Melbourne

The thinking and designing for this project took place on Mparntwe, one of three estates of the unceded land of the Arrernte nation.I pay my ongoing respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, to those that continue to practice and teach their worldview through language, dance, art, organising and the multi-ways in which culture expresses itself.I also acknowledge my ongoing complicity in the structures that manifest injustice, discrimination and disrespect of those that hold and come from this land, sea and sky and all the entities held by it

Sophie Gannon Gallery

A Matter of Myth

Station Gallery

Exit Strategy

My Friend, Lavender

CCP’s Members share a deep interest in photography, and actively keep up with the medium, both through the engagement we put on at the gallery, and independently. Many Members are photographers themselves, who are drawn to our CCP Membership program for the community, and opportunities to develop their practice that come with it. For this reason, we were excited to invite the Members to take part in CCP’s Still Life exhibition series, which has previously shown inspired lockdown content from CCP’s Volunteer and Salon Prizewinner communities.The diversity in our Membership pool is reflected in the diversity of the material we received back from our Members. Some responded to the iconography of lockdown with specificity and a wink, some took the opportunity to escape to otherworldly dimensions through abstraction and colour. Some gave us classic still life imagery, some stretched and played with the form. We’re lucky and excited to be able to share these still lives from our Members.

Centre for Contemporary Photography

Still Life

While closed to the public, we invite you to explore our current exhibition Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection virtually below. Take a closer look at each artwork, and gain deeper insights with an audio guide narrated by Victoria Lynn, exhibition curator and Director of TarraWarra Museum of Art (available within the virtual space, or here on Soundcloud). Watch in full-screen for the best viewing experience. Each blue circle can be clicked to open multimedia content.Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection offers a new appraisal of the work of leading women artists held in the collection of TarraWarra Museum of Art. The exhibition explores the themes arising from works by women artists in the collection—such as memory, landscape and abstraction—and also includes a modest selection of works by male artists that amplify these images, ideas and styles.In the form of unexpected pairings, the exhibition shows the ways in which women artists have pioneered certain ways of seeing the world. Making Her Mark provides the opportunity to make new comparisons across decades: Jenny Watson and Charles Blackman; Louise Hearman and Godfrey Miller; Kate Beynon and Howard Arkley. Rather than a dialogue about precedent and influence, this exhibition presents a nuanced conversation about image, composition and mark-making where women take centre-stage. In this way, art by women is not seen as a category, but rather as a catalyst.

Tarra Warra Museum of Art

Virtual Exhibition – Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection

Artists | Sarah Brasier, Kiron Robinson, Simon Zoric, Lewis Fidock and Joshua Petherick, Amrita Hepi and Darren Sylvester.In response to a rapidly changing world - Gertrude presents Hope in the Dark, a street-facing exhibition in the windows at Gertrude Contemporary and the window vitrine at Gertrude Glasshouse. This project will evolve over the coming days and weeks (or as long as possible) while our regular programming is on hold.Exploring ideas of confusion, resignation and anxiety offset with humour, hope and resilience, these gestures offer an opportunity for a bit of aesthetic and comic relief while we collectively #stayhome.

Gertrude Contemporary

Hope in the Dark

LON Gallery

Portraits

Devised as a way for ACCA to continue to work with and support contemporary artists during the COVID-19-related gallery closures and disruptions, ACCA Open was an invitation for Australian artists and collaborations from all backgrounds, career levels and practices to submit ideas for projects that could be presented through digital platforms.While the original plan was to commission three new works for the series, an additional three projects have been added, thanks to support from Creative Victoria’s Strategic Investment Fund.Ahead of ACCA’s physical re-opening, we are pleased to support the production of new digital projects that respond to and reflect on our unusual times – from a soundtrack, an AI chatbot, a 3D animated film and an infinite audio-visual process.

