Archive : 2015

December 16 - December 22, 2015



The Mad Minute

THE MAD MINUTE: RUBICON FUNDRAISER EXHIBITION

CHOOSE AN AWESOME ARTWORK IN UNDER A MINUTE !

EVENT NIGHT TUESDAY 22 DECEMBER 6 - 9pm

Buy a $100 ticket in exchange for an AWESOME artwork chosen by YOU! 



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Here's how it works:

1. Express viewing of the show is from 6pm. 
2. Exchange your ticket at reception for a numbered red dot sticker on the night
3. The draw starts at 7pm sharp! Hosted by Andrew Gaynor
4. The host will pull 2 numbers out of a box. The two ticket buyers with those numbers will then have a minute to place their red dot on the artwork of their choice. 



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Buy Tickets here: http://www.trybooking.com/JRVM

EXHIBITION DATES: December 16 - 22.

Its FREE for anyone to attend, the tickets are for those who would like to participate in the Mad Minute art draw. 

FREE drinks for donors and ticket buyers! For all others gold coin donations welcome. 

Queries can be emailed to: mail@rubiconari.com.au




November 25 - December 12, 2015



Naomi Bishop

Green Burial

Green Burial is a series of recent paintings by Naomi Bishop.  These works were produced during a summer residency at the Arteles Creative Centre in Finland in August of 2015.

 In this series she has continued working with mysterious symbols and imagined ritual objects and substances, making images of memorial stones, forest burial grounds, illusory thresholds and celestial phenomena. These are places and objects that might be used for conjuring supernatural forces, contacting or remembering departed souls. Elements of rock, bone, wood, earth, and salt are interpreted and developed into imaginary sacred objects.

Chance plays a part in the creation of the images, from initially finding a shape with which to work, through to the movement of the paint and the fall of light and shadow across the painting on the studio table. Naomi Bishop has worked with the colours seen in the infinite Northern Summer sky, misty pink mornings shift through mauves and then to brilliant, endless blue and into the magical, luminous green of the Northern Lights.  

 In 2016 Naomi Bishop will be exhibiting with Taiwanese artist Chih-Fen Tsai in Dark Winter at the National University in Taipei, and will have a solo exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Silin in Paris. 



David Freney-Mills

Sublimation Cycle

David Freney-Mills’ most recent series of work SUBLIMATION CYCLE explores the visual properties of words and the patterns that form when a word is repeated and overlapped through the merging of improvised layers of painting in ink. This process of repetition emulates the recitation of mantras and the realisations that occur when we read or hear words that resonate within us, such as in poetry or songs. In Jungian Psychology sublimation is an alchemical process in which an ascending action results in change to a higher form. Freney-Mills employs a similar process of metamorphosis, in which the legibility of the word is ‘sublimated’ in favour of more abstract forms that trigger contemplation and allow for a viewer’s consciousness to expand.       

Freney-Mills has had solo exhibitions at STEPS Gallery, PB Gallery-Swinburne, Trocadero Art Space, Five Walls Projects, Rubicon ARI and has been curated into a number of group exhibitions, including ‘Rewriting the Image: Text as art’ at the Town Hall Gallery- Hawthorn Arts Centre in 2014. He was an Artist-in-Residence at Caritas Christi Hospice-St Vincents in Kew in 2011/12. Freney-Mills travelled to Japan in 2011 and 2012 where he observed the materials and techniques of contemporary and traditional Japanese painting and dye art practitioners, an influence which he has subsequently incorporated into his own practice through the medium of ink on paper.     

http://davidfreneymills.com/



Oscar Capezio & Naomi Xeros, Marissa Bagley, Eadie Newman, J. Felix Skinner

New Speculation

New Speculation is a group show curated by Patrick Larmour consisting of print, drawing, needlepoint, video and clay sculpture ranging from the bombastically colourful to the subtly delicate. Encompassing aspects of surrealism, abstraction and naivety without the weight and baggage of established doctrine. The combination of imagery and material used creates a parallel world that would be easy to slip into. One that elucidates common but unspoken emotions and observations. These works build upon themselves with a lightness of touch that incorporates missteps and successes.

These artists work from a speculative and exploratory place in which work and process becomes a method of thinking. Through making complete systems of their own they reflect so many details, ways of doing things and absurdities in the fabric of human activity. Imparting impressions from their experience in the world rather than planned translations of past events.

Oscar Capezio & Naomi Xeros and Eadie Newman are based in Canberra, Marissa Bagley is based in Sydney and J. Felix Skinner is based in Melbourne. Each has exhibited widely in recent years throughout Sydney and Canberra.




November 4 - November 21, 2015



Kubota Fumikazu

New Idea!


Viv Miller, Max White

Colour Imperative


John Aslanidis, David Sequiera, Emma Coulter

Colour Imperative



October 14 - October 31, 2015



Joe Scerri

Magnetic Rivers

A drawing instrument marks a surface leaving traces of memory, producing a cognitive map of the mind. Within each stroke lies an untraceable thought, grouped together to reveal hidden stories. Swathes of twisting rhythms expand and retract, jolt and jitter—perpetuating the unspoken currents of the subconscious. The process reveals inner disturbances and desires, memory and reflection, calm and chaos—that drift like magnetic rivers through the air, manoeuvring and morphing through a captured but animated stillness.  Intrigued by the unknown and the unseen, Joe Scerri tries to capture the moment a thought emerges and vanishes, like the ghostly apparitions of emotions whirring around in our rooms, retrieving the unknown spectacle that may lay between us.



