Melbourne

Stephen Bush is a painter who explores modes of representational painting and its history. Known for his use of amplified colour and experimentation with the techniques and processes of painting, Bush reinvents its narrative possibilities. Revision, contradiction and juxtaposition are key elements of his work. Costumed figures often mingle with modernist forms in idealised, hypnotic landscapes. Picturing the tensions that exist between the original and reproduction; old and new; natural and man-made; the arbitrary and rational, are fundamental to his practice.

Sutton Gallery

A Troubled Mind

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

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

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

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

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.

Heide Museum Of Modern Art

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!

Modern Times

Hidden Narrative

Vessel

The exhibition features fresh new works by James Makin Gallery represented artists and guest artists to the gallery.

Summer New

Looking Glass is an important and timely exhibition which brings together two of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists— Waanyi artist, Judy Watson and Kokatha and Nukunu artist, Yhonnie Scarce.

Tarrawarra Museum of Art

Looking Glass

Australia’s largest photomedia competition and exhibition, annually drawing entries from over 450 artists across the country.

The ILFORD CCP Salon

This body of work explores the use of internet search metrics as the basis for making non-objective paintings. Measurements of internet searches for news events over a duration of time are translated into visual representations, illustrating the fluctuation of our attention spans as we search for meaning and understanding within the information overload of our hyper mediated age.

Attention! 

Measures Concluded will be the final presentation of the body of work that began in 2019. Directly continuing from the exhibitions Ritual Measures (Artereal Gallery, 2019) and Measures Sustained (Artereal Gallery, 2020), Measures Concluded will present an exploration of colour, presented within aspects of geometry taken from traditional domains of domestic and ritual design found in Japanese culture. The paintings are made up of geometric compositions that have been cut, layered and re-joined to create panoramic style paintings. The result is colour and shape rising out to the viewer, drawing them into an experience where contradictory elements of contrast and harmony, and rhythm and repose are celebrated.

Measures Concluded

Showcasing hundreds of artworks of all mediums measuring under 35x35x35cm, from artists from all around Australia and across the world.

Small Works Art Prize

This exhibition unpacks the development of social and political un/truths of past and contemporary women’s liberation. Through this collaboration, the artists present a visual symbol for what we can learn from the women’s rights movement of the past and how the conversation of gender representation is evolving today.

Footscray Community Arts Centre — FCAC Roslyn Smorgon Gallery

Eye to Eye

Derived from a quote from The Prophet Muhammad, the title of this exhibition strikes out feet and replaces it with hands. Hands allude to the mother’s agency, what she creates, gives, passes on, feeds you with, that’s where heaven lies. This exhibition aims to tell a story, and each object flows on to another in a constellation. Featured are semiotic and semantic disruption of visual language and lexicon, splicing the two together to illustrate the ambivalence and juxtaposition between love and war, nurturing and violence, and nourishment and destruction of the body, so prevalent in the Middle East.

The Enterance to paradise lies in your mothers hands

Monumental is a new suite of works by Amrita Hepi that casts a central colonial figure within a continual sunrise... or is it a sunset? Through performance the monument is serenaded by sound and dance, then destroyed by paddles and cricket bats, and finally replaced by seven people. By creating a dreamscape of dance and demise, Hepi sets her sights on the historical archive of colonial monuments, making them bodily once more.

Monumental 

he Children’s Tapestry Project is a tapestry based program designed and executed by Charmaine Muscat Kvalic.The project gives children the opportunity to experience tapestry as an art form and to work collaboratively with Charmaine to create small scale tapestries. This suite of tapestries showcases the latest works of the project from children of differing ages. Whilst Charmaine interprets their drawings into tapestries each child’s personal aesthetic is explored and comes to the fore.Woven in recent times with silk, wool, cotton and lurex for a touch of sparkle, the tapestries reflect the joie de vie of childhood. An artistic project created in collaboration with Charmaine Muscat Kvalic and Dominic, Jakson, Luca, London and Buster.

The Children's tapestry project

Marisa Mu’s BLOCK PARTY FOR LOVE embodies the colourful spirit of when the rhythm of the night meets disco diva in downtown funky town. Dresscode: Birthday Suit.

