A CURATOR VISITS

Simon is an artist filmmaker specifically interested in the space between traditional filmmaking and video installation. He is currently studying a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts.

This is Me, my House: Study (phase 2) – First Vertical Film Festival, Katoomba, 17th of October 2014. Awarded 2nd prize in best vertical film competition.

Some Say You Can Find Happiness Here - Group Exhibition exhibited at Sydney College of The Arts Graduate Research Gallery with This is Me My House: Part 1-5 (phase 1) five screen video installation. July 2014

Sydney College of the Arts Postgraduate Show with Five Dock Crew an MFDI graduating film. Dec 2012. Finalist Best Documentary ‐ St Kilda Film Festival 2012)        

A Love Story: short film funded by Screen Australia; 2009 Writer Anna Lall, Simon Baré Director/Script Editor

Eleven: short film created for Beyond Blue, 2009; Simon Baré: Director/Editor 2009

Love Story 2007: theatre, Short & Sweet Festival 2007; Simon Baré, Director. (

Winner Week Five Best Short Play and at Gala Final AFC Award for Play Most Likely to become a Short Film

Eau de la Vie: 13 minutes, Short Film, Di Oliver Productions, NZ 1994; Simon Baré Writer/Director

My practice is installational with a strong tendency towards found objects, architectural intervention and light.  I have exhibited in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia.  I think of my practice as conceptually based with the output of installational practice.  My recent projects include the installation of a cubicle for conversation including myself as the conversational partner, light based sculptures of real time projections of lightbulbs, and have involved the installation of a fictional corporate office bird of doom selling the fear of flying in a gallery situated in the Sydney flightpath.

www.ciaranbegley.com

Jess Bradford (b.1987 Singapore) is an emerging artist working across painting, installation and video.  Her work explores intersections of fiction and reality in relation to memory, history and narrative.  Bradford’s current work approaches these concepts by using a personal collection of found photographs.  Bradford replicates her collection manually through painting, and places it in fabricated structures reminiscent of theatrical backdrops. Fundamental to her practice are the many ways that photographic objects can be interpreted and encountered, from historical document to images that invite speculative imaginings.  

Bradford is undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts by Research and has received the Australian Postgraduate Award.  She has been a finalist in the John Fries Memorial Prize, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, and the Jenny Birt Award.  Bradford has participated in solo and group exhibitions across various Artist Run Initiatives and Regional Galleries, including Firstdraft Gallery, 2013; Archive Space, 2014; Penrith Regional Gallery, 2013; and Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, 2014.  Bradford has been awarded the Blacktown City Art Prize for watercolour in 2012 and 2013.  She is in private collections and under the public acquisition of the Ford Land Company.

www.jessbradford.com

Corinne’s main focus has been the search for the nature and location of settler belonging. This has been strongly allied to meanings and consequences of concomitant Aboriginal dispossession. Land or Country has been key to this search.

SELECTED AWARDS

2011 Chartwell Travelling Scholarship, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Finalist, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre Open Prize

Finalist, Port Jackson Press Graduating Printmaking Prize

COLLECTIONS

Acquisitions by Department of Technical and Further Education 

Private galleries and private collections in Australia, USA and UK

Sydney Olympic Park Permanent Collection

ANCILLARY ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS: Between a Rock and a Hard Place 

http://sydney.edu.au/sca/pdfs/GS_conference_papers/

Brittain_2012.pdf

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:

2012 Graduate Conference, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney

2012 Arts and Society, Liverpool, UK

2011 AAANZ, Victoria University of Wellington,New Zealand 

ASSOCIATE EDITOR, The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts

Clare Britton is an experienced artist and a sought after collaborator with a practice that spans performance making and visual art.

From 2003-2014 Clare developed work as Co-Artistic Director of acclaimed performance collective My Darling Patricia. A founding member of the company, Clare collaborated to create My Darling Patricia’s unique process and body of work. This work has received numerous design and theatre awards and toured nationally and is recognised having made a major contribution to Australian Independent Theatre. Clare has been responsible for initiating, shaping and nurturing this body of work in collaboration with Halcyon Macleod and the other My Darling Patricia artists. Clare demonstrates a deep and rigorous commitment to projects often developing works side-by-side over 3 – 4 year periods.

Clare’s active freelance practice includes an ongoing collaboration with artist Matt Prest- creating performance/installation works The Tent, Hole in the Wall, Room Noise and, together with Branch Nebula, the Helpmann award winning Whelping Box. All of these works were recognised for their innovation and for extending the possibilities of the audience experience. 

Clare is a current recipient of the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and is completing a Masters of Studio Art at Sydney College for the Arts.

http://www.clarebritton.net

http://www.mydarlingpatricia.com

Kate Brown is a Sydney based artist and musician, who is a current Masters candidate at Sydney College of the Arts focusing on experimental performance and voice in relation to collective conscious, Participation Mystique and ritual.

Kate analyses the functions of the body/object to explore ways of remapping space and time. Kate often places her own body in video performance works where she questions the body and its context as a machine or landscape. These working methods help to explore ideas of the body’s relationship, potential and extension in an environment outside of itself. She also extends these ideas in her collaborative practice where she devises live art and video installations depicting minimalism in performance verses the spectacular.

Kate Brown has exhibited/performed at Gaffa Gallery, Firstdraft gallery, Sydney Non Objective Gallery, Factory 49, 107 Project Space, Intersect Arts and Art Beat to name a few. She has been in residence at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Gunyah Artist in residence, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Anyplace Project Space, Artist@work Albury Art Gallery and The Lockup Cultural Centre Newcastle. She performed in 2011 PACT Ensemble production Beguiled and was a part of Stage Juice’s Freshly Squeezed production Island

www.brownkate.com

https://inmyheterocliticbody.bandcamp.com/

Stephen Burstow (b. 1957 Toowoomba, Australia) is an artist and producer and director of film, television and online media relating to the performing and visual arts.

His current research concerns images of people on screens: from television and computer screens to the hand held screens of smart phones and tablets. One strand of this research investigates the use of personal images on hand held devices to support face-to-face storytelling. Providing historical perspectives on this phenomenon are earlier incarnations of the hand held image: the portrait miniature and the carte-de-visite.

His first screen-based installation work, Looking, has been selected for the Virtually Pop exhibition, being staged in Wellington, N.Z. in association with the 2015 annual conference of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand.

He is currently a PhD candidate at Sydney University, Sydney College of the Arts.

Three short scenes from screen installation Looking:
https://vimeo.com/album/3321057

Video (2m 51s) Little Pictures:
https://vimeo.com/124132912

Penelope Cain is an interdisciplinary artist working between video, photography and drawing. She has an ongoing interest in the urban / city landscape and the contemporary urban condition; how we experience, negotiate and narrate the built urban spaces.

She is drawn to glitches and porosities in the narratives of the city. She frequently operates within the terrain of the porous, generating propositional narratives to negotiate the urban landscape and condition.

Penelope Cain has a BA (Hons) from Canberra School of Art, ANU, and in 2014 completed a MFA at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She has a previous background in veterinary science.

She has exhibited in various galleries nationally, including Stills Gallery Sydney (2012), MOP Projects Sydney (2014), Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne (2010) and Queensland Centre for Photography Brisbane (2014).  She has exhibited in curated shows in Aram Art Gallery, Goyang, Seoul (2012) and University of East London Gallery (2011), and most recently been afinalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize, Art Gallery NSW (2012), the Blake Prize (2014) and the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2015).

www.penelopecain.com

(b. 1990, Sydney, Australia) is an artist with a dedication to the field of contemporary drawing and printmaking. Her current practice investigates the Surrealist methodology of automatic writing for retrieving unconscious language and repressed memory. As the production of text forms an unraveling of knowledge, Carlson explores the process of the work itself as a way to regain control and understanding of questions and anxieties of the self. By writing through the body, Carlson examines repetition and the collapsing of words to the point of erasure. She engages with the performative aspect of the drawing process through video and photographic documentation. 