Kasia Fabijanska

Ecoruminating

Drawing on influences from Timothy Morton's ecocritical work Ecology Without Nature, and the aesthetics of fantasy films such as The Neverending Story - the etchings, drawings and 3-dimensional textile / multimedia works in Ecoruminating show nature in surreal, metaphorical landscapes and icon-like compositions. The body of work is a deliberation or rumination on the status quo of ecology, how it may reflect the human psyche and what needs to shift in the collective culture to help propel the move towards a sustainable future.

Kasia Fabijańska completed a BA in Fashion Design at RMIT, (2000) and soon afterwards gravitated towards a visual art practice. In 2012 she completed an MVA in printmedia at Monash. Her work is held in many private collections. She is currently undertaking the Australian Print Workshop Dowd Foundation Scholarship. This is her second solo exhibition at Rubicon ARI
 



Michael Vale & Nick Ives

The Umbelliferous Portraits

The swung torch scatters seeds in the umbelliferous dark …

(Ern Malley, Night Piece)

When the literary conspirators Harold Stewart and James McAuley invented the fictional poet Ern Malley in 1943 they followed the Surrealist manual, cutting and pasting text and collaborating with chance. Their alleged motive, the lampooning of Modernist poetry, has been historically (and hysterically) overblown while their creation, Malley’s suite of poems, remains as testament to the quality of their project. (Not many realize that Stewart had already explored visual collage with convincing results and clearly understood the spirit of automatic imagery).

Nicholas Ives and Michael Vale have explored the poems with the aim of re-imagining the cast of bizarre characters that populate these works: “the robber of dead men’s dreams”, “the scrub-typhus of Mubo”, “the damaged prince” and “the cold-sea-gazers” to name a few. Each artist has attempted to work with chance and spur of the moment imagery, collaborating both with the ghost of Ern Malley and with each other. Appropriately, they have dubbed their results “the umbelliferous portraits”.




September 23 - October 10, 2015



Iain Dean

Skimming Stones

I sit under a lamp relishing in its warmth. The seasons are changing but winter still lingers. I look out my window at the budding trees and you know summer is coming again. Hot summers that bleach the trees and melt your face. Too hot for picnics. I’ve been skimming stones on the reservoir finally filled by the winter rains. It will soon be warm enough to swim and then it will dry out again. I feel hopeful and ready to move on. It’s gonna be a good summer.

Iain Dean completed his certificate IV in Visual Arts from Adelaide Central Arts in 2007 and is currently furthering his studies in fine art at Curtin University, Perth. His work is held in private and public collections in Australia. Solo shows include Dream baby Dream at Free Range gallery, Perth, WA, 2015; The End of Legacy at Fort Delta, Melbourne, VIC, 2015. Recent group shows include Loser Unit, Magazine launch, Up Gallery, Perth, WA, 2015; New works, Margaret River Galleries, Margaret River, WA, 2015; Young Ones, Sir Charles Gardner Hospital, Perth, WA 2014; City of South Perth Emerging Artists 2014, Perth, WA. He has been selected as a finalist for the 2015 Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Sydney NSW for his work Adult comedy action drama. In 2014 he was the winner of the Black Swan National Portrait Prize, Perth WA for his work Pilar Mata Dupont and in 2013 was selected as a finalist in the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for his work Tell me lies and lullabies, but don’t tell me to change.



Anja Loughhead

Populate or Perish!

Populate or Perish! is a satirical series by emerging Canberra based photographer and installation artist Anja Loughhead. A processing site utilised during the infamous White Australia Policy, the Bonegilla Migrant Training and Reception Centre drew public attention in the media as a result of riots and infant deaths. Sourced newspaper clippings and government handbooks are used as a visual mechanism to form parallels between past and present migration issues. Augmented terrycloth nappies, blankets and found materials are presented as objects of memorial, a commemoration for the lives who suffered as a result of the Australian government agenda..Populate or Perish! is a tongue in cheek commentary on the way in which Australia continues to capture, record and transmit national immigration policy information through the media.



Andrew Goodman, Erin Manning, Sam Spurr

Weather Patterns

A weather pattern is created through a complex set of forces interacting within an environment. Weather patterns tune the environment.

This exhibition uses the context of the weather pattern to set up an ongoing tension between a series of objects and forces that play out within the gallery over time. The ‘weather pattern’ at Rubicon Ari investigates the problem of how an artistic system might develop a capacity for the event to activate its own internal motivations. This installation is a collective exploration across disciplines and continents between artists Erin Manning, Andrew Goodman and Sam Spurr.




September 2 - September 19, 2015



Harley Manifold

Contained

Manifold’s oil paintings depict the lone figure ambling through alleyways in Melbourne landscapes, dwarfed by skyscrapers and highway overpasses. A dark, saturated palette details hard geometrical streetscapes, bathed in the soft liminal glow of dusk and the night-time sky. Adorning the figure’s torso, a flimsy upturned cardboard box, mimics yet contrasts the impenetrable vast, heavy buildings. This recurring motif’s vulnerable transient interior is accentuated by the sturdy veneers of the surrounding concreted architecture and questions the influence of the modern social delineations, boundaries and interfaces we traverse daily. Manifold’s paintings tread the discourse of unnoticed physical and psychological terrains. City landscapes, constructed by people yet cluttered by ‘anti-spaces’, Manifold’s paintings reflect tensions between states of camouflage and discontinuity in an era of increased communication and alienation. These intimate self-portraits open enquiries regarding the place and positioning of the human condition in this contemporary technological age.