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

ACCA Open: Digital Commissions

In a unique new collaboration, ACCA is honoured to present NIRIN NAARM, a three-week satellite exhibition presenting selected key works from the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, titled NIRIN, under the artistic direction of acclaimed Indigenous Australian artist Brook Andrew.The 22nd Biennale of Sydney is an artist- and First Nations-led endeavour presenting an expansive exhibition of contemporary art that connects local communities and global networks. NIRIN, meaning ‘edge’, is a word of Brook’s mother’s Nation, the Wiradjuri people of western New South Wales. NIRIN has been conceived as a world of endless interconnected centres; a space to gather and to share, to rejoice, disrupt, and re-imagine.At a time when travel between states is limited, ACCA is delighted to collaborate with the Biennale of Sydney and Brook Andrew to present NIRIN NAARM for Melbourne audiences, a selection of video works, a sculpture and an installation from this landmark edition of the Biennale of Sydney – bringing NIRIN into dialogue with NAARM, a Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung word which refers to the land and waters of the Melbourne area.NIRIN NAARM presents the work of artists from Australia, Aeoteroa/New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, Haiti, Kashmir, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, USA and elsewhere. It is set against a number of increasingly urgent social, cultural and political contexts and backdrops, such as the climate crisis and devastating bushfires in Australia and Brazil; the current global pandemic; and in solidarity with global activism related to the Black Lives Matters movement, which has underscored local and global histories of violence and discrimination, along with questions of justice, truth-telling, reconciliation and reparation. NIRIN is at the forefront of global movements to centre indigeneity, to reconsider cultural narratives and practices, and to reimagine public spaces, monuments and memory.“NIRIN and NIRIN NAARM demonstrate how artists have the power to inspire and lead through difficult global times. There are many turning points in the world right now: come and be a part of this story and immerse yourself, your family and friends in inspiration, change and imagined futures. Melbournians and visitors to Melbourne can discuss issues exploding through the audio-visual power of NIRIN NAARM which is a lens to view the exhibition NIRIN currently open in Sydney.” – Brook Andrew, Artistic DirectorParticipating artists: Tony Albert, Maria Thereza Alves, Denilson Baniwa, Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, Moara Brasil and Janaú, Colectivo Ayllu, The Collie Crew, André Eugène, Victoria Hunt, IraQueer, Arthur Jafa, Teresa Margolles, Rehab Nazzal, Musa N Nxumalo, Syed Shahriyar, Adrian Stimson, Salote Tawale, Warwick Thornton, James Tylor, Trent Walter and Stuart Geddes.

NIRIN NAARM

Meatus is presented as part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a suite of three unique commissions to support Australian women artists working at the nexus of performance and installation. The series is presented in partnership between the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (ACCA); Carriageworks, Sydney; and the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.Drawing on her background in performance, curating and collaborative models of making, Sydney-based artist Frances Barrett has expanded the solo commissioning focus of the Fellowship to present new sonic compositions and live performances by multiple artists. Alongside a major sound installation developed by Barrett in collaboration with Hayley Forward and Brian Fuata, Barrett has curated three specially-commissioned sound compositions by artists Nina Buchanan, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga, each of who have responded to the concept of meatus.A ‘meatus’ – to which the exhibition title refers – is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body, such as the ear canal and nasal passages. The meatus is a juncture between the internal and external, where the body opens itself to the world. For Barrett, the concept of a meatus, abstracted from its standard medical definition, becomes both a curatorial and artistic methodology through which to consider any bodily opening or incision, with attendant and expanded possibilities for the body to bleed, leak and flow in new, and transformative, ways.Barrett has conceived of the four galleries of ACCA as meatus: as ear canals, oral cavities, and anal spaces, that passage through and into each other. Meatus thus becomes a performative staging of the body as an intense, immersive and sensory environment of sound and light; a body into which the audience may enter to consider the physical, sensual and critical experience of listening. An inherently relational exercise, listening here serves as a starting point from which to encounter embodied practices that bring us into closer being with one another, our histories and our surrounds.Frances Barrett is an artist and curator who lives and works in Sydney on Gadigal land. Her practice extends the paradigm of performance, with much of her recent work pivoting around the modalities of listening and touch. Barrett is one member of art collective Barbara Cleveland and is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne.Frances Barrett’s new work has been developed with the generous support of the Australia Council for the Arts; Monash Art Design and Architecture (MADA), Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; Chunky Move, Melbourne; Vitalstatistix, Adelaide and Sounds and Motion.

