Artist Talk: Catherine Bell at the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale
On the occasion of her inclusion in the first edition of the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, The Burden of Objects, Catherine Bell will be in conversation with fellow artists Rob McLeish and Sean Meliak on Saturday 12 October at the Villa Alba Museum in Kew, VIC. The engaging talk will offer insight into the exhibiting artists’ respective practices and each sculpture included inaugural exhibition.
Attendance is free and booking is not required.
Artist Talk: Catherine Bell, Rob McLeish and Sean Meliak Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Objects Villa Alba Museum, Kew, VIC Saturday, 12th October, 1–2pm
Art Forum: Mia Boe (Artist Talk at the Victorian College of the Arts)
Mia Boe will present a talk at the Victorian College of the Arts on Thursday, 10th October as a part of their ongoing Art Forum series.
Proving a rich insight into her work and its relationship with the work, Boe will share the themes, processes and ideas that drive their practice.
This event will take place at Federation Hall at the Victorian College of the Arts’ Southbank campus, while simultaneously being streamed online as a live webinar. Please note that registration is not necessary to attend this in-person event.
Art Forum: Mia Boe Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne Thursday 10 October, 12.15pm
Peter Robinson’s solo exhibition Charcoal Drawing has recently opened at the Whangārei Art Museum in Whangārei, Aoetearoa New Zealand.
Stretching across two spaces of the museum, the exhibition features an assembly of congruent quasi-sculptures. Posited here as line drawings conducted in space, Robinson’s liberal and malleable handling of the material gestures toward rudimentary or reduced forms such as spirals, ships or waves. Composed of a burnt-wood-veneer aluminium, Robinson’s installation makes reference to the longstanding Minimalist interest in a phenomenological experience of sculpture in the museum space with each outstretching yet recoiling sculpture indiscriminately plotting various lengths of the gallery.
Peter Robinson Charcoal Drawing Whangārei Art Museum 8 September – 8 December 2024
Catherine Bell in the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale
We are thrilled to announce that Catherine Bell is included in the inaugural Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, The Burden of Objects.
The exhibition will feature four sculptures from Bell’s acclaimed ‘Maker Unknown’ series, wherein the artist reuses the enduring Oasis floral foam from discarded or decayed bouquets. This is then carved and reshaped to resemble a botanical motif, functioning as a monument to a lost love one while shrinking the chasm between decay and vitality, ephemerality and permanence, nature and artifice.
The Burden of Objects is the first iteration of the newly established Melbourne Sculpture Biennale. The exhibition will be held form 9–13 October at the Villa Alba Museum, a heritage mansion in Kew. The exhibition features 19 artists based in greater Naarm/Melbourne who are making objects at scale or in costly or labour-intensive materials and traditional sculptural processes such as carving, moulding, casting, modelling, and assembling.
Melbourne Sculpture Biennale: The Burden of Objects Villa Alba Museum, Kew 9 – 13 October
Kate Beynon features in the exhibition The Mask Spirits Hour opening soon at Carlton Library as a part of the Yarra Public Art Light Box Program. Presented by the collective group TudoFAM (Kate Beynon, Rali Beynon & Michael Pablo), the exhibition features intricately drawn and painted ‘mask spirits’ that has been transformed and illuminated through the light boxes to create a dreamscape that explores ideas of storytelling, shapeshifting and hybridity.
The Mask Spirits Hour Carlton Library, Naarm/Melbourne 25 September 2024 – 24 March 2025
Join Karen Black and curator Danielle Robson, principal and senior curator at Urban Art Projects, for an in-depth conversation on Black’s work at the Woollahra Gallery on Saturday 21st September.
Karen Black is a finalist in the recently opened Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize 2024. Her work Mountain Head (2024) continues Black’s exploration of the intersection between body and landscape, abstraction and figuration. The amorphous and corporeal sculpture denotes an array of bodily connotations: limbs intertwine like root systems, growing together, reaching for something to hold on to.
Please note registration is necessary as this is a ticketed event with limited capacity.
