d.i.why?

Billy Bain, Joshua Bentley, Jennifer Brady, Zoe Gojnich, Millie Mitchell, Rumpa Paweenpongpat, Natalia Stojevski, Matthew Varnay

16 January - 2 February 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 15 January 2019, 5-8PM

D.I.Y. (adjective)

Do-it-yourself; describing something that may be constructed by one’s self without the help of a trained professional.

d.i.why? is a cross-disciplinary investigation into low-fidelity, do-it-yourself and process driven artmaking practices. Glorifying failure and inadequacy, the exhibition celebrates the home-made, man-made, found-object, cheap, damaged, broken and breaking.

This curated mess prioritises process and the act of making, in the production of materially-aware artworks. The works are united not through media or thematics, but instead through an overarching grunge aesthetic and layered approach to artmaking. Encompassing assemblage, ceramics, photography, printmaking, installation and performance, d.i.why? disregards ‘perfection’ in order to actively engage and communicate with the audience.

Cover Image: Natalia Stojevski, Ew Vom Don’t Call It That (detail shot), 2018

Space one

This is That

Bradlee Wiseman

6 - 23 February 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 5 February 2019, 5-8 PM

This is That investigates a deeper involvement with self and space. Working across mediums of painting and installation, this exhibition is offering up a new pictorial perspective of how we shape and perceive our physical world. Playfully using colour, form and composition, Bradlee Wiseman explores facets of people, objects and the outside world. Through an accumulation of physical experiences, on screen and in tactical painting mediums, this exhibition aims to acknowledge these links between art and everyday spaces. By presenting a series of whimsical happenings across 2D and 3D forms, This is That seeks to manifest the potential for the medium of painting to re-configure the way we perceive the world around us. 

Image: Bradlee Wiseman, Open sesame (metaphorically), 2018, acrylic on paper, 21.0 x 29.7cm

Images courtesy of the artists and Kudos Gallery. Photos: Liam Black

Space two

Northern Tales

Vilma Bader

6 - 23 February 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 5 February 2019, 5-8PM

Using three locations, Northern Tales explores the mnemonic function of linguistics, semiotics and space in the construction of identity. The work emerges out of two years of travels and artist residences in Iceland, Finland and Estonia. All three locations, while indisputably European, are peripheral within the European imagination. Contemplative immersion and engagement within these locales’ communities and experiencing the landscape in all seasons was important. The approach differs and culminates in a compelling, kaleidoscopic world where fact, fiction, myth, history, the old and new merge and play off each other. The hand-made appliqués in the Icelandic component refer to the country’s medieval sagas, and stories and events from its not so distant past. The extensive use of textile and hand stitching evoke long dark northern winter nights and storytelling. The Finnish component functions as a collection of visual poems and as a comment on the unsustainable timber industry in Finland. The Estonian component brings forth the strikingly colourful doors of its capital city. Northern Tales is foremost about the local and particular, while suggesting multiple narratives which link universal histories and the common memories they may share. 

Image: Vilma Bader, Women in the Age of Settlement 2018, 62 x 210, acrylic, canvas, hessian, hand stitched and painted appliqués, textile, cotton thread

Images courtesy of the artist and Kudos Gallery. Photos: Liam Black

Space one

Heirlooms for Mutant Children

Hugh Black, Rosy Leake, Sena Kosaroglu, Lihnida Krstanoska-Blazeska, Joshua Reeves, Patrick McDavitt and Ella Tindal

27 February - 16 March 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 26 February 2019, 5-8PM

Our mutant children will not understand our creations.
You might not either.
They are born of a time which once was but will never be again
A future and a past unknown, a present understood but uncertain.
They will remain, vitrified and permanent in their states until perhaps one day their parts are realised again.
Bitchumen, Earth, Bolts, Glass, Perspex, Glaze. Our immediate environment fired in our guts.
They are not precious
But they are the remnants of our most darling flesh
Fired into being.
They are the heirlooms we pass down to our senseless children.

