Bernhard Sachs
Bernhard Sachs, digital image from Anathema/Anachronism/Apostasy, 2008-2009, original photographer unknown.

ANATHEMA / ANACHRONISM / APOSTASY
Exhibition dates: 29 January to 14 February
Opening: Friday 6 February 6–8 PM

Anathema/Anachronism/Apostasy comprises Bernhard Sachs’ PhD research presentation and brings together work created by Bernhard Sachs between 2004 and 2009.

Anathema/Anachronism/Apostasy is the summary exhibition of a series entitled Trilogy concerning history and representation as theatrum mundi, an allegorical theatre or opera of the world, after the definitive 1924 text by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The title 'Trilogy', referring directly to a sequence of films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is misleading. Trilogy is to date, eight exhibitions, beginning with (Reconstruction of) The Polish Game, Ocular Lab, Melbourne, 2004, which featured a dinner in a heavily decorated interior and the exhibition of its aftermath, and ending (or possibly not) with a recital, Oratorio Faust on 6 February 2009, and its aftermath, in a heavily decorated interior.
Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship

Exhibition dates: 20 February to 13 March
Opening: Thursday 19 February 6–8 PM

Featuring: Ross Coulter, Peter Daverington, Patrick Foster, Betra Fraval, Melanie Irwin, Amelia Johannes, Veronica Kent, Anastasia Klose, Sophie Knezic, Jessica Kritzer, Tully Moore, Laith McGregor, Sherry McLane Alejos, Linda Tegg, Utako Shindo, Paul Williams.

The Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship is awarded biennially through the generosity of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. The Fellowship has maintained the spirit of the National Gallery Travelling Scholarship, which was first awarded to John Longstaff in 1887. It was offered every three years until 1968 when it became a biennial event. The Travelling Fellowship is designed to allow a young artist to travel and study overseas at a particularly important period in his or her career. The award is for $20,000 and all VCA School of Art graduates (ranging from BFA to MFA level) are eligible to enter within the first four years of their graduation. All exhibitors are short-listed finalists in the Murdoch Travelling Scholarship. Previous recipients include Steven Cox, Jon Campbell, Vera Möller and Andrew Hazewinkel.
Cock and Bull
Beagles and Ramsay, Glitter Island, 2007

Featuring: Tony Garifalakis, Matthew Griffin, Jon Campbell, John Beagles and Graham Ramsay
Curated by Kate Daw and Vikki McInnes
Exhibition dates: 20 March to 18 April
Opening: Thursday 19 March 6–8 PM
Public Lecture: Friday 20 March 11.30 am

Cock and Bull presents new work by five artists from Australia and the UK. Examining and critiquing the institutions and structures of contemporary society through various artistic strategies – including humour, irony and melodrama – Cock and Bull devolves around the concept of autofiction, postulating the artistic self as an instrument of critique. Cock and Bull encompasses a number of approaches such as the shaggy dog story, the aside, the impossible narrative, the invented biography, all constructed and designed to lead the viewer up the garden path. The artists’ private histories conflate with their unconventional versions of institutional critique. By mingling fact with fiction, the works in the exhibition also develop dialogic relationships between and among the artists and their audiences.
Once More With Feeling
The Telepathy Project: Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Duck, 2007. Photo: Michelle Tran
Featuring: Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples (The Telepathy Project), Timothy Kendall Edser, Bridie Lunney, Sarah Lynch, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Alex Martinis Roe and David Simpkin
Curated by Meredith Turnbull

Exhibition dates: 24 April to 23 May
Opening: Thursday 23 April 6–8 PM

1960s and 1970s performance art has been a seminal influence on contemporary art as we know it. Chris Burden, Valie Export, Paul McCarthy and Bruce Nauman are just a few examples of progenitors of Performance Art as a movement. More recently artists like Mike Parr, Jill Orr, Stelarc and many others have provided significant Australian contributions to this ongoing discourse. Once More with Feeling brings together a diverse group of nine Melbourne based performance and video art practitioners to unravel why this art form is so important today and to provide a local and contemporary perspective on this discussion. As an audience, our experience of Performance Art is often mediated through viewing surviving video and documentation of original live performances. Once More with Feeling attempts to devolve this sense of art historical and museological archive by exploring how that perspective can infuse performance art being made today.
What Makes This Poem Beautiful?
Featuring: The Badiou Reading Group, Simon Boucher, Stephen Bram, Maria Cruz, Mick Douglas, Marco Fusinato, Neal Haslem, Neon Parc, Elizabeth Newman, and others.
Curated by Lizzy Newman

