Archive : 2019

Makeshift explores the continuum of the ever-changing spaces we live in. The paintings reflect spaces at various stages: new, old, renovated, upgraded, and experienced or yet to be experienced as well as spaces that act as a temporary measure. The dynamic nature of spaces arranged and rearranged, aimed to be functional and to serve the human need. Through layers of paint, traces or shapes that reflect the environment, I aim to emulate one’s experience of space, an experience of space that is frequently makeshift or impermanent. 

Some Things Have Changed is a collection of paintings about a family’s grief. In secular Australia, we are quick to bury our dead and return to daily life. We have forgone many of the rites and rituals around death embraced by generations past, and we feel uncomfortable when we see someone grieving publicly. The portraits in the collection depict moments in the lead up and aftermath of my father’s death. They capture moments of change that are both small and momentous. In Mum’s Gone Blonde, the couch my mother sits on is the first piece of furniture moved in the family house since my father’s death. The paintings are both reflective and hopeful: they acknowledge the glacial work of mourning and the permanence of a family member lost, but they also capture moments of strength and resilience. 

Lucy Fahey is a painter, illustrator and animator living and working in Melbourne. Her work investigates issues of identity, selfhood and family life. Since graduating from RMIT University in 2009, Lucy has exhibited in gallery spaces in Melbourne and created commercial work on commission for public institutions and private clients. Her work has been acquired by the State Library of Victoria and Museum Victoria. In 2019, Lucy’s paintings were shortlisted for the Ravenswood Art Prize and the Milburn Art Prize. She was awarded an ArtStart grant by the Australian Council and in 2010 and a creative fellowship by the State Library of Victoria in 2011

The plan... it all begins with that. Then expectation. Then execution. Then the photograph. The moment is captured. There is no going back now. Taking reference from personal photographs, Can’t we just be spontaneous? explores the nature of memories and the way that they can be re-contextualised and re-informed. Rendering snapshots in time, Butler’s drawings question the way that moments are portrayed and the fractured recollections of what we see versus what we remember. Through her latest body of work she explores the mundane, the interesting and the forgotten, all the time questioning whether we can ever break away from a singular lived moment.

Working across drawing and collage, Della Butler’s practice is informed by personal experience and family history. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Monash University in 2014 and a Masters of Art (Arts Management) with Distinction at RMIT University in 2016.

Night Garden’ presents mixed-media works on paper, canvas and wood alongside sculptural ceramics that are installed to emphasise spatial play; encouraging a navigation of the gallery that is immersive. 

The conceptual basis of the project is inspired by organic processes that occur by the light of the moon and during sleep that are both transformative and regenerative for humans and the natural world alike. By drawing attention to the magic and mystery of natural laws that humans appear to have lost contact with, ‘Night Garden’ invites the viewer to undergo an experience wherein reflection upon the roles of a range of organisms within these cycles is acknowledged, illuminated and embraced.

Natalie Papak is a visual artist & art educator born and working in Melbourne. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Traversing the Void’ (2016) at Seventh Gallery, and ‘Nascent Desire & Captivating Narcissism’ (2013) at BLINDSIDE gallery. A notable career highlight was her artist residency in the the historic town of Vallauris in the South of France, in 2014 where she worked alongside a group of peers to create and exhibit an individually proposed body of work.Her educational background includes a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and a Post-Graduate Diploma of Visual Art, both completed at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Her Graduate Diploma of Teaching was completed in 2003 at Melbourne University. Natalie has been exhibiting her work professionally in a range of contexts since 1997, her first solo exhibit was held at the George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University in 1999.

We rarely speak honestly and specifically about mental illness and its treatment. Running into a Carpark Naked is a group of paintings and drawings that show and speak about personal memories from a 2 month period of time spent in an open ward, locked ward and seclusion room of a psychiatric hospital in South Australia, Five years ago. 

Max Callaghan is a visual artist from Adelaide. In 2017 he graduated with BVA Honours (First Class) from Adelaide Central School of Art and in 2018 he held his first solo exhibition at FELTspace in Adelaide. He is currently undertaking a 1-year studio residency at ACE Open in Adelaide.