Meatus

ACCA is pleased to present the second edition of the Macfarlane Commissions in 2020, continuing a multi-year partnership designed to support the production and presentation of ambitious new projects by contemporary artists.The second iteration of this biennial series considers the role of biology, ecology, archaeology and site, as well as ideas of material transformation and alchemy, through artists who engage organic materials, laws of nature, deep time, ideas of growth and shapeshifting, as well as formlessness, entropy and abjection. It is intended that ACCA’s galleries will be transformed through intense sensory and material effect, with works encompassing living and artificial organisms and processes, and installations and assemblages of narrative and material significance.Participating artistsRobert Andrew (Brisbane)Mimosa Echard (Paris)Sidney McMahon (Sydney)Sam Petersen (Melbourne)Isadora Vaughan (Melbourne)The Macfarlane CommissionsThe Macfarlane Commissions is a biennial series of exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art featuring new commissions by emerging and mid-career Australian and international artists. Artists are invited to make a new large-scale work to be presented as a keynote project in ACCA’s exhibition program. The inaugural exhibition was held in the summer of 2018-19, with the second edition planned for ACCA’s winter season 2020.The Macfarlane FundThe Macfarlane Fund is a new philanthropic initiative established in 2017 to honour the life of respected Melbourne businessman Donald (Don) Macfarlane, who throughout his life took immense pleasure in the arts. The Macfarlane Fund’s primary focus is to offer financial support across the career span of artists, with three main funding streams developed at graduate, mid-career and senior levels.

Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions

Developed over a two-year period in the lead up to ACCA’s summer season of 2020–2021, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? will engage contemporary art and cultural practices to consider critical ideas as to what constitutes public culture and to ask, and who might it be for? The project will explore and animate recent global debates and phenomena including the increasing incursion of private interests into public culture; the dynamic relations between urban design, surveillance, regulation and gentrification; as well as related unsanctioned counter-positions, improvisation and play. It will explore ideas of community, collectivity and the commons; the cultivation of fear in media and urban space; ongoing debates related to the freedom of speech, assembly and censorship; and the public broadcasting of private lives. It will also explore the ways in which technology, knowledge and mobility impact upon and transform our understanding of public space, culture and its values. In the wake of the coronavirus, and the rapidly changing pandemic landscape which we are currently negotiating, the project will also consider the radical shift from the civic space of the public square to the virtual space of the digital commons.Developed by ACCA curators, working collaboratively with a diverse group of artists, academics and cultural producers, the exhibition adopts a collective curatorial model. Whilst centred at ACCA, the exhibition will extend beyond the walls of the gallery into public space itself – through engagement with and interventions into public and urban realms, mainstream and social media, as well as community centres and academic contexts.Working with an assembly of collaborators and partners, and informed by a number of workshops, think tanks and public projects over the next eighteen months, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is organised according to a dispersed, distributed structure, encouraging a polyphonic and polycentric understanding of our increasingly complex public realm.

Who’s Afraid of Public Space?

The exhibition Inside Out: Space and Process presents two Melbourne sculptors from different generations, born 50 years apart, who evidence an enduring concern with material, process, and abstraction. Erwin Fabian and Anne-Marie May use a range of found and fabricated media to explore the poetic correlations between surface, substance and space through intuitive and experimental processes.Erwin Fabian was until recently Australia’s oldest practising sculptor. He was born in Berlin in 1915, the son of painter Max Fabian, and trained at the School of Art and Craft in Berlin. He arrived in Australia in 1940 during the Second World War after being interned in London. Later returning to London, he worked as a designer and lecturer at the London School of Printing before permanently basing himself in Melbourne in 1962. His work was referenced in Gombrich’s seminal text, Art and Illusion, published in 1960. Sadly Fabian died in January 2020 during the development of this exhibition, however it provides an opportunity to celebrate his life and work. Erwin Fabian is represented by Australian Galleries.Born in 1965, Anne-Marie May lives and works in Melbourne. She uses diverse materials to undertake explorations of colour, abstraction and space. May has exhibited since the late 1980s, and was a member of the influential artist-run space Store 5 in Melbourne. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004; Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, 2004; and Murray White Room, Melbourne, 2009, 2011 and 2013. Her work was included in 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia at Heide in 2012. Anne-Marie May is represented by Murray White Room, Melbourne.

