3 - 25 March 2006
Commonwealth Games Festival exhibition
An exhibition of work by twelve contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand that acknowledges recent social events while engaging sly humour to explore national identities and symbols. Curators Christine Morrow (Aus) and Danae Mossman (NZ)
Fergus Binns (Aus), Aleks Danko (Aus), Tony de Lautour (NZ), Daniel du Bern (NZ), Adam Geczy (Aus), Julie Gough (Aus), Jacquelyn Greenbank (NZ), Sue Guilfoyle (Aus), Raafat Ishak (Aus), Daniel Malone (NZ), Nathan Pohio (NZ), Sriwhana Spong (NZ), Constanze Zikos (Aus)
1 -15 April 2006
Artists
Helen Braun, Alice Buscombe, Pamela Cunningham, Simone DePetro, Ryan Foote, Sarah Haq, Catherine Hart, Marcus Keating, Yvette King, Kasia Lynch, Jessica Price, Alysia Rees, Kate Spencer, Rosa Tato, Emil Toonen, Melanie Wolfe
The screen has been behaving badly in the last decade, leaking out of the cinemas and living rooms, changing shape, growing and shrinking in size. The screen can bridge the ever-blurring boundaries between what we perceive as fantasy and reality. The multiplicity of texts that appear in our immersive screen-riddled environment come in varying valencies, creating a range of opportunities for interactivity between the texts and the audience.
Kellogg's cornflake's, wholesome, iconic healthy goodness is played out against a perverse narrative of a fanatical, sexual, health psychopathology bubbling beneath the surface. Kellogg's bowel training health camp issued enemas, experimental bowel surgery and believed a clean body equals clean thoughts. The Dirt Factory explores the contemporary health pre-occupation of detoxing and cleansing, and its origins in the development of the cornflakes breakfast cereal and it's founder Dr John Harvey Kellogg.
The exhibition plays on notions of dirt and aesthetics, culture, art and the body, which is all about dichotomies: the clean/unclean, healthy/unhealthy, low/high, distasteful/tasteful and the beautiful/ugly. The notion of dirt producing a loaded symbolic value of the other, the abject, the unknown and the alien. The dirt factory becomes an analogy for the human body, a machine engineered for producing filth. At the end of the day like everyone else your shit still stinks. You are dirt.
Encountering Culture: A Dialogue is a contemporary document on the polemics of urban life in Alice Springs seen through the prism of Aboriginal youth—the site of testimony and lived experience. Identity politics, performance, and self-presentation are played out within the specifics of place—together with the power of encounters and human relationships. This project presents both the mundane nature and theatricality of the everyday. The Todd Mall or Town Pool for instance, both ordinary socialised spaces, become settings for the staging and performance of identity and the presentation of the self. However, the intrusive nature of the camera reminds everyone of the conditions surrounding the event and the dynamics of production. Culture is not a reality objectively recorded by the camera, but one provoked by its active presence. Photography and performance become a form of autobiography. Performance also mediates the politics of identity.
Chris Barry has maintained an on-going relationship with Alice Springs/Central Australia since winning the Alice Prize in 1993, fostering a professional working relationship within that community. The Encountering Culture project results from twelve years of physical and emotional journeying into Alice Springs. The photographs on exhibition are one marker of these intimacies and social exchanges.
Bess Nungarrayi Price is a well-known public speaker, cultural adviser and spokesperson for the Aboriginal community in Alice Springs. Steve Gumerungi Hodder is a spoken word artist and Jacinta Nampijinpa Castle is a vocal artist—all three will represent and speak on behalf of the participants in this project—that is, the young people featured throughout the exhibition - and their families and extended kin. An Artist Talk will be held on Thursday 11 May, 12.30-1.30pm (VCA Gallery) featuring Chris Barry, Bess Nungarrayi Price, Steve Gumerungi Hodder and Jacinta Nampijinpa Castle - and will be chaired by Dr. Karen Burns. All speakers will be available for interview immediately after the Artist’s Talk.
Encountering Culture: A Dialogue is generously supported by the City of Melbourne.
The Artist Talk is supported by the School of Graduate Studies Academic Activity Grants.
1 to 24 June 2006
Michael Bullock, Eleanor Crook, Nick Devlin, Jon Jones, Justine Khamara, Steven Rendall
Life is Getting Longer (curated by Steven Rendall) features new work delving into the realm of portraiture by six artists from Australia and the UK. Heads, faces and bodies have been absorbed and formed into various arrangements. These configurations reflect and distort images we have of ourselves into new and sometimes unnerving forms. The compulsive desire to depict the human figure and portrait is subjected to stresses, doubt and strain.
On 31 May 2006 Life is Getting Longer will be presented at the VCA Gallery. Michael Bullock continues his fascination with figural transformation by fashioning a sculpted self-portrait located somewhere between the male and female gender; UK sculptor Eleanor Crook will exhibit one of her compelling wax figures, all realism and hints of curious psychology; Nick Devlin elaborates on his near forensic examination of the portrayal of reality within the public gaze using the magnetism and seduction our own image holds for us; Jon Jones remains enthralled with the allure of failed celebrity, the intimacy of family life and his own face; Justine Khamara collages 6000 photographs of her mother and father into an hypnotic double portrait and Steven Rendall paints and reassembles his heads into shambolic new forms.