Block party for love

Ruth Maddison: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times is a significant survey exhibition curated by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), focusing on Maddison’s social documentary practice from 1976 to the current day. Bringing together key historical works with a major new commission, this exhibition is a timely and focused look at one of Australia’s leading feminist photographers.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Site &amp; Sound: Sonic art as ecological practice, 2 December 2020 – 11 April 2021, invites audiences to consider the importance of listening as a means towards a better understanding of the urgent and complex environmental issues facing our planet. Whether it be the roar of bushfires; the creak of fragmenting glaciers; silence where there used to be bird song; or the hum of cicadas, our comprehension of sounds can lead to an intuitive understanding of the ecological issues confronting us.Curated by Jon Buckingham, Lawrence Harvey, and Simon Lawrie, Site &amp; Sound surveys diverse practices to reveal the connections between deep listening, field recording, acoustic ecology, natural science, and spatialised sound in contemporary art.

McClelland Sculpture Park & Gallery

Site & Sound: Sonic art as ecological practice

As we reopen for 2021 we have hung some of our favourite stockroom works throughout the gallery spaces at Boom

Stockroom Gems

This recent body of work is about discovery, of a new city, an unsettled state of mind and first impressions of a new landscape. Visual elements such as waterfalls, gardens and rolling hilly skylines are abstracted and merged with psychological expressions of relocation with the intent of capturing a sense of spirit in the work.

Finding My Way

In praise of the sacred gum tree, the ancient spirit of the land.

Sacred Gums

Playful colours and shapes intertwine to depict simplistic interpretations of the familiarity and beauty of everyday objects and architecture. Inspired by the streets of Jaipur, India, “Colours of Jaipur” portrays my exploration of the mix of colours and vibrancy discovered within this magical place.

Off the Kerb

Colours of Jaipur

Towering refers to the trees and concrete housing buildings they surround as they compete for airspace.Aplin’s work is inspired by urban landscape, issues of urbanization, social structure and the flux of city environments. I am interested in Brutalist architecture, modernism and finding beauty in the ordinary/ overlooked.The subject matter is drawn from the numerous precast concrete low cost housing developments locate around Melbourne. Similar buildings can be found all around the world giving a globalised architectural familiarity, though a Melbourne resident will find them instantly recognizable, more so as they are paired with iconic Gum trees.

Towering

The motifs and narratives we cultivate and preserve through the act of storytelling, visual or otherwise, shape our identities personally and collectively. In the Beginning explores humanity in relationship to the universe by teasing out visions and symbols that serve as fragmented elements of a personal cosmology.The creation of these watercolour paintings celebrates a life-bearing connection to nature and the cosmos— a meeting place where the sensual human experience merges with the divine.

In the begining

These watercolour paintings follow the trails along the Yarra River and the Merri Creek—spaces in which I commute, exercise and get lost in—a green wonderland within Melbourne’s urban north. I planned for this exhibition to celebrate Autumn in lockdown: it became a four season show. Finding private, tranquil, natural space within the public realm became important for more people in lockdown. Finding privacy in shared space channels the sense of a community collectively soothing the stress of a turbulent year with the help of back-lit leaves, a summer breeze, a winter sunrise: a shared path.

A shared path

“Since I began painting some fifty plus years ago the landscape and the figure have been among the main preoccupations of my work. I first visited Wilsons Promontory in 1964 and have returned to it as a source at various times since. In the past my interest in the promontory landscape has focused on light and form and at other times on curved rhythm. Apart from the natural wilderness, the beaches of the promontory are also populated with the quintessential “bather”- another of my subjects. More recently my attention has been drawn to the way – enveloped within the dynamics of light – dappled, fractured and encrusted surface textures and details interact with the underlying triangles, diagonals and spheres of “natures geometry.” Because the lockdown made the actual landscape inaccessible for a large part of the year, I think in some way I have become much more aware of the distilled essence of my experience of it.” – John Hopkins 2020

