Archive : 2018

Ash Coates work draws from images of both real and imaginary places, to examine relationships between micro and macro worlds and the language, forms and networks that exist within our biosphere.

The languages and symbiotic relationships of plants, fungi and bacteria cultures, give rise to transformations of microorganisms, energy fluctuations, transmigration of cells and the distribution of nutrients within the environment and our bodies. It is these processes that influence and form the shapes, composition and psychedelic tones within these works. The paintings are a process of ritual and meditation on things both massive and microscopic, magic and scientific, internal and external.

Using both painting and moving image the artist aims to examine and create dialog in regard to the boundaries of what is natural and what is artificial within the environment and the point where science meets science fiction.

This series of paintings explores the narrative and durational aspects within the still image. The paint is applied in ribbons of oil paint that act as pathways. An unspoken invitation to follow the folds as though walking through a maze. Discovering the way in which the painting was constructed and how the representational aspects drift in and out. The materiality of the medium disrupts the development of the image. Achieving a state of flux and dissipation and opening the conversation between the object and its content. .

There is a window of time that divides the moment between deconstruction and how a space is reconstructed and utilised differently. This interstitial space between absence and presence in the landscape becomes an evacuation of the known and a confrontation with the unknown. We wait, we catch glimpses, a change happens before us, without us. We then live with a new architectural presence, a form that has been decided for us. My process, when I aim represent this notion in a 2-dimensional manner (painting), is through a series of layered observations that reduce as well as evolve in to a balanced composition of density and space.

'New works on paper. Studies for murals in black and white'

Callum Jackson’s solo exhibition, Calm Your Teenage River, examines the role of nostalgia in the modern era. Through print-based media, painting and drawing Jackson has produced a suite of work that investigates the significance of nostalgia, and if it is a force that can stimulate progression or lead to stagnation.

Central to Gresswell’s practice is the materiality of paint and surface as she explores concepts of vulnerability and protection.  Her paintings are created in response to various histories - both personal and art historical. ‘Sensory narratives’ are formed by transferring that which is felt from hand to board, generating textured and rich surfaces with evidence of the artists’ touch. 

The moving finger

When it strikes, it leaves an indelible mark, something clear and true, unmistakable.

This body of work explores the translation of musical stimuli into the physical realm. Like lucid dreaming allows conscious thought to guide the subconscious, listening to the shapes and textures emerging from the notes that become three dimensional form. Engaging in a deliberate  state of chromesthesia giving insight into the colour of sound, how deep, how light, how lush.

Power lies within these chords, the muse and author Dorothy Ashby lived as a pioneer, forging her own path in a place dominated by tradition, poverty and race inequality to birth a sound most true to herself. This is a tribute to her work.

In a practice that encompasses photography and sculpture often using found objects or imagery Christine Myerscough’s series ‘Too Late Too Cloudy’  layers a sequence of photographic images in an enigmatic play of appropriation and re-creation.  Her images and characteristics are more akin to drawing or painting, of soft stains and visual noise, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’ direction and speculation. Myerscough collapses and condenses her series of images, creating works that propose new visual and conceptual terms to consider and distil historical photographic practices.

Sometimes Humorously, sometimes deadpan, Some Things Cannot Be Undone explores the notions of nature and ecology in the Anthropocene through found object assemblage and still-life photography. Removing the nature/culture binary, and with a hint of myth and the occult, Kalemba attempts a playful collaboration with phenomena and found objects. The objects, presented as subjects, with deliberate use of pareidolia (seeing patterns or faces in random data) attempt to arouse empathy within the viewer . . . Or at least a sense of humor. While inviting a questioning of the prevailing anthropocentric worldview, the works explore agency of the non-human and the abject positioning of nature to suggest contemporary stories of ecology and place.

Paul J. Kalemba is a Melbourne-based artist. He finished his Master degree of Visual Art at the the University of Melbourne and earned several finalists, such as the “Still; National Still-Life Award. Coffs Harbor Regional Gallery”, “Banyule Award for Works on Paper” and “The Nillumbik”. In 2018 and 2011, Paul had residency projects in Iceland for “Icelandic Notes for the Weltgeist: SIM Residency” and in Riverbend for “The Symbiogenisis project: Laughing Waters”. Paul’s artistic practice extends across drawing/work on paper, new media, photography and sculpture. His latest work explores the nature and ecology in the Anthropocene through found object and still life compositions. His artworks also became a part of collections in several institutions, such as the Hepburn Shire and the Nillumbik Shire. 