Karen Black and Danielle Robson In Conversation Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf Double Bay, NSW Saturday 21 September, 2–2:45 pm
Laresa Kosloff at e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn, NY
Laresa Kosloff’s new video work The Bleaching will premiere at the e-flux Screening Room in Brooklyn, NY as a part of the programme View From a Body, guest curated by Naarm-based artist Cate Consandine.
Exploring provocations that surround moving-image culture and notions of embodied affect, View From A Body will screen the works of ten Australian contemporary artists: Cate Consandine, Archie Barry, Hayley Millar Baker, Claire Lambe, Laresa Kosloff, Leyla Stevens, Tina Stefanou, James Barth, Ezz Monem, and Stephen Garrett. Navigating the imaginings of First Nations, diasporic, queer, and female artists, the screening presents affective embodied and disembodied perspectives, creating the space to reflect on how our bodies affect the way we see and understand moving images, and how artists use this through their work.
The Bleaching (2024) is a short film made entirely from commercial stock footage purchased online. For this new work, Kosloff employs this footage to tell the tale of an environmental problem outsourced to artificial intelligence (AI). Far from identifying a scientific solution, the AI offers a comprehensive analysis of hegemonic systems, including white supremacy, the military-industrial complex, and the billionaire class. The film is narrated by the satirical comedian and actor Andrew Hansen, and First Nations actress and director Rachael Maza of the Yidinji and Meriam people.
Admission starts at $5. Registration is necessary.
View From a Body 26 September 2024; 7pm. e-flux Screening Room 172 Classon Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 USA
Please join us at Sutton Gallery this Saturday as artist David Rosetzky will be in conversation with Anouska Phizacklea, the director of the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) at Sutton Gallery, discussing his current exhibition After Palermo.
Theis free event will take place from 2–3pm at the gallery; refreshments will be served. RSVP is essential via link below.
David Rosetzky in conversation with Anouska Phizacklea Sutton Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne Saturday 24th September, 2–3pm
Vivienne Binns iconic painting The Aftermath and the Ikon of Fear (1984-85) is included in the current group exhibition WILDER TIMES: Arthur Boyd and the mid 1980s Landscape on show at Bundanon Homestead.
In 1984 Arthur Boyd was commissioned to create a series of Shoalhaven landscape paintings for the new Arts Centre Melbourne. In this exhibition, Boyd’s series of fourteen powerful paintings returns to Bundanon for the first time since its creation. Responding to these paintings, WILDER TIMES brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.
WILDER TIMES: Arthur Boyd and the mid 1980s Landscape Bundanon Homestead, Illaroo, NSW 6 July – 13 October 2024
Laresa Kosloff in the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
Laresa Kosloff has been commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) to produce a new sound work entitled ‘Public Announcements 3’ for the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT11) taking place later this year at the museum in Meanjin/Brisbane.
Opening on Saturday 30 November 2024, APT11 will feature seventy artists, collectives and projects from more than thirty countries, comprising an extensive and wide-reaching exhibition and events programme that represents the region’s most dynamic and exciting contemporary art. APT11 will be presented throughout both the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) and Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and include works produced across vast geographies and cultural contexts, offering audiences a multiplicity of experiences, perspectives and diverse approaches to both contemporary and community-based customary art practices.
The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial will be accompanied by live performance, public discussions, cinema programs and projects for young visitors, along with ongoing community engagement activities and research partnerships, as well as a fully illustrated publication and newly commissioned digital essays for the Asia Pacific Art Papers series.
11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT11) Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Meanjin/Brisbane 30 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Photo credit: Nicholas Umek, QAGOMA Image Courtesy: QAGOMA
Gian Manik in conversation at the Victorian College of the Arts
Gian Manik will deliver a talk at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Southbank campus on 15 August as a part of their ongoing ‘Art Forum’ series. Providing a rich insight into his work and its relationship with the world, Manik will share the themes, processes and ideas that drive his practice.
The lecture will be presented live in the VCA’s Federation Hall in Southbank and is free to attend. The talk will be available as a webinar broadcast live via Zoom. Registration is not required.
Art Forum: Gian Manik Thursday, 15 August 2024 12:15 – 1:15PM Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts, Southbank, Naarm/Melbourne
Art historian Jacqueline Millner’s recent article in AWARE (Archive of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions) discusses the relationship between materiality, public space and the memorialisation of women artists through Catherine Bell’s practice.