Heirlooms for Mutant Children suggests trajectories for a future through ceramic objects which engage with traditional and contemporary ceramic production methods. This disparate selection of contemporary ceramic works explore concepts of the queer body and identity; archaeology and environmental degradation; loss; language and text; and childhood, while responding to an overall theme of physical and mental malformation. We have created art that is experimental, provocative and at times grotesque. They are the precious heirlooms one might pass down through generations yet they are signifiers of a tense and confused modern climate.

Image: Rosy Leake, ‘Mangrove mountain 1970-2018’, (detail) 2018. Fired found clay and objects, dimensions variable. 

Images courtesy of the artist and Kudos Gallery. Photos: Liam Black

Space two

Supervis

Jack De Lacy, Gillian Kayrooz and Elijah Innes

27 February - 16 March 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 26 February 2019, 5-8PM

Supervis is the camera as a point of exchange between embodied and represented identities. Sydney based artists Elijah Innes, Gillian Kayrooz and Jack De Lacy use film, audio, sculpture, performance and print, to consider the way contemporary image culture and digital spaces en-frame physical reality.

They seek to understand the collapsing boundaries and a pluralism of space between the physical and virtual that the internet and media has allowed us to experience. This temporality lets one’s self-concept become the means by which we can transcend and re-create oneself.

Supervis reveals virtual communions; intimate private chats, collected spam, deleted browser history, and YouTube ‘story-times’ as collected data of identity. Aesthetically, Supervis revels in image-inundation. It enjoys the chaos and confusion, the glossy visual impact, and guiltily, the supervision of it all.

Image: Jack De Lacy, Enframing (digital version), 2019

Courtesy of the artist and Kudos Gallery. Photos: Liam Black

Space one

Aoide

Dylan Batty

(This exhibition has been made in collaboration with many many people, too many in fact to properly list within the official advertising material. This work in this show will attempt to acknowledge every single person who contributed to this work without any form of hierarchy.)

3 April - 18 April 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 2 April 2019, 5-8PM

Who made your work? Whose labour produced your cultural capital?  

Aoide is the conclusion of my research, addressing the hierarchies of authorship and labour within art practice and institutions. Aoide imagines a gallery space devoid of the hierarchical structures that dictate authorship and access to cultural capital. By borrowing from Post-Internet theories of mediation and mimesis, cultural capital can be distributed based upon labour, refuting and flattening the hierarchies of intellectual property.  

Aoide builds upon the previous shows: Mneme and Melete, each of which was named for the original muses of cultural practice, representing the elements of “contemplation” and “occasion”. Aoide represents the final notion of “voice”, in essence providing the final element through which the preconditions of cultural production are met. 

Image: Courtesy of Dylan Batty

Space two

duel/duet

Elle van Uden

3 April - 18 April 2019

Opening Night Tuesday 2 April 2019, 5-8PM

'duel/duet' interrogates the relationship between the vertical and the climbing body to explore alternate ways of seeing and understanding verticality. This is informed by the artist's experience as a climber, which through years of training has produced an embodied knowledge of movement on the vertical. Whilst verticality in the gallery is typically distal, flat and sanitised, there is potential to extend this plane and its operation into an embodied and proximal zone - a liminal space that can produce speculative, abstract and diagrammatic ways of seeing and sensing.

Image: Elle van Uden, Anchor I , 2019 , rope, pulley, carabiner, bolt plate, screw , Dimensions variable 

States and Senses

Opening: 5-8pm Tuesday 30th April

1st - 18th May 2019

Artists talks: Saturday 11 May from 1-3pm

Curated by Brooke Leigh

Sylvia Griffin, Brooke Leigh, Markela Panegyres, Janet Passehl (U.S.) and Cecilia White 

States and Senses is an interdisciplinary exhibition which explores intense emotional states that are often suppressed —such as grief, rage, loss, fear and anguish, and their drivers. By drawing upon wide ranging experiences of vulnerability––a term commonly associated with reduced agency––the artists in this exhibition cultivate a space for reflection, contemplation and identification.  