Dagmar Cyrulla

Amour et vie

My paintings are about feelings, based on how we relate to one another. The aim is to engage the viewer in the same thought process as mine. To open an opportunity for self questioning. They are stories which hopefully reflect my love of people and their stories. The kinds of things I draw on as a subtext would be;  Father and daughter relationships, power relationships, relationships to parents, being and having a role model, sibling rivalry etc.  I have clarity with each painting in regard to what ideas I am exploring,  however  it is more important for me to be engaged emotionally with each work.  I play with colour and light to help create the mood that I want the viewer to experience. 

Having completed a masters of Fine Arts at Monash University; Dagmar Cyrulla's artwork is held in major private and public collections in Australia and overseas. She exhibits regularly nationally and has been awarded prizes and qualified as a finalist in; The Doug Moran, Dobell, Adelaide Perry, Rick Amor Drawing prize, Black Swan Portrait Prize, Sulman, Prometheus, Warnambool Social Commentary, Albany and Alice Prize. Dagmar has been the recipient of two New York residencies and is the subject of the artist monograph Dagmar Cyrulla: Watched and Watching edited by Marguerite Brown and published in 2012.



Peter Thomas

Uncollected Works

UnCollected Works began in 2012, when I found a golf tee at Dachau concentration camp near Munich. This discarded object seemed out of place. Its incongruity seemed significant. Something that fell from a visitor’s pocket as rubbish was distracting my attention from what needed it. I photographed it lying there, and put it in my pocket.

Looking at the ground became a compulsion in Europe, a compulsion that continued upon my return to Australia. Over time this anti or “Un” collection has built up.

The resulting works completed for this exhibition represent a strange assemblage of memorials to historical and cultural sites. They might draw attention to the banality of touristic experience or depict an alternative version of memorial culture. For me though, the substance of these paintings is located in the space between knowing and not knowing, felt in the transformative moment when a picture of a golf tee in the gravel becomes a picture about genocide.




August 12 - August 29, 2015



Callum Harper

“_#,”

“_#,” is a solo exhibition that explores the influential and transitional introduction of social media applications. Social media platforms can either create the illusion of accessible socializing or the viewpoint that ‘Apps’ contain the ability to alter constructs of reality, whether you are directly involved with it or not, in place of actualized human presence. Utilising source information via applications including Facebook and Grindr, the exhibition aims to formulate ideas of both personal and unknown identities being warped both intentionally and otherwise. Individuals who do not consume or partake within the Internet, are at some point involved within it’s online applications; as simply as a photographic representation of themselves or typed word. The exhibition utilises humour to show humanity’s vulnerable nature in the Westernized technological modern era.

Callum Harper is a Melbourne based artist, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014, at Monash University.  Harper will be undertaking a Masters’ of Art in the Public Realm at Konstfack University in Stockholm commencing this August.



Simon Degroot

Composite Orders

A composite order refers to the delicate appearance of architectural columns used in churches during the Renaissance. They are a mixed capital design combining and restructuring elements from previous orders in new ways and in a different order. This double use of the word order is important here as it suggests an architectural relation and structural arrangement. This arrangement or order is also reflected in layers of computer code determining the order of operations often visually depicted using the phosphor green of early monochrome computer monitors. In this exhibition Degroot employs this green considering how contemporary painting can abstract, build on and combine visual structures to explore a space between the digital and the real.

Simon Degroot is a PhD Candidate and sessional academic at The Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. He was recently awarded the 2015 Moreton Bay Region Art Award and is represented by Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane.



Kaitlyn Gibson, Oliver Hutchison, Justine Austen, Nick Hackett, Andrew Weatherill

Making the un

Curated by Andrew Weatherill, Making The Un aims to document the experience and process of making work. It is a bringing together of materials that activate the gallery space to investigate how the viewer relates and interacts to the individual artists work. The un denotes the absence of a state. Sometimes it is necessary to unmake in order to create a resolved artwork. The purpose of this group exhibition is to act as a discursive investigation into how art functions.




July 22 - August 8, 2015



Lorilee Yang

New Atlantis, Urban Myths

The identity of places is unfixed and arbitrary, both informing and formed by those that inhabit them. “Where are we?” Is interchangeable with “Who are we?” Through globalisation fixed geographical co-ordinates are rendered and place identity becomes reliant on the local, the d.i.y, the obsolete. New Atlantis, Urban Myths takes departure from images garnered from wandering through cities and towns in tangible and digital realms in an attempt to uncover an underlying, global experience of place, a sense of familiarity that may stem from particular objects, forms or colours.

Lorilee Yang explores the aesthetics of identity and the banal in the globalised world, using painting to create works that exist in a simultaneous binding and undoing. In 2014 Yang completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) at the VCA and was part of the Upstarts Program at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Upcoming exhibitions for 2015 include TCB Art Inc. and Bus Projects.

http://lorileeyang.com



Kate Hodgetts

I got a Feelin'

I Got A Feelin' is a solo exhibition of recent works by Melbourne based artist Kate Hodgetts. Consisting of moving image and print, the exhibition revels in both tactility and immersion, encouraging both a penetrating gaze and a close examination of surface. Her print works are a modern adaptation of the camera-less photographic technique of Cliche Verre (meaning to paint on glass) and are constructed through the physical manipulation of film. While the works in this exhibition may at first appear non figurative, they do shape-shift, taking on different forms and structures dependent on the vision and experience of the viewer.

Kate Hodgetts completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2007 and has recently completed a Masters in Cultural Material Conservation at the University of Melbourne. 

http://www.katehodgetts.com



Justin Hinder & Eleanor Louise Butt

Parallels

In Parallels Butt and Hinder present a collection of their individual work within the context of figurative and landscape paintings to create separate environments running parallel to one another. 