Australian Galleries

Dappled Things

This project began in Cuba researching the question: “How can the character of the rail line, it's surrounding communities and the experience of the journey help us understand and contribute to expanded sites of social engagement, dialogue and creativity?”Originally built around two rail lines - the famous Hershey line linking Havana to the sugar town of Matanzas explored in the video created by Paul Candy and Geoff Hogg - the exhibition focuses on the Upfield line connecting central Melbourne to its northern suburbs. Emphasising movement, portability and change, it includes cartographic works made by Geoff Hogg from materials found along the line, three travelling cases to contain them crafted by Nick Blackmore from a discarded Japanese instrument box, and an intricate carrying bag, enabling them to be easily moved created by Alisdair McKinnon. All four artists are connected to the site through workplace, home and the experience of everyday life.

Tinning Street Presents 

Two Lines and Three Blocks

LOOM is an ongoing series of 'weavings' created using python and photoshop. Presented as prints, LOOM explores the demateralisation of making; the historical relationship between programmable looms and computer science; and the design approaches of the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Drawing upon these lineages, LOOM positions the computer not only as a tool but as a site for making: as a communal workshop or personal studio, in and of itself.Please note there is no public opening for this exhibition.Exhibition open to view from 11am, Friday February 5th.

LOOM

Confluence follows Watson’s merging sense of home. Through drawing and storytelling this exhibition explores various meetings; history and the ocean, trees and the self, and how waterways carry that which we cannot always see.Please note there is no public opening for this exhibition.Exhibition open to view from 11am, Friday February 26th.

Confluence

CONNECT is an exhibition in two parts curated by Tamsen Hopkinson. Located indoors and outdoors at Footscray Community Arts Centre, CONNECT investigates ideas of re-emergence and considers the way we navigate place, community and public space through contemporary art.  As part of FCAC Summer James Nguyen and Victoria Pham will extend RE:SOUNDING; a collaborative project that aims to locate, record, digitise, and re-engage with the percussive sounds of the Vietnamese Bronze Age Đông Sơn drum. Displayed at FCAC are reconfigured video works by Nguyen and Pham alongside hand-made black aluminium reliefs of the Đông Sơn drum.In the second part of CONNECT in May, Nguyen and Pham will invite the community to re-engage in person with the Vietnamese Bronze Age Đông Sơn drum by encouraging participants to play the instrument.FCAC’s outdoor amphitheatre acts as a scaffold for Rafaella McDonald’s paintings assemblages; an investigation of painting as a site of multi-directional forces that speak to a contemporary moment, where the personal intersects with narrative, language and process. For the second part of the exhibition, the paintings will be buried to absorb some soil toxicity, shifting the PH of the fabric and mordanting the fabric, before being hung in part two of the exhibition, documenting the contributions of the site to the painting composition.Rafaella, James and Victoria will be joined by Hannah Brontë, Kerrie Poliness, Centre for Projection Art and Nabilah Nordin in the second part of the exhibition, CONNECT: Part Two, in May 2021.

Footscray Community Arts Centre

Connect Part One

‘The Super Spreader’ is the artist’s ninth solo project with the gallery, showcasing Frank’s absolute mastery of luscious pigments and gleaming materiality alongside his ongoing empirical investigations into the potentiality of painting itself.This new suite of large scale, alluring artworks further Frank’s experimentation in painting both conceptually and materially. Introducing new mediums such as iridescent Perspex and powdered pigments to his unique and continuously evolving painting practice, these works radiate the artist’s own brilliant and dynamic approach to art and art-making.

Neon Parc

The Super Spreader

Referencing Dada film, constructivist theatre and graffiti culture, Georgina uses DIY materials such as cardboard and spray paint to create large-scale stages in a suburban garage. These theatrical stages then become the background for photographs and videos in which, Georgina features as a film siren and femme fatale. Drawing from western ideals of the body such in modernist painting, Cubist masks and classical Greek sculpture, Georgina’s work explores female identity through self-portraiture and performance.