McClelland Gallery

Inside Out: Space and Process

Nearness explores relationships; Ben's connection to family near and far, Mickey's affinity to the natural world around him and Ren's intuitive response to those closest to him. In this uncertain time of enforced separation, these artists reflect on their connections to others through painting.

Boom Gallery

Nearness (in a time of separation)

Found Light is an observation of ambient light in the natural environment. Exposures recorded on medium format film at different times of the day reflect variations in the quality and colour of light. These images taken around the Great Ocean Rd aim to capture the serenity of the location, inviting audiences to also look inward for a similar feeling of stillness.Anita explains “I am looking to find peace and inspiration by being in the natural environment, and hope to convey the calm I feel though my subject matter in my images.” Inspiration is found in the work of artists such as Mark Rothko and Ansel Adams, while her treatment of both the infinite and disappearing horizon evoke Hiroshi Sugimoto’s famed seascapes.Employing only natural light in her shots, Anita photographs with a medium format Mamiya twin lens c330 camera with 120 roll film. The negatives are scanned, and the images then printed on to watercolour paper. Analogue photographic techniques are employed to obtain detail and quality and then realised in a painterly manner through the size of the print and the quality of the paper.

Found Light

When we go through the stock lists and picture racks to plan for group shows, there are some works which we keep deciding to pass over. “Maybe next time”, we say. Often this is because their subject matter doesn’t fit comfortably with the rest of the group – usually it’s sex, violence, death, or politics – and, not surprisingly, such works tend to ring as jarring a note beside a modernist landscape or still life, as against a geometric abstract. Sometimes it’s simply the fact that the work remains enigmatic – posing questions rather than making statements. So, in these difficult times, we’ve given these “difficult” pictures a room of their own. And hence a warning, some works in this exhibition contain explicit content. Any underlying theme? Perhaps the way artists as disparate as Arthur Boyd and Tony Coleing use the distortion of the human form as symbolic of the distortion of the human mind. We’ll let you, the viewer, decide on that. Charles has never been shy of a difficult picture, often being attracted to the strange rather than necessarily the saleable. So, in a sense, this show demonstrates another vein in his collecting taste – and one that Kate feels (worries) she may have inherited.

Charles Nodrum Gallery

Left of Field

Doomsday is a series of photographic film portraits that have been contaminated prior to development by various liquids in order to alter the final results. These contaminants act as intermediates in the photographic process and evoke a sense of foreboding through the aesthetic disruption. Doomsday visualizes the alchemy of sabotage.

Brunswick Street Gallery

Doomsday

Systems we have loved is a slyly critical and poetic engagement with the ways in which we participate in the subjective construction of reality through mediated forms — such as language and technologies of representation — as perceived through the nonlinear and fragmentary world of our dreams and memories.

Systems we have loved

Cara Coombe’s first solo show Human(e) draws on photography’s long tradition to describe the human condition. Her introspective exploration of taboo topics such as mental illness, terminal illness and dysfunctional relationships serves as a powerful reminder that the personal accounts she conveys to her audience present aspects of a broader more universal experience that affects us all.

Human(e)

A warm palette and black-lined architectural geometry create an inviting visual world. This series of portraits, urban vignettes and neon still lifes combines careful observation and whimsical expression to draw the viewer into the artist’s world - a world that is as familiar as it is enticing.

