Change Platform 2007, wood, plastic tarpaulin, seats, cushions, carpet, publications, guitar, in the exhibition Increase Your Uncertainty, ACCA, Melbourne 2007

“While [some] exhibitions make for sombre reflection on attenuated forms of cultural anxiety, such gravitas was irreverently inverted in A Constructed World’s mini retrospective at ACCA, Increase Your Uncertainty. Renegade in intent, works by A Constructed World (aka Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva) celebrated instability by confounding the binaries of author and audience, success and failure. For this collective, experimentation—with its attendant embarrassment or failure—has been embraced. An emphasis on the open-ended and provisional was embodied in the materiality of the works themselves: found objects, scrawled text, sketches, post-it notes.

For Vikki McInnes, Director of VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, A Constructed World’s self-styled mottos like No need to be great, Stay in groups ‘reflects their anxiety about the breakdown of community—a particularly contemporary concern, extrapolating the failure of late capitalist society to care for or about its individual members.’4 The openness to supposedly negative terms like failure, and dialogue on the efficacy of working in groups, was expanded in a series of public forums. By redirecting the focus from the artwork to the relations between the participants, A Constructed World created shared spaces that could become, in their own words, ‘a working model of culture’.5”

Sophie Knezic

Anxious Times: Strategies of Doubt, Un Magazine, vol 2, issue 2, November 2008, Melbourne