Richard Grigg, Christopher L G Hill, Jess Johnson, Richard Lewer, Andrew McLeod, Séraphine Pick, Stuart Ringholt, Vin Ryan, Ken Shimizu, Jensen Tjhung

Opening Thursday 8 February
Exhibition Dates 9 February - 10 March
Curators: Meredith Turnbull and Jess Johnson
A curatorial collaboration between Jess Johnson and Meredith Turnbull, Zonal Marx is an investigative group exhibition into contemporary manifestations of drawing practice. The exhibition is the second instalment of what is proposed as an ongoing presentation of new works by drawing practitioners. The first instalment Victims of Drawing Support Group featuring John Eaton, Jess Johnson, Jordan Marani and Kate Smith was presented at Victoria Park Gallery earlier this year (April 19-May 6, 2006).

Zonal Marx expands on an initial interest in obsessive-compulsive drawing to focus on drawing that is produced as an `unconscious action'. The exhibition will explore the act of drawing as a visual index to the internal state of the artist, illustrating the immediacy of drawing production – direct from brain to mark making. Zonal Marx demonstrates the variety of approaches to contemporary drawing practice including, site specific and spatial installation, works on paper, artist books, performance, sound, video and projection. Including works by some of Australia and New Zealand’s leading contemporary drawing practitioners Zonal Marx aims to investigate and pose questions about new developments in contemporary drawing practice.

Exhibition dates 16-31 March 2007
Opening Thursday 15 March 2007 from 6 to 8pm

Artists: Michael Bullock, Peter daverington, Emily Ferretti, Ryan L Foote, Patrick Foster, James Kenyon, Annika Koops, Laureen Lansdown, James Parrett, Kate Robertson, Kiron Robinson, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Nick Selenitsch, Cyrus Wai-Kuen Tang, Jessye Wdowin-McGregor.

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 PhD level) are eligible to enter within the first four years of their graduation. All exhibitors are short-listed finalists in the Murdock Travelling Scholarship. Previous recipients include Steven Cox, Jon Campbell, Vera Möller and Andrew Hazewinkel.

The 2007 recipient of The Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship is Annika Koops.

Fiona Abicare, Jessie Angwin, Cate Consandine, Danielle Freakley, Kate Just, Simone Slee, Andrea Tu
Curators: Kate Daw, Vikki McInnes

The subject of women and craft in relation to contemporary visual practice has been highlighted periodically since the 1970s, when feminism reclaimed techniques and craft strategies and sought to propel them into the arena of fine art. The field of the ‘traditional’ arts, often including the domestic realm and its relationship to art, continues to interest both artists and viewers – despite the time shift away from the 1960s when activism and feminism first entered the public consciousness, in visual art practice and more broadly in mainstream western culture. Bird Girls attempts to identify whether there still questions to be addressed around this area, even in 2007.

Each artist has been asked to present two works for exhibition, including one newly commissioned work that demonstrates the range of their practice. Each has an obsessive, repetitive making aspect/element to their practice (good girls: obedient, neat, passive, neurotic) but each also produces films, paintings and/or performative work (bad girls: free-wheeling, expressive, out of control and wild). In planning the exhibition, it is acknowledged that the artists have not confined themselves to working with one type of material or idea but, rather, matrix-like, they move from concept to material and back to idea, creating a type of web of interconnected works. From knitting to video, from publication to painting and embroidery, from writing to cutting up fabric and making big objects, these artists have no loyalty to their medium. Rather, the message is paramount; the idea and its context of utmost importance, with the materials subservient to the message. Bird Girls is an update on this perennial subject; the latest look in a long line of enquiries into art making and feminine identity. Emotional, subjective, wilful, intellectual and tough, these Bird Girls hold their hearts in their hands.

Bill Sampson PhD Exhibition
24 May - 9 June 2007

Prettybad represents Bill Sampson's PhD research, the aim of the project was to find a strategy that might employ the concepts of the informe and sunyata.

The operation of the informe seeks to strip away that veil of fantasy from the psychological space in which we live our lives, and touch upon what Lacan theorises as the ‘real’, or what is commonly termed, the horror vacuii. The concept of sunyata (or ‘nothingness’), on the other hand, is a theory not unlike the Lacanian theory of the ‘gaze’, although it proposes a notional space, meaningless like the ‘real’, that is inclusive and empowering and altogether provides a less enclosed idea of one’s relationship with everything else, a wider view, or a view without a frame. It is proposed that the comprehension of the ‘real’ is altered with the appreciation of the concept of the sunyata, as the idea that the ‘real’ as menacing and terrifying is much diminished.