Carlson is passionate about co-ordinating exhibitions which stem from her current field of research, bringing together both established and emerging Australian and International artists. Her projects include, Between the Lines, at Verge Gallery (2015) and Drawing Abroad (2014). In 2014 Carlson undertook an artist residency at Art Print Residence in Barcelona. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern and London’s National Theatre.

Carlson is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate at Sydney College of the Arts.

www.brooke-carlson.com

Cecilia Castro (born Santiago, Chile). As a sculptural ceramic artist I explores alternative ways of working with traditional ceramic methods and materials to hand build sculptural installation to highlight current social issues affecting the largest indigenous group in Chile, the Mapuche.  An amalgamation of biology, microscopic images, my heritage from Chile, my recent discovery of my Mapuche heritage, family and my identity are intertwine in my work as I seek to bring awareness and acceptance of the Mapuche culture.

Since starting at SCA in 2011, I have received several awards and scholarships, including 2011 The University of Sydney Academic Merit Prize, 2013 The University of Sydney, Dean's List for Academic Excellence.  I have been accepted into the SCA International Exchange program twice, 2013 and 2015 at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile as well as receiving twice the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Exchange Scholarship.  2011 Jerome De Costa Memorial Scholarship, 2014, Winner 3D Sculpture Verge Awards 2012, Verge Gallery, 2011 Winner. Utility: Our House. Gallery 1, Sydney College of the Arts, and People's choice award. Palms Awards 2011, Verge Gallery.

http://www.ceciliacastro.com

Consuelo is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on how we see and understand space. Taking its cues from film, photography and architecture the work employs technically simple visual effects to distort perception and unsettle the relationship between viewer and space. The spaces alluded to in the work are illusory and imaginary – spaces of the psyche rather than the concrete world.

Independent curatorial projects have consistently flanked Consuelo’s practice. She has developed a range of exhibitions including a major project involving the presentation of ephemeral artworks in public spaces.

Currently based in Sydney, Consuelo is a Masters of Fine Art candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree (Art and Languages) from UWA in 1993 and a Bachelor of Art (Art) with Honours from Curtin University in 2002. She has exhibited in various galleries nationally including 55 Sydenham Road, Sydney, 2014; Perth Centre for Photography, 2014; Firstdraft, Sydney, 2013; Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth, 2013; Galerie Düsseldorf, Perth, 2012; Linden Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2008; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2014. 

http://www.55sydenhamrd.com

Toby Chapman is a curator and arts worker who specialises in socially-engaged arts projects. He is currently Assistant Curator at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where he started in 2011 . Since then, he has worked on a range of curatorial projects both at 4A and externally including Assistant Curator, C3West, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2010-2012); Assistant Curator, Edge of Elsewhere (2011-2012) and Assistant Curator, The Floating Eye – The Sydney Pavilion, 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012). Beginning in 2013 Toby joined 4A full time as Assistant Curator and has since curated projects including Vertical Villages (2013), 4A and the 15th Jakarta Biennale; and Haze: Tully Arnot, Sarah Contos, Jensen Tjhung (2014). He was the inaugural recipient of the NAVA Emerging Curators Grant (2010) and also received the MGNSW Curatorial Mentorship (2013) to undertake a residency with Indonesian artist collective, ruangrupa.

Ben Terakes: BRIGHT END OF THE WORLD (2012) http://home.alaskaprojects.com/The-Bright-End-of-the-World

Vertical Villages: http://www.4a.com.au/vertical-villages/

HAZE: http://www.4a.com.au/haze/

Jason's practice takes a satirical view on our sense of reality posing questions concerning the effect of technological advancements and how they have impacted our physical and cultural evolution.

Jason’s work takes unexpected forms and embraces unconventional materials through the combination of traditional production methodologies with cutting edge techniques. 

After successful careers in the film and design industries Jason returned to Sydney College of the Arts In 2010 equipped with newly acquired skills and ready to rekindle his artistic career.

Jason has since completed two master degrees and is currently undertaking his PhD research degree.

Jason’s research PhD concerns itself with the contemporary art practices of the Torres Strait Islanders as well as indigenous – non indigenous collaborative works. Through his research and collaborative works Jason hopes to foster the use of new technologies and materials within the contemporary art practices of the Torres Strait Islanders.

In the five years since taking up further studies and resuming active work as a visual artist, Jason has held two solo exhibitions and has been the recipient of 9 awards in major competitions as well as being a finalist in the Wynne prize and awarded an Australian Post graduate award.

http://jasonchristopherartist.com/

Tracey Clement is an artist, arts writer and current PhD candidate in Fine Art at the University of Sydney. She is known for creating artworks that meticulously utilise labour intensive techniques for their conceptual resonance. Clement has exhibited widely, both in Australia and overseas, and her writing is published regularly in numerous art and design magazines.

Her current research responds to the vivid prognostications of J.G. Ballard’s novel, The Drowned World (TDW). Written in 1962, Ballard presents a post-apocalyptic vision of a ruined metropolis which reads like an uncanny premonition of the key crisis of our current age: climate change.

In Clement’s sculptural work (in progress) salt has taken the place of water, a nod to our desert continent. Fragile steel structures represent the skeletal remains of a ruined city perched on corrosive, glittering white peaks. Twisted, rusty and ephemeral, these model ruins will eventually disintegrate completely.  

In her maps the labour intensive work of ‘drowning’ the world in pencil and rust highlights the fact that this impending doom didn’t ‘just happen’; we worked long and hard to reach this current state of crisis.

ttp://traceyclement.com/category/artworks/

Claire Conroy is an Australian artist using unique photographic techniques to create evocative contemporary images. In an era when most photography is taking place in the digital realm, Conroy’s work involves the use of centuries-old analogue photographic processes, such as the camera obscura and pinhole photography, and explores the relationship of this practice to 21st century anxieties about environment.

Conroy constructs her own pinhole cameras and darkrooms from found objects, including a 1950s caravan, a water tank and a three tonne truck. She uses these devices to expose images of the Australian landscape onto photographic paper, creating large-scale negatives. She develops these using common household supplies and natural substances. The resultant works are enigmatic and haunting interpretations of the natural world.

Both Conroy’s practice and subject matter are concerned with the Romantic melancholic notions of Weltschmerz, or “world grief” – and also the complex relationship we have with the landscape and our impact upon it.

Conroy’s works have been collected by the NSW State Library, the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and in private collections across Australia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Sydney College of the Arts.

claireconroy.net

Cybele Cox’s latest work is part of a research project that attempts to reinvoke the occult practices of the past with the understanding that the magic and ritual of these practices has been buried by Christianity and capitalism and is now forgotten but sometimes glimpsed in art and altered states. These large totemic sculptures in glazed ceramic playfully evoke the rituals of repressed paganism. The idiosyncratic style is the personal handwriting of the artist, inspired by the functionality of the ritual object and the lost space of the dream state.

Cybele Cox is a Sydney based artist who uses ceramic sculpture, painting and drawing as an exploration of hallucination and the mythic world. She graduated from the College of Fine Arts in 1994 and is currently engaged in a Master of Fine Arts degree at Sydney College of the Arts. Cybele has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Sydney (Mop Projects, Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown and Sheffer Gallery).
 

cybelecox.com.au

http://dasplatforms.com/writing/the-golden-flower-pot-cybele-cox-and-ali-noble/

Fiona Davies ( b.1955 Sydney) is an installation artist who works with video, sound, and object.  Her primary area of interest is medicalised  death. That is death mediated by the social, technological, economic and cultural contexts of a hospital.  Her work is also informed by the selected site of exhibition and the audience in and of that site.

Her father died after the failure of an aneurism repair operation after four and a half months in intensive care.  Her response to this event/process  has informed her  art practice since 2006.  A subsection of her practice  is  an arts/science component,  a collaborative project called Blood on Silk, looking at specific technological and scientific aspects of intensive care. 

