THE PROBLEM IS...
The Duck-Rabbit Problem 1991
synthetic fur, synthetic stuffing, wood, polystyrene, enamel paint
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Rudy Komon Fund, Governor, 1998
© Kathy Temin
Kathy Temin is a critically-acclaimed Melbourne-based artist who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. Temin is central to a generation of artists who influentially reasserted the use of unconventional materials and installation formats in contemporary sculptural practice in the early 1990s. Her highly idiosyncratic objects embrace a do-it-yourself aesthetic, and her seemingly haphazard constructions of MDF and fake fur confront the art-historical legacies of modernism and formalist abstraction. Temin’s work engages with her personal history, Jewish cultural heritage, and with the trash and treasure aesthetics of global pop culture. This survey will consider her contribution to Australian art, achieved through an individual and biographical synthesis of materials and attachment to art, history and consumer culture.
