Stuart likes to take things apart. Plastic chairs sliced in half, playing darts turned into paint brushes, crushed coke cans now used as aerosols. These objects, from the scatter series Low sculpture (2008), point to an approach innate to how Ringholt grapples with this sick, sad world as an artist. The act of dismantling, from mass produced objects to found printed material, continues to offer us curious results once put back together. Since the early 2000s, Ringholt’s collages have evolved from making slight or simple alternations, typically to a human body—the twist of the head or a smile turned upside down—to producing more chaotic, tactile effects. This frenzied style is notably found in the series Theatre Stills previously exhibited at Neon Parc in 2018, where magazine pages of Italian texts were pulled apart, remixed, and interwoven with large monochromatic images of classical art, architecture, ornate interiors and landscapes, with entertaining Monty Python-esque outcomes.
Chelsea Hopper is a curator and writer. She is an editor at Memo Review and Index Journal, an independent peer-reviewed art history publication based in Naarm/Melbourne.