Davies has exhibited both nationally and internationally.  Cementa -15 at Kandos NSW,  MAP projects at various locations, Tufts University Boston,  Campbelltown Arts Centre, The State Silk Museum Tbilisi Georgia, Whitebox, Griffith University Queensland,  and as part of Ian Milliss' exhibition Notes on the collection at Artspace, NSW are projects from the last eighteen months. 

Her exhibition practice is specifically linked to various artist residencies she has undertaken at Tufts University Boston, Istanbul and Tbilisi.  

http://www.fionadavies.com.au   

www.bloodonsilk.com

Born 1977 Vancouver Canada

Lives and works Sydney Australia

Chris Dolman’s practice uses the formalist tropes of Modernism with an irreverent and self-deprecating humour. Moving across painting, printmaking, ceramics and video, and drawing on the histories of geometric abstraction, Pop, and early modernist design, Dolman employs non-traditional self-portraiture with kitsch aesthetics to explore notions of identity and engage themes of loss and failure.

Dolman graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne with first class honours in 2010. He was the recipient of the VCA’s Wallara Travelling Scholarship, as well as New Work (early career) and ArtStart grants from the Australia Council for the Arts. He has undertaken residencies at Hill End, Bundanon Trust, BigCi NSW, Ceramic Design Studio (Sydney Institute), and St George Institute of TAFE. He has exhibited nationally in galleries including: Alaska projects, Firstdraft, West Space, Seventh, FELTspace, Fontanelle, Wellington St projects, MOP projects and [MARS].

Dolman runs the project gallery TWENTY THIRTYSEVEN, and is currently a research candidate at Sydney College of Arts, with an Australian Post Graduate Award from Sydney University.

He is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney. 

www.chrisdolman.com

Szymon Dorabialski lives and works in Sydney, Australia and is currently a Masters of Fine Art candidate at Sydney College of the Arts.

He works primarily with installation using multi-channel moving image amongst sculpture, poetry and various self-invented subjects such as- ‘artificial artefacts’, ‘artificial algorithms’, ‘imagined specimens’, and ‘experiments in romantics and drunken epiphanies’; In an attempt to fudge atmospheric distinctions between museums, temples and art galleries.

His practice and research explore the possibilities of a language of self, working with worldly structures of 'truths' and languages within various pedagogical systems (i.e. science, religion, literature, semiotics, art) and reconfiguring them through transcendental processes to navigate the relationship between the ego and the spirit; a selective collage of the structure of the material world and personal spiritual experience.

His most recent solo show at Scratch Art Space was entitled The Roughest Sketch of the Most Perfect Thing: experiments in romantics and drunken epiphanies. 

Katie Dyer is a contemporary art curator with extensive experience working with established and emerging artists and historical collections. Her focus has been on working with national and international visual art, moving image, performance and art in the public realm. Her research areas focus on creative practice as a response to our contemporary conditions, interdisciplinary collaboration, drawing and the re-imagined museum. Katie has recently been appointed as the Curator Contemporary at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences to lead and develop creative cross-disciplinary contemporary curatorial programming, current projects include Disobedient Objects and the major art commission Evidence: Brook Andrew.

She was the founding Curator and Gallery Manager at the National Art School. Under her curatorship the NAS Gallery presented innovative artist initiated exhibitions and projects, public art commissions and significant presentations of contemporary and historical exhibitions. Solo exhibition projects included Sheela Gowda, Mike Parr, Richard Lewer and Hayden Fowler. She developed an artist in residence program that supported artists such as Song Dong (China); Lyndal Jones (Vic); Eva Kotatkova (Czech Rep); Linda Matalon (USA); Tim Knowles (UK) and artists from remote Indigenous communities. She regularly worked with the undergraduate and postgraduate students on professional practice programs and the delivery of their graduation exhibitions.

Katie was has been engaged as a freelance curator on several projects including the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera series in 2010 and on the Bon Scott Letter’s Project for the Fremantle Art Centre, WA. Prior to her role at NAS, Katie worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, and the Museum of Modern Art and The Drawing Center in New York.

(b. 1985 Moscow, Russia) works and lives in Sydney Australia. Marya migrated to Australia with her family as a child post the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her work is at the intersection of personal biographical narrative and political discourse. She recalls playing “World War II” as a preschool child in the snow. Marya uses a variety of mediums including performance, video, installation and sculpture to explores the possibilities of artist as agent of change, the absurdity of politics and artistic forms of protest. 

Marya completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons I) at Sydney College of the Arts in 2010. She has this year returned to SCA to complete her Phd after taking personal leave. Marya has exhibited widely in Australia including shows at ICAN, 55 Sydenham Rd, Roselyn Oxley9, Sawtooth (Tas), AEEF (S.A) and VCA gallery (Vic). In 2009 she travelled to Holland where she spent a semester studying at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam under a scholarship from SCA. Marya also exhibited in Moscow and St Petersburg when she returned to Russia in 2013 as part of her research into Russian protest art including the work of Pussy Riot and Viona. 

The work of Chris Fox manipulates and extends the territory of architecture, installation and sculpture. Each experience of Fox’s work is relative to the technical and conceptual grammar of architecture and construction. Sculptural works, playfully mimic, distort and disrupt their environment, using materials such as cabling and cars, as well as various building material with a para-function.

Beginning his art practice in 1996 after graduating from SCA, Fox went on to become a founding member of Imperial Slacks. Still involved with the collective today, he has established an independent career with commissions taking place both locally and internationally, including ‘Convergence’ in 2011 for the lobby and atrium of Global Switch data centre in Paris and ‘Drift’ for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney (2013).

Fox has exhibited in numerous exhibitions, solo, group and collaborative, in and beyond Australia, including Salon Jetpack, Gallery Barry Keldoulis (2009), Scope Miami, Timothy Yarger Fine Art (2011), Urbanition: Sister City Biennial, San Francisco and Sydney (2011) and Cosmic Love Wonder Lust, The Imperial Slacks Project (2015). On the board of Artspace Sydney and a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, Fox is also completing a Masters of Fine Arts at SCA.

http://www.chrisfox.com.au

Kath Fries is an artist based in Sydney, where she is currently a PhD candidate at SCA. Her practice focuses on sensory experiences of materiality and impermanence. 

Drawing on personal experiences of the passage of time and fragility of life, Fries’ sculptural installations incorporate natural and everyday materials to explore tactility and nuance. These works conjure interconnections between our senses and our surroundings, poetically linking humans and nature, locality and history, micro and macro, existence and mortality. 

Fries’ sculptural installations grow from a process of quiet observation that incorporates a sensitive engagement with site, addressing the permeability of manmade boundaries both indoors and outdoors. She exhibits in conventional galleries and also creates intervention installations in heritage buildings, cemeteries, derelict urban spaces, tidal zones, museums and rural sites. 

Fries was awarded the 2010 Japan Foundation New Artist Award, a 2011 Australia Council ArtStart Grant, a 2012 NAVA NSW Artists’ Grant, the 2013 Fairfield Museum contemporary art commission, and a 2014 Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant. She has been an artist in residence at Arteles Creative Centre, Finland; Fremantle Art Centre, WA; Hill End, NSW; Bundanon Trust, NSW; Gosford Regional Gallery, NSW; The Lock-Up Museum, Newcastle, NSW, and Laughing Waters, Eltham, VIC.

www.kathfries.com

www.kathfries.blogspot.com

is a Sydney based artist who works in ceramics, performance, video and installation and is currently completing his PhD at Sydney College of the Arts. His research, entitled The Cult of Mud, focusses on the mystique of clay and its attraction as a medium and material to contemporary artists. His work consists of complex figurative ceramics created using the coil building method. These highly sexualised figures are deities and participants in the cult of mud, abject, scatological and intensely decorated with glazes and graphic oxide drawings. He has exhibited his work at numerous ARIs in Sydney since the mid-1990s and notably in the show SEXES at Performance Space in 2012, where his installation Evil Flowers recalled a crumbling temple with sculptures placed on elevated platforms veneered with collapsing brick walls and embedded video. In 2013 he studied in Taiwan as an exchange student and has travelled extensively in India visiting amongst other places the erotic temples of Khajuraho and Konarak. From 2003-2007 he was a member of the Wild Boys collective, whose work centred on radical drag performance and was included in It’s a New Day at Artspace, Sydney, a show about participatory practices.

