A flower competition for the not-too-distant future.
Experimental art duo Pony Express stage a thorny take on the traditional horticultural show.
In residence amongst the Blue Mountains’ garden festivals, cool-climate growers and spectacular spring displays, this live art installation draws inspiration from an unlikely piece of Sydney’s history: the floristry competitions once held by the industrial workers at Sydney’s White Bay Power Station.
Pony Express have recruited fellow artistic duos to clock on for a subversive contest of arranging, judging and display. Reshaping the categories, techniques and exacting standards of traditional floristry shows.
In our rapidly automating age, when there’s no more work to be done and leisure becomes labour, Workers Arranging Flowers wonders what we’ll do with our idle time when the workers outlive the work.
Report for your shift as Pony Express and their workforce of artist pairs compose an unlikely arrangement of factory floor, Best in Show display and post-leisure party.
Enter the production line for this work-in-progress test-run of Workers Arranging Flowers, where the work itself is still being arranged.
Workers: Pony Express (Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair), SPACEFLOSS Collective (Kaylee Rankin and Rachel Seeto), raeandwill (Rae Colquhoun-Fairweather and Will Bartolo) with hosting aka Donovan Miller.
Antidisciplinary art duo Pony Express (Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair) lampoon soft and hard power structures to create large-scale, world-building projects. Presenting nationally and internationally, their post-immersive, post-sustainable, participatory, pandrogynous process constructs near futures and alternate timelines that reflect & refract your present. Pony Express collaborate across disciplines and species, with niche subcultures, scientists, hobbyists, sportspeople and thought leaders, to implicate audiences as investors, voters, voyeurs and lovers. Their works stress-test the ethics, ecologies or alliances needed to survive and thrive in a future uncertain.
Their projects tour widely across major contemporary art institutions and non-traditional institutions: from sex clubs (Ecosexual Bathhouse), to laboratories (Tentaculum), to ships (Raft of the Medusa), to showgrounds (The Queer Woodchop), to museums as attraction rides (Extreme Forces), to galleries as stadiums (Abolish the Olympics) and to city halls as geological congresses and battlegrounds (Epoch Wars).
Pony Express thrive in spaces where cultural spectacle, civic infrastructure & ecological inquiry collide, assembling mirror universes: intricate, participatory situations that expose, lampoon & destabilise the structures we live inside.