Current

Exhibition opens: Wednesday 11 January 2012, 6-8pm
Exhibition continues: to 28 January 2012
Artist talks: Saturday 28 January 2011 at 2pm

Gallery 1
Jonas Ropponen
The Blank Pages

The Blank Pages is a playful engagement with papier mâché and personal history.  A a large, hollow, cartoon-like head is skewered on a wooden pole like an olive.  Spit-balls, made by chewing a portion of a blank page of one of my teenage diaries, are applied to the work. The head has a large nose. What a large nose it has!  What a burden to have such a large, large nose!  A colourful woodcut accompanies the work. The colours I use in it make me glad.  It is happy work.

Jonas Ropponen is a Melbourne based artist and has shown widely in artist run spaces and galleries around Australia and in his birth country Sweden. His work can be found in state and regional galleries and private collections.  Jonas is currently completing a Masters in Fine Art at Monash University.

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Gallery 2
Jasmin Coleman
Chaos Shields

Chaos Shields invites audiences to consider the role socio-political power structures play in shaping and standardising mass societal behaviours, which appears to be impinging on the development of our collective social-cultural identity. Chaos Shields wants to contribute to the strengthening (as opposed to fragmentation) of our individual, intrinsic values and sense of self by fostering critical self-reflection and non-passivity. These shields borrow from the formal reductionist ideals of minimal art and design.

Jasmin Coleman (born 1980)  is a Queensland based emerging artist. Her hybrid practice shifts between large-scale installations and sculptures. She has been curated into many local and national exhibitions. In 2011 Jasmin participated in The Jump National Mentoring Program and was a top 10 finalist in the Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards (2010). In 2011 Jasmin collaborated with sound artist Cara-Ann Simpson to create Stabilisers, which toured nationally.

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Gallery 3
Baden Pailthorpe
Lingua Franca

Fresh off the back of 18 months in Paris, Baden Pailthorpe’s new series Lingua Franca explores language, translation and misunderstanding through a variety of new media artworks. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Eighty-Four Doors, a limited edition, experimental translation of Orwell’s 1984 using every language on Google Translate. This extended process of linguistic remixing is mapped through a data visualisation produced in collaboration with London-based designer Stefanie Posavec. Also revisited by Baden Pailthorpe is the cinematic adaptation of 1984, re-edited according to the mysterious, algorithmic and sometimes poetic logic of Google Translate. Catalogue essays written by artist and writer Lily Hibberd and media theorist Jussi Parikka.

Baden Pailthorpe is a new media artist and current PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. Baden also holds masters degrees from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, and the Université Paris VIII, France. His work has been widely published and exhibited, both locally and internationally, and is held in numerous private collections.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Gallery 4
Boe-Lin Bastian
A Matter Of When

Being hugged to the planet by an invisible force makes for a mysterious existence, and though we may defy it in short bursts, it inevitably wins in the end. In A Matter of When, Boe-lin Bastian reflects on the strangeness of gravity and our tenuous grip on balance.Manifesting as a sculptural installation, the work in this exhibition investigates weight and buoyancy in various states of matter. Whilst referencing the formal qualities of post-minimal artists, these temporary and makeshift forms communicate the immediacy and intuitive nature of abstraction.

Boe-Lin Bastian holds a BFA with Honours from RMIT and completed her studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Recent projects include, exhibitions at Dianne Tanzer and Kings ARI in Melbourne, screenings in Greece and Scotland and a work for the Queensland stadium project, Kick Off. On completion of her residency at Firstdraft in 2012, she will undertake an Arstart project with Australia Council funding. A Matter of When is supported by the Janet Holmes à Court Artist Grant:

Boe-Lin would like to thank The Janet Holmes à Court Artist Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts