Space one

Beauty and the Breast

Bec Litvan

11 - 28 Jan 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 10 January 2017, 5-7pm

This exhibition aims to glorify the aesthetics of disfigurement and bodily debilitation in response to the gendered societal shame typically imposed upon breast cancer sufferers. I combine the mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography to evoke the multiform (reflexive, interpersonal, public) marginalisation that’s experienced. The paintings take diptych images of my mother’s double mastectomy scarring and present them as abstracted landscapes whose linearity is illuminated against a voided background. The mastectomy bras replicate – and appropriate – images of graphically animated cancer cells. Finally, the photographs feature my mother modelling the cancer-cell mastectomy bras in high fashion poses.

Image: Bec Litvan, Scarred (1), 2016, acrylic on MDF, 120 x 120 cm

space two 

Collusive Miscellany

Amy Claire Mills and Bailee Lobb

11 - 28 January 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 10 January 2017, 5-7pm

Collusive Miscellany is an exhibition of recent performance works by Amy Claire Mills and Bailee Lobb.

This exhibition marks the first time these existing works have been situated in conversation with each other within one gallery space. The installed fabrics were created during the duo’s speculative exploration of thermoplastic moulding – a technique that produces new volumes and forms in fabric by reshaping the polyester polymers through complex tying patterns and heat manipulation. As the resulting fabrics billow through the space the artists use their body’s to perform with, and continue to manipulate, the fabric and its surrounding space. As cloth rolls over skin and body the tactile experience started through the thermoplastic process continues and their body’s become, yet another, mechanism for understanding collaborative process.

Image: Amy Claire Mills and Bailee Lobb, 'Collusion' (detail), 2016. Performance and Installation with mixed media and lame. Dimensions and duration variable. Photograph by Amy Claire Mills, 2016.

Elegant Degradation

Akil Ahamat, Rachael Archibald, Grace Blake, Aston Creus, Claire Finneran, Aidan Koch, L/HT/T/TT, Richard Phillips, Jannah Quill and Stonehouse.

Curated by Finn Marchant and Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

1 - 18 February 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 31 January 2017, 5-7pm

With much of contemporary culture in late capitalist societies now greatly consolidated by personal computing devices, our experience of the material is largely deferred in favour of more immediate, digital representations. 'Elegant Degradation' responds to this context, examining this disjuncture between the material and the digital and the anxiety that this gap engenders.

This exhibition brings together a selection of artists whose practices explore this space between the digital and the material, engaging with photographic representation, online relaxation, geopolitics and digital representations of space. 

Image: Richard Phillips, Stage (i), 2017, UV print on acrylic, digital print, 74 x 104cm.

Space one

Good Thanks, How Are You?

Siân Davies and Lily Golightly

22 February - 11 March 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 21 February 2017, 5-7pm

Good thanks, how are you? is an exhibition of works by Siân Davies and Lily Golightly.In this series, both artists are interested in the everyday and the ordinary. Seeing the potential in otherwise meaningless materials that they collect, playfulness is underscored by humour. They are interested in collecting, arranging, changing and adapting these materials into works that remain tentative and playful. They remain closely engaged, yet their practices remain separate. 

Sian’s minimal style, repetition and tentative combinations are a product of uncertainty and a questioning of the incessant requirement for artists to construct profound meaning. Lily collects lightweight, unassuming scraps and objects. She approaches these materials tenderly, as if she feels the need to take care of the things she has found. 

Image: Blueberries, 2016, Lily Golightly, blueberry container, tape, paper, dimensions variable.

Space two

Alternate Theories of Pyramid Construction

Daniel Emmerig

22 February - 11 March 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 21 February 2017, 5-7pm

Prints, paintings and drawings by Daniel Emmerig. The show explores myths, conspiracies, and fables as symbols which are used to explain the world to ourselves. An eye is knowledge and intimacy, but also conspiracy and surveillance. The language of iconography is examined in a body of work spanning a year in creation. 

Image: 'Daniel Emmerig

Castellorizian Migration Stories Photo Exhibition

Castellorizians migrated to Australia from the late 19th century up to the conclusion of WWII.

28 March - 2 April 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 28 March 2017, 6-8pm

Short Film of Migration Story Interviews to be shown at 1pm daily.

Castellorizians began migrating to Australia from the late 19th Century, when Athanasios Augustis, escaped from the Ottomans to Port Said Egypt where he was joined by his cousins, Dimitris and Athanasios Manolas and together they came to Australia. Between 1910 and 1930, Castellorizians migrated to Australia, for a number of reasons, including the imposition of conscription by the Ottomans on Christian citizens, a war between Italy and Turkey where the vast Castellorizian merchant fleet became a target to the Italian onslaught and the Great War broke out in 1914 when Turkey targeted the island. The population of Castellorizo reduced from 10,000 at the turn of the 20th century to 2,230 by 1931. Since 1930 migration continued, sponsored by the Castellorizian families in Australia and was interrupted by WW2 and in 1946, the first ship arrived in Australia with migrants, including Castellorizians, under the Commonwealth governments initiated migration program.

Image: Christina Athanassiades arriving at Pyrmont Wharf October 1946

Castellorizian Migration Stories Photo Exhibition is presented in association with the 2017 Greek Festival of Sydney

Tribute

E.O. Gill

5 - 22 April 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 4 April 2017, 5-7pm 

Tribute is a video installation engaging with the aesthetics of reality TV and amateur porn including low-fi, low-res image quality and camera styles. The work operates like schizophrenic verse using amateur, camp performance, badly formed character arcs and cheap costuming to explore a range of narrative themes.

As theorist Jord:ana Rosenberg writes “being lost requires an extension of the body into space.”

Tribute asks how we might extend our understanding of the ways in which bodies are sexualised, gendered and defined by how they extend into space. How can feelings of disorientation and getting lost particular to amateur and indeterminate images be understood as queering heteronormative processes of becoming like reproductive order, enforced gender constructs and nuclear family structures?

Through the performances of its central characters Catmeat, Candy and Neil, the work explores queer culture, identity as roleplay and the struggle between individual expression and communal belonging.

The concept for this project forms part of the artist’s Masters by Research at UNSW Art and Design.

List of artists participating:

Makeup Artist – Anastasia Zaravinos

Performer – Nat Randall

Digital Photographer – Zoe Wong

Film Photographer - Spence Messih

Photo Editor – Alexander Tanazefti

Text Graphics - Charlie Cummings

Kumano 

Ella Tindal / Daniel Emmerig / Katie Rijke / Angelica Madani / Jared Ziegler / Hannah James / Brittany Endacott / Bhoomi Fofandi / Lucinda Rose / Jacqui O'Reilly / Luke Power / Sergey Litvinov / Lily Peng / Wong Yau Chun / Rosalie Waugh / Charlotte Pearce / Leila Frijat / Carly-Anne Eluna / Helena Todd 

Curatorial Team: Alex Malcolm / Rosalie Waugh / Angelica Madani

27 April - 13 May 2017

Launch Night Tuesday 2 May 2017, 5-7pm 

What inspires 20 art students to travel from UNSW to Wakayama Japan to walk 60 Km through an ancient forest on a thousand year old pilgrimage trail? 

Kumano answers this by reflecting upon the collective and personal journeys experienced whilst walking the trails of Kumano Kodo and Koyasan, to offer new transformative as well as cross-cultural perspectives. 

Kumano responds to these students’ deep engagement with the natural environment, spiritual traditions and folklore as well as the people from the local community. Through diverse disciplines and media, their works explore the powerful interconnections between environment, spirituality and community specific to the cultural and historical context of Kumano Kodo and Koyasan.  

Space one

here / there

Rebecca Waterstone

17 May - 3 June, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 16 May 2017, 5-7pm

here / there is an exploration of the visceral intensity of yearning across extreme distance. Through distilled imagery, colour fields, sensory materials, and found objects, this exhibition reflects the artist’s personal experiences over 17 years of living and travelling between Australia and Scotland. Works drawn from immersion in the landscapes of the Upper Blue Mountains (Australia) and the outer-Hebridean Isle of Skye (Scotland) are transposed into a series of meditative, minimal works that blur memory, time and place. Works include film, sound, scent, photographs, found objects, textiles, and encaustic (beeswax) painting.  

space two

Fuselage

Bruno Panucci

17 May - 3 June, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 16 May 2017, 5-7pm

Performance Times:

Tuesday May 16 - 5 - 6pm Wednesday May 17 - 11am - 2pm Friday May 19 - 11am - 6pm Saturday May 27 - 11am - 4pm Wednesday May 31 - 11am - 2pm

Drawn from their own experience of intercontinental relocation and the subsequent feelings of up-rootedness upon ‘homecoming’, emerging artist Bruno Panucci shares observations from the aircraft seat which acts as a metonymy for (extra)personal states of transition in the liminal space that is the Fuselage.

The installation is activated by a segmented twenty-hour durational performance, mapping the personal but also complicating, for eclectic audiences, the uncanny and abstract notion of ‘home' - as both a nowhere and now/here state. Like the aeroplane, Fuselage and its inhabitants are ever changing and in constant transit. Offering the prophetic potential to reimagine these non-spaces, spaces between temporality and location, in a post-nation narrative. 

Or in the musings of Alain De Botton, “with the inflight tray, we make ourselves at home in this unhomely place.”

1) Alain De Botton, “The Art Of Travel”. Chapter II: On traveling places. Pp 45.

Image: Bruno Panucci, Fuselage (detail). Performance activated installation. 2017.

space one

A Trail of Petals and Dirt

Douglas Schofield

7 - 24 June 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 6 June 2017, 5-7pm

A Trail of Petals and Dirt is a painting and printmaking exhibition responding to the contemporary, controlled relationship between humans and Nature. This exhibition is a reaction to the Anthropocene age, in which all environments are in some way effected by human activity. In particular, looking at the ways we confine Nature through practices of gardening, farming, horticulture and indoor plants. These works provide a space to challenge what Nature looks like today, and how we define and interact with it. Playing with an abstract expression of colour and texture, Douglas Schofield explores an alternative way of engaging with the natural world.

Image: Douglas Schofield, Look at all those greens! Are you looking?!, 2016, acrylic and oil on canvas, 70x50cm.

Acknowledgements

Caoife Power; for contributions to the writing of the exhibition description.

Space two

Interceded Living Space

Jenny Tubby

7 - 24 June 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 6 June 2017, 5-7pm

Interceded Living Space is an immersive multi layered installation of fictional spaces for habitation in the form of sculptural constructions. The exhibition is a reconfiguration of components from previous works to create a new installation. The constructions are informed by memory, history and architecture and are fabricated principally in recycled paper and cardboard and are accompanied by objects and performance video. The work is designed to be added to and can be continually developed and manifest in different ways.

The making of the rooms is a means of processing memories from my past and because of this a layering of personal history is embedded in the work. The rooms are also like curiosity boxes that invite the viewer to enter and explore.

Image: Jenny Tubby, The Mirror  (detail) 2016, mixed media.

Space two

Re: materialise

Patrick Younis, Tara Jade Pearson, Loc Nguyen, Alyssa Kulyk, Lily Belnick

5 - 22 July, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 4 July 2017, 5-7pm

Re: materialise is an exhibition that explