Upcoming

Exhibition opens: Wednesday 22 February 2012, 6-8pm
Exhibition continues: to 10 March 2012
Artist talks: Saturday 10 March 2012 at 2pm

Gallery 1
Connie Anthes
He Blinked Back

What goes up must come down, or so “they” say. He Blinked Back comprises the next in a series of adventures inside the expanded field of drawing for Sydney artist Connie Anthes. Working with wind as a material for creating, breaking and shaping line, these inflatable “drawings-in-space” conjure new kinds of gestural movements, patterns and mark-making possibilities. The only question is… will they perform on the night?

Connie Anthes is an emerging artist who combines painting, drawing and installation techniques to interrogate everyday systems that we inhabit, be they spatial, cultural or semantic. With a focus on material processes that court unpredictability, ambiguity and failure, her work tests perceptive limits to deliver images that oscillate between the cognitive and the expressive. She has exhibited in Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney and is currently represented by Damien Minton Gallery.

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

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Gallery 2
Pia de Bruyn & Andrew Atchison
It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole)

It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole) is a collection of drawings by two artists who use the resultant trace of an implement or weapon in the creation of their works; scalpel contact for the sake of line, rivets for the sake of holes.
Atchison’s sgraffito drawings are created via a process of material removal, an act of revelation. The drawings are freed from their support by means of a shallow orifice in the superficial layer, to reveal wild colour below. Bodies emerge and are subsumed within an uncertain black plane where negative space has greater weight than delineated form.

In de Bruyn’s work incarnations of drag queen Divine, native banksias, priests and totemic heads speared like shashliks are made to inhabit a singular narrative plane in a rhapsody of borrowed mysticism. de Bruyn’s drawings are assemblages of icons that the artist represents in complex, impossible relationships.
Andrew Atchison and Pia de Bruyn have been collaborating in various forms since 2001 including public drawing works, poster designs for Next Wave Festival and an ongoing Polaroid project recording live performance. Music, queer sexuality and Australian cultural iconography are common interests and recurrent themes each artist’s practice.
Pia de Bruyn lives and works in Victoria and has exhibited work in galleries, record stores, bookshops and fashion boutiques in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth.

Andrew Atchison is an art maker and writer currently based in Melbourne.

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Gallery 3
Chloe Langford
Heavy Jelly

‘Heavy Jelly’ continues my investigation into the gallery as a public space for adventure and curiosity. Observing the interactions (and non-interactions) with my most recent work has left me with a raft of questions about the viewer’s role as explorers. Do artists need to give audiences permission or will they intervene and participate of their own volition? Can the mere act of looking at or listening to an artwork be a public performance or spectacle? Rather than seeking to definitively answer these questions in my work, I aim to set up situations and observe how viewers test my assumptions about how ‘the work’ works. ‘Heavy Jelly’ will consist of a series of sculptures and on opening night, a sculpture-based performance work.

Chloe Langford is an artist who sometimes curates and writes. She co-founded the permanent Format Collective space in Adelaide and co-directed the 2010 & 2011 Format Festivals. In 2011 she exhibited in both galleries and public spaces, including the Jam Factory, FELTspace and SASA Gallery. Alongside these projects she curated the annual Arts SA office hangings and the aEaf’s odradek space. Chloe has a Bachelor of Visual Arts with First Class Honours from the South Australian School of Art.

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Gallery 4
Chloe Hughes
Containers of a Liquid Reality

Containers of a Liquid Reality documents the performance practices of participating individuals through the creation of interview-based documentaries. The work develops a dialogue about capitalist enclosure of physical space and about the way in which human bodies are treated within a capitalist system of economics. Through a discussion of their performance practices, the interviewees provide insights into the imaginative ways in which they redefine and reclaim their physicality.