Aylsa McHugh lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. In 2002 she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Aylsa’s most recent practice sees her utilising collage, appropriating images found in magazines and books. She is particularly focussed in the multitude of ways environmental narratives inform and colour our individual and collective psyches. Aylsa's debut solo exhibition Persona is the result of her ongoing investigations into marrying seemingly heterogeneous subject matter to create new and divergent readings. She is interested in how the recontextualizing and combining of found imagery can convey the uncanny. Persona is a series of paired images of vintage hair models with sculptures from the modernist period which enact simultaneously unsettling and elegant juxtapositions. These assemblages are compelling and perverse, disjointed yet harmonious, a celebration of the arcane and strangely beautiful. Aylsa would like to respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which she is exhibiting, the Wurundjeri peoples of the Woi Wurrung language group. She would also like to acknowledge that the Wurundjeri people have never ceded these lands and have been caring for and living on Country, making and creating here, for many, many thousands of generations. She honours their Ancestors, Elders and next generations of community.

Slow Territory responds to the connection between stitching, weaving and drawing and the contemplative, meditative nature of these activities. Using natural dyes, inks and acrylic and collaged felt, silk and cotton, the works respond to a range of natural processes such as the cycle of rehydration and evaporation found within salt lakes, tidal drawings of bush fire ash on coastal areas and verdant growth on lava rocks. Notions of distilling an atmosphere of place are explored and the works form a map of remembrance and meditative intent. 

Deb K Williams has exhibited widely and is currently interested in creating works that explore traditional making methods and how these are linked to place and memory. 

In Opposition is an investigation into the significance of a process based technique that connects to industry, and class. Sarah Murphy and Matt Feder's works are bound in their semiotic usage of transport imagery, and what it is to move, or be moved from one place to another. To merge, and simultaneously expose the differences between two separate works dealing with: the value of the artists hand, materiality and the binary of high and low art, questioning what it is for the masculine, or feminine to build/construct an atypical object or environment.

Emergence is the process of becoming. Beings of the in-between, these manifestations represent a turbulence in the natural world that has succumb to human consumption and disregard. They emerge from the depths of moral pollution and crawl upon the wasteland of our mortality. Slowly becoming a mark of death and decay, these are the spirits of our unbecoming.

Christiaan Moes is an emerging Melbourne artist whose work revolves around the subject of anthropomorphism (the attribution of human characteristics to animals) using it as a metaphor and visual embodiment for the human condition, critiquing social identity, sexuality and perception of nature.

The artists in Earth bound, light bound share a deep interest in the rich and mercurial paradigm that encompasses our connection with the earth and its atmospheres. Their works include both wearable and sculptural forms and are the result of close observations of the shared space of natural phenomena and emotions. 

Physical and ephemeral elements of our relationship with the natural world are channeled through sensitive transformations of materials that include metals, minerals, textiles and ceramics; speaking in languages that resonate internally and externally, referencing the landscape, the body and the psyche and the symmetries and tensions between them.

A series of landscape paintings inspired by Tarra-Bulga National Park, Victoria.

https://www.james-little.com/

These works form part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of information and how it is generated, distributed and fragmented. Each work is produced according to the same set of constraints, using the same set of fragmented information generated from found imagery. Through this process the found images are separated from their original content and used instead as a means of exploring the various tensions inherent in painting; rigid structure and improvisation; flatness and depth; the mechanical and the handmade; movement and stillness; durations of time; seriality and variation. The formats of these works also reference common display resolutions of screens through which we are exposed to a perpetual stream of information. The found images used to create this series of artworks were taken from the top ten Google search trends for 2018.

A Combinatorial Explosion is an installation and mural work which looks at exponential, cascading chain reactions that occur in nuclear explosions. Within the context of this body of work, these chain reactions function as a signifier of a potential global catastrophe; whereby growth occurs too rapidly and decay soon follows. The artist uses geometric conceptualism and abstract forms to convey the stages of the nuclear reaction. The diagrammatic forms are used to create a progressive abstract composition, within which, one form triggers another, and then another, and another in progression. 
This project is proudly supported by the Australia Council for The Arts and Arts NT.
 

The Museum of Platitudes and Aphorisms project is a series of exhibitions and events that explore how individual artists and audiences explore their thinking about the presence of art in a studio or a gallery environment. It seems that there is a peripheral vision that occurs in all artist’s practices which, once recognised, either avoids or extends the awareness of the role of art and galleries in our lives. The aim of the project is to ask both makers and observers to reflect upon their own values in the experiences of making, encountering and looking at art. The role of the museum or gallery as the psychological architecture used to reflect upon accepted knowledge is also in review.