How might artwork combine such concepts and what might be the effect? It is suggested that the answer was discovered, in part, in a process that to a very large degree negated the role of the artist, and had an attractive even beautiful quality. The process was the anachronistic craft of marbling for it allowed for the exploitation of the random behaviour of the paint and resulted in beautiful though expressionless, and yet seemingly gestural, marks. Furthermore, it appeared as if it were something other than what it was. For example, the artwork might look like an abstract painting and so have the promise of an interpretation regarding expressive gesture – but of course it was the product of chance and could never fulfil that promise.

Yet these characteristics alone might still allow a spectator to either impose some meaning upon the artwork and grant it significance, or still too easily reject it as kitsch. That is, give the work meaning and value, or no value at all. However, an overtly descriptive and ludicrous title given to the work serves both to negate the possibility of any suggestion of meaning and also to deflate any idea of value. This strategy ridiculed the topic implied or designated by the title and also any suggestion that these works might actually mean something. The combination of the Marbling and title serves to do away with practically all meaning – save for the meaning that the work was joyfully, nihilistically and primarily about the negation of meaning.

In this state, if the work nonetheless manages to sit at a notional point between insignificance and kitsch, and still raise a possibility that it has the veracity of an artwork, it is considered ‘Prettybad’. In summary, the Prettybad negates form, signification and value; it sits on the very edge between art and kitsch, and it proposes a nihilistic aesthetic based on the informe, the insignificant and on valueless beauty – an ‘aesthetic of the expressionless’.

Exhibition Dates 14 June – 7 July
do it began with a discussion between Christian Boltanski, Betrand Lavier and Hans Ulrich Obrist a the Café Select in Paris in 1993. Through these artists combined interest in using instructional procedures, Obrist conceived an exhibition of do-it-yourself descriptions and procedural instructions.

do it is an open exhibition model, and exhibition in progress. Individual instructions can open empty spaces for occupation and invoke possibilities for the interpretations and rephrasing of artworks in a totally free manner. do it effects interpretations based on location, and calls for a dovetailing of local structures with the artworks themselves. The diverse cities in which do it takes place actively construct the artwork context and endow it with their individual marks or distinctions.

It is important to bear in mind that do it is less concerned with copies, images, or reproductions of artworks, than with human interpretation. No artworks are shipped to the venues, instead everyday actions and materials serve as the starting point for the artworks to be recreated at each "performance site" according to the artists' written instructions. Each realization of do it occurs as an activity in time and space. The essential nature of this activity is imprecise and can be located somewhere between permutation and negotiation within a field of tension described by repetition and difference. Meaning is multiplied as the various interpretations of the texts accumulate in venue after venue. No two interpretations of the same instructions are ever identical.

The do it project at the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery is conceived by international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and realised by the Centre for Ideas in conjunction with Alliance Francaise de Melbourne.

12 July – 4 August

“The physical landscape of Australia is a starting point for a journey into the conscious and the unconscious self. I am the visual traveller and my own cultural attaché. I record, observe, assemble and archive organic objects, animals, cultural relics, places, tools and experiences, creating a highly personalized iconography. My drawings, paintings and prints are not only visual diaries but a language of the real, the imagined, and the half forgotten.

These images are placed intentionally into a map or chart-like arena whereby objects that are embedded merge to the surface only revealing half their secrets while others float, hang and peer into the picture plane like curious spectators. Often a small dotted or broken line becomes a drag line, linking each object to each other while representing the path that the seasoned traveler makes if he or she needs to return home.” Sarah Amos

Sarah Amos was born in Melbourne, Australia. She earned her BFA in Printmaking at the Phillip Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia in 1987. She also went on to complete the Professional Printer Training Program and the Master Printer Program in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Tamarind Institute 1991-2. In 1998, she attended the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont to attain her MFA in painting and printmaking.

12 July - 4 August

“Books are kept within homes, yet they represent worlds afar within, books are notations of history or flotations of ideas and dreams. They are more than the object we perceive but can be reduced to nothing in a short period of time.