Cleo Gardiner (Sydney, Australia) is a cross-disciplinary, conceptual artist, whose work includes the exploration of issues relating to identity, icons, desire, class, sexuality, size positive representations of the body, gender & gender identities. Her work often includes text which illustrate how words can inspire, rupture and embrace ones self.  Her artworks, map cultural and collective memory, illustrating a personal journey, an unravelling or unbecoming to become. Gardiner has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the recent (2015), Notes to a Future Feminist – Cross Arts Books, Young Artist Initiative – M Contemporary, Looking for Sound -  See Street Gallery and The Chippendale New World Art Prize – NG Gallery. 2014 culminated in winning the University of Sydney Medal and the Dean’s Print Media Prize for her Honours work XX-Class/if/y. In 2014 she also co-produced the performance and installation, Feminum Circulum at the MCA (ArtBar) with filmmaker Kelli Jean Drinkwater. 

Ania was born and spent her childhood in Russia. Through symbols, references and allusions, her historical background constantly feeds into the images she create. Influences emerge from a rich history of Soviet film, classical literature, contemporary cultures and memories.

Ania continuously explores different mediums and techniques, aiming to develop and solidify an original and cohesive style. Her work is often described as whimsy, strange and quirky. She possesses a multidisciplinary practice - encompassing watercolour, acrylic and oil paintings, coloured pencil and ink drawings, digital illustrations, screenprints, etchings and photographs, and more recently, animation. Largely preoccupied with experimentation in colour, Ania explores the emotional momentum existing within highly saturated, deep and vivid colours, whilst simultaneously investigating the visual form of lines. She represents the peculiar, the bizarre and the strange in a way that draws audiences to a new, alternative world.

Her work is inspired by numerous artists, art movements, music, manga and anime. The ultimate aim of Ania’s work is to visually captivate an imaginary world that is inhibited by biographically referential motifs that represent her interests, life and contemplations. She invites others into this universe merging Russian motifs, traditional print, posters as well as contemporary Japanese culture.

http://inkyhaus.tumblr.com/

(b. 1961, Sydney, Australia)
Master of Fine Art by Research candidate (current)
BA Honours Painting RMIT (1990)
Diploma of Art Applied RCAE (1979-1981)
Augmented studio practice based on painting, documentation and socially engaged practice. Areas of sustained interest include: social justice, environmental sustainability, the built environment, quality of life, zero emission vehicles, planning and placemaking. Promoting the Sydney Green Ring, a holistic, socially engaged, art and liveability project through mapping, cycle tours, documentation, blogging and advocacy.       

25 years of sustained practice exhibiting in solo and group shows. including artist run spaces, competitions, prizes, commissions and residencies. 

Founding member of ARTcycle Inc., an artist-run not-for-profit that promotes the arts and artist friendly activities with the bicycle as a tool for conviviality. Working with arts, community and social organisations to build audience for the arts through social rides and events.

Former co-director of At The Vanishing Point Contemporary Gallery. Currently supplementing art income with preparator work at various galleries around Sydney while completing studies.

http://www.artcyclesydney.com

http://www.sydneygreenring.org

http://gilbertgrace.com

(b. Sydney, Australia) is a multi media artist whose practice is concerned with ways of expressing grief and mourning and mediating trauma. This mostly installation-based work, is informed by the experience of having Jewish European parents affected by the events of the second World War. Her artwork reflects her interest in postmemory discourse and references the capacity of familial objects and rituals to express complex, often difficult emotions. To this end, materials such as bronze, stone and wax are offset with indexical and ephemeral elements such as shadows, projection or the leaving of traces; the role of the ephemeral and its ability to negotiate or reconcile loss being of particular concern.

Her recent work has been exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions including at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney; VAC Gallery, La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre; and Verge Gallery, Sydney University. She has been a grant and scholarship recipient and a finalist in various Awards and Prizes including winner of the Willoughby Sculpture Prize, 2013. She is currently undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

www.sylviagriffin.com.au

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z70fednCJAM

(b. 1983, Tehran, Iran) Graduated from BFA from Art University of Tehran in 2007. She lived and worked in Iran until 2010, and then in Dubai for four years until August 2014.

Collaborated with Art Dubai (Abraaj Capital Art Prize team) as artists’ assistant helping set up and introduce artworks to people, work with curators Laura Egerton, Nat Muller in 2012, Morteza Valli in 2013, Nada Raza and Nida Ghose in 2014.

Maryam’s works has been exhibited in Tehran and Dubai.

She moved to Sydney in August 2014 to live there and to study Master of Contemporary Art in Sydney University. Her artwork engages with cultural and social relations.  The paradox between people lifestyle and their beliefs is her main issue in her works. She is interested in space and area as the place that people live in and most of them are not aware of it. Her artworks relate to Middle East where she lived and worked until August 2014. 

Yvette Hamilton (b.1977, Sydney, Australia) is an Australian artist working across photomedia, video, interactivity and installation. Her interdisciplinary practice creates work that explores both physical and virtual space through the convention and framework of portraiture. This exploration acts as a launching platform to explore the enmeshed concepts of place and being-in-the world. She is interested in the evolution of the notions of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ as influenced by evolving technological heterotopias. Her work traverses a field of oppositional relationships – human/humanoid; presence/absence; and seeing/surveillance.

She has recently completed a Master of Fine Arts (Research) at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She has exhibited widely in Australia and has also exhibited in London and Slovenia. In 2015 held a solo exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery and was an artist in the Cementa15 festival in Kandos, NSW. In 2014 she won the Dominik Mersch Gallery Award, was a finalist in the Josephine Ulrick & Winn Schubert Award, the Fishers Ghost Art Prize, the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize and the Iris Award at the Perth Centre for Photography. 

www.yvettehamilton.com

Hana Hoogedeure (b. 1992, Sydney) is a multi-disciplinary artist with a primary focus in installation practice. Informed by anthropology, architectural theory, magic and pop culture. Hoogedeure creates large-scale installations and performances often based in pleasure and a light heartedness. Her work navigates through the social, the architectural and the domestic space, and is concerned with the sculptural qualities of forms of shelter and the emotional response we have with these creations. Hoogedeure’s practice is narrative based, orientated around notions of domestic ritual, personal mythologies and everyday magic. 

She has been a finalist in the Steadler Yen Art Award (2014) and Stonevilla’s Wearable Art Prize (2015).  She was awarded a six-month residency with Stonevilla studios in July 2015.  Hoogedeure has participated in many group exhibitions including at Archive Space, Gaffa, 55 Sydenham Rd, Mils, Articulate Project Space and Interlude Gallery.

Hoogedeure graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2014 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in Sculpture.

www.hanahoogedeure.com.au

I am currently investigating the use of techniques, processes, imagery, and material languages to explore and describe an imaginative space between the everyday experiences of my urban surroundings and the rural environment in which I grew up.

The signature medium used in my practice to date has been pulped cotton fibre. This is produced from second-hand clothing and domestic cloth, which is broken down using an industrial beater. I work with this pulped fibre in a number of ways, including spraying-painting with a mortar sprayer and screen-printing layers of pulp onto hand-made cotton paper and spraying onto concrete walls.

Process is central to my practice. I am investigating the potential for process and materiality to articulate meaning through exploring the sense of familiarity that occurs for me when making work connected to the repetitive tasks, daily routines, mechanical soundscapes, and other sensory aspects of working on a farm.