Thousand Tears investigates the study of visual re-presentation and its ability to create distance between idea (memory) and object (self). Spivak isolates, breaks and reconstitutes the materials inherent to photography allowing the medium an opportunity to look back on itself. This exhibition serves as a reminder of the physical and chemical processes of photography, granting the viewer space to consider the value of image in our visually saturated culture.

Noah Spivak studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York and received a Bachelor of Fine Art in photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver in 2015. Shortly after graduation he migrated to Melbourne and has been actively producing since in his Brunswick based studio. Spivak has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Patrick Heath is an emerging artist from Adelaide. His work uses found materials and pop cultural artifacts to explore overlapping personal and social narratives, playing with myth, nostalgia and the vernacular culture of suburban Australia. Standing On The Outside...New work representing the artist’smusings on repetition, nostalgia and the intimacy of the ubiquitous. These altered, found canvases explore ideas of home and the fractured nature of memory through histories encoded within patterns.

This exhibition is supported by the Helpmann Academy

Portraits between Alice Springs and Darwin presents a collection of figures drawn from my childhood memories of farmers and stockmen while traveling in this region. Executed on several large scale canvases the characters depicted here explore ideas of masculinity, isolation, fragility and the development of identity. I hoped to respectfully portray people whose perceptions of the world and their environment differ from those held by many urban Australians.

Working for two minutes takes its cue from Alain de Botton’s, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and considers the ‘hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace’. Reflecting an ongoing tension between work-work, and art-work, Working for two minutes is a personal attempt to reconcile these coexisting forces, examining one through the lens of the other. 

A meditation on the mundane, a rumination on the routine, the work celebrates the ordinary daily performance of working life. 

Rachel Gresswell is a Melbourne-based artist, working primarily in figurative drawing, and the study of movement through drawing for moving image.

Caterina Leone is a Melbourne-based artist revitalising the technique of silverpoint to create artworks that question societal belief structures and notions of gender. Working in self-portraiture is her rebellion against a cultural conditioning that disempowered her sex and gender identity. Religious, mythological and art historical references and aesthetics feature heavily, as these hold conflicting suggestions of exclusion and reverence for the artist. Her combination of silverpoint - a largely forgotten way of drawing with precious metals - with contemporary mediums like spray paint, is a means of exploring this inner conflict in her choice of materials as well as subject matter. 

Shift and Simmer considers the phenomenology of looking through contemporary abstract painting. The body of work examines colour’s state of flux by negotiating the perceivable energies in painting, viewing duration, and materiality.  Drawing from the Optical Art movement’s intention to reveal and awaken vision through optical manipulation the selection of bold, idiosyncratic works engage painting’s possibility to enliven over durational viewing.

The paintings in this eexhibition provide a space for a dialogue between zones of intention and happenstance. They harness chance within the formal context of geometric abstraction using process-based approaches to production.  The work interchanges between premeditated and accidental actions, integrating incidental marks to interrupt the established formula bringing forth questions of perceived intentions and moments of happenstance.

An exhibition of artworks made in responce to the Rubicon space and surrounding areas featuring - 

Rain White
Oonagh McGowan
Voula Christopoulos
Nada Jovic 
Paulina Campos
Aneta Bozic
Louis Balis 
Stephen Glover
Liza Pozar 
Felicity Gordon
Sue Bottomley 
Margot Sharman
Kate Carey Peters
Sharon Crabb
Michelle Eattell
Julie Harmsworth
Norma McGowan
Rose O’Shea 
Julian Di Martino
Carol Rowlands
Daniel Strauss
Trish Round 
Erin Round
Carl Reidy 
Sue Pavlovich 
Sarah Summers
Jenny Gibson

This body of work is concerned with the inability of articulation and comprehension. The works aim to reflect on, and capture feelings of tension and frustration akin to having a word on the tip of your tongue and being unable to deliver it, or understanding something only for it to be fleeting and out of your grasp once again. The work suspends and holds this liminal space; a space before comprehension and articulation is finally (if ever) achieved. 

The conflict that arises when a wall is created continues to inform my art.  The relationship between materials and process is always my starting point. I create a wheel thrown, functional vessel which I then challenge and manipulate.  The end result is a new artwork but one that remains embedded in this original narrative. 