States and Senses features new work by critically acclaimed U.S. artist, Janet Passehl and Sydney-based artists, Sylvia Griffin, Brooke Leigh, Markela Panegyres and Cecilia White––who each navigate difficult emotional and sensory terrain through different performative practices. Particularly concerned with female perspectives, these artists engage the(ir) body as subject in order to contribute to a growing, globally urgent, examination of challenging social and (inter)personal experiences. 

The context of the current international upsurge of new feminist movements––such as #metoo and #TimesUp–– supports the view that the hidden or silenced voice is of critical social and personal importance. There have also been a number of recent exhibitions dedicated to states of mental health––such as The Big Anxiety Festival (UNSW Art & Design, Sydney, 2017), ––and trauma and healing––such as The Fate Of Things: Memory Objects and Art (Jewish Museum Sydney, 2018-2019). States and Senses understands the need to find ways to live differently, and this exhibition could not be more relevant to a conversation that provokes, challenges, and encourages reflection on (inter)personal connection, understanding and validation.  

Performance: 'The Wait/Weight of Emotion' by Cecilia White from 6pm Tuesday 30 April Artist Talks: with special guest Noula Diamantopoulos (artist, psychotherapist and founder of BeCause Movement NFP) Artists talks: Saturday 11 May from 1-3pm

States and Senses Interview with Brooke Leigh for Arcadia Magazine

Image details: Sylvia Griffin & Ellen Dahl, I Just Couldn’t Keep Him Safe (detail), 2019, archival pigment print, 110cm x 67cm

Space one

Dear Homeland,

Hyun Jee Cho, Huy Lim Kha, Yvonne Minh Tinh Le, Nolan Ho Wung Murphy, Tanaporn Norsrida, Linda Sok

Dear Homeland, is a sensitive inquiry into the East- and Southeast-Asian Australian diasporic identity by a diverse group of emerging Sydney-based artists with homelands spanning across Cambodia, Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. The works by these artists deliberately employ vastly different mediums - painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video and performance. Unified by their diasporic history and biographical practices, they work to individualise their own unique experiences within the contemporary Australian context. 

 

The works featured in Dear Homeland, engage with amalgamated identities which exist in liminal spaces that have been formed through the hybridisation of cultures from the motherland and the current land. Their practices act as avenues for intimate and vulnerable expressions of a displaced identity post-migration by deconstructing how locality and heritage coalesce and manifest within an artistic practice.  

 

Dear Homeland, transforms the Kudos Gallery space into a contemplative and inclusive journey into personal cultural landscapes by giving voice to hidden narratives and histories. The complex and multi-faceted nature of the post-migratory experience is depicted through the diverse materials used, allowing for audiences to experience the array of identities that manifest. Collectively, the works offer a glimpse into the East- and Southeast-Asian diasporic experience that exists within Australia. 

Space two

Mantle Piece

Rosie Thomas

Opening: 21 May 5-8pm

Continues: 22 May - 6 June 2019

The mantle piece has become a place where objects are discarded, arranged or placed. It is an altar of the day, a place of trace. My mantle piece no longer channels smoke up a chimney. Rather, it sits comfortably and changeably, collecting day to day activities and memories through the objects placed on it and removed. Each object placed on the mantle has its own sense of time and memory embedded in it. These objects form new non-linear temporalities, unexpected possibilities. These objects placed together form a new narrative and this narrative is adaptable.

Image: Rosie Thomas, Mantle Piece (detail), 2019, imagined forms, collected forms, ceramics, plaster, ash, screen print, silver gelatin print, dimensions variable

The Ghosts of Exquisite Materials

Cybele Cox, Szymon Dorabialski, Audrey Newton, Yeliz Yorulmaz

The Ghosts of Exquisite Materials is a melodrama about an imagined afterlife. This installation delves into new and experimental sculptural disciplines but still touch on familiar themes embedded in each artist’s respective practices; the ephemeral, the mystical, the absurd and the mythological. In a collaborative effort, the group will build a set to stage scenes of a mystical narrative that will be performed by the artists and their separate works. 