I completed a Bachelor Degree in Visual Arts at Southern Cross University in 2003 majoring in Printmaking and Papermaking. I have had many successful Solo shows: in 2014 I exhibited at Marrickville Garage in Marrickville, Breeze Block Gallery in Surry Hills, Syndicate Gallery at Dank Street Galleries in Woolloomooloo. I have been invited to exhibit in The Blacktown Art Prize for the last three years and in 2014 I won The Environmental Prize.

www.melissajharvey.com

Laura Hunt (b.1987 Sydney Australia) creates communicable exchanges between otherwise inaudible objects. Hunt’s practice involves making impermanent instruments with water and amplification inside ceramic and plastic vessels. She explores the relationships that arise between performance improvisation and control. The sonic sculptures enter into an exchange beyond the artists control; they exist temporally as well as fixed and Hunt takes on the role of both creator and spectator. 

Hunt began working with water in a sculptural sense when she embarked on her first artist residency in the south of France in late 2013, working with Ice sculptures and images, the work investigated processes of transformation - producing sound and revealing images - through natural decay and impermanence; An acoustic beat was produced when the flow of water hit plastic surface. Hunt’s work manifests from a history and connection to collaboration and playing music. Music in a group environment often begins as a spontaneous, performative and communal pursuit. Replicating qualities of live communal performance is seen in Hunt’s visual practice.  

Laura Hunt has shows at Underbelly - Island Salon, Verge Gallery and Archive Space. She received an Honours Class 1 in 2011 in Media Arts at SCA and is a current MFA candidate at SCA.

http://laurahunt.co/m/

https://vimeo.com/laurahunt

https://soundcloud.com/lauraehunt

Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger is an artist exploring the connections between science and art, specifically the area of Bio-Art. Her work on the macro and microscopic worlds of plants is influenced by the human connection and influence on our biosphere.  Using materials as varied as glass, ceramics, drawing, printmedia, painting, installations which include sound and film, Lea works to create a social comment on our changing times.  

Currently studying her MFA at SCA (Sydney College of the Arts) University of Sydney Lea recently completed a research trip to the Galapagos Islands partially funded by SCA.  Her art works were recently shown at MOMA PS1 in the NYABF; she has also completed two residencies in New York at SVA (the School of Visual Arts) Manhattan she holds a Diploma of Fine Art and a Master of Studio Arts.  In June 2014 year Lea delivered a paper on her work regarding the Dandelion From Weed to Tree an exploration of the Dandelion at the Humanities conference Affective Habitus at ANU in Canberra.   

In June 2015 she will be giving a paper at the AESS (Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences) in San Diego CA, this paper There Be Dragons: human impact on the unique environments of the Galapagos and Lord Howe Islands reflects her current research in these areas.

www.leakannar.com 

Melissa Keys is an independent curator and writer. She has curated a wide range of projects and programs in museums, galleries and art spaces locally, nationally and internationally including solo, survey and thematic exhibitions. Born in Melbourne, Australia, Keys holds an MA in Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne and a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts. She was previously Associate Curator at the Embassy of Australia in Washington DC and Curator at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Prior to these roles Keys held positions at Monash University Museum of Art and Heide Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, she was an Asialink Curator in Residence at KHOJ, International Artists Association in New Delhi, India, and in 2012 she undertook a curatorial residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. Melissa Keys currently lives and works in Sydney.

NOTES FROM THE FIELD - CATALOGUE

Del Lumanta is an artist and musician from Sydney interested in locating cultural blind spots concerning the value of print within contemporary culture. In working through digital and analogue aspects of design and illustration Del assembles scenarios between print, objects and space. Her work investigates the discourse surrounding printed forms from its historic context into the everyday, revealing a network of constellations that aim to recalibrate our relationship with printed media. 

She has exhibited at 55 Sydenham Rd, the Papermill and Verge Gallery, curated the mini-festival Symptoms of Failure at Firstdraft, Sydney and produces for FBI’s art and ideas program Canvas. She is currently coordinating Double Vision, a showcase Australian experimental and DIY music at Verge Gallery. Upcoming shows include ‘Island Salon’ in collaboration with Claudia Nicholson for Underbelly Arts and ‘Against a degree of blindness’ at Mop Projects, curated by Isobel Parker Philip. 

https://dellumanta.wordpress.com/

Anna McMahon is a Sydney based artist and curator.  She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD) in 2010, a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Sydney in 2011 and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD).   She is a 2015/2016 Co-Director at Firstdraft Gallery Sydney.  Her practice is grounded in her ongoing investigation into the paradox of the artist as a professional dilettante.  McMahon also collaborates with fellow artist Kate Beckingham as OK YEAH COOL GREAT.  She has shown nationally and internationally in solo, group and curatorial projects in various galleries including, Raygun (QLD), Gaffa (NSW), Metro Arts (QLD), Open Source Gallery (NY), and Verge Gallery (NSW).  As OK YEAH COOL GREAT, she was part of the 2014 SafARI Live program.  She has upcoming exhibitions at Archive Space (NSW) and MOP Projects (NSW).  

www.annamcmahon.net

okyeahcoolgreat.com

(b. Wollongong, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist working with experimental technological mediations to bring light and sound together, correlated into high-resolution perceptual events. His practice extends across sound, custom modified electronics, still and moving images, software patches and field recording to produce installations that bring to attention subtle dynamic forces and allow us to listen in on phenomena at the edges of the perceptible including the microscopic light emissions of bioluminescent marine algae, the intricate turbulences of mist and water vapour, and the effects of atmospheric lensing on our experience of the stars.

Kenneth is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Sydney and a BA Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Western Sydney. 

www.ichnosrecords.com 

Abigail Moncrieff is an independent curator based in Sydney, with experience across a wide range of projects and  exhibitions in museums, galleries and public spaces both nationally and internationally. Recent projects include Electric Affinity at Alaska Projects and an upcoming exhibition at Goulburn Regional Gallery.

Abigail was formerly curator of international media art biennial of Experimenta Speak to Me, initially presented in Melbourne in 2012 with a subsequent two year national tour. In her role as Project Coordinator of C3West at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Abigail has developed projects such as HEADS UP with Craig Walsh, What Is Missing with Sylvie Blocher, Talking Trash with Jeanne van Heeswijk and The Begin-Again with artist Angelica Mesiti. She has worked with artist collective Campement Urbain (Sylvie Blocher and François Daune) on their project in Penrith from 2007 to 2011. Prior to this, Abigail worked on numerous artist projects and exhibitions, including La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc with Javier Téllez for the 2004 Biennale of Sydney and as Studio Manager for artist Simryn Gill. 

C3West:
http://www.mca.com.au/artists-and-works/c3west/

Experimenta Speak to Me:
http://www.experimenta.org/exhibitions-projects/currentExhibitions/past-2/current-7.html

Electric Affinity (Jess Johnson and Tina Havelock Stevens) http://home.alaskaprojects.com

(b. Newcastle, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the methodological processes that underpin scientific action. Interested in the constituent elements of the ’Scientific Method’ – namely observation, experimentation, method (as action) and standardization –  her work examines how these mechanisms are recounted within artistic practice and can be further leveraged through artistic inquiry. Her work is both research and process-driven, often employing durational, repetitious and participatory components. These performative actions are devised to test and expose the internal processes of methodological labour – evoking the exhaustive, the obsessive, the poetic and the absurd – aspects that are all inherent to scientific practices. 