A Body
The landscape
A body in landscape
The landscape in a body

Accompanied by a text by Tai Snaith and a limited edition poster designed by Kim Jaeger.

Justin Hinder:  2015/16 Next Wave Emerging Curator Program. 

Eleanor Louise Butt graduated VCA honors 2013

http://www.eleanorlouisebutt.com

https://justinhinderwords.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 




July 1 - July 18, 2015



Emily Yuting Chen

Submergence

Submergence explores the underlying intimacy between light and space. The transmission from one medium to another, from object to subject creates a tension between entities. The possible resistance and alternation between mediums during the act of touching disturbs the intrinsic identification of the self. Emily Yuting Chen is interested in the ephemeral existence of abstract language generated during the occurrence of recognition/mis-recognition. Submergence materialises the intangible and contingent moments of perceptual encounters.

Currently completing her Honours of Fine Art at Monash University, Emily Yuting Chen is a Melbourne-based Taiwanese artist who works closely with analogue and digital apparatuses, exploring the property of light reflexively through the mechanisms of technology. She works experimentally across a mix of durational-based mediums, exploring the agency and properties of mediums in response to the relationships between beings.

 



Annette Chang

Spending

‘Spending’ features two works Paid Bills and Receipts. Paid Bills is constructed from the artist’s personal paid bills accumulated from 2012-2014 while Receipts is constructed from accumulated receipts from 2012 to March 2015. These works are a self-reflection of how the mental and physical desires and the need of ‘owning’ and ‘keeping’ have unconsciously driven her into this massive spending and collection. Through the process of sorting through these bills and receipts, she has come to realise that much of this consuming is unnecessary. Many of the purchased items were completely forgotten and have been sitting in storage since day one. This has her wondering, by the time the print on the light and heat sensitive receipt paper has faded, will these goods still be laying in storage untouched? Is this just the artist’s own obsession with consuming, or is this someone else’s story too?

Annette Chang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She migrated to Australia in 1991 and has been living and working in Melbourne since. She has completed Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 2014. Her artwork is centred on reconfiguring found and existing materials to create two and three –dimensional artworks. She is interested in being innovative with common materials in order to change how the viewer perceives them. Through her innovative artworks, she aims to create an unconventional visual experience for the viewers.



Mariana Jandova

I still haven't found what i'm looking for

The installation offers a reflection on that which we are compelled to grasp but which remains always just out of reach. An interactive work where the viewer is enticed to reflect upon his or her own internal struggle to attain what is most desired. A transformation occurs in the process, seen as emergence of a universally shared condition that, not without a touch of humour, sheds light on our many futile yet unceasingly compelling drives.

Mariana Jandova was born in Czechoslovakia, completed her Fine Art degree at the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia and recently also a postgraduate degree in Social Work at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her practice stems from her ongoing interest in the psycho-social dimension of human life, the intricacies of human perception and the way we create and structure the world around us. 




June 10 - June 27, 2015



Brad Rusbridge

Hollow Gully

“As long as drones the size of mosquitoes continue to breach the borders of personal space and property; I don the rag.  While robots work around the clock collating data received by motion-capture cenotaphs and CCTV cameras hiding in the cracks of stone cairns; I diligently and without hesitation, don the rag.  While personal devices automatically upload the souls of their users, every minute of every hour of every day; I am sitting on a dirt floor at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft, sporting a tin-foil akubra.  To the youth who asserts his or her individuality in a gesture of mind-numbing homogeneity - as the iphone camera captures the ubiquitous selfie - I am akin to the sound of its shutter: a haunting, hoarsely whispered, faux-mechanical ‘click’, fated to fade inconsequentially from existence.  And so I lower the veil on it all.  In town, only when I absolutely must, I appear as a hollow shell of a man, a ghost without subjects, a rare and tragic vagabond.  But my thoughts are rich, my project private yet profound.  Beyond this khaki calico face-covering lies the eyes of a painter, the mouth of a poet and the mind of a pedagogue.  Though now... for what use... I don’t know.”

In early 2015 Brad began work on an extended prose poem entitled Hollow Gully.  It is a fictional memoir of self-imposed exile set on the outskirts of the artist’s hometown of Bendigo, Victoria.  This narrative, set in a dystopian near-future, drives the subject matter of his recent paintings.



Patrick Larmour

systematic use

The bright discarded objects and grimy fixtures that make up Systematic Use come from an interest in the mundane consumer products that exemplify the connection between technology and the human body (as opposed the human eye) in day to day life. These items form the minutiae of the ways in which basic concerns like shelter and safety are expressed in urban Australia. Plastic moulded to fit parts of our bodies form an intimate relationship with users inviting us to hold and make use of them. With them we maintain the space we have carved out of the land.

Patrick Larmour is an emerging artist based in Melbourne. After graduating from the ANU School of Art in 2011 he has shown throughout the ACT and Melbourne in his recent career.



Penelope Hunt

Remains to be seen

‘Remains to be seen’ consists of a series of contemporary photographs that explore the abandoned painting studio of close relative and WW2 War Artist Alan Moore who last year turned 100. After entering the gates of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Alan was told to take photographs because no one would believe his drawings.

This is not an exhibition celebrating our war history. Instead, Penelope Hunt tries to disentangle the spaces between the real, the imagined, the stories told and the remains left behind. Created over two years as part of her VCA Masters project, the images explore the weight, both of physical and emotional responses, so often contained within personal artifacts. Paints, both used and pristine, lie around the studio in a palimpsest of time, encrusted tubes becoming a documentation of practice itself. The images created for Remains to be seen exist in the present whilst exploring fragments of the past in a studio that has effectively become a Still Life.