I personally have a tendency to hoard and covet these dusty things of the past, this process of cutting up and breaking apart beautiful objects to reveal their words within and also destruct their status is an initial act I have embarked upon. I wish to impart part of this to others to follow the next cycle of this journey, which is the regeneration of the physical into an idea and the recreation of disparate languages into creative imaginary spaces. Forging interstitial relations, between others process and mine.” Tara Gilbee

The Space in Between brings together over 30 artists who have constructed a new work from a book collected and supplied by the curator. The project aims to explore the interstitial relations of art to its environment and within collaborative practice and represent themes of transition, change and movement between spaces. This aim is held in line with an interest in expressing the artistic processes revealed by working inside and outside of the individual practice, to incorporate both the act of one and many co-joined in tension – to interrupt binary associations as much as to embrace them.

Polar
10 August – 1 September

Curators: Kiron Robinson and Lani Seligman
Jeremy Drape, Simon Horsburgh, Louise Hubbard, Sanja Pahoki, Kiron Robinson, Lani Seligman and Utako Shindo.

Polar features seven artists who take photographs in diverse contemporary contexts. The exhibition continues a curatorial collaboration between Lani Seligman and Kiron Robinson. Following on from Doubt presented at Conical in 2006 – also featuring Simon Horsburgh, Louise Hubbard and Sanja Pahoki – this exhibition includes artists Jeremy Drape and Utako Shindo.

The presentation of works in this exhibition is one component of an extensive collaborative process between the artists, including regular meetings over the past several months to discuss, develop and formalise their work for this exhibition. This unique knowledge of the individual practices of the group informs the production of new works for this project and allows for exciting intersections between the artists.

It was the inherent pervasiveness of doubt in these artists’ practices that initially brought the group together and Polar expands on this previous undertaking. Many of these artists do not identify themselves as ‘photographers’ but Polar tracks the presence of the photographic and shows a variety of approaches to contemporary photographic practice, as an interface between concept and form, site specific and spatial installation, performance, video and projection.

My House, My Kylie, My Chateau.......My Everything
20 September – 6 October

This exhibition brings together work by Kathy Temin made between 2001-2005, and explores the creative influence of suburban and popular icons, and private and collective memory. In particular the reception of Kylie Minogue has been a vehicle to explore these ideas from the perspective of both fan and artist. Notions surrounding fandom; ownership and memory, sentiment, escapism, recycling and fantasy, have been explored.

Since 1990 Kathy Temin’s work has engaged with the themes of identity and memory through suburban, cultural and artistic images. These works have taken the form of sculptures, photographs, glass and felt pictures, installations, auditions, collections, publications and live events.

Following the project My Kylie Collection, 2001 at the MCA in Sydney, this exhibition will show unseen work. It displays the video and photographic documentation of the auditions and live event, My Kylie, 2004 that took place at the ICA in London that will be shown alongside other work related to this project. The My Kylie event auditioned performers to sing a Kylie song of their choice and included both male and female performers aged between 14-50.

Other recent sculptural works include My House, 2005 and My Chateau, 2005 that incorporate memory and identity in relation to domestic space and artists’ residencies. They are two sculptures which engage with doll house structures, miniature interiors, video screens and idealized garden settings.

Image: My Kylie Audition: Lois, 2004, Image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

Luck

Fran van Riemsdyk’s practice explores issues around the ideas of choice, luck and chance, and how we create meaning from the myriad of visual and non visual information that surrounds us.

This project was influenced by two historical examples based around luck: the Gold Rush in Australia in the mid 19th Century and Tattersalls Lottery which was the dominant lottery in Victoria until the mid 1980s. Visually these ideas are explored through digital collages which emphasize detail, and complex diagrams which emulate the type of data used to make decisions within the business world.

Second VCA Mirror

This is the 25th in a series of venue specific projects, the majority of which have referenced unconventional exhibition spaces, and have included painted illusions, mirror images and actual mirrors in their modus operandi. The architectural idiosyncrasies and the changes of natural light within each site have determined the final form and the content of the installation, and established a symbiosis between the real space of the observer and illusionist space. Second VCA Mirror involves the architecture and light of the building’s stair well and recorded and observed from the first and second landings of the stair case structure.