Sara Morawetz is a Ph.D. Candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and an Australian Postgraduate Award recipient. She has been previously awarded the Martin Bequest Traveling scholarship, the University of Sydney Chancellor’s Committee scholarship and was a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Fine Art, The New School, NY in 2014. Upcoming work includes performances for Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, in Chicago, IL and a 37-day durational action at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn, NY where she will live according to Mars Solar Time (Sol.).

http://saramorawetz.com/

Nicola Morton is an Asian/Australian artist who loves playing with machines and the paranormal. When she was young she would dream she was a steam train. She has a B.Music (Technology) from Qld Conservatorium of Music (2003) and is currently a MFA Candidate at Sydney College of Art. Her artwork is driven by her visionary activist campaign to psychically connect to machines/the Internet in order to cause a (r)evolution towards nature, telepathy and the hand-made. She has held psychic séances, psychedelic and meditative collaborative performances based on research exploring psychological deaths with Shamans from Wik-Mungkana, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Inuit Nunangut. The 17th VideoBrasil Exhibition shortlisted her psychic video project, ‘Remote Viewing Experiment #1.’ Her performance work and facilitation (encompassing music and visual art) has received significant support in the form of independent review in Art&Australia, Realtime, The Wire (UK) and Pipeline (HongKong); plus development grants from QMusic, Asialink, Brisbane City Council and Renew Newcastle. Administratively as a co-director her missions remain for impermanence, live art and new altruism at EXIST ARI and support for the divergent and marginalised through the not-for-profit FOUNDATION OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC & CULTURE. Telepathic community building in the post-internet is contingent to her research.

http://site.videobrasil.org.br/en/acervo/obras/obra/1349626

http://nicolaisgreat.com/p/romantic-grasses.html

http://otherfilm.org/ghosts-are-present/

Paul Mumme is a multidisciplinary artist born in Brisbane. His work deals with the paradoxical aspects of human thought and behaviour, often articulated in terms of the philosophical absurd. Usually performative, it stresses the presence of a protagonist that is sometimes present as a suit-clad figure. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including the Institute of Modern Art, Australian Centre for Photography, QUT Art Museum, Chalk Horse and Canberra Contemporary Art Space.  He has held solo shows in spaces including Pine Rivers Regional Art Gallery, Archive Space, Queensland Centre for Photography, Metro Arts and Independent Exhibitions Brisbane as well as numerous regional galleries.  He has participated in festivals such as Art & About Sydney, Freerange Brisbane, PhotoLA and the Queensland Festival of Photography. His work is held in several private, corporate and government collections.  He currently lives and works in Sydney.

www.paul-mumme.com

scanlines.net/person/paul-mumme

James Nguyen (b.1982, Vietnam) is a Sydney-based artist working in the applied methods of art and politics. His output ranges from drawing, installation, video and performance. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the National Art School, Sydney, in 2012 and is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of Arts (SCA), University of Sydney. He has been the recipient of the Clitheroe Foundation Scholarship and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship.

Nguyen’s video and performance practice looks at the process of making and observing art through the “performative potential of the camera”. By documenting the actual recording of footage, the camera and the act of film-making becomes part of the work rather than just the filmic apparatus. Beyond the principles of cinematography, Nguyen is also working through BAD MUDDA (with Salote Tawale) and Astute Art Investments International to find versatile collaborative interventions to engage with artists and communities from China, Australia and the greater Asia-Pacific Region. 

http://jamesnguyen.com.au/pix/ 

http://www.astuteartinvestments.com/

Sean O’Connell (Sydney, Australia, 1972) has been chasing the fundamental roots of knowledge and perception for some years now. Using moving film, image and sound, he documents the outcomes of various physical experiments that probe into the structure of reality. Works such as the crumpled forms of colliding metal boxes, presented in slow motion cinematics, reveal the physical qualities of material and energy coursing through the materials of everyday life. The main body of his work uses pseudo-scientific experiments to explore the physical nature of reality, as much as the personal significance of separation and interaction, and the philosophical issues of structuring knowledge into worldviews.

Sean is currently undertaking his PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, under Mikala Dwyer. He has exhibited sporadically, including work shown at Sherman Foundation and Roslyn Oxley 9 in Sydney, as well as at smaller galleries in France, Japan, Scotland and Singapore. An upcoming solo show in July will show moving and still images, alongside sculptural works.  He has received various grants, including several new work grants and a residency from The Australia Council, and has just returned from a 5-month exchange at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

www.oneorangedot.com

Art Historian, independent curator and Valuer Australia Government's Cultural Gift Program.

Akky van Ogtrop graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, majoring in printmaking and has a Masters Degree Fine Arts, Sydney University. Akky works as an art historian and independent curator.

As a director and project manager of major arts events Akky worked for the Biennale of Sydney, ARTiculate Campaign, the World out West and is the founder and Executive Director of the Sydney Art on Paper Fair.

Akky has proven experience as arts administrator and creative manager with extensive contacts and national and international project experience and as an organiser, speaker and facilitator of national and international symposia, workshops and discussion panels.

Apart from her expertise as a public program, event manager and art historian Akky worked as curator with art museums, galleries and contemporary art spaces.  She presented exhibitions by Australian and international artists, and worked on contemporary art exhibitions and projects, touring exhibitions internationally and nationally including:

2000 Works on Paper by German artist  A.R.Penck: touring exhibition: Tin Sheds Gallery, and Newcastle  University Gallery

2005 Drawing on Experience, a memoir of the life and art of Beth Hamilton and the life and work of Theo Batten: Manly Art Gallery and Museum

2007 The O’Grady sisters redrawn, a contemporary view of five women artists from the collection. Grafton Regional Gallery

2009 Point of Connection: Print Workshop Encounters, Grafton Regional Gallery.

Intensely Dutch: Image, abstraction and the word, post-war and beyond, Art Gallery of NSW

2011 Hot off the Press, Sydney Printmakers, travelling exhibition,

 Voiceover, Lake Macquarie City Gallery

2012 Beach Comber, works on paper and paintings 1981-2011, Jennifer Marshall, Manly Art Gallery & Museum

2013 Peripheral Vision, Australian Prints since 1968, IMPACT VII, Dundee,  Scotland

2014 Kyoto Hanga, the International Print Exhibition, Australia/ Japan. Kyoto Municipal Museum, Fukuyama  Museum of Art

Since 2012 Akky has worked on a series of specially curated exhibitions at the Brenda May Gallery in Sydney, focussing on the Dada Movement and beyond, starting with:

Going Gaga with Dada, a dedication to spontaneity, chaos, innovation and nonsense.

2013, The Ongoing Gaga Saga, Fluxus, Pop and beyond.  

2014  CON*TRA*PUN*TAL, Line+Movement+Abstraction.  

2015 Small Publishers, artists' books and zines produced by small presses,

Multiples, prints, posters, artist’s books, and sculptural objects.

Akky is presently serving on various boards, including: President of the Print Council of Australia, President Sydney Chamber Music Festival, Vice President Walter Burley Griffin Society , Committee member  the Arts and Cultural Committee of the Manly Art Gallery & Museum. She is a foundation member of the Art Gallery of NSW.

Jess Olivieri is the co-founder of Parachutes for Ladies, a working model that address modes of collaboration and authorship. Jess’ practice investigates the social and cultural factors that influence how we inhabit public space. These projects are often located in or responding to historical events and manifest as performance, dance, opera, video and sound works. Currently a PhD candidate at Sydney Collage of the Arts and is also engaged in curatorial and writing projects.

In 2015 Jess is working towards a large scale project on a hill in the middle of South Africa. On this hill zebras and giraffes roam free as a rock formation of a White Horse occupies the western side, the history of these painted white rocks is contested and it is this contestation that will form the basis for the project. 

Jess often collaborates with sound artist Hayley Forward, showing at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (GOMA) and has collaborated with a wide range of groups including the Aura Australis Women’s Choir for the performance Hello at the MCA, the Sydney Chamber Choir for Campbeltown Art Centre and the Brunswick Women’s Choir for the Melbourne Art Fair. 

http://www.parachutesforladies.com/

Venita Poblocki is currently the Curator at Willoughby City Council.  In this capacity she has initialled the inaugural 2015 Willoughby Visual Arts Biennial which engaged Robyn Backen as its major artist amongst many other artists ranging from video artists, installation artists to ceramicists. In 2013 she curated the Willoughby Sculpture Prize and on-going, she curates exhibitions at the Walter Burley Griffin designed Incinerator Art Space. 

Venita also works as a freelance curator and has curated the 2011 & 2012 John Fries Award, was recipient of the 2012 First Draft Gallery Emerging Curator Grant and curated the inaugural exhibition for the Australia China Art Foundation in Melbourne.

She recently completed the Gunyah artist-in-residence program which provided valuable time to focus on her writing.  She has written catalogue essays for galleries in the USA, Melbourne and Sydney.  An interest in how we define a sense of place and cultural identity has directed her career.

