April Exhibitions 2013

Main Space: Ensphere

 Catherine Evans:

 In her expanded photographic practice, Catherine Evans utilises found and abstracted photographs to investigate the latent social and environmental history of materials and objects. Juxtaposed against found, modified and cast objects, the final installations result in the poetic extension of opposed forces, such as the natural and manufactured or fragility and fortification.

Catherine Evans completed first class Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 and is a recipient of the inaugural VCA Graduate Mentorship (2013) and ArtStart (2012). Awards include the National Gallery of Victoria Trustees Award (2010), the Alliance Francaise Award (2010) and the Substation Gallery Exhibition Prize (2011). She has exhibited widely in group and solo shows, including the Future Now award exhibition currently touring regional Victoria and the collaborative project, Bird Hide and Bunker, to be exhibited at M16 ArtSpace, Canberra in May 2013.

Fiona Winzar Architects:

Fiona Winzar Architects is interested in the natural forces of order & chaos, the masculine & feminine, place & memory.  In this work FWA has has produced a geometric study using the ceiling pattern and imagery from a recently completed house extension, Victoria Road House.  The client’s childhood memories growing up with her father and affinity with Indian culture provided great inspiration.

Fiona Winzar Architects, a multi-award winning Melbourne practice, was established in 2005 specialising in bespoke and site specific residential and interior projects.

Fiona’s work has been widely published both locally and internationally.

Fiona is recognised by the profession for her commitment to excellence in design and contribution to education. 

Inez de Vega

Inspired by the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Inez de

Vega seats herself provocatively in Melbourne's Federation Square and waits for something to happen. The transgressive invitation she extends to the public to hit her if they can make her smile —seemingly a call to danger — yields just the opposite: a joyful exchange with a stranger in the middle of a busy metropolis. But at what price this happiness?

Inez de Vega works in video and performance art. Her cinema-infused videos play with our inherited screen culture, while examining the nature of female subjectivity, abuse and psychological neurosis.

Inez de Vega graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2011. She has exhibited her work in Australia and overseas at a range of public and artist-run galleries including the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Nellie Castan Gallery, LaTrobe University Gallery and the Substation. Internationally, de Vega has shown her work in China, Chicago and Berlin.

In 2012, de Vega received the Australia Council ArtStart Grant.

In May 2013, she will travel to Paris to take up a two-month residency at the Cité des Arts, awarded by the Art Gallery of NSW.

James Taylor

Systems and communication; society disperses, receives and induces media, culture and information in many forms. Hypermedia freezes this notion of communication and creates a visual mapping of this system. 

James Taylor is a Melbourne artist currently studying Fine Art at Monash University, Melbourne. Focused on a multi-disciplinary approach, influences in architecture, spatial theory and graphic design are paramount to his practice.

He has exhibited at Runt Space gallery (MADA) and participated in group exhibitions including the Victorian Architecture Awards, 45 Downstairs  (2012) and dis(-array), Artist Book collaboration, Light Projects (2011).

James Taylor holds a Certificate IV in Design.

  

 Karryn Argus

Exploring the relationship between architectural space, materials, making and creative remembering, Form Fused is a spatial exploration of the Platform exhibition space cabinet. Formal elements trace the space creating an environment where forms are fused together.

Form Fused includes a fabric panel, which is the third artwork in a series of works by Karryn Argus featuring the Canadian Smocking Stitch. A prominent form from the artist’s childhood, the stitched component not only frames the wall of the Platform cabinet but also refers to the artists earliest memories of exhibiting her ‘works of art’. 

Karryn Argus is an emerging Melbourne artist having completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts with 1^st class honours at Monash University in 2012.

Karryn has exhibited her work in several group shows in Melbourne, most recently at Walker Street Gallery (2013) and Level 17 Artspace (2012). She has exhibited in the Group Show at Sydney’s Factory 49 (2012) and in 2011 completed a short-term internship at the Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects.

Naomi Eller

Naomi Eller’s work actively engages the space between classical and contemporary art through the reinterpretation of mythologies and religious representations. It invites viewers to engage with archetypal narrative as a way to explore deeper universal meanings. Eller primarily works in sculpture using various types of clays. She also takes photographs, which in turn form the collages that are an integral part to my practice.

Eller is currently completing a residency at Northcote pottery. In December 2012 she had an exhibition at C3 gallery, titled’ Nothing is set in stone’. Prior to this Eller was affiliated with Death be Kind and was represented by them at the Melbourne Art fair, 2011. 

