail Hastings,
exhibition catalogue,
Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Sydney
no.2.07,
2007.
Excerpt
Hastings seeks to craft space — in particular, she seeks to craft an inter-subjective space, a social space of conversation and communication. This is at once a remarkably fraught, ambitious and fascinating enterprise. It is also one reason why the experience of Hastings’s evocative situations is like confronting something vaguely familiar, yet weirdly opaque.
Wiehager Renate,
‘Contemporary Art in dialogue with 20th century architecture and design: Gail Hastings — Charlotte Perriand’,
in Renate Wiehager (ed.),
Minimalism and Applied II,
exhibition catalogue,
Mercedes-Benz Art Collection,
Berlin
2010,
pp.2–7.
Excerpt
The architectural space of the ‘sculptural situation’ missing walls: bureaucracy at work, 2007 — outlined by the four zigzag walls differently colored blue, yellow, red and black — is at first seemingly empty. That is until, of course, one leaves this central chamber and finds outside, on the black zigzag wall, a page from the ‘Encyclopaedia of works of art on walls never made’. A dialogical space echoed within the missing walls of this sculptural situation’s library is a conversation that actually took place in 1911 between architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, from which stemmed the concrete design of a library to tower over Australia’s federal parliament in Canberra as the nation’s crown. Never built for bureaucratic reasons, it is a conversation once planned but never had, still to this day. And yet, in its wake, through the spatial geometry of its radically social ambitions, a viewer’s embodied remembering of this space makes it full and present, not missing.
Wiehager Renate,
‘Gail Hastings’,
in Renate Wiehager (ed.),
Blitzen Benz Bang: Daimler Art Collection,
exhibition catalogue,
Hatje Cantz,
Berlin
2009,
pp.418, 423.
Excerpt
Gail Hastings places the process of perceiving, understanding and taking action at the center of her space-related constellations of texts objects, colors, material and formal guiding systems. […] Her formal language is shaped by the Minimal and Concept Art of the 1960s, but even more by the Utopian view of life and art taken by Russian Constructivism in the early years of the 20th century.
Viewers entering the exhibition space, see and relate the individual elements to each other as physical and mental components of the work. We can see her work as abstract pictorial compositions tending to the three-dimensional, but we can also step into them, use them and accept their possibilities for action. Real, architectural, and aesthetic space are activated and fade into each other.