In capturing and recording changes of state in materials and processes, Amanda Page makes works about transformation. Phenomena and the coalescing and dissipation of natural systems are investigated. Change is explored as a universal condition that connects all matter. All things move toward their end records erosion and references fragility, loss and impermanence. The works developed from observing ice formations around Antarctica and Iceland. 

Amanda Page makes works about transformation, in capturing and recording changes of state in materials and processes. While the works reference ecology and climate and can be positioned within the framework of environmental art, they also reference change as a universal condition that connects all matter. Works develop from observing transformative processes in natural systems and phenomena, such as weather patterns, temperature, erosion, interaction between organisms, metamorphosis, growth and decay, where organic substances break down into simpler forms of matter, and how matter and energy change under varying circumstance. 

Page uses water, ice, sunlight, fire and camera-less exposure processes combined with drawing, printmaking and sculptural methods to catalyse, explore and articulate processes of change. By using constructed parameters, Page records the processes of melting, freezing, molding and transforming materials into various states. Perishable materials reference fragility, loss and impermanence in natural systems and capture the interaction of invisible forces and energies.

Move over climate change denialists, Holocaust deniers, flat-earthers and post-truthers. Audrey the Chicken-who-did-not-die-an-unremarkable-death has a new truth. She is now in the business of divination, post-death, as a two-bit fortune teller, quite literally.

Uncontainable calm, questions what it is to live in a world of accelerating change, where the era of mass media circulation offers a prescription for life; news, fake news, desire, hope and deceit on relay. The project aims to manipulate familiar images that are believed to carry meaning and capture the paradox that can emerge. The parts of human nature that try to remain on authentic autopilot, but beneath the surface lurks a charming anxious social identity that violently erupts, stares and behaves inappropriately. Lineham’s abstract/figurative oil paintings explore the dichotomy between the lengths one may go to exert power or conform to a set of ideals, compared with those that disconnect from society, are powerless or feel alienated. The hope of obtaining a sense of calm that can be contained seems to be out of reach, constantly falling out of reach. Her approach is to make the work partially redemptive as well as to indicate a philosophical dimension: the interconnection between evidence and the space shifting form of one’s perception.

A plot is plan, in action and space. It is a devised sequence of points, their relation to one another seemingly determined in advance. The plot exists in time, in capacity, and only through output. The plot is used amongst an array of enterprise, in an effort to resolve measurement between marks, manage the succession of time and to express a decision or intention to affect. In industry it is used to demarcate ownership and devise location. In narrative it is used to intend direction and give line to a path. How do we use a plot to reconcile our experience within physicality? Is the devising of a plan the only part we can determine? 

Plot uses a make-believe Marker of a series of hypothetical patterns to explore these concerns. A Marker is a plot used in the garment production industry to plan the shape of pattern-pieces and how these will relate in their intended cutting. The Marker is made on a plotter, a machine that feeds paper under a demarcating pen. The ball-point pen records the information leaving the system of the pattern making program. This hard copy of vector lines is a reflection of how intention can take form. 

The Markers in Plotting, show mused shapes of clouds and hair, two objects associated with thinking. One may pull and twist their hair when they think or reflect. One may gaze at clouds and ponder or plan. These shapes or ‘patterns’ are given names. The Pattern pieces and the naming text of each piece is plotted on two separate markers. The shapes and text work together to show an abstracted plan, and a networked potential plotting. A scaping of their pieces’ lines and words explores the shape of a plot and its efforts to give assurance through determinism. Here the pre-meditated method of a garment is abstracted to interrogate the method of decision making in design, and in the greater context of any individual’s free choice.

Everything that can be seen can be broken down into shapes and colours. Tania Matilda's paintings and drawings break down the visual and simplify it into shapes then fragmenting and merging them to produce an abstract image. Everything used can be broken down to the materials used to make it. She has collected discarded items found on the side of the road and used them as a painting surface bringing attention the part each item may have played in its role during its life.

‘El did this’ is an expression of concepts much more profound and complex. The more abstract the more reluctant one is to explain the meaning to outsiders. Telling what it means diminishes the magical and protective powers of the work. A private language that only I can understand, or those who can translate it to their own ideas and senses. No complications no obscurity and no serious message to give pleasure and create beauty.
Each stroke of paint is as beautiful as ancient scriptures, paint strokes are scriptures. Do not seek answers from artists, seek it from within. All i will express is my deep admiration and profound respect and love for paint. And that is all i want you to know. Allow yourself to appreciate and embrace the beauty of my work. Let it arouse you, let it provoke you to feel things you wish not to acknowledge. Allow it to captivate you, feel moved by its beauty and grace. You are allowed to appreciate its beauty and still be aware of all that is wrong in the world. You will not grow ignorant in appreciating the little beautiful things that remain.