The respective strengths and varied skill set of each artist combine in The Ghosts of Exquisite Materials to build an absurdist set of abstracted forms that are simulations of an imagined afterlife. This afterlife will be summoned and texturised through varied materialities such as timber, copper, found objects, living/decaying organisms, plaster, concrete, ceramic and resin. This devised dance of objects that signifies the death throws, transition and habitation of the afterlife is an ephemeral, intuitive and mystical process. This process expresses and alludes to the body transforming and transcending its material and functional form. 

Ecologies of Being

Jessica Bradford, Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, Monisha Chippada, Kalanjay Dhir, Carmen Glynn-Braun, Gillian Kayrooz, Ida Lawrence, Sofiyah Ruqayah, Louise Zhang.

Curated by Tanushri Saha and Naomi Segal for Peril magazine

Opening: 2 July 5-8pm Continues: 3 - 20 July

Ecologies of Being is an exhibition that considers the ways in which we are enmeshed in flows between beings, place, memory, and time. The exhibition offers reflections on interdependence and our entangled relations to the space around us, asking– how and where are we orientated? What particular shape or form do the worlds we inhabit acquire? 

In asking these questions, the artists seek to move towards a more complex understanding of the ecologies they are both embedded in and contingent upon. The works featured in this exhibition present insights into worlds that are corporeal, speculative, multi-faceted and in constant flux. 

When examining the spheres of our existence, frictions emerge from asymmetries of power: we become aware of the imbalance between relations that are immediately perceptible for us, and those that remain spectral and peripheral. To contemplate these tensions is to come closer to opening oneself up to different ways of knowing, being and doing. The exhibition maps and negotiates these intricate relations through differing forms and lines of inquiry by the artists.

Ecologies of Being serves as an archive of bodily, spatial and temporal entanglement, whilst also gesturing towards the possible shape of future worlds. 

This event is supported by Arc @ UNSW Ltd, Kudos Gallery, Peril magazine and Young Henrys.

Image: Louise Zhang, ‘Feed you pink’ (series) 2018, polyfoam, resin, acrylic, rope. Courtesy of the Artist and Artereal Gallery.

Substrate

Opening: 23 July 5-8pm 

Continues: 24 July - 10 August

Donna Brown, Tara Birks, Raymond Cheng, Jasmin Danic, Skye Dixon, Adam Doughty, Isobel Farnon, Angus Foxley, Owen Hall, Anita Jones, Franziska Laesser, Lucy Maher, Theodosis Malikides, Kylie Moore, Jana Ortanez, Kelly Owen, Leah Paterson, Lucy Whitelaw ,

Substrate is a cross-institutional exhibition exchange between UNSW Art & Design and the University of Newcastle that brings together a selection of works by students who work with photography in the undergraduate degree program. The works in the exhibition present a diversity of compelling ideas in photography and photo-based art in the form of still and moving images, objects and installations. Using digital and analogue cameras and processes, together they explore a broad range of concepts including identity, place, environmental destruction, surveillance, representation and politics to challenge our views that there is only one kind of photography. 

The first iteration of this exchange opens at Wattspace Gallery in Newcastle on Thursday 4th July and runs until 28 July 2019.

Image: Angus Foxley, from the series Media Dysphoria (detail) 2019, 110x79.6cm, inkjet on cotton rag

Kudos Emerging Artist + Design Award 2019

Winner's Announcement Night: 27 August 5-8 PM

Exhibition runs: 15-31 August

Finalists include:

Lachlan Bell	Shahroud Ghahani	Patrick McDavitt	Eloise Steele
Alvi Bruce	Dylan Goh	Kate McGuinness	Brenton Smith
Sarah Catania	Amber Hammad	Nolan Murphy	Sivaan Walker
Harry Copas	Rachael Hegh	Forough Najarbehbahani	Felice Yan
Alana Cotton	Lillian Knothe	Eva Nolan	Leora Zuckerman
Adam Doughty	Yvonne Le	Tanaporn Norsrida
Zoe Fang + Farhan Sumantri	Isobelle Lowe	Naomi Segal

The Kudos Emerging Artist + Designer Award is an annual award by Arc @ UNSW Art & Design that seeks to recognise, nurture and support innovation and talent across all disciplines at our campus. Celebrating its 18th anniversary this year, the Kudos Award aims to promote excellence in visual art and design at UNSW A&D, to encourage experimentation and development of process, material and concept, and to display students' works to the broader community and to nurture critical and creative engagement and activity.