On this visit Venita will be accompanied by Curatorial Assistant, Kathie Najar.  Kathie Najar trained as a fine artist and worked for many years within the decorative arts. In more recent years while completing a Masters of Arts Administration she worked for commercial art galleries and arts organisations across Sydney, has assisted and independently curated exhibition and as well as designed, programed and facilitated extensive public programs in relation to these exhibitions.

Elizabeth Pulie (born 1968, Sydney) has been exhibiting her work since 1989. Initially involved in a ten-year conceptual painting practice testing art’s ontology via the creation of decorative paintings, she moved to a relational practice between 2000 and 2005 wherein she ran Front Room (an artist run space in the front room of her house), wrote, edited and published the magazine Lives of the Artists, and initiated an artist’s group, Sydney Ladies Artists Club. Pulie re-focused on an object-based practice in 2006 via her end of art project, on which she is currently basing her PhD research at Sydney College of the Arts (The University of Sydney). She has held individual exhibitions at galleries including Bellas Gallery (Brisbane), Sutton Gallery (Melbourne), Sarah Cottier Gallery (Sydney), Neon Parc (Melbourne), and artist-run initiatives locally and internationally. Group exhibitions include The New Naturalism (IMA, Brisbane 1989) Primavera (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1995) Sydney/Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Kunste, Vienna 2000) Quiet Collision (Viafarini, Milan 2003) & 20/200 (Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney 2014). Her work is held in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Daimler Foundation, New York. Pulie is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney and Neon Parc, Melbourne.

https://elizabethpulie.wordpress.com/

https://epulieendofartblog.wordpress.com/

http://sydneyladiesartistsclub.blogspot.com.au/

Tanya Alexandra Richards was born and raised in Northern China and migrated at 14 with her Russian parents to Australia. Her work bridges the gaps across sculpture and installation art. Richards completed  BVA in 2001, BVA (Hon) 2002, MFA (Research) 2006. Currently is in 3rd year of a PhD research degree.

Richards has exhibited in solo exhibitions across Australia:  Gosford Regional Gallery, 2009; Maitland Regional Gallery, 2010;  UWS Chancellor Gallery, 2010;  Blacktown New Teaching Facility, 2011; Finalist in International Lace Award, 2011; Public Art Commission Blacktown Hospital, 2011; Awarded APA, 2013; Finalist UWS Sculpture Award, 2014. Her work is in NSW government and private collections.

The aim of her PhD project is to create a connection between her work and the physical, as well as metaphorical realms of the smooth and striated spaces, emphasizing the facets of her practice, characterized by Deleuze spatial duality and hybridity. The aim is to explore the smoothness and striation in relation to specific artworks; that in Claire Colebrook’s words, ‘are not representations of images of life’, but, if we consider the emergence of the genesis of art and philosophy, can be understood as ’something of life’s creative potential’ (Claire Colebrook, 2006:30). 
 

http://mrag.org.au/exhibition/tanya-alexandra-richards-sediments-of-haptic-play-in-the-art-factory/

http://sydney.edu.au/sca/news/2010/above_below_inbetween.shtml
 

http://virtualtours.uws.edu.au/uwsartgallery/abovebelowinbetween
 

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/lovelace/index.php/country/australia/caress-with-eyes-only
 

http://sydney.edu.au/sca/news/2010/tanya_richards.shtml

http://virtualtours.uws.edu.au/site/assets/media/UWS%20Sculpture%20Award/UWS-Sculpture-Award-2014/ARTXXXX-Sculpture-Awards-Catalogue_web3.pdf

Sara Roberts (b.1982, Sydney, Australia) spent her childhood between Australia, Mexico, France, Sweden and Poland. The shifting of her locations, and the experience of constantly moving plays a role in her practice. Travelling and relocation inevitably brings with it powerful memories of transient homes, and the question of what constitutes familiarity and a sense of place in the landscape is a major theme. Inviting the viewer to experience the landscape in new ways, Roberts’s paintings explore not only ideas of travel, but also ideas of what constitutes a sense of belonging in the landscape. Implanting fictitious elements into the constructed scene attempts not only to draw together the real and the fake, but also to draw disparate cultures that she has experienced assembled within the canvas.
Recent and upcoming shows include: MCA staff show: Contemporary's Contemporaries at the Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Eloise Cato and Elyse Goldfinch, The Lab curated by Art Pharmacy, Retroneers at Chrissie Cottier Gallery and Retroneers 2 at Australian National Capital Artists both curated by Kathleen Linn. Sara Roberts is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts.

www.sararobertsartist.com

Megan Robson is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, where she recently curated the exhibitions Martu Art from the Far Western Desert (co-curated with Anna Davis) (2014) and MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context (2013). She has worked across a range of exhibitions including solo projects with Aleks Danko, Sylvie Blocher, Runa Islam, Anish Kapoor, Christian Marclay, and Annette Messager, and group exhibitions such as string theory: Focus on contemporary Australian art and Marking Time.

Previously she has worked for a number of art organisations in Australia and the UK, including the Barbican Centre, London and the Biennale of Sydney. She received an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a BA (Hons) from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. In 2011, Megan received an Asialink grant to undertake curatorial research in Hong Kong with co-curator Joel Mu. She writes regularly on contemporary art for a range of publications and journals.

Rebecca Shanahan is a Sydney based artist working across photography, video, performativity and installation. In March 2015 her participatory works ‘Open For Maintenance’ and “We Are Still Alive’ were exhibited at SCA Galleries, Rozelle and in 2014 her photographic and video work ‘I Had But Could Not Keep’ was exhibited jointly with Damian Dillon in ‘Dead Air’ at MOP Projects, Sydney and Substation Centre for Art and Culture, Newport, Victoria, supported by a NSW Artist Grant. In 2013 she was a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (Monash Gallery of Art) and the Substation Contemporary Art Prize (Substation Centre for Art and Culture) and her work ‘Small Hours’ was shown in ‘The Nightwatch’ at Incinerator Gallery, Victoria (curator Richard Ennis). Shanahan’s current PhD research project at Sydney College of the Arts examines relationships between affective performative actions and their lens-based documentation with reference to 1960s Conceptual practices, surveillance culture and the self-surveillance of social media. She lectures at UNSW Art and Design and the National Art School.

http://www.rebeccashanahan.net

Jasmin Stephens is a freelance curator, writer and project manager who lives in Sydney. She has held education, programming and curatorial roles in many institutions. As Curator/Exhibitions Manager at Fremantle Arts Centre she curated over 70 exhibitions. Prior to this she was Senior Manager, Education and Access, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Client Services Manager with Artbank, the Commonwealth art rental collection.

As an independent curator, Stephens has worked across the sector in Perth and Sydney and undertaken residencies with Singapore Biennale and The Reading Room in Bangkok. She has subsequently curated artists from Southeast Asia into exhibitions in Australia and published on topics relating to engagement with Asia.

Her recent exhibitions are Yonder, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth (2012); Metallic, Edith Cowan University, Perth (2012); Novel Ecologies, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2013); far and wide: Narrative into Idea, UTS Gallery, University of Technology, Sydney (2014); Collection+: Pinaree Sanpitak, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2014); and My Sisters and other Ghosts: Genevieve Chua, Imhathai Suwatthanasilp, Bussaraporn Thongchai, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2015). In 2014 she worked with artist David Haines as a curatorial participant on Kuandu Biennale at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, in association with Asialink.

A regular panel assessor, exhibition judge and mentor, she has recently served on the Board of ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and written for ArtAsiaPacific, Vault magazine and ARTAND Australia.

Armelle Swan (b.1965, Australia) recently completed the MFA and Honours
(First Class) at Sydney College of the Arts. She comes from a background in paramedical science that continues to inform her artistic concepts and practices. While figurative painting is her ‘mother tongue’, with drawing and collage, she has recently broadened her practice to include box-like assemblages inhabited by intriguing and mysterious arrangements of diverse media, found objects and small paintings. The human face is a major theme, particularly when unburdened by identity and female. Another concern is the way that an intense register of perceptual attention to a subject, that is, the visual thinking that occurs in artistic observation, be it of an object, person or artwork, is an important locus of invention. Moreover, how this potential for invention applies to the nexus between art and science is deeply fascinating and may be the subject of future work.

