Visions Beyond
Jobe Williams (HYPER REELIST), Campbell Henderson, Bronte Hock, Tess Williams, Jonathon Bolitho, Emily Hana, Jennie Feyen.
19 January- 30 January
Opening Night: Tuesday 18 January 2015; 5-7 PM
Visions Beyond is an group exhibition that explores ideas of spirituality, immateriality, fluidity and the experiential; and their potential to flow beyond, across and through artists and their individual works. Underpinning these diverse practices is a striving for a state of being that is otherworldly and using a sensory experience of light and colour. Visions Beyond is an exhibition that employs the interdisciplinary media practices of Jobe Williams, Campbell Henderson, Bronte Hock, Tess Williams, Jonathan Bolitho, Emily Hana Johnson & Jennie Feyens. Through a collaborative making process, these artists give and take influence from one another to create a multi-sensory conversation circulating around the notion of transcendentalism.
This aesthetically playful exhibition occupies a phenomenological and sensorially affective space of exploration, where each artist’s individual styles connect through close collaboration and curation.
Bronte Hock’s work explores spirituality through religious iconography and the repeating gestures found within religious studies. There is an element of abstraction in Bronte’s work which is mirrored by Tess Williams’ painting works which explore repetition as a spiritual practice. Alongside these, sits Tess’ performance work, which replicates yogic movement and the fluidity of whole-body actions. This is combined with Jobe Williams’ delayed projection visuals which overlay Tess’ movements, complimenting her actions with colours and shapes to reflect the intention of her practice. In a live performance space, Jobe and Tess’ collaborative practice engages the audience in an serene sensorial experience of a movement-based meditation. In alignment with this transcendental state of performance is Campbell Henderson’s projected video work which plays on the Ganzfeld effect, which is intended to engulf the viewer and trick the mind into intense hallucinatory visuals. Campbell and Jobe’s projection and prism photography works employ similar colour fields and motifs as they operate in the space together, pulling influence from one another. This is also true of Jobe and Jonathon Bolitho, who have a close collaborative practice that explores human homeostasis and the phenomena of light through interactive technology and electronics. Emily Hana’s paper sculptural works explore the relationship of light and shadow in affecting our understanding of objects. Similarly, Jennie Feyen utilises the medium of light to explore notions of sexuality and body politics. The fluid dialogue between the artists and their works in the exhibition space speaks directly to the central theme of the exhibition - that is a movement beyond, across and through.
With a wide variety of material experimentation, this collaborative group exhibition explores interdisciplinary art making practices underpinned by the notion of a sensorial experience of transcendentalism. In this way the Visions Beyond exhibition is a practice of meditation and mediation through sculpture, sound, video and performance.
A While
Lap-Xuan Do-Nguyen & Jihye Min2 February - 13 February 2016
Opening Night: Tuesday 1 February 2016; 5-7 PM
A while explores the perception of time in relation to the fragility and resilience of the human soul. Within the interval, one’s past, present and future are rather the fractions of one’s struggles. Within the interval, there are hopes, doubts, and anything in between.
Through varying art practices such as Ceramics, Drawings, Installation, Performance, both Jihye and Lap-Xuan express a personal process of healing. Jihye’s works lie along the vacuum time, which may bring her to the real presence. As for Lap-Xuan, the works are found in the intricate threshold between a personal realm and the outside world.
For a while, countless births and deaths happen. The dialogues of human experiences are portrayed gently, yet the yearning for the other ends could be sensitively disturbing.
Image: Lap-Xuan Do-Nguyen & Jihye Min, ‘Dialogue’ – ‘A while’ exhibition development 2015, Mixed media performance installation, Dimensions variable.
ArcHIVE://2016
Glops
Amaya Lang & Sheila Alati17 February - 27 February 2016
Opening Night: Tuesday 16 February 2016; 5-7 PM
A shared exhibition of new works by Sydney-based artist Amaya Lang & Tasmanian-based artist Sheila Alati that reflects on our relationship to our insides-envisioning its fluctuating, unpredictable and naturally messy states. Themes concerning the human body are central to the work of each artist and are expressed differently through their respective practices. Amaya Lang’s unsettling sculptures incorporating sound and light, along with Sheila Alati’s two dimensional flows of mixed media on drafting film, consider the bodies mutability, while reflecting on the paradoxical nature of bodily control.
Image: Sheila Alati, Fulfil your function (detail), Mixed media on drafting film 100 cm × 148 cm, 2015. Photos: Gavin Pili and Zoe May
Somatic Sotia
Torika Bolatagici2 March- 5 March 2016
Opening Night: Tuesday 2 March 2016; 5-7 PM
Fijian military bodies have become a valuable commodity in the economy of war. In Somatic Sotia, Torika Bolatagici presents photographic, video and mixed-media works that explore Fijian masculinity, militarism and the intersections between gender, embodied knowledge, commodification, migration and globalisation.
Drawing on her research into archival military footage of nuclear tests in the Pacific and contemporary soldier images from social media, the work in Somatic Sotia is concerned with the ways the Fijian military body has been mythologised and constructed through colonial and neo-colonial representation and the ways Fijian agency is performed in vernacular contexts.
Image: Torika Bolatagici, includes aspects of Export Quality #4 (2012), Hand stenciled masi designs on backlit lm, approximately 42 x 59 cm.