In August 2004 the exhibition Life is very long (at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery) assembled the work of these artists for the first time. Part of the original criteria of Life is very long was to continue the process by exhibiting new work by the same artists every two years, demonstrating how artists’ practice and concerns evolve over a period of time.
Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel Strike a Pose
30 June to 22 July
Opening Thursday 29 June
6 - 8 pm
Strike a Pose is the major international showcase exhibition in the Gallery's 2006 program, incorporating two core elements:
Firstly, French artists Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel will be in Melbourne from 29 May making new work for Strike a pose. This exciting project is the latest in Dewar and Gicquel's joint practice. The artists combine an obsession with lifestyle hobbies and traditional handcrafting techniques with the ideas and aesthetic of the ready-made. The resulting artworks are large-scale sculptures and assemblages that combine the mundane with the absurd. In this instance, they will not only collaborate together but also with a number of VCA School of Art Honours students to create a major new work that will be produced on campus.
Secondly, curator Charlotte Laubard will conduct extensive visits to studios and galleries throughout Melbourne and, from this series of encounters, will curate an exhibition to coincide with Dewar and Gicquel's collaborative project. The two components will be presented together at the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery.
28 July - 12 August
In 2006, the IDAA takes a new direction, focusing primarily on leading Chinese artists working in digital media in partnership with the Beijing Film Academy, which will play host to the IDAA later in the year. IDAA 2006 features a diverse range of art works crossing a broad practice of video, interactive media and photomedia. Artists include: Maleonn, Dawei (David) Xu, Cui Xuiwen, Chen Qingqing and Aniu.
Also on show at IDAA are selected nominees for The Harries: National Digital Art Award presented by Queensland Health Skills Development Centre. The Harries presents printed and new media art works exploring ideas about the human form and condition, including the interplay between art and science. Artists include: Judith Wright, Eugenia Lim, Geoffrey Weary, Christopher Bennie and Janice Kuczkowski.
IDAA 2006 is presented by QUT Precincts and International Digital Art.
8 to 23 Aug 2006
An exhibition of twenty-two shortlisted artists from the final year of the Bachelor of Fine Art degree.
Image above: Loophole Landscape by Marita Hamalainen
An exhibition by VCA Centre for Ideas PhD candidate Targan.
"I've been a practicing Indigenous artist for the past thirty years and have had numerous exhibitions in that time both solo and group. For the past eight and a half years, I've been studying at the Victorian College of the Arts attaining my BFA, PGD and MVA and I am now completing my PhD. Since studying at the VCA, my works have attained a depth of meaning and impact that was somewhat missing until my enrolment at the VCA.
Along with two other people, I run my own gallery and studio space and manage sixteen other artists that display in this space. On average I sell 6 - 10 pieces annually to clientele that I've built up over many years as a professional artist. If anything I lean towards a political commentary on the plights of my people both past and present. I endeavour to highlight the problems pertaining to my people in Australia and an acceptance by the government of its responsibilities towards my people and the harm done to them by previous governments. My present works are somewhat didactic in their commentary. I do not see this as a negative but rather an affirmation of my own personal thoughts of Australia's history." J. Targan
15 September to 7 October
Damiano Bertoli, Cate Consandine, Chantal Faust, Danielle Freakley, Kate Fulton, Brad Haylock, Katherine Huang, Raafat Ishak, Sean Loughrey, Tom Nicholson (with Andrew Byrne), The Rollergrooves (Narinda Reeders and Tai Snaith), Bernhard Sachs, David Simpkin
The Office of Utopic Procedures' 2006 project Endgame includes new work by fifteen contemporary artists, working and living in Melbourne and devolves from a series of ongoing conversations and artists' projects.
Endgame addresses the issue of the dystopic, framed in terms of an analysis of the current cultural moment as the pathology of a type of reality principle. The Office of Utopic Procedures is an umbrella concept for a series of projects directed specifically to the circulation of symbolic language as a political problem.
19 Oct to 11 Nov
Resistance is futile is an exhibition that originates from the discussion and critical examination of the Star Trek phenomenon. Comprising specially commissioned works, it will examine the ongoing importance of the Star Trek series and films within popular culture. This revealing and sometimes playful exhibition will adeptly employ the Science-Fiction genre to provide new avenues for the discussion of historical and contemporary cultural issues such as exploration, colonization, immigration and imperialism.
Once a year, the VCA School of Art studios are dismantled and the doors are thrown open to the public. Graduating students from each of the School's departments - Painting, Photography, Drawing, 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. It's also a terrific occasion to snap up works by Australia's leading emerging artists.
The Graduate Exhibition is Melbourne's most eagerly anticipated annual art show. For nine days only, from 24 November to 2 December 2006, the entire School of Art at the VCA will be transformed into a vast gallery showcasing work from students graduating in 2006.
Don't miss this rare opportunity to preview the next generation of Australian artists.
2006 GRADUATE EXHIBITION
Dates: From 24 November to 2 December 2006
Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday and Sunday 12noon - 5pm