Highlighting Bell’s project Maker Unknown (2022), Millner explains how Bell’s materialisation of memory in relational ways allows her reinvigorate lost or forgotten histories through inclusive and eloquent sculptural gestures.
Laresa Kosloff in conversation at Buxton Contemporary
Laresa Kosloff will be in conversation with curator and writer Tristen Harwood and fellow artists Hayley Millar Baker and Tina Stefanou at Buxton Contemporary. Held on the occasion of the exhibition The Same Crowd Never Gathers Twice (on view until 13 October 2024) in which five of Kosloff’s early Super-8 films are included, the symposium ‘View from a Body’ will explore conceptions of the filmic gaze that reflect upon the personal and collective, cultural, political and constructed landscapes inhabited and experienced through engagements with haptic visuality.
VIEW FROM A BODY: Symposium on Moving Image Culture and Embodied Affect Thursday 8th August 2024 12.15pm – 5.30pm
Kate Beynon in TudoFAM projections at Collingwood Yards
Animated paintings and illustrations by Kate Beynon’s family collective TudoFAM form a collaborative presentation Shapeshifting at Collingwood Yards this month.
The display merges the two disciplines of painting and animation in a dreamscape of kaleidoscopic visions. Exploring storytelling, kindred spirits, shapeshifting & hybrid identities through guardian figures and talismanic imagery, the work hopes to evoke an otherworldly space to counteract earthly anxieties & troubled times, brought together and enlivened on the occasion of the Bla(c)k Together Month festival in Naarm/Melbourne.
On show nightly at Collingwood Yards through the month of July, the presentation culminates at the BTMfest Block Party on 28 July at the Yards.
Brett Colquhoun at the Mornington Regional Peninsula Gallery
Brett Colquhoun’s work The Mirror (2010) is currently on show in the collection group exhibition Both Body and Not held at the Mornington Regional Peninsula Gallery (MPRG).
Showcasing works from the museum’s collection, the exhibition aims to think beyond the self through artworks that situate themselves as markers of the communities and universe we inhabit. Thinking about a shared philosophical venture of humanity and art, the show takes it’s departure point from the Austrian architect, philosopher and artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s theory of the five ‘skins’: bodily skin, clothing, community, ecologies and universe. These layers provide a useful reference point for how an individual connects to the various layers of their environment, as the show highlights works in the collection that reference ideas of body, community and universe as ‘layers of being’.
Both Body and Not Mornington Regional Peninsula Gallery 22 June – 18 August 2024
Peter Robinson and Sara Hughes at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand
Peter Robinson’s sculpture Universe (2001) and and Sara Hughes painting RAM (2004) are included in the forthcoming landmark exhibition Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection. Organised by the City Gallery Wellington | Te Whare Toi, the exhibition will be presented at Te Papa as a part of the Chartwell 50th Anniversary special programming.
Described as a “big noisy group show featuring contemporary art made by Gen X artists”, the exhibition draws from one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant contemporary art collections, the Chartwell Collection, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Featuring a diverse range of national and international artworks, made during the 90s and early 2000s, the exhibition spans painting, sculpture, installation, sound and video. The artists included address concerns ranging from globalisation, capitalism and the culture wars to identity politics, third-wave feminism, and the commodification of art schools.
Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection Te Papa Tongarewa | Museum of New Zealand 27 July – 20 October 2024
Read: Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams in Memo Review
“I see this exhibition only through Williams’s transmogrifying documentation. Warm tungsten light illuminates one room, warped in the reflection of Piggott’s mirror work and filled with the luxuriously varied textures of Johnston’s collection. There is an angled chair with an embroidered chartreuse velvet cushion, wicker weft, and glossily oiled wooden arms; a pinstriped yellow wallpaper, lines wavering; and an eighteenth-century society portrait of a young woman in a satiny blue-and-white gown fingering a small bunch of roses, her face obscured by a stretch of thin white fabric draped over the top of the picture frame like a veil. In these photographs, the accoutrements of an aristocratic past are transported to a psychologically mysterious shadow realm.” – Cameron Hurst, 2024
Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams’ two-person exhibition Mirror, mirror at Sutton Gallery has been reviewed in this week’s Memo Review.