The major award is $1,500 funded by Arc @ UNSW Art & Design, followed by highly commended awards, involving a series of exciting prizes donated by arts organisations and local businesses. We will also be presenting Girl Genius Award which is an independent prize awarded by a prominent guest judge and as facilitated by Tess Allas and Miranda Samuels.

This will also be our second year in which we will be running a People's Choice Award which will allow everyone to have their say! Visitors are encouraged to visit the exhibition prior to the winners announcement in order to vote for their choice. (The People's Choice Award will retroactively exclude the Kudos Award main award recipient from being in the running for People's Choice)


2019 Judges:
Danielle Karlikoff
Marikit Santiago
Naomi Riddle

Highlight Commended Awards generously donated by:
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
Art Gallery of New South Wales
ArtsHub
DarkStar Digital
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
National Association for the Visual Arts
Palace Cinemas

With thanks to Young Henrys for supporting our winners announcement night.

Kudos Emerging Artist & Designer Awards 2019 Results

Major Prize: Alana Cotton

Highly Commended: Alvi Bruce Isobelle Lowe Eva Nolan Leora Zuckerman

Girl Genius: Isobelle Lowe

People's Choice Award: Adam Doughty

Space one

Gilding the Lily

Emily Galicek

Opening night: 5-8pm 3rd September 2019

Exhibition continues: 4th - 21st September 2019

Gilding the Lily is an exhibition of paintings by Emily Galicek that critically engage with the post-digital context. The post-digital context is characterised by the proliferation and saturation of images, screens and digital networks into all areas of contemporary existence. It is also concerned with the potential that these forms have to be infinitely replicated and manipulated, and the way that processes of replication and manipulation can alter meaning and understanding. Given these characteristics, questions arise of whether painting has the capacity to visualise the intangible digital networks that surround us, and if so, how might it do this? The paintings in this exhibition form a potential response to these questions, using strategies of parody to self-reflexively critique the post-digital context in which they exist.  

Image: Emily Galicek, Internet Painting I (2019), acrylic on canvas, 914 x 1016mm

Space two

Mimesis

Robbie Karmel

Opening night: 5-8pm 3rd September 2019

Exhibition continues: 4th - 21st September 2019

Situated in the expanded field of drawing Robbie Karmel’s PhD project investigates mimesis through intermodal, observational and reflective drawing and making processes, themselves mimetic practices. Through several major bodies of work Karmel documents and conceptualises the recursive and productive phenomena of mimesis. The works include graphite, charcoal and oilstick drawings of the body on paper, along with the purpose built apparatus and studio-furniture made to facilitate the production of drawings. At the core of this investigation is the phenomenological body as it is expanded through the network of human and non-human beings: tools, materials, the subject, collaborators, the audience, and the environment. The investigation also addresses: how do these phenomena facilitate and present themselves within mimetic drawing processes.

Image: Documentation from Head Box II Performance with Katya Petetskaya. Image credit: Heidrun Lohr  

The Displacement of Ghosts An exhibition in two archives Judith Martinez Estrada

Opening: 24 September 5-8pm 

Exhibition continues: 25 September - 12 October

The exhibition is divided into two spaces (let’s call them archives): 

Archive 1: ‘El Apartamento: Retales/ The Apartment: Remnants’ is a visual documentation of place, as a mnemonic, post-memory study attempting to thread together a portrait of my family in Madrid, and in return gathering a greater understanding of identity. I have applied Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘Lieu de Memoire’ (sites of memory) to an investigation of personal history as a study of ‘33, Menendez Pelayo, Madrid’ – the residence of my paternal family. I have approached this project as an archaeologist and archivist – gathering, documenting and labeling. The pieces to be exhibited will represent the outcome of the archival documentation process in the form of photography, to show how all the remnants — a combination of the physical, the ephemeral, the behavioural — have helped shape this first floor apartment into a site of memory. 

