Constance ARI

INFLIGHT gallery is on Elizabeth Street half way between Hobart's seedy CBD mall and the almost-cosmopolitan restaurant/bar strip of North Hobart. It is a small warehouse split into two exhibition spaces - the main gallery and the project space - and located amidst car yards, across the road from a meat wholesaler and next door to a granite and marble importer. You enter INFLIGHT via a car park at the back of a cafe/nightclub. Many an opening is spent lingering with beers and plastic cups of wine in this asphalt no-man's-land, as Friday afternoons slip into Friday nights. This is an idiosyncratic space in which to run an art gallery. It's a fair distance from Hobart's long established cultural institutions (state galleries, museums, art centre and art school) housed in heritage buildings along the city harbour front. And it's nowhere near commercial galleries supplying local creations to the insatiable tourist trade. We are positioned in a transitory zone: lots of traffic passes by. It's a hybrid zone too: kind of suburban, pretty commercial, not quite inner city.

Occupying uncertain ground, geographically and psychologically, causes an entity to question itself and its place. This could be approached as a tension needing resolution. Alternatively, it might be seen as a state worth perpetuating. It can necessitate the invention of categories and the creation of new criteria. It might stimulate growth and change. It manifests opportunities. Straddling divides is also hard work.

But it is common knowledge that the most interesting territory always exists between established points. The best bits are in the crossovers, grey areas, and at the edges - like that tantalizing dodginess on the brink of another's privacy, or the seeming emptiness between creative thoughts and words, or the horrible slippages constantly occurring between bodies. These are challenging, unnerving, uncertain, rewarding spaces.

These states, like temporary delusions of glory or the intangibility of loneliness, are also impermanent and inherently unstable. They can be as anarchic as the battlefield of politics, and as risky as a bad metaphor. Sometimes it's simply unknown territory because few have trod there before. Or else it's been a really long time since anyone's returned there. These are degrees of wildness to be managed, or not.

This is what it is like being on the board of an artist run initiative, especially one that explicitly supports 'emerging' and 'experimental' art as INFLIGHT does. Boards themselves are not static phenomena and there are infinite ways you can describe a group of people. Right now we have 10 board members, 5 of each gender by complete luck. 3 members joined us this year. At least half of us moved here from elsewhere. 1 board member is currently in Amsterdam. For another, this exhibition constitutes his last contribution to this organization he helped found.

Between us we have 8 children (another important characteristic of INFLIGHT openings). Most of us have, at one time - or more - passed through the Hobart art school. We all call Tasmania home, and accordingly, we are pretty familiar with the idea that potent forces come from the periphery.

Bec Tudor 2007