ST PAUL St Gallery is pleased to present It happened that, an exhibition that explores speculative approaches to perception and the possibilities that guide one’s experience of one’s surroundings. The exhibition brings together works by Christian Capurro, Maddie Leach, Sean Lynch, and Sriwhana Spong that share a tendency to shift in place and time, creating an awareness of contingencies.

The artist’s concerns range widely and engage with areas such as image and non-image, matter and immateriality to query image making and perception; the commodities market through investing in precious metal; the history of an imagined island off the west coast of Ireland; and the imprecision of recollection and capture of place, object and atmosphere.

Informing the exhibition is the phrase ‘it happened that’, an expression and attitude drawn from the novel The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. The novel contains the idea that if there is such a thing as a sense of reality then there must also be such a thing as a sense of possibility. This possibility is defined as the ability to conceive of everything.

If one has a sense of possibility then one can invent, proposing ‘here this or that might, could or ought to happen’ and that if something is one way, then could it not just as well be otherwise? The observation and analysis of events under the influence of this attitude is at the heart of the novel and serves here as a backdrop for the wider consideration of how contingency operates upon us.

In addition to taking part in It happened that in 2010 Australian artist Christian Capurro is showing at Artspace Sydney and is part of the exhibition Erased: Contemporary Australian Drawing, touring to Singapore, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen & the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2009-11. In 2007 Capurro’s project, Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette showed at the Venice Biennale as part of Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense curated by Robert Storr.

Wellington based artist Maddie Leach is currently in Chicago for the Close Encounters project at the Hyde Park Art Center. In 2008 her work Perigee # 11 opened One Day Sculpture in Wellington and she was also an International Artist In Residence at The National Sculpture Factory in Cork City, Ireland. She will complete a commissioned project in Cork later this year and is the Taranaki Artist in Residence for 2011 at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Sean Lynch studied history at the University of Limerick and fine art at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. He has completed solo exhibitions at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 2010 Heaven’s Full, London, 2008, Galway Arts Centre and Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2007. Lynch has featured in recent group exhibitions at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery,Cork, Camden Arts Centre, London, Neugierriemschneider, Berlin, and Office Baroque, Antwerp. He is also author, editor and publisher of several books and pamphlets that focus on Irish art and architecture. He is represented by the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin.

Since her graduation from Elam School of Fine Art in 2001, Sriwhana Spong has exhibited throughout Australasia and more recently in the USA and Europe. In 2010 Spong exhibited at Art Statements, Art 41 Basel. Her work was curated into Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial, Artspace, Auckland, 2007, and A Tale of Two Cities, Busan Biennale, Busan, 2006. In 2007 she completed a residency at Artspace Sydney, and in 2008 she participated in the ISCP Studio Residency Program in New York City.

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}

_{It happened that(installation view), 2010.}