Artspace Presents Michaela Gleave’s First Major Solo Exhibition, Event Horizon

Michaela Gleave uses light, sound, performance and chromatic experiments, to explore the nature of reality and highlight questions of movement, time and bodily experiences. Often inspired by scientific data, her works transcend data and the purely visual, to create installations and experiences that act like passages from one reality to another, encouraging audiences to reimagine their understanding of art, life and the world around them.

Using energy fields and physical materials such as mist, sound waves, atmospheric conditions, glitter, recycled timber and inflatable objects, Michaela invites visitors to heighten their awareness of their own process of perception, to explore new ways of seeing and feeling.

Event Horizon showcases Gleave’s wide-ranging approach to making art. The exhibition presents her open-ended experiments as tools for thinking about our changing planet, non-human forms of intelligence, and the uncertainties we face today. It highlights her research-driven practice and her long-standing engagement with conceptual, feminist, and environmental practices.

Over the past twenty years, Gleave has developed a distinctive body of work presented across the public realm, the digital sphere and in museums and galleries both in Australia and internationally. Event Horizon features four new bodies of work, along with her ongoing performance series Universal Maintenance. Inspired by concepts from astrophysics, quantum physics, and Earth sciences, the exhibition explores the limits of observation, scale and knowledge, shining a light on what we can and cannot observe or measure.

In physics, an ‘event horizon’ is the boundary around a black hole, marking a threshold beyond which information cannot return to an external observer. It’s not a physical surface, but a limit imposed by spacetime on what can be known or described.

Event Horizon uses this idea to conceptualise epistemic limits, or the boundaries of human or machine knowledge: where usual ways of explaining things no longer work, and where society must rely on inference, imagination, and new ways of knowing.

The exhibition is organised into five distinct and interconnected activations:
● Zone 1: Reading Room
● Zone 2: Quantum Field
● Zone 3: Organic Realm
● Zone 4: Entanglement Field
● Universal Maintenance (ongoing performance)

Michaela Gleave said:
“The exhibition brings together long-running investigations into time, perception, and material processes at a scale that’s rarely possible, drawing multiple threads of my practice into a series of interconnected environments. The freedom to let the work evolve over the duration of the exhibition has been liberating, marking an important moment for my practice.”

Artspace’s Director, Victor Wang said: “Artspace exists to give artists the conditions to make work they simply can’t make anywhere else. We’re proud to work alongside Michaela Gleave to present her first major solo exhibition in Australia. Supporting artists at this point — when a practice is ready to expand, deepen and take risks — is at the heart of what Artspace does.”

Event Horizon curated by Katie Dyer, Senior Curator, will be presented in dialogue with works of renowned multidisciplinary artists Ming Wong (Singapore), Rithika Merchant (India) and Desmond Woodforde (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara), as part of Artspace’s Void Space, Banner Series and Ideas Platform respectively.

For more information, please visit: artspace.org.au.