Phebe Schmidt

Hard Bodies explores the brightly adorned surface of female bodies in high key, kitsch colours. Through this process the idea of ‘hard bodies’, muscled and impenetrable is replaced by bodies that articulate an obsession with beguiling guises reflecting a different kind of impenetrability that challenges conventional ideas of softness and hardness. Just as musculature reinscribes and reforms the natural body, these images are inscribed with a plasticity and hard edge colour that reflects an alternative narrative with dark and disturbing undertones masked by a superficial brightness and cheesy lightness.

Phebe Schmidt is a Melbourne-based photographer who creates hyperreal images, often portraits, which are tightly constructed but essentially ambiguous. Her practice takes inspiration from Roland Barthe’s description of photography as ‘a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and make-up face beneath which we see death’ (2000:32). Her work has a stylized plasticity and bright surface that acts as a mask that plays with ideas of self, theatrical role-playing, and what lies beneath. She recently had a solo exhibition at Kreisler’s Dirty Little Gallery in Brunswick.

The Rexroth Mannasmann Collective

In this architectural project an historic example - Charles Garnier’s Opera de Paris - is dissected and transformed to inform a post-industrial residential space in Collingwood.

Reworking the idea of stage, theatre box, and dressing room required a re-examination of domestic space and introduced playful drama. The public ‘display’ spaces are treated with rich, patterned, lavishness. Economical materials are often used inventively to achieve this effect. In contrast the back-of-house palette is honest and utilitarian.

Like the Paris Opera, this project uses revelation and concealment to create tension and theatrical effect.

This architectural practice, established in 2002, is predominantly engaged in residential projects in and around Melbourne. As their name suggests, they have a collaborative approach to design and their client’s personae is often discernable in their built works.

Their work focuses on contextual solutions and examines the physical, historical and cultural qualities of each site and project. The Collective employs an aesthetic of assemblage and a textural palette to invest the spaces they create with a richness of experience.

 Sophie Takách

Habitat is a response to the local conditions of Platform Art Space, a subterranean passage which is populated but not inhabited. In the work the cabinet becomes a nesting place for an unknowable creature, whose presence or absence can only be guessed at. Local materials are manipulated into a burrow, hide, home.

Born Cambridge, England 1979; she lives in Melbourne and is currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts (sculpture) at Monash University.

In a multi disciplinary practice that includes sculpture, drawing and print, Sophie Takách explores the biological and psychological spaces of the body, and the limitations of perception. An interest in science, anatomy and language directs research into constructed realities and subjective truth. Using language and definition as a starting point for investigation, her work incorporates organic and geometric forms in an experimental methodology central to her aesthetic and conceptual concerns.

Vitrine: The Great Boom of Doom

Amy Cleary and Danny Frommer

The Great Boom of Doom is a site-specific collaborative work that is formally derived from the Vitrine itself, specifically the curve of the windows and its function as a display space.

Amy and Danny are interested in display systems, techniques and materials that range from dioramas that are made by children, models made by architects and mechanical engineers, and information design for museums.  They are interested in how people represent the past as historical, and try to present an ideological and sustainable future.

The artists explore through their own practice how humans relate to nature via their conceptual and technological frameworks, and how they try to shape, control, and exploit it. The beauty of the forms that can be derived from these frameworks interests them, however are also skeptical of their means and ends.

Danny Frommer makes kinetic work that explores the relationship of humans to machines; craftwork to mechanical processes. He makes components out of things that are not normally mechanised in order to make forms that show the humour, beauty and fallibility of some of our systems of understanding.

Through relief paintings and sculptural assemblages, Amy Cleary brings together traditional and non-traditional art making materials and forms – allowing the materials and forms to speak for themselves and to each other, producing unexpected outcomes.

Sample: Versus

Agnes So

Versus is two-screen video installation a depicting the artist in performance with a range of everyday objects. The actions presented are absurdly choreographed with the intention of to placing the body in a situation where it starts to replicate the functions of the object that it is performing with.

These vignettes are simple and inane, but when framed with the cameraʼs lens, they transform into meditative events that remind the viewer of the complex visual and physical relationships between subject, object and viewer.

Agnes So is a Melbourne-based artist from New Zealand. Her practice is centered on an interest in the visual and corporeal relationships between subject, object and viewer. After graduating with a Master of Fine Art from RMIT University in 2011, she has exhibited both locally and internationally. Recent projects include Dances with Things at SEVENTH, Melbourne, Thingification at RM Gallery and Projects, Auckland, Perception Wave at the Waitakaruru Sculpture Park, Waikato, Blindside Summer Studio 2012, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne and trololol at TCB Art Inc, Melbourne.