Through self-performance Salote Tawale explores the identity of the individual in collective systems. Projects draw upon personal experiences of race, ethnicity and gender, growing up in suburban Australia.  Employing photography, video, installation and live performance in her works, Tawale is heavily influenced by the feminist video artists from the 1970s. Interested in the viewer’s experience within a work she often employs tactics of resistance or pathways to negotiate where the audience is taken on a physical and/or intellectual journey towards multiple possibilities.

Having exhibited widely within Australia and internationally: including the Wellington Art Centre (NZ), Indonesian Contemporary Art Network Yogyakarta (IE), and Oxford Modern (UK), Tawale also undertook a self-devised tour of American video archives (Chicago and NYC), funded by the Australia Council, and has been included in national and international publications including, Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations edited by Anthony Gardner; Art in Australia; Realtime and Artlink.

Community development is also a large part of her practise, most recently developing and producing youth workshops, an emerging art program and exhibitions for the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival an annual festival that explores Contemporary Pacific Arts within an Australian context.

Tawale has lectured and tutored at Monash and Deakin Universities and is currently completing a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Sydney on an APA scholarship having previously completed a Bachelor of Arts (Media Arts) and a Master of Fine Arts (coursework) at RMIT University.

http://salotetawale.com/

(b. The Netherlands) is a Sydney based visual artist. Her recent artwork has incorporated moving between borders and into a new country with an installation called “Homeward Bound”. Van der Aa’s work concerns materiality, forms and shapes. In making intercon- nections between different objects she explores sustaining one’s cultural identity while moving in an open, connected and fluid world. Her art practice is quite abstract but plays with a recurring theme of the beauty of the (Australian) bush and trees in particular. The questions of ‘where do I belong’, ‘where are my roots’, ‘how can I grow new roots’ and ‘roots vs routes’ are all explored as part of this theme. She has used dif- ferent materials such as Perspex and more recent natural materials such as wood. Van der Aa lately exhibited in shows in Delmar gallery, The North Sydney Art Prize, the Chippendale New World Art Prize and at the SCA Postgrad show. She was the winner of the Art Abstract Palm Awards at Verge gallery in 2011. In the past 10 years she has exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne, Central Coast, Wollongong, Newcastle, The Netherlands and France across painting, sculpture and installation. 

www.ingridvanderaa.com 

Josee Vesely-Manning (b.1975) is now based in Sydney after working in Melbourne as an artist and curator for several years. During this time she has delivered projects and exhibitions for Arts House: Meat Market, Dark MOFO/MONA, Next Wave Festival, Melbourne Art Fair, Federation Square, ANL Mission to Seafarers Art Prize and ARI’s throughout Melbourne and beyond. She has been funded by The Australia Council, Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne and The City of Port Phillip. 

Since 2010 she has been interested in “Para functional spaces” or traditionally disenfranchised urban spaces; housing estates, industrial wastelands, drains, tunnels, subways, abandoned buildings, vacant lots and all “terrain vagues”. Light, explosives, performance, BB guns, cars, fireworks and motorbikes have all been utilised as artistic interventions within these “nihilistic” sites, arenas for strange liberation or “magical thinking”. She has entitled these encounters Magic Nihilism.

She is currently describing this Magical Nihilist “universe” uitilising sculptural models and found objects with reference to constellations, simultaneous time, silver, gold, obelisks, crystals and minerals, neon, comets, collapsing planets, intergalactic lightening, failed space colonies, anarchy, star clusters, alchemy, indifferent nature, imploding universes, black holes and plants. 

She is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts.

http://www.arts.vic.gov.au/Funding_Programs/Funding_Recipients/2011-2012/Arts_Development/Copy_of_Project_Grants/Project_Grants/Josee_Vesely-Manning

http://comicenjose.blogspot.com.au/

www.gg-art.com/news/read.php?newsid=96829

http://www.crawl.net.au/index.php/south-australia/details/2177-nausea--i-am-an-artist-i-am-not-an-artist--myth--the-disciples--grands-luminaires

https://vimeo.com/62276028

http://dasplatforms.com/writing/post-humans-electric-sheep-/

www.brustmanboyde.com/home

http://artguide.com.au/archive/?freeSearch=iam+an+artist+iam+not+an+artist

http://www.theweeklyreviewbayside.com.au/story/288266/park-towers-housing-estate-lights-up-under-rainbow/

https://themelbourneartsclub.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/seventh-gallery/

(b.1953, Sydney, Australia) has spent most of his professional life in Europe (The Netherlands and Italy). He has recently relocated to Sydney to continue studies and his professional life. The concepts of love and beauty are crucial themes in his work. They define culture. Using both traditional and innovative intaglio print-making techniques these concepts are investigated through an expression of the intimate and the universal. Visione’s work has been exhibited internationally at print biennales and manifestations, and at commercial galleries in South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, China, Belgium, The Netherlands, U.K., Germany and Portugal over more than four decades.

www.markvisione.nl

Tamara Voninski (b. New York) is a photo media artist & filmmaker who works within the blurred boundaries of photography, film essay and visual poetry. Her work often depicts life in the Australia and Oceania region exploring themes around cultural norms and rituals in relation to urban life, femininity, and adolescence. Her photographs have won international awards and residencies including: International Pictures of the Year Awards, Art Gallery of NSW residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris and the inaugural Alexia Foundation Photography for World Peace grant. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, France and Australia over 25 years.  She has recently returned from 1.5 years on the road exploring cross-Australia in a caravan journey reminiscent of the early photographers wagons travelling and photographing from town to town.  Voninski is a founding member of the Australian based Oculi collective (2000-present). The Paris based Agence VU represents her work throughout Europe. She is currently a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts in Screen Arts.

http://oculi.com.au/photographers/tamara-voninski/

http://www.tamaravoninski.com.au/

https://vimeo.com/tamaravoninski (password upon request)

Linda Wilken (Sydney, Australia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores social and political aspects of contemporary culture. Her practice includes installation, collage, sound, screen printing and assemblage of commercial products which are held up as cultural markers. Currently undertaking a MFA at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Wilken’s research, titled Porn Identity: The sexualisation and objectification of young girls; engages with the commercial, social and cultural aspects of collective gender identity formation. It questions the impact that a tendency towards an earlier sexualisation process, may have on the sense of identity, health and wellbeing of the contemporary generation of children. Wilken’s work reads as social commentary and has a specific community engagement component. Public forums, where she speaks of her art practice and research alongside child health experts, are held in conjunction with her solo exhibitions and form part of her practice. Solo exhibitions: Daddy’s little princess, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, 2013, Daddy’s little princess, (goes to Newcastle), The Commons, Newcastle, 2013 and I’m no princess, Peacock Gallery, Auburn, 2014.

http://www.linda-wilken-artist.com    

Bryden Williams is a Sydney-based artist working with site-specific installation, sculpture, video and photography as a means of depicting a burgeoning human presence within the Australian landscape. Williams has been featured in a number of prizes, including the John Fries Memorial Prize (2013) and the Chippendale New World Art Prize (winner, 2013). Internationally, he has spent three months in Beijing as resident at Red Gate Gallery. In 2014 he held a major solo exhibition in Sydney and also took part in a number of group and partnered exhibitions, most notably (semi)Permeable at Archive Space in October 2014. Recently, Williams received the February 2015 NSW Artist Grant for his project Hydro Wilderness; a two-week project in the Victorian Alps at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture. Since joining the SCA postgraduate cohort in 2015, Williams is honing his interest in the Australian landscape, having recently created site-specific works for the rural arts festival Cementa in a historic shepherd’s hut and blacksmith’s cave. Throughout his Masters degree, Williams aims to further his approach to understanding a sense of place by exploring the fractured idyllic notions of Australia’s decaying pastoral landscape. 

brydenwilliams.com