‘I find it hard to get up in the morning’ is a series of sculptural works that spread across the horizontal plane of the gallery. These works intersect and play off each other, simultaneously creating a precarious stillness and inertia in the space around them. These works explore the idea of Becoming through their shifting forms; through this process these objects evoke notions of being on the verge, an echo, a whimper, a lift, a gesture and a jolt.

What You Left Behind is text-based visual poetry meditating on the physical and non-tangible remnants of life. Drawing influence from the powerful and sometimes confronting visual form of protest signs; this exhibition encourages the viewer to visualise and question past, present and future inheritances that influence the footprint of our personal legacy and the environment. Through deconstruction and investigation Linhart, navigates sentiment, tragedy and humour of the past and present, questioning the human condition to capture an emotional response to untraditional or traditional forms of beauty.

Mongrel Rupture consists of a suite of paintings that attempt to address the affect of the inaudible buzz that oscillates underneath the surface of a post card landscape; a weighted cloud that hovers over the Australian continent. Deliberately ambiguous and elusive with the denial of a palpable legibility, the works are concurrently accessible and impenetrable in their meaning, retreating to the undefinable. On the surface they possess a kind of silence that is not unlike the unspoken narratives that stain Australian history.  The impetus of the works reflect in their own materiality, and eludes to the emptiness of historical settings; Europe or Australia, the imagined landscape. Images are wiped out, erased, architectural references imbrued with personal narrative, played against the canonisation of the history of painting itself.  The private becomes intimately entwined with the public and vice versa. 

In a practice that encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture, Mia Kenway reconsiders found imagery to create a softly abstracted version of reality. The work is often subtle, in tone as well as application, and offers a new perspective of our field of vision, one that is ultimately more light and optimistic. This recent series of paintings explores change through differences in colour and pattern.

Perspicuity pivots around lenses of perception and notions of reality. Limestone, a material that can be millions of years old is formed from previously live creatures by forces of geology and holds an inherent catalogue of time. Through the Virtual Reality headset and materiality the temporal notion of the past and future conjuncts with tension, offering possibilities for constructs of time to be destabilised and swayed. Stackhouse is interested in geological formations, landscape and methodologies of human interaction with places and artifacts and is informed by research of the human need to design and construct tools to enable functional and imagined experiences.

‘Depth Perception’ considers the way natural environments affect our bodies and minds. By distorting and collapsing perspective the graphite drawing work on paper explores the notion of how we perceive and experience the natural world, presenting an immersive textural environment that sits somewhere between landscape and mindscape.

Focusing on experimental responses towards the space, SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM is an exploration between a space and the audience; where the focus of the ‘art’ shifts from being the static area to being the dynamic relationship between the environment and the people. This exhibition is not a mere information propelled towards the public; rather, it is a conversation, a constantly changing communication, or a dialogue. As the audience moves, the figure of the artwork moves, making it an experience that photographs cannot provide
SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM is a response in relation to the space, which is conducted by a collective of artists from various disciplines. Deriving from different cultural background and focus, SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM is a blend of experience and experiment that bears a fresh element that raises questions towards the convention of exhibition itself.
SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM refers to altering dimensions and different wave lengths and frequencies which in turn relates to the artists who helped create the exhibition. It is about different people from different geographical backgrounds coming together to create a shared experience in turn showing a different side of the spectrum.

By transforming space, SIDE OF THE SPECTRUM will act as a means to transport people to a different destination while enjoying the space they’re passing by at the same time.

Whats Remains is an exhibition that explores everyday moments of beauty, humour and connection. Experimenting with painting on a variety of surfaces as well as wall reliefs, it includes works that explore the themes of intimacy, tenderness, fragility, and transition.

Inspired by the title of Marcel Duchamp’s series that critically questions “the logic of measuring”, Stoppage explores our relation with data. What can painting gestures juxtaposed with graph images and textiles reveal about the essence of the measuring system? The French definition of ‘stoppage’ evokes a technique of repairing woven textiles. Combining conceptual and material lines, the painting series dissolve the binary between material production and the abstract production of knowledge. 

