Hany Armanious

Australian artist Hany Armanious is the 2004 Artist in Residence at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, NZ. He will exhibit at the Auckland Art Gallery in late 2004-early 2005. His work, Untitled (Snake Oil) 2003 is a recent acquisition to the Chartwell Collection.

Hany Armanious, Untitled (Snake Oil) 2003, 23 pieces, glassware and hot melt, image courtesy Michael Lett

The 23 pieces in the work are made from found glassware and hot melt. In a recent interview with Claudine Ise of the Hammer Museum and Luke Parker of the Lord Mori Gallery, he explained that hot melt is a liguid petroleum substance that, when melted and poured into a mould, forms a gelatinous, rubbery cast of an object - in this case the artist has used the glassware itself as the mould. The subsequent object was formed from the interior of the glass which was then used as a support for the work - like delicate plinths that provide a positive/negative/ interior/exterior/ upside down and inside out conjunction.

The artist discovered the hotmelt material in a surfboard shop around the corner from his studio whilehe was doing a residency in Los Angeles, at the 18th Street Arts Complex.

The title Snake Oil refers to a sense of magic, secrets potions and cure-all processes and the artist explained in the interview that it also provided him with a cure for all questions sculptural- "what do we do with an object? what's really its function, what does it do as form, how do we anticipate it, how do we place it, how do we live with it?" The hot melt is indeed a magical product and even, as the artist commented at a recent gallery talk, has a reptilian surface- soft yet dry. "Wonder stuff", says the artist.

He later developed the use of the material by abandoning the use of moulds and simply dropping the hot melt into water. "It did this incredible thing," he explains in the interview. " It would set instantly and it was a self-forming thing. That really intrigued me." This development allowed for a contrast to the formed shapes made previously- they became unformed, abstract, suggestive, uncertain, uncontrolled.

The artist comments that he is interested in the idea of the tension between control and not having control and experiments with aspects of this in his work. For example, he has an ongoing project involving the collection of plastic bags from cities he visits. Once he develops methods for indexing them, ordering them and manipulating them, he leaves it up to the curator to hang them in the gallery however they want to.

It was this process that curator William McAloon used to hang another of Armanious' work, Ladybug ( Pornament) 1993, from the Chartwell Collection in Home and Away, the 1999 Chartwell exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.