Brunswick Street Gallery 

A Concrete Blush

The Corona virus pandemic has seen the entire world go up in disarray. Even the most powerful countries, and the wealthiest of people were not immune to this virus. The effects are so widespread; it saw deaths in the hundreds of thousands, hospitals cripple, economies collapse, governments defeated, and businesses close down with massive job losses. Resilience has however presented and most noticeably in the arts. During this pandemic, throughout the world, creativity has flourished. Now more than ever, we know the power of art and its immense ability to heal.This group show titled “COVID LIFE” presents works of 48 of Melbourne’s finest creatives! Artists have presented work that has helped them face and overcome the challenges of social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Off The Kerb

Covid Life Group Show

My lazy graffiti; easier and safer than finding a spare public surface.With so much time, research and money goes into the design and presentation of the outside of boxes; Mark Betts balances the universe by adding some love to the other side of the boxes.

Cereal Pest

James Makin Gallery

A Clown In The Moon

Betra Fraval

3:33 Art Projects

Jack Rowland

Steelo is a sculptural meditation on the intersection between domestic labour, industrial production and modern art. Through her use of steel wool, Carolyn Menzies explores the dual nature of steel’s materiality: the soft flexibility of kitchen scouring pads, a symbol of feminine labour, in contrast to the hard edged forms of modernism. Her tenderly swaddled forms recall the softness and sensitivity of wool, countering the industrial abrasiveness of steel through the act of binding. If steel stands as a signifier of industrialisation and alienation from the natural environment, then Menzies’ wrapping, lopping, knitting and knotting of steel wool to create organic forms gently undermines this narrative and suggests an alternative, more mutable world.

Vitrine Gallery — Craft Victoria

Steelo

Re-emergence

Seams

Stacks on

Shape of Time/Sense of place

Stacked

It's an absolute pleasure to announce the solo exhibition debut of Stephen Baker at Backwoods Gallery.Baker’s ‘Blood Moon’ tells the story of two characters who come together under the seemingly impending event of a Blood Moon, a total eclipsing of the moon whereby refracted sunlight from Earth‘s atmosphere bathes the moon in a reddish orange hue. Both spectacular and eerie, many people have speculated it’s meaning and origins. Through the ages many cultures have created their own myths related to such mystical sights, both being a bad or good omen.This latest collection of works, as with previous instalments finds Baker’s stylised characters once again roaming a minimal landscape devoid of material reference. Female figures are seen posing against angular geometric forms, sometimes it would seem interacting, and others quite separate. Their relationship is unclear however they seem to be comfortable with each others presence. As they await the rising of the blood moon, a ritualistic dance is performed to honour the occasion. Finally the two figures embrace and are bathed in the moon’s sea of red not knowing of what may come next.With ‘Blood Moon’ we see Baker still adopting an escapist ideology with the aspirational figures drawn from fashion cultural references, posing model like with their holiday island swimwear in apathetic scenes of lethargy. The only difference this time around is that there’s an unexplained phenomenon occurring which seems to threaten the idyllic setting.A warm sunburnt palette adorns the latest series. Carefully constructed lines hold the solid areas of colour together as they flow through the scenes and out to the canvas edge. Forever intrigued with our pursuit of the aspired lifestyle as a means of escape from the real world, Baker plays with both this reference and the idea that art itself is a manifestation for a means of escape.

Backwoods Gallery

Blood Moon

Emerging first in the 1960s, Robert Owen is one of Australia’s most eminent artists. His art traverses an ambitious and far-reaching range of mediums and contexts, from painting, sculpture, photography and installation, to public art and architectural commissions. Grounded in geometry and abstraction, his visually stunning works are inspired by his diverse interests—encompassing philosophy and psychology, science and mathematics, music and literature—and reflect his incessant curiosity about the world. Owen’s approach is underpinned by a poetic and intuitive exploration of the expressive potential of space, light, colour, context and materials.The first museum survey of Owen’s practice for twenty years in Melbourne, this exhibition will encompass his work from the 1960s and 1970s living in Greece and London, while also featuring new and more recent paintings and sculptural installations.