Archive 2: ‘Palimpsest’: Palimpsest is the result of altering fragments from the past to create a present. Displaced people from antique vernacular photographs have new landscapes created around them, exploring human identity and the notion of the individual through time and place. A sense of reverence is felt towards these anonymous figures – who were they and why has the memory of them been discarded? What comment are we making about our own identities as we dispense with such images?

Image: Projected Portrait (grandfather). Judith Martinez. 2018 Photographed at ‘33, Menendez Pelayo, Madrid Digital print on archival watercolour paper 80cm h x 100cm w

Poetics of the Line

Featuring: Lottie Consalvo, Gaby Dounis, Alex Gawronski, Danny Giles, Robbie Karmel, Amalina Latiff, Daniel McKewen, Nolan Ho Wung Murphy, Conor O’Shea, Kurt Schranzer, Sylvie Veness 

Curated by Tim Marvin

Opening night: 5-8pm Tuesday November 5
Exhibition continues: 6 November - 23 November

'Poetics of the Line', curated by Tim Marvin, investigates methods of defining 'the line' in contemporary artistic practice. The curatorial project will survey a decade of artistic practice that actuate critical and creative configurations of the 'line’ which derive from a continuity of political, personal and aesthetic motivations. The exhibition will evaluate the prevailing art historical and theoretical legacies that inform these approaches, reflected through the extensive and experimental methods of drawing, stitching, gathering, stapling, browsing, printing, tracing and gestural recording that have been generated upon a variety of mediums. 

By examining the traditionally linear or overtly formal understanding of this elemental art form, the exhibition will arrange a receptive and continually unfolding exposition of these practices that encourages us to reconsider what a line may reveal about our world.  

Image: Daniel McKewen, ‘Confidence Games’ (detail), 2016, acrylic on linen, 160 x 120cm, Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane 

Space one 

Posters for a Friend's Bedroom 

Celeste Stein

Opening night: 5-8pm Tuesday 15 October  

Exhibitions continues: 16 October - 2 November

In Posters for a Friend’s Bedroom, I have brought together a series of artworks for loved ones. The works are intended to hang in a fictional bedroom, as blessings of friendship and forces of protection. Each work is made as a gift, and therefore interrogates what it means to produce for the result of giving away. The ‘posters’ depict intimate moments, parts of friends I wish to help heal, and objects/places that influence my approach to affection. This list of subject matter moves through many material processes - from drawings, to scans, to digital files, to machine cutting, the resulting 'posters' are poetic and obscured.

Image: 'Aarhus' Preparation cut file, digital cut file screenshot, Celeste Stein

Space two

Super-organism

Penelope Cain, Barbara Doran, Kath Fries

Opening night: 5-8pm Tuesday 15 October  

Exhibitions continues: 16 October - 2 November

Super-organism is a multi-media, multi-sensory project by Penelope Cain, Barbara Doran and Kath Fries, exploring pattern finding and self-organising systems. The term super-organism is usually used to describe an interdependent social organisation where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. Classically this term is applied to insects, but we are reinterpreting it more widely in relation to human/human and human/nonhuman relationships, across ways that we negotiate the interdependence of individuals and the collective nature of exchanges systems. As the anthropocentric world has become increasingly digitalised and interconnected, expanded notions around super-organisms as a mode of being are becoming increasingly relevant. Our Super-organism project will play out as generative and responsive evolving conversations, beginning with an interest in honeybees as a typical super-organism and an indicator species of ecological change. This expands into creative engagements with human systems of economy from an individual and colony perspective; to systems of information exchange, from the analogue of speech and wing-vibration to digital networks. Our Super-organism project will involve ‘Telling the Bees’ a series of participatory conversations and honeycomb drawing sessions with the artists and gallery visitors, using handmade beeswax crayons. As well as panel discussions with invited guests.

Image: Barbara Doran, Bungonia Honeycomb, 2017, digital photograph