Affording Truth

Affording Truth explores how we perceive and navigate truth in an era of global uncertainty, using the framework of affordances - the qualities of objects or environments that suggest or enable actions and interactions. Perceived, false or hidden, affordances are everywhere and key to how humans navigate the world.

Fuelled by the rapid integration of digital networked systems and hardware, social media, algorithms and artificial intelligence, truth has become relative, contested and ambiguous. Facts once deemed indisputable are now questioned and open to manipulation in social, political and digital worlds through the creation and widespread distribution of unfiltered content, artifice, fake news, disinformation and confected realities.

The exhibition presents new and existing work by artists who interrogate the increasingly muddy space of truth including Alison Alder, Robert Andrew, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Lauren Dunn, Honor Freeman, Tyza Hart, Daniel McKewen, Juanita McLauchlan, Raquel Ormella, Baden Pailthorpe, Ryan Presley, Alex Seton, Scotty So and Esther Stewart. Their use of affordances are both nuanced and straightforward, perceivable and obscure, provoking thought, exposing hidden systems or challenging social assumptions.