May 20 - June 6, 2015



Terrence Combos

FEHRSGVOUYE

FEHRSGVOUYE means absolutely nothing. It is a random string of letters formed using a keyboard mash, the act of aimlessly typing letters into a keyboard.

The works comprising FEHRSGVOUYE delve into the formative and destructive potential that arises from a systems-based conflation of abstraction and language. They seek to test the boundaries of legibility and comprehension through a syntactically collapsed engagement with language, presented through visual systems that fuse letters together, shift in orientation, and blur figure-ground relationships.

Terrence Combos (b. 1988) is an emerging artist based in Sydney. In 2014 he exhibited in the two-person show Sugarcoated Realness with Louise Zhang at Archive_ in Sydney, was awarded a studio residency at Penrith Regional Gallery, and was the winner of the drawing section in the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award at Campbelltown Arts Centre for the second consecutive year. Terrence is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at UNSW Art & Design. This is his first solo exhibition in Melbourne.

This project has benefited from an Arts & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited



Simon O'Carrigan

Pyrite Radio

Hanging on the wall are scraps of dowel, lashed together into crosses, and woven with wire like a spiders web. Strange contraptions made of scrap wood, cardboard tubes, tin foil, masking tape, gold enamelled wire wound around bottles are dotted around the space. They all connect by wire to the hanging crosses.

Some have antiquated headphones attached, a tiny earpiece, or an origami gramophone horn. There is no power plug, no battery connected, and yet, if you listen closely you can hear different radio broadcasts emanating from each makeshift device. Turning dials here and there (as the signs invite you to try) selects different radio stations.

For Pyrite Radio Simon O’Carrigan has built a selection of homemade ‘crystal set’ radios: an invention first considered at the turn of the century, and popularised through the 1930s and ‘40s. These radios used a crystal such as pyrite to convert radio waves into a very weak electronic pulse — just enough to make audible sound.

Also present are paintings of archival photographs, each just as eccentric as the tin foil and masking tape devices in the room. For instance: a man sits for a portrait wearing a shoulder-mounted antenna, connected to a crystal set conveniently mounted in a tobacco pipe, feeding sound into his headphones. “How do you tune it?” the article read, “I just turn my head” was his reply.

Since 2005, Simon has shown in over thirty exhibitions, and his animations have had over twenty screenings in film festivals both locally and internationally. Since 2012, he has been focussing his work on the different methods by which we communicate with another. He has absolutely no prior electronics training, and it most likely shows.



Alison Kennedy

Putting the Noth into Nothing

Art can teach us to see the noth-ing (the nilism) of the nothing- the darkness surrounding the light of the sensible. (Heidegger)
It defies our subjective impulse towards conceptual mastery – through technology for example- and acknowledges the tension between the truth as a constant covering and uncovering of authenticity.

These works explore ‘when do we know when something makes sense?’ through a series of photographic prints that explore the movement between clarity and obscurity, the literal and the poetic. They do so by layering images taken in the studio with cinematic stills and archived images.

This exhibition continues Alison Kennedy’s exploration of the relationships between philosophy, art, technology and image.

In 2014 she co founded the Centre of Logos and Philosophy Café Melbourne an interdisciplinary group dedicated to integrating philosophical thought into everyday experience and creative practice. https://philosophycafemelbourne.wordpress.com/about/

She completed her Masters of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne in 2012 and has exhibited consistently since then. She has a background in law, writing, and architecture.
http://alisonkennedy.co/

 




April 29 - May 16, 2015



Clara Bradley

COALESCENCE

Coalescence examines the altered face of intimacy from within contemporary digital communication constructs via handmade and embroidered garments that deploy tactile, distillations of ‘poetic memory’ functioning to preserve autobiographical moments of intimacy. Coupled with hand printed portraits that inspect the multifaceted composite of selves operating within amorous exchanges.

Clara Bradley works primarily in embroidery a medium imbued with connotations regarding quotidian gender structures and personally, the separateness inherent in the feminine. Obsessed with the dislocation between concealed womb and the multiplicity of selves, she examines the struggle for autonomy within intimacy, identity and the preservation of memory. Clara is based in Melbourne and this is her first solo show.



Georgia Anson

Shell of Venus

Shell of Venus is an installation that explores themes of animality and challenges the humanist notions shown in “The Birth of Venus” painting by Boticelli through a series of works that focus on evolution of the animal and human connection. The work looks for beauty in evolution, growth and transformation. Drawing from a focus on the human/animal divide and connection, and studying how the human skin, bodies and flesh are changing as a result of medical and scientific research.
 The exhibition treats the bodies and relationships of animals and humans as a second skin or membrane, that is always transforming and evolving.

Georgia Anson is a multi disciplinary artist whose work often activates and plays upon the divide between human and animal. In installation environments generating vibrant, fantastical gardens, and in performances in which Anson engages with an animal companion including a snake or dog, the artist attempts to introduce viewers to her fantasy world in which the primacy of nature, the body and tactility rule. 



Anthea Kemp, Loralee Newitt and Laura Skerlj

The Perfect Lethargy of Orbit

Painting’s unseen moon circles the rectangle, dragging matter in: hands, geological iota, cliffs, shelters and fugitives. Inside the frame, all these things and more cross paths. Rooms and landscapes collapse into one another, undoing their boundaries. The minute mirrors the massive; the representational begins to abstract. 