Gertrude Contemporary — Gertrude Glasshouse

Pictures

Station Gallery 

The Ashtray Reader

Hold a body together

Convent-based artist Isabel Koslowsky presents abstract interpretations of her personal memories within Victoria’s landscapes in Dreamscapes of the Natural World. Through this exhibition, one is transported back to dreamscapes of the natural world—reconnecting and feeling at one with nature.

Abbotsford Convent — St Heliers St Gallery

Dreamscapes of the Natural World

What confrontations, complexities, critiques and conundra emerge when art adopts the perspective of the alien?The implications of this anthropic inversion proliferate throughout Xenogenesis, the first major solo exhibition of The Otolith Group in Australia, which brings together a cross-section of influential artworks from 2013 to 2018. The works selected are linked by The Otolith Group’s concern to formulate a science fiction of the present using historical and contemporary images and sounds. By treating the technologies of images, sounds, voices and colours as narrative vehicles for transtemporal travel, the artists seek to reimagine the contemporary global crises that ‘we’ have inherited from colonialism, renarrate the ways in which humans have shaped the planet, and reconfigure the ways that ‘we’ are changing in response to new technologies.

Buxton Contemporary

Xenogenesis

The works presented in DEBUT XVII: Made to Keep the Memory Alive explore notions of the monument, staging, performance, darkness and play. Blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is imaginary, the artists examine the precarity and absurdity of personal experience. BLINDSIDE’s annual DEBUT exhibition presents exciting and rigorous work by recent graduates from Melbourne’s leading art institutions. This year BLINDSIDE is proud to present work by Kurt Medenbach, Nina Sanadze, Ponch Hawkes and Levi Franco.

Blindside

DEBUT XVII : MADE TO KEEP THE MEMORY ALIVE

Pascale Bardos’ practice is characterised by a dualism in which empirical research and intuition coexist- developed through her enquiry of sensation and experience. Bardos investigates properties of matter (lightness, translucence, fluidity) and physical phenomena (reflection, perspective, balance) to form her methodologies. Creating installations, immersive environments and sculptures, she orchestrates a sensory experience of her surroundings allowing the physical properties of space, colour and light to guide the final work.Combining practices of large-scale architectural interventions, sculpture and durational performance, Bridie Lunney acknowledges the body as a conduit between our psychological selves and the physical world. Recent projects include Temporal Proximities, Magdalene Laundries at Abbotsford Convent, 2019; From Will to Form, TarraWarra Biennial, New Histories at Bendigo Art Gallery, 2018; Fold for Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, Federation Square, 2017; An Imprecise Science Artspace, Sydney, 2015; This Endless Becoming for Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2014. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture at the National Art School, Sydney.

EIGHT

A Line in the Sea is a moving-image work by Leyla Stevens that contests the construction of Bali as an island paradise within the Australian imagination. The multi-channel video is a feminist retelling of a seventies Australian cult surf-film that popularised Bali as a tourist destination. The lush, colour-saturated imagery directly references the footage of Australian male surfers as they ‘discover’ south Bali’s coastlines, less than a decade following Indonesia’s anti-communist killings that claimed 80,000 lives in Bali alone. Using speculative and documentary modes of filmmaking, the work explores the spectral trace of Bali’s political violence and looks at the ways the Australian surfer romance of wiped the island clean of past atrocities.

West Space at Collingwood Yards

Leyla Stevens

This series uses photographic portraits, archival images and floral scans in sculptural, woven and collage forms. These works indirectly ask how we relate to our present and past and what we choose to weave to create our concept of self.

MARS Gallery

Monstera Obliqua

In the times we are living in, where simple freedoms and moments of peace are hard to come by, we must turn inward. Mining through pre-existing images of the past in order to open up new possibilities – new images, new meanings – in the present, Nowhere Near is a contemplation of the grief, empathy, loneliness and desire felt by many in 2020.

Nowhere Near

Li is a site-specific installation that responds to the unique social and institutional histories of the Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, formerly the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital. The installation pays homage to the caregiving environment that once existed for patients at the hospital, and makes reference to ‘the shed’ -a kitchen located in an unused ward that became the locus for…

Bundoora Homestead Art Centre

Through the hand to the mouth explores the gesture of lighting a cigarette as a recurrent and coded motif occurring in gay cinema since 1950.Presented in the atmospheric Old Billiards Room at Bundoora Homestead, this series of largescale prints continues Eaton’s inquiry into undisclosed homosocial histories, evoking the sensuality of these discrete exchanges.

