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2010 exhibition program

Addition and Erasure

19 February to 20 March

Opening Thursday 18 February 6–8pm


Artists/participants: Luke Beesley, Michael Farrell, Doug Heslop, Helen Johnson, Margaret Mahem, Peter O’Mara, Simon Pericich.
Curators: Luke Beesley and Doug Heslop.



This project will represent a collaboration between a number of artists and poets and will engage a between space – 'addition and erasure' – as a conceptual beginning for an artwork. Addition and Erasure includes participants and works that locate language and/or text somewhere between contemporary art and poetry, as a strategy for illuminating the question or place of the author, reader, spectator or critic; and as a way of challenging easy categorisation. Some of the questions the exhibition aims to raise include: Is text a limited medium? How can poetry exist alongside contemporary art practice?  Where might the gallery and the page meet? Can they be made identical? More specifically, perhaps: Can ‘poets’ and ‘artists’ be critiqued in a single breath?
 

Omega

26 March to 24 April

Opening Thursday 25 March 6–8pm


Artists: Alain Declercq (France), Tony Garifalakis (Australia), Joaquin Segura (Mexico), Jeanne Susplugas (France), Ewoud Van Rijn (Netherlands).
Curator: Tony Garifalakis.



Omega presents the work of five artists from France, The Netherlands, Mexico and Australia. The exhibition explores the structures of power and authority in the early 21st century. The artists in the exhibition employ symbols and signifiers of these structures in contemporary culture to reveal how they impose similitude and engender conformity. In doing so they generate a space for an individualistic and personal response to these oppressive social structures.



With funding support from the French Embassy and the Mondriaan Foundation

Lamp Chair Table Big Painting

30 April to 29 May

Opening Thursday 29 April 6–8pm

Artists: Veronica Kent, Doug Heslop, Lou Hubbard, Christopher LG Hill, Elizabeth Newman, Nicki Wynnychuk.

Lamp Chair Table Big Painting the exhibition is designed to explore some of the tropes of collective activity including anonymity and group consciousness. The project aims to create a single cohesive exhibition created by its six diverse artists in response to/in the style of one artist – the late German artist Martin Kippenberger, who was chosen as the point of departure because he is a key art world figure who refused to be identified by a particular style. His penchant for mixing media, styles and processes influenced younger artists, largely because he believed no style or artist's work was off-limits for appropriation.


Trouble Set Me Free

4 June to 3 July

Opening Thursday 3 July 6–8pm


Artists: Catherine Bell (Melbourne), Kathy High (New York), Mark McDean (Melbourne), Patricia Waller (Berlin), Bronia Iwanczak (Sydney), Stephen Garrett (Melbourne). Curator: Dr Catherine Bell.



Oh trouble set me free
 I have seen your face
 And it's too much too much for me (Cat Stevens, from the film Harold and Maude)

The 70s cult film Harold and Maude has been a pivotal influence on the curatorial rationale for this project, as the teenage male protagonist’s staged suicide, his attendance at funerals as a social outlet and love affair with a ninety year old woman shows how he courts morbidity as a way to understand mortality.  This exhibition brings together five artists who engage with trauma either as the catalyst for making work or purging its many repercussions through black humour, catharsis, transference or sublimation.


Paul Garrett: Brand Standing

16 to 30 July
Opening: Thursday 15 July 6 - 8pm

Brand Standing represents the completion of Melbourne artist Paul Garrett’s PhD research.

Within Western culture, branding and advertising seems to permeate at every level and might be argued to be its most recognisable face. This project undertakes to navigate the obstacles of money and materiality versus spirituality – a task made even more complicated through the power and influence of branding – by posing such questions as: How much of an artist’s value is dependant on the art they make, as apposed to the level of fame they hold? Has art become so imbued with labeling, status, and taste that we see it as just another apparition of our consumer selves?

Garrett contends it is testimony to art’s survival and reinvention that its true value cannot be measured by material means. Further, that its worth lies in the ability to question and objectify understanding of our own inner beliefs, which in turn shapes not only our unique identity but also that of the world we inhabit.

This project is generously supported by the Yulgilbar Foundation Graduate Sculpture Scholarship.

 

Wallara Travelling Scholarship

13 to 27 August
Opening: Thursday 12 August

An exhibition of finalists in the 2010 Wallara Travelling Scholarship. This annual scholarship of $10,000, supported by Wallara Asset Management, was awarded for the first time in 2001 and is open to all third year art students. The purpose of the award is to enable its recipient a period of overseas travel at the conclusion of their undergraduate degree. The guest judge for 2010 is Alexie Glass-Kantor, Director of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.

 

Since we last spoke: Andrew McQualter and Raquel Ormella

3 September to 1 October
Opening: Thursday 2 September

Since we last spoke is an exhibition of works by Raquel Ormella and Andrew McQualter that feature elements of interactivity and collaboration. From the anonymous exchange between the author of political graffiti and a local council, to the mapping of dialogues between an artist and economists, the exhibition explores social, political and philosophical concerns via a mode of practice that may best be described as conversational. Eschewing the didactic mode of address common to much politically or socially motivated practice, Ormella and McQualter present objects and images that seek to engage a viewer in a process of dialogue or exploration.

 

The Solo Projects: Sean Loughrey and Jensen Tjhung

Part of the 2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival
8 October to 6 November
Opening: Thursday 7 October

For The Solo Projects, Melbourne-based artists Jensen Tjhung and Sean Loughrey each construct a room within a room to create intense and immersive viewing experiences.

Through researching and collating information on the psychology of fractured belief systems, places of worship in philosophy and mythology, Tjhung creates a large-scale monument reflecting the dark forces of the Australian psyche from the deep suburbs to the outback. Loughrey’s new work, titled Fiat lux – Let There Be Light – Again, utilises projection, both inside and outside a prefabricated constructed and furnished room or shed. As in previous works, this new project reflects upon the work of Samuel Beckett. While the title pronounces a repeated beginning, the contrary underlying philosophical concerns are the very questions of existence – and the end of ‘things’, as a character in a Beckett play might say.

 

Graduate Exhibition

23 to 28 November
Opening: Monday 22 November

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 Diploma of Visual Arts – 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

7 to 12 December
Opening: Monday 6 December

The Masters Exhibition presents final work of the graduating students from the Master of Fine Art and the Master of Visual Art. The MVA is a program that focuses primarily on the professional work of the artist and on building a sustainable practice. The MFA is a two-year research degree that has an element of scholarship and theoretical focus in keeping with academic research in the higher educational setting. These two programs run in parallel and while differently designed, they both are the resolution of extensive and committed period of study and they represent the students’ focused ambitions. Following the Graduate Exhibition, the School of Art studios are reconfigured to showcase the work of this graduating cohort – in effect an exciting exhibition of twenty-eight discrete projects and solo shows.