It is this gravitation toward flux that connects the work of Anthea Kemp, Loralee Newitt and Laura Skerlj: an image-making less concerned with accurate illustration than painting’s material imperative to exaggerate, erase, and move compositional elements in and out of view. In this way “memory would resemble/A cross-section of the earths core”[1], everything that came before filtering up to meet an indistinct future.

Inside, space brims. Intimate subjectivities are lured by an overarching cosmic force or fate. Landscapes seek the containment found in architecture, while rooms move past any foreseeable horizon. There are human things: losses, wishes, bruises. Wild things too: mountains and their limits, lakes and their depths. Here, space is not abandoned but in meditation, with matter moving in, as thoughts do, and out, in exhale.

 




April 8 - April 25, 2015



Sarah Gosling

The captivators

Using an extensive collection of found and gathered imagery, Sarah creates worlds in which the relationship between humans and animals are fragmented and recreated to demonstrate its apprehensiveness. In The Captivators,  settings appear constructed and human made with alienated figures that imbue a sense of unease. This is amplified by the rawness of the painted surface, deliberately left rough and imperfect. The paintings reflect our own fractured relationship to other forms of life and the natural world at large.

Sarah Gosling is a painter who completed a BFA from Monash University in 2010. She has since had numerous exhibitions in Melbourne and rural Victoria. Sarah lives and works in Castlemaine, Victoria.



Sarah Brownlow

When I Came I Was A Stranger

When l came l was a Stranger explores representations of the masked self in public space. Playing with the power of appearance in identity-making, Brownlow’s self-portraits pose questions around visibility and subjectivity, authenticity and exteriority, identity and performance.

Sarah Brownlow is a Melbourne based artist. She received a Bachelor of Design at Monash University in 2002. She continued her undergraduate studies at Monash, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art, Painting in 2008. She is currently a candidate in the Masters of Art (Art in Public Space), RMIT University. This is Brownlow’s fourth solo exhibition; she has recently shown at Off The Kerb (2015) and PS50 (2014).



Ted McKinlay

Distemper has a Hold

Ted McKinlay is interested in image, memory and the uncanny. He seeks to render the familiar strange via the interplay of incongruous images, problematizing a sense of figurative or narrative coherency. The works allude to the act of remembering or online searching; where one encounters a somewhat random succession of images while attempting to locate that as-yet undefined memory or idea. The surfeit of images and abstract data (lines, facets along with other geometric or chromatic misregistrations and slippages) results in a sense of simultaneity and recognition, as the viewer attempts to negotiate the various perspectives offered up by each composition. A sense of uncanny familiarity is highlighted via the use of a restricted palette of oversaturated color and hue, reducing the images to a shimmering mirage of almost disconcerting colour planes. These disconcerting colour combinations imbue each image with a sense of finiteness and entropy.

Ted is based in Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (majoring in Drawing) at RMIT University in 2012. He has exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.




March 18 - April 4, 2015



James Little

Interlude and credits

Interlude and Credits investigates the linkages between memory association and abstract portraiture.The project examines the traditions of portrait making, and the relationships between the artist, subject, and the viewer. Memory association is defined as the ability to learn and remember the relationship between unrelated items; i.e the characteristics of an individual when recognising their face, the aroma of a particular perfume.

James Little is a Melbourne based artist. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Art degree at RMIT University in 2011.



Aaron Hoffman

Transfer

Engaging with found objects, particularly in regards to the domestic, Transfer presents new work by Melbourne-based artist Aaron Hoffman. The reconfigured forms included in the exhibition present personal narratives that implicate memory, restraint and the absent body. Composed of metal grids, cast hybrids and video, Transfer is Hoffman's first solo show.

The artist has contributed works to a number of local group shows and will be completing his studies at VCA this year.



Ieuan Weinman

The Editorial

The Editorial: Viewpoints that can be highly subjective ruminating on issues laid out bare on one plane and edited with an overwhelming censoring process. Faces that are innocent, fascinating and deceiving culled from personal and media sources; the nun who sold me bamboo in 2011, a journalist arrested, the cudlay seller, voters, guards, artists and a fishmonger on a bicycle.

Ieuan Weinman lives and works in Melbourne. He works with the mediums of painting whilst also incorporating elements of video and sound. He completed his MFA at VCA in 2007 and has been a committee member with Westpace for the past 3 years. Recent Shows include Bambalapitya Deep House at Little Woods (2013), Threatening Environments at both TCB and Platform (2012) and the group show Non-aligned in Colombo (2012).




February 25 - March 14, 2015

Telia Nevile: Too Good To Be True, inkjet photo, card and resin, 17.5 x 27.5cm, 2015


Telia Nevile

More Than Words

Researchers claim romantic comedies can ruin your love life by creating unrealistic expectations. As someone who has more than one Mills & Boon book secreted shamefully underneath my bed, I know the battle between sweet fiction and cold fact. ‘More Than Words’ wades into the arena where fantasy and reality collide, where hearts are won and broken.

Telia Nevile is a writer, performer and photographer. Her visual arts practice explores photography’s ability to alter and fabricate memories, and the blurry line between imagination and actuality. Her heartfelt ode to 80s director John Hughes can be read in the Women of Letters anthology ‘Between Us’, out now through Penguin Books.

http://telianevilephotography.virb.com/#/id/i7064729

 

Emme Orbach: Tetragonal Crystal, aluminium, mono-ammonium phosphate, wire and snap-hooks, dimensions Variable, 2015


Emme Orbach

NH4 H2 PO4 (residue building systems)

NH₄H₂PO₄ is the chemical compound that Emme Orbach utilises to create intricate, crystal encrusted alminium sculptures. This exhibition interrogates the traditional notion of the artist as sole contributor. Orbach explores this by utilising residue-building processes, and ultimately allowing the organic growth of crystals to dictate, and carry the works aesthetic. This systematical approach allows the work to conjure it’s own intrinsic aesthetic, which develops independently from the artist’s hand. Alternatively, the artist becomes a catalyst for an operation far more complex than the human hand could ever produce alone.