Anne Ferran’s iconic photographic series Scenes on the death of nature (1986) is included in the major exhibition Namedropping, recently opened at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Nipaluna/Hobart.
Bringing together over 200 artworks and objects, the sprawling exhibition emerges out of an interest in the nature of status and its preoccupations.
Namedropping Museum of New and Old Art (MONA), Nipaluna/Hobart 15 June 2024 – 21 April 2025
Karen Black in conversation at the National Art School
On the occasion of her inclusion in the group exhibition undo the day at the National Art School (NAS), Karen Black will be in conversation with curator Gina Mobayed and artist Jodie Whalen. Brought together to discuss and reflect on the ‘undo the day’ exhibition rationale, the trio will explore the driving themes behind the show such as human instinct, liminality, the blurred lines between darkness and light, and sitting with ambiguity while reaching for hope.
In Conversation: Karen Black, Gina Mobayed and Jodie Whalen National Art School, Sydney Saturday 20th July, 3 – 4pm
Please note this is a ticketed event and booking is essential (Admission $10.00, NAS students free).
Please join us for the finissage event to mark the closing of Nick Selenitsch’s exhibition Pool Noodle on Saturday 20th July, 3–5pm. The artist will be in attendance.
Closing event Nick Selenitsch Pool Noodle Sutton Gallery Saturday 20th July, 3–5 PM
John Meade in conversation at Heide Museum of Modern Art
John Meade is in conversation at the Heide Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of his inclusion in the group show Hair Pieces. Together with collaborative duo Charlie Sofo and Debris Facility, Meade will discuss his works included in the show stories behind them. Drawn to the shape-shifting qualities of hair and its substitutes, John Meade sculptural practice has included elements of hair, locks and braids for more than thirty years.
Art Talk: John Meade, Charlie Sofo and Debris Facility Heide Museum of Modern Art Saturday 13 July 2024, 11:00 AM
This event is included in the admission ticket to Heide. Registration is not required.
Karen Black’s work I Will Shade You From The World (2024) is included in the group exhibition New South: Recent painting from Southern Australia at the Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW. Conceived as a biennial program celebrating excellence and diversity in Australian painting, New South showcases the work and stories of a diverse group of painters from Southern Australia. They represent varied artistic communities in this undefined region.
I Will Shade You From the World is a painting about the conditions of compassion, care and renewal. As the title suggests, it inhabits the instinctual desire to protect those we love from terror, both real and imagined. Like many of Black’s paintings, the work is set in an ambiguous landscape both inside and outside. A large tree takes up much of the canvas while the skirting board of a room appears on the right-hand side, creating tension between what we think we see and what the artist wants us to see. Ever mutable, boundaries are not only blurred but internationally transgressed.
New South: Recent painting from Southern Australia Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW 6 July – 8 September 2024
“The current exhibition of Nicholas Mangan’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (closing this weekend) offers, in a modest way, a series of alternatives to this historically evacuated present. It suggests that art is today a crucial site for analysing the past and future, and offers the gallery as a place where history’s various forms—its loops, eddies and arcs of progress—might be presented for our consideration” – Nick Croggon, 2024
Nicholas Mangan’s exhibition A World Undone at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney has been reviewed in this week’s Memo Review.
Helga Groves at the Macquarie University Art Gallery
Helga Groves’ painting Colours of the Arctic Fells (2003) is currently on view at the Macquarie University Art Gallery, featured in the collection group exhibition Australian Abstraction in Context.
Curated by Rhonda Davis and Kon Gouriotis, Australian Abstraction in Context reflects upon the legacies of the varietal imports, indices and counterparts of abstraction. The exhibition highlights Australia-based artists’ practices that challenge the aesthetic orthodoxies of abstraction, particularly the idea of shape as content, while revealing new ways of thinking and talking about Australian abstraction.
Australian Abstraction in Context Macquarie University Art Gallery, Gadigal/Sydney 20 June – 5 August 2024