Heide Museum Of Modern Art

Blue Over Time: Robert Owen—A Survey

In Memory Horizon Carolyn Eskdale presents new work that responds to the modernist architecture of Heide Modern—formerly a domestic house commissioned by Heide founders John and Sunday Reed as ‘a gallery to be lived in’—and that activates the house as its own cast object.After spending time ‘inhabiting’ the building and making ephemeral installations in each of its seven rooms, Eskdale has developed a sculptural language of motifs and forms specific to its character and history. This in-situ work and documentation is incorporated into the exhibition itself, as she explores the history of Heide Modern as a domestic and public space, the interstices between private and public life, and the overlap between the studio and the gallery.

Memory Horizon

This major survey exhibition celebrates the powerful work of Joy Hester, a unique figure in twentieth-century Australian art.Joy Hester produced some of the most distinctive and intriguing imagery to emerge in Australia during the 1940s and 1950s. Working almost exclusively with brush and ink, she focused on potent expressions of the human figure, using drawing as a vehicle to grasp life in all its complexity.The exhibition traces the progression of Hester’s artistic interests, from her formative works responding to the oppressive climate of World War II to compelling psychological portraits and later intimate images of faces and lovers made not long before her untimely death in 1960. Hester was unafraid to explore subjects considered highly provocative during her lifetime: love, sex, birth, and death—themes that are threaded throughout the exhibition. Joy Hester: Remember Me brings together significant works from public and private collections including many drawings that have never before been on public display, offering new insight into the working methods and creative processes that Hester developed from the very start of her career.

Remember Me

While living in Italy in the 1950s Albert Tucker embarked on a new chapter in his artistic practice. Inspired by early Christian and Renaissance art, he painted biblical narratives about resurrection, rebirth and overcoming adversity. It was a time of self-discovery that led him to explore the Australian landscape from a new perspective, relating the fissures of the outback to the idea of physical and emotional scars. It was only years later that he recognised a link between these works and his drawings of traumatised World War II soldiers. This exhibition presents a selection of Tucker’s religious paintings alongside his wounded landscapes, explorers and earlier studies of soldiers, drawing aesthetic and conceptual connections between these bodies of work.

Marking The Past

Home to Heide founders John and Sunday Reed between 1935 and 1967, the Heide Cottage was a hub for progressive thinking and modernist ideas that centred on art, but which extended to literature, politics and sociology. The rise of Communism and Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the spectre of World War II spurred urgent debate concerning the role of the artist and the imperative of creative freedom. Drawing on aspects of the European art movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism, and their own personal experiences, the artists of the Heide circle forged a new humanist, antipodean modernism, the hallmark of which was a shift from objective to subjective reality.Focussing on these turbulent decades, this exhibition presents many of the best-known works from the Heide Collection along with recent acquisitions by the artists supported by the Reeds including Sam Atyeo, Danila Vassilieff, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.

House Of Ideas

Inhabiting a space between video artwork, devotional poetry, performance and music video, Archie Barry: Fistimuff is presented as a long-form video self-portrait. Barry destabilises commonplace experiences of domesticity and the human body to propose an altogether more open-ended, fluid and multifaceted understanding of self. As the latest iteration of their cyclical working method, Barry will produce a new performance work for Heide to be shown on the closing weekend of the exhibition.Fistimuff was commissioned by Channels Festival 2019, co-curated by Kelli Alred and Laura Couttie and supported by BLINDSIDE through the City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria.Video credits:Lead Artist and Composer: Archie BarrySound Design and Production: Sean LowryCameraperson: Emmett Aldred