Emme Orbach is a contemporary sculptural installation artist based in Melbourne. She completed a bachelor of visual arts and design at ACU in 2012, and more recently graduated from honours in spatial practice (sculpture), at RMIT in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in various group shows, notably the NotFair Satellite Art Fair in 2014, and Blindside’s Debut XI in 2015. 

http://www.emmeorbach.com

Travis Vella: The Condor and the Bull, acrylic and oil on canvas, 170 x 230cm, 2015


Travis Vella

machine minds with machine hearts for machine men

Travis Vella considers himself a Neo-Narrative painter. Using a mixture of traditional and experimental painting techniques he has developed a practice that draws from text and film to explore the human psyche and the sub-conscious. Machine Minds with Machine Hearts for Machine Men explores the divisions within humanity where Vella considers the current state of human relationships, both within our immediate surroundings and on world scale, finding compassion waining as selfishness grows.  These works reference the Charlie Chaplin film “The Great Dictator”  and its direct call to humanity and real connection not motivated by gain or profit.  Machine Minds with Machine Hearts for Machine Men  looks at where we find the line between pragmatism and humanity itself. 

In 2004 Vella was awarded a scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where he also participated in numerous group shows and joined the Brooklyn Art Collective. Since then Vella has established Twin Skulls studios in 2009 and had his work featured in various venues including the artist zine, Change, Brunswick's Grandview Hotel, Twin Skulls Studios’ gallery (2010) and Red Gallery (2013). Future exhibitions include The Rebel, Rubicon ARI (February 2014) and his first solo show at Editorial Gallery, New York in June 2014. 
Vella completed his BA at Southern Cross University, Northern NSW in 2005. 

http://travisvella.com




February 4 - February 21, 2015



Jordan Wood

Flat Space

In Flat Space Jordan Wood uses collage as a means to explore the hazy links between constructed environments, perceived nature and the body’s navigation between the two. Through the extraction via scalpel blade, magazine images lose their intended objectivity to suggest something more transient: macro to micro, inorganic to humanoid and the things in the spaces in between. The analogue process of cutting and pasting exposes the potential for absurdity within the printed records of contemporary society.

Jordan Wood is a Melbourne based artist working across installation, sculpture, ceramics and collage to explore propositional future landscapes/ experience/ relics. Recent exhibitions include ‘Kuantan Flux’, Unicorn Lane Gallery, Ballarat, ‘Why you are here’, ECAiR Gallery, Kuantan, Malaysia, ‘Blow Off’, Rear View Gallery, ‘Wish You Were Here’ Linden Gallery, and ‘Atrophia’ at West Space

Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours), Victorian College of the Arts, 2007.

http://jordanlwood.carbonmade.com



Basil Papoutsidis

GT

Through a deconstruction of architectural energy and the utility of the product and material range of the construction industry, Basil Papoutsidis explores an ongoing interest into the differences that lie between the theoretical language of architectural practice and the realities of construction. This interest in solid form and the muscular, energetic volumes of Modernist abstraction and architecture is combined with a personal concern with the aesthetics of the custom muscle car culture of the late 60’s and early 70’s. It is this cross-referencing of Modernism and custom automotive culture that constructs and informs a comment on the masculine condition.

Basil Papoutsidis lives and works in Melbourne, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. Working predominantly in sculpture, he constructs three-dimensional objects and offsets, revealing construction methods and materials that depict architectural prose in new vision. Papoutsidis has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 2014 International Mokuhanga Conference held in Tokyo, Japan. 



Jaedon Shin

Dead Guerrillas

I have painted the figures that are generally in a ‘plight’ which is given to them in a political or social situation irrespective of their own will or awareness.  Through practice I have been investigating the aspects of problematic human conditions that lead viewers to think about the relationships between people and the environment surrounding them.  The figures in my works do exist in a space with historical, political and social background. 

In this exhibition, I am exploring the tragedies, which have happened between South and North Korea.  I specifically focus on the North Korean Guerrillas invasion of South Korea in 1968.  Among the 120 specially trained North Korean communist guerrillas, 113 were killed and 7 were captured by the South Korean Army.  I intentionally chose the source images that show political violence in a bold and insensitive way. 

When I was a school boy, such events used to happen in almost every year.  In most cases, the guerrillas were killed and the mopping-up operations made the headlines of major newspapers with the photographs of the scenes.  When I saw the horrible photographs of the killed guerrillas exhibited on the school corridors, such painful echoes used to come to my mind; why they came, only to be cruelly killed?  Without any mercy, all of them were killed.  When I grew up, I heard the rumors that we, South Koreans, also had sent guerrillas and spies to the North.  However, I have not heard anything about their returns and thus I just assumed that they were also thoroughly eliminated by the North Korean military.

As a Korea born artist, I investigated and explored that event as a historical human tragedy, which is often portrayed as a desperate existence behind a surface of dispute that we are experiencing in the modern history of the world.

 

 




January 14 - January 31, 2015

Image: Jimmy langer, Dead City Scroll, Ink on paper, 57 x 70cm, 2014


Jimmy Langer

parlour game

Parlour Game is just that, a personal game I’ve made for myself to examine outcomes. I’m investigating the overlap of determinist action and randomness, something that alludes to broader notions of abstract ideas of free will, universal patterns, decay and entropy.