Through the hand to the mouth

In this exhibition five artists will each inhabit a room within Bundoora Homestead transforming the space into their own version of the universe. In these parallel worlds the artists find their doppelgängers engaged in dismantling the mainstream, each offering us a portal into what could be in their alternative realities within the multiverse.

The Multiverse

noun. The attraction to and preference for that which is from or characteristic of the past.A collection of works examining mainstream decorative design from the nineteen sixties and seventies through a modern lens. The collection explores the ability of simple shapes, forms and colours to facilitate recall of specific memories and emotions. A nostalgia invoking exhibition for the retrophiles!

Off the Kerb — Front Gallery

Retrophilia

Everything that can be seen can be broken down into shapes and colours. My 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. I have collected discarded items found on the side of the road and used them as a painting surface bringing attention the role each item may have played during its lifetime.

Stripped Down

Dive into the vividly colourful world of Liam Murphy with his latest body of work, Super Mild.In his signature style, Liam has created a collection of freshly light, bright and airy artworks that are deeply reminiscent of an Australian Summer. This body of work explores a loosening of painting styles, showcasing a spectrum of colours that either come together harmoniously or playfully clash. Super Mild is a celebration of the negative space between the layers and the happy accidents, whether it be a glimpse of gold or a defiant brushstroke of colour. Liam spent the closing months of 2020 working on the collection in his coastal Port Fairy studio. Whilst reflecting on the tumultuous year that was and contemplating the year ahead, he intended to create a body of works that articulates his aspiration for a colourful future.

Fenton & Fenton

Super Mild

David Rosetzky’s enigmatic project Composite Acts traverses video, choreography, performance, set design and photography to explore non-binary identities and the relative and fragmentary nature of the self.To produce the work, Rosetzky interviewed his collaborators about their personal relationships and family histories to devise a script that forms the nexus of the piece. The script is subsequently spoken, deconstructed, and integrated with choreographed movement enacted in dialogue with a suite of sculptural objects.The exhibition also features a new series of colour photographs that draw upon the performative language and material of this collaborative project.

Composite Acts

This exhibition presents a new series of paintings developed from a standard 22-inch bass drum. The work explores an aesthetic interpretation of a decrescendo, which is a diminishing passage of notes in music. Based on their monochromatic colour, each series of paintings borrows titles that make a reference to blue, which has been used widely as a theme in music for its connotations to nature, mood, and the infinite void: (1) Kozmic Blues; (2) Tangled Up In Blue; (3) It’s a Blue World; (4) Almost Like the Blues; (5) Goodbye Blue Sky; (6) Blue Monday. These are songs that have also experienced their own disappearance over time, through their unique histories that have shifted in the flux of popular culture.

Blue Notes

REGISTER is a witty articulation of a Minimalist aesthetic combined with a formalist conceptual approach to painting offering a wry take on the art market and contemporary issues. These include iconic artworks, the pandemic, track and trace technology and online shopping, while at the same time extending arguments surrounding objective and non-objective painting. The work explores ‘painting’ through the history and conventions of painting, appropriation of the art world generally, and the context and function of the gallery itself.

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ACMIWednesday 1 May – Tuesday 31 December

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Stephen Bush

A Troubled Mind

Sutton GallerySaturday 20 May – Saturday 17 June

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ArtCal by studiomass.com.au

Saturday 12 October
2024

ACMI
Wednesday 1 May – Tuesday 31 December

Bendigo Art Gallery
Friday 1 December – Sunday 3 November

Sutton Gallery
Saturday 20 May – Saturday 17 June

Saturday 12 October
2024

ACMI
Wednesday 1 May – Tuesday 31 December

Bendigo Art Gallery
Friday 1 December – Sunday 3 November

Sutton Gallery
Saturday 20 May – Saturday 17 June