Fistimuff

The Jewish Museum of Australia, in partnership with William Mora Galleries and supported by Heide Museum of Modern Art, presents MIRKA – an intimate, previously unseen view into the rich and fascinating life of the late Mirka Mora (1928–2018).A story of survival and migration, interspersed with a generous dose of family, art, food and love, Mirka Mora’s history is a profoundly affecting post-Holocaust Australian Jewish tale which, until now, has not been presented with such depth and scope.​​Launching in December 2020, MIRKA will transform the Museum into an immersive ‘Mirka-world’ that reflects the artist’s trademark mischievousness and bohemian spirit, and shares her powerful story in vivid detail – as told through letters, sketchbooks and diaries, and recorded interviews from the Jewish Holocaust Centre archives.​​Featuring never-exhibited works from the private collections of the Mora family and Mirka’s studio and archives, alongside pieces from the Mirka for Melbourne collection recently acquired by the Heide Museum of Modern Art, MIRKA will offer a most comprehensive picture of the artist’s life and 70-year-long career.Director &amp; CEO Jessica Bram: ‘It feels enormously poignant that the Jewish Museum of Australia’s milestone project for 2020 is a celebration of the life and legacy of iconic artist Mirka Mora. Beloved and remembered as much for her extraordinary career and contribution to cosmopolitan Melbourne as for her remarkable joie de vivre, Mirka’s gift was the magic of hope and resilience.’​​William Mora: ‘We, the family, are honoured and delighted to be collaborating with the Jewish Museum of Australia to launch MIRKA – a celebration of her life story and art. Melbourne’s enduring love for Mirka and her art is well-known and we believe this exhibition will give new insights into her world. Mirka’s work embodies humanity and hope; her life of art shows her desire to embrace diversity and to be enriched by our differences.’​​A joyful and optimistic honouring of a truly miraculous and marvellous life, MIRKA promises the most intimately detailed portrait of this cherished icon of Australian culture.Image: Mirka Mora, In the Garden of Dreams, 1975-81, Australia, Private Collection, Melbourne.

Jewish Museum of Australia

MIRKA

5 X 5 walls is a mixed group show with friends and colleagues and is an exchange of ideas between the artists and their circle.Showcasing group, pairs, and single works for the wall.The title of the show was inspired by the 5×5=25 Moscow 1921 exhibition, a historic 2-part show with 5 artists: Aleksandra Ekster; Lyubov Popova; Alexander Rodchenko; Varvara Stepanova; &amp; Alexander Vesnin.

Five Walls

5 X 5 walls

I began “Juncture | Disjuncture” at the start of the COVID-19 isolation period in late March. While the above exploration is still valid and continuing, the paintings themselves have changed significantly as I navigate this juncture of my/our personal, ethnic, national and international histories and the global health crisis.Segmented solid blocks of colour form pathways. These pathways symbolise our position within society, our relationship to technological, and our spiritual beliefs/systems that during times of uncertainty are critically important. Some pathways connect and others are disrupted, reflecting a disjuncture between our various personal journey/experiences.

Disjuncture / Juncture

We are currently witnessing a surge in emotive expression in the global public domain with many sharing the way they feel about restrictions to movement and loss of spontaneity and physical connectivity in daily experiences.The body of work in “Open to Uncertainty” explores the potential of material manipulation to embody and translate emotive responses associated with notions of control, restriction and connection.During times such as these, boundaries become blurred and distorted – often heightening an awareness of corporeal vulnerability – where vulnerability is not considered a sign of weakness but as an openness to uncertainty and risk.In these works, the juxtaposition of distorted geometries and gestural manipulations in which canvas, frame and textiles are folded and layered, aims to engage in an emotive dialogue between control and spontaneity.The grid is deployed – not as the anti-sensuous container of ordered emptiness often identified in Modern and Conceptual Art – but as a means to depict an embodied space of contested boundaries and connections.Benton is an emerging experimental artist based in Sydney. Her work involves manipulating material to embody the emotions that often arise as we oscillate between many of life’s dualities such as momentum/confinement, perfection/imperfection, fragmented/whole and familiar/unknown.She adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the process of making and although not loaded with a personal narrative, her works can be read metaphorically as alluding to the limits experienced by the individual and within the socio-political environment.Benton recently graduated from Sydney University College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons1).

Open to Uncertainty

Neon Parc City

Melinda Harper

Neon Parc Brunswick

Superpositions

Jolt yourself out of isolation mundanity with the riotous, vibrant new work of Melbourne artist Christopher Jewitt!

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