I am interested in the minutiae of the mark itself: the mark’s journey on the paper starts and ends in opposite and competing areas of thought. The outcome deconstructs the mark, diverting meaning and informing another pattern, then linking them. Once again, the opposing notions of accident and the conscious act are brought together.

The idea is to extract patterns and movement from various forms of mark making and figurative depiction. The subject matter of these depictions varies from natural topography to more defined urban images, often patterns in their own way, ready to be ‘re-patterned’.The process maintains surprise in the outcome, while confining the outcome to a predictable starting point

Jimmy Langer is a graduate of the ANU School of Art in Canberra and has been residing in Melbourne since 2009. He has exhibited in Canberra and Melbourne. Over the years he has explored the visual and theoretical space inherent in urban and artificial places.  The environment of this has opened many questions to do with the nature and value of space itself and the impact it continues to have. Surrealism, absurdism, nihilism, mathematics and architecture all play a part in this investigation. Growing up in desolate outer-suburban Canberra was a convenient first step in considering the more absurd aspects of the space we build -and don’t build- around us.

Jimmy Langer will be commencing an MFA at the Victorian College of Arts in March 2015.

http://jimmylanger.com

Image left: Marcos Guzman: The heavens dance in the dusk hours, perspex, spray paint, 110x110mm (Photo: Jeremy Dillon) Image right: Sarah Louise Ricketts, Tetraopods: The Giant's Jacks, felt, 30cm x 30cm x 30cm, 2014


Annie Gobel & Marcos Guzman / Sarah Louise Ricketts

Colourfast guaranteed / Play - Pose - Post

Colourfast Guaranteed considers the ‘brilliance’ of colour and the permanent visual effect that remains after the ‘wash and rinse’ cycle of associations and experiences. Annie Gobel and Marcos Guzman seek to represent colour through specific applications and thoughtful decision making that speaks of hues, contrasts and compositions while embodying a literal jewellery form. This exhibition celebrates the use of colour and the applications that the artists employ to render wearable pieces.

Annie and Marcos’ consideration of processes and techniques seek to acquire ways of representing their individually esteemed values of colour, while their chosen materials are indicative of their context within the contemporary jewellery practice. Conceptually, Annie’s work deals with the idea of toys as objects revealing traces of childhood experiences through visual and physical characteristics, whereas Marcos’ work looks into reimagining a childlike state of contemplation with the aid of narrative titles and statements.

http://www.anniegobel.com

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PLAY - POSE - POST  focuses on interactive human beings, to whom I offer art objects with which to play. Participant-viewers are invited to share their experience with the wider world via interaction on social media platforms. This becomes a “real” exploration of play itself, of how we react to and interplay with forces within and outside ourselves, as beings actively engaged in creating our society online and off.

The interplay of real and virtual life has been my own life’s experience. An enduring interest in computers began in the 1970s, with work on a mainframe, and has continued throughout the digital revolution. PLAY-POSE-POST can be seen as the desire to combine digital methods with art practice, both for myself, and for others.

The work is an installation, consisting of human-scale interconnecting play objects (Tetrapods: the Giant’s Jacks) within a small invitational space, supported by sounds reminiscent of the joy of play. 

http://www.sarahlouisericketts.com/curriculum-vitae

Image: Benjamin Aitken, Table 1, circa 2012, drug paraphernalia, artist's blood, and mixed media on wood. L: 100 x W:39 x D:73cm


Benjamin Aitken

Sometimes i feel like killing my self(ies)

Sometimes I feel like killing my self(ies) is a series of paintings that investigates the concepts of personal identity.  The rise in popularity of the 'selfie' image - documenting and sharing our lives - pertains to pop culture's fascination with celebrityhood. An important topic and problem for debate and discussion is that these ‘selfie insights’ for our lives can depict a polar reality against our own internal idea of ourselves. The relationship between the identity created in the selfie as a public image, and the identity that the individual sees themselves as typically don't correlate with each other.

Using this disconnection, Sometimes I feel like killing my self(ies) states: sometimes I am conflicted with my internal identity, and sometimes I am conflicted with my external identity. The inquiry as to the where the overlap of these two identities occurs is what the series seeks to investigate. Exploring narcissism, alcohol and drug abuse, family estrangement, independence and religion as a personal studies, the series serves as an admittance to what has contributed to creating the perceptions of my self. The creation of the artwork series seeks a catharsis, and a deeper understanding of myself to be eventually gained.

Ben has had a solo show at GallerySmith Projects, curated into the Biennial Howard Arkley/Not Fair curated by Ashley Crawford and won the highly commended in Perth for the Black Swan portrait prize.

http://www.alexmccullochart.com.au/ben-aitken-sometimes-i-feel-like-killing-my-selfies/

http://thesubmachine.net/2015/02/04/ben-aitken-jan-2015/


 




January 9 - January 10, 2015



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Darren Nedza is a Melbourne based artist. He completed a Diploma of Visual Arts at Box Hill Institute in 2011 and a Bachelor of Fine Art at Melbourne University in 2014. Through innovative


Darren Nedza (presented by Artmeet ARI)

variations of mixed media and tradition, Darren’s work investigates and challenges the conventional expectations which surround and influence contemporary art institutions, questioning the



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validity of the creative act and the inherent uncertainty within those institutions. He has shown in galleries throughout Melbourne and recieved the Edith Rose Memorial Prize for Sculpture.

http://www.artmeetari.com