The landscape provides a setting for abstinence. There are very few people here. I'm alone, and sexually frustrated. I'm in awe of this vast, empty landscape, but also feeling a great sense of resentment towards it. I want to appreciate its beauty and wildness, but instead my mind wanders and is consumed by thoughts of sex. But I'm isolated here. So I walk, make drawings, take photos, and try to think about abstinence, despite my mind being filled with sex. 

Thoughts on abstinenceis a project conceived during a three month stay in the Scottish highlands. Landscape photography of the surroundings is shown alongside drawings of sex-obsessed creatures which are created from scribbles. 

At the same time that art’s representations of the female body have undergone revaluation as a result of a critique of the male gaze, a culture of women’s self-representation of their bodies has emerged online via social media sites.

 Today, women’s own publication of their bodies online has become part of everyday life. Certain cultural forms made possible by social media, such as that grouped around ‘#fitspiration’, demand ever greater (self-)scrutiny of women’s bodies. While this cultural form’s practice of peer rewards, along with the rhetoric of ‘choice’, appears to emphasise women’s agency, #fitspiration is arguably a powerful disciplinary tool, functioning in the Foucauldian sense to correct 

Chroma in the diskothek​ is a solo exhibition of new painting by Natalie Mather. Drawing from Deleuze’s lines as ‘becomings’, that ‘bifurcat[e] and diverg[e] ... [connect and entangle]’, Natalie explores how her painting can create both movement and a sense of immersion. Using Frank Stella’s idea of ‘geometry that [has] a narrative impact’ as a starting point, Mather has made a large-scale, multi-panelled narrative abstraction, with mirrored pictorial elements underscoring the ‘bifurcating and diverging’ of the painted image. ​chroma in the diskothek​, packed into a small thoroughfare space, uses both a saccharine colour palette reminiscent of the 1980s and frenetic pictorial space to agitate, to overwhelm, and to engage the viewer as an interstitial part of the whole.

'If you get it on a try you never learn it back' -   Clark Coolidge

The show is titled "Good Mirage", and is a series of monochrome abstract paintings, with a 75-ball Bingo template complete with a  winning bingo combination, both printed and painted atop.
Bingo is a game in which players mark off numbers on cards as the numbers are drawn randomly by a caller, the winner being the first person to mark off all their numbers in particular combinations. Some of these combinations form the dotted compositions within these paintings.
  It is a game of chance, and is played mostly by the elderly.

The exclamation 'Bingo!', much like 'Eureka!', is often used to express satisfaction at a sudden positive event or outcome.


I am interested in popular games as analogies for structures that govern meaning and value.
Good luck, '
 

Kevin Morgan Jones 2019

As a medium, drawing has the capacity to physically capture the actions, movements and gestures of an artist. Each mark on the surface of the paper can act as a record of the artist’s processes and decisions as they unfolded over time. Ariana Luca explores this idea through creating large drawings on the floor of her studio. She uses unfixed drawing materials like pastel or charcoal to physically trace her own movements as she paints and draws abstract compositions. In this process moments of chance and randomness, like smudges and fingerprints, are captured alongside carefully controlled watercolour forms and patterns.

From becoming to belonging is an interdisciplinary exhibition of new work by a group of emerging artists responding to an exploration of own cultural identity within personal experiences in Australia as migrants. Born overseas or in Australia within a migrant family, 'the otherness' is felt, so is the constant process of choice to engage or disengage with Australian socio-cultural standards. Cross-cultural narratives bring a sense of belonging into emerging futures as long as they are visible and appreciated. Being present but absent, lost but searching, still but constantly moving, foreign but Australian are some of the complexities explored in this show.

Utilising a logic that is sensory and compulsively circular, Moriarty elevates found debris into a self-fulfilling functionality.

A hook, a latch, concrete rubble; objects are collected instinctively. Obtained separate and displaced, they hold one-another; their references are both preserved and recontextualised. These materials contain an agency in their relationship to each other and the site, the relationship is both logical and visceral within its logic. A poetic satisfaction through recognition occurs.

Works become charms extending from the architecture, sitting in a charged, humming loop that is encapsulated within each form. Structures support themselves, held in a tense, connected space of being and becoming.

Underbelly blew up my house. My childhood home was a location for Fat Tony & Co. (2014). It played a meth lab, which mum chose not to take personally.
In early 2018 my childhood home was demolished (for real this time), to celebrate I invited my artist friends to create a loving sendoff. For one evening my parents opened up their home of over 30 years to some old friends and some strangers. We called it a ‘House Party’.