Exhibition dates: 29 May to 27 June
Opening: Thursday 28 May 6–8 PM

‘Ka threw off his coat the moment he entered the room. He opened the green notebook he’d brought with him from Frankfurt and wrote down the poem as it came to him, word by word. It was as easy as following a dictation whispered into his ear, but nevertheless he gave the words on the page his full attention. Because he’d never before written a poem like this – in one flash of inspiration, without a single pause – there was a corner of his mind that doubted its worth. But as line followed line, it seemed to him that the poem was perfect in every way, and this made his joyful heart beat faster still. So he carried on writing, hardly even pausing, leaving spaces only here and there for the words he had not quite heard, until he had written thirty-four lines.’

This exhibition curated by artist Elizabeth Newman reveals some of the social bonds that exist behind the making of art work. Included in the exhibition are the artist’s husband (artist Mick Douglas) and children, her dealers (Neon Parc), fellow artists Maria Cruz, Stephen Bram and Marco Fusinato and collaborators such as graphic designer Neal Haslem and electrician Simon Boucher who once helped Newman make a work. The exhibition includes a lecture on psychoanalysis and a performance by members of Al Wunder’s ‘Theatre of the Ordinary’.

From Snow by Orhan Pamuk (2002), p.89.

Sandra Bridie: The artist as composite
Sandra Bridie and Julie Davies, 2007

Exhibition dates: 3 to 18 July
Opening: Thursday 2 July 6–8 PM

In the exhibition Sandra Bridie: The artist as composite, Sandra demonstrates, through a range of works, her version of the term, ‘composite practice’. Works here encompass the numerous modes that she has practiced concurrently over the duration of her PhD candidature and include; a series of interviews/oral histories with artists; documentation of ‘pedagogical projects’ she has coordinated with students from local and international institutions; numerous projects which have come out of her ongoing involvement with the artists’ collective and space Ocular Lab, where she is one of its founding members; documentation of her curated exhibitions; writing; a photographic collaboration with Ocular Lab member Julie Davies; and her solo production, the invention of fictional artists.

Material Ligero: Five Chilean Artists Travelling Light
Material Ligero, Five Chilean Artists Travelling Light, Catalina Bauer, Rodrigo Canala, Rodrigo Galecio, Gerardo Pulido, Tomás Rivas, 2009

Material Ligero: Five Chilean Artists Travelling Light
coordinated by Zara Stanhope
Featuring: Catalina Bauer, Rodrigo Canala, Rodrigo Galecio, Gerardo Pulido, Tomás Rivas

Exhibition dates: 24 July to 22 August
Opening: Thursday 23 July 6–8 PM

Material Ligero is a project generated by five artists from Santiago, Chile. During their residency, the artists will create work in-situ at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Material Ligero explores three concerns relating to contemporary practice: the ways in which art circulates; the materiality of artworks; and the ways in which the political and visual may interconnect. Central to Material Ligero is the relationship of art and materials within their socio-economic context. The project will incorporate a conference, studio visits, workshop and a catalogue that documents the artwork and includes a critical introduction and background to the artists’ research and conceptual stages of the project across its development. Material Ligero highlights corporality – that of the artist, the spectator and of art itself to embrace the global and cultural potential of contemporary art.
Wallara Travelling Scholarship
Finalists: Ramona Angelico, Nicole Breedon, Maggie Brown, Jenny Chang, Christopher Dolman, Jack Douglas, Matthew Greaves, Leo Greenfield, Tessa McDonnell, Seijiro Nishioka, Jules Renton, Madeline Sharrock, Dylan Statham, Brooke Williams

Exhibiton dates: 28 August to 4 September 2009

An exhibition of finalists from the final year of Bachelor of Fine Art degree. The Wallara Traveling Scholarship offers a young artist the opportunity to travel overseas before returning to study.
The Invisible Generation