Absurd Obsession is an investigation into breaking down the segregation of fine art and to amalgamate ideas through opposing medium. Conforming to a concept of absurdity whilst still maintain an armature of traditional application, in short the balance between chaos and order. When I am painting I think about the substance of sculpture in creating form to enable me to make a viscous surface. When I sculpt I constantly think about drawing and the relationship to line to define and frame space. And when drawing I am thinking about painting and how to define and investigate form and the illusion of mass on a 2-dimensional surface. Subject to me isn’t so important, I do not wish to illustrate or represent my observation. My life long vocation is to use the subject only as an armature to make art.

See Little Change is a series of works that explore the figure as an unclear identity faded to a ghostly embrace. They are paintings that depict the vagueness of figures and place them in an in between space. On paper, Hao takes the figure as far as he can and then takes it back again. Forward and back until he ends up with something bare. It is due to this deliberate vagueness that the work eludes any definition of what constitutes the figurative. Even if we don’t know we will make it up to fill in the gap.

Myles Prangnell is a contemporary photographer engaging in the worlds of social documentary and constructive photo making. Myles’ practice diversifies from analog to digital, still-life to landscape. He makes images that are built on creating connections between experiences and identity to form a body of work that engages with the relationships between them.
 

Nepenthe is a series of botanical images depicting subtlety in nature, focusing on colour, texture and form. Utilising the natural sunlight and open windows available to the gallery space, the artworks are responsive to light and weather changes over the course of the exhibition, with varying transparencies and tones being highlighted and subdued due to these naturally fluctuating changes.

Political art treads a fine line between the imagination and the polemic. In this exhibition I put protesters at the centre of the problem. I show protesters, myself included, in looping wires, cushions and sewn objects. In a world of undeniable climate change, discrimination and an unprecedented widening in the gap between rich and poor, this exhibition is a question as much as an answer.

Melanie Joy is a Melbourne based artist whose practice is predominantly installation based. Her history of displacement, self exile and burning antagonism to injustice fuels her art which treads a fine line between polemics and investigation. She completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2014 and since then has exhibited at Red gallery, Blindside, Linden Gallery, Alternating Current Art Space, Counihan Gallery, and Brunswick Street Gallery.

Through Haze will not only convey decline, regrowth and the regenerative power of nature but depict the dichotomous relationship between the designed city utopia and the social realities of city life. I believe the natural world is often a tonic for those who reside in the metropolitan drawl. My work conveys the paradoxical nature of urban landscapes; diverse networks form within these landscapes and brilliant architectural designs are realized yet they are places where one can feel intense isolation. Figures are suspended amongst modernist architectural dream buildings, drawing into sharp relief the failure to realize utopia on a social scale.

This project was inspired by the story of Empress Josephine Bonaparte, and her fascination with Australian botany in the 1800s, evidenced in her Australian plants and animals collection at her Malmaison glasshouse and gardens, in Paris.

In “PlantarumFeminam”, Katherine investigates the unlikely emergence of women botanists of this era, and the relationship between women and nature, and the dichotomy of the ‘wild’ and tamed’ concepts around ‘the feminine’. As the study of plants has historically been a male domain, this shift in science was a rather radical form of feminism. 

Plantarum Feminam encompasses Katherine’s interest in the start of the Romantic period in Europe, and the rise of female botanists around the globe, who bridged a predominantly male domain, that of science. The notion that a woman of that era had the potential to be 'fashioned' by herself, handmade, not merely serving a man’s ego, or only via 'feminine' ideals, is a source of inspiration for Katherine’s paintings and sculptures. 

The Cult of Love is a multi-part video series that mashes together philosophical questions of self-awareness, the dynamics of intimacy, and a self-reflexive exposition of a collaborative artistic practice. 

If individual consciousness is merely a bundle of processes without any central point of synthesis, then joint consciousness may become not merely a possibility but a necessary outcome of any systematic collaborative process involving multiple selves who themselves already qualify as conscious. The progression of an intimate relationship is used as the narrative basis for artistically bringing into being a third “entity” that is aware of itself, while also making explicit the sexuality that is implied by the synthesis of definably separate selves. 

man[und]lady is a collaboration between artists Sam Hatfield and Fiona Skelton. The overarching premise of their joint practice is to use humour and the absurd to provocatively deconstruct psychosocial paradigms. Their work is also heavily influenced by their involvement in neuropsychological research.