Shelley Lasica - The Design Plot

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Shelley Lasica’s practice has placed the creative and processional machinations of dance and choreography centre stage. Skirting histories of visual, spatial and performance art as closely as she has embraced dance and choreography, the Melbourne artist’s propositions test the limits of the mediums in which they operate, forever expanding contexts and posing questions of just what dance is and what it can be as art.

Lasica’s debut book The Design Plot - which features texts by project producer Zoe Theodore, curator Pip Wallis and writer Megan Payne - acts as both documentation of Lasica’s ever-evolving practice and a wider vehicle for exploring the relationship between the body and architectural space, imagination and memory. Tracing ten iterations of the collaborative dance work from which the book takes its name, The Design Plot is at once organised and amorphous in its bearings – image sequences fracturing and folding in on themselves amidst a measured, cumulative flow of gestures, people, movements and architectures.