A Vision Forum project curated by Per Hüttner and Daniele Balit

Opening: 19 September 1-5 PM
Exhibition dates: 22 September – 10 October

When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
-William S. Burroughs

Vision Forum presents The Invisible Generation: a series of events in September and October 2009 that are inspired by a text by William S. Burroughs with the same title. The project will primarily be made up of unannounced performance-based interventions in the public space in Beijing, Melbourne, Shenzhen and Kiev. The Invisible Generation is realized in collaboration with Margaret Lawrence Gallery and Satellite in Melbourne, CCA in Kiev, CPU 798 in Beijing and OCAT in Shenzhen (confirmed), the Arrow factory and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (confirmation pending). The project brings together high profile artists from a large array of different countries and cultural backgrounds and with roots in Europe and China as well as in Africa and South America.

The events of The Invisible Generation form a series of time-based interventions and the presented work falls between the boundaries of music, performance, installation, interviews, literature and film and uses the genre gap to penetrate the established codes that govern our perception of reality, opening up space for alternative and imaginative thinking and dialogues between cultures.
Susan Jacobs Security. Illusion. Elvis Richardson Housed
Susan Jacobs, Leap/Alley, 2009. Elvis Richardson, work in progress, 2009.

Susan Jacobs Security. Illusion.
Elvis Richardson Housed

Exhibition dates: 16 October - 14 November
Opening: Thursday 15 October 6-8 PM

This exhibition is part of an ongoing commitment by the Margaret Lawrence Gallery to showcase new works by established Melbourne based practitioners, providing an opportunity for contemporary artists to create a new body of work on a large scale specifically designed for the gallery space. The project supports artists working with site-specific concerns to pursue developmental research into contemporary modes of practice within a variety of media from sculpture, installation and spatial practice to photography, video, painting and drawing. The exhibition for 2009 will feature two discrete solo projects by Susan Jacobs and Elvis Richardson.

Elvis Richardson’s work examines personal and domestic spaces for traces and signs of previous inhabitants. This new project uses domestic commercially manufactured carpet retrieved from public housing properties at times of physical, social and governmental change. The carpet, retrived and displayed whole in the gallery setting, becomes a physical document displaying the indentations, stains, and wear of its narrative and forensic qualities. Accompanied by her photographs of car interiors these works seek to emphasise the anxiety around public and private spaces and home ownership in Australia today.

Susan Jacobs work re-interprets Yves Klein’s iconic image ‘Leap into the Void’ (1960). Susan will enact an inversion of Klein’s staged action, spatially and conceptually, by jumping from a trampoline on a raised platform in front of the stable, through the open doors into her home. The work acknowledges the creative potential of physicality and an appreciation of the practicality of the domestic. It also considers the notion of security as a social construct, reflecting on the idea of stability in relation to ‘home’. Unlike the trickery used to achieve Klein’s composite image, the work will document this action (with video and still photography) revealing the practical apparatus involved to attain the inward ‘leap.’
Graduate Exhibition 2009

Exhibition Dates: 24 to 29 November
Exhibition Opening: Monday 23 November 6 to 8 pm

Exhibition Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 11am to 5 pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 pm to 5 pm

Once a year, the School of Art studios are dismantled and the doors are thrown open to the public. Graduating students from each of the School’s departments – Drawing, Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture and Spatial Practice – as well as those completing Honours and Postgraduate courses, present some of the highlights from their years of study. The resulting show is a feast of drawing, prints, photography, sculpture, painting, screen-based and digital media, reflecting the gamut of artistic expression.

The annual Graduate Exhibition represents an opportunity for friends, family and art lovers to enter this cultural laboratory, providing access to the intense artistic explorations and the creative energy that emits from the School of Art.

Masters Exhibition

Exhibition Dates: 8 to 13 December

Exhibition Hours:
Tuesday to Friday 11am to 5 pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 pm to 5 pm

The Masters Exhibition is a new annual event that will provide a framework for research and its creative outcomes. It will be a major exhibition of ambitious solo projects by Master of Fine Art and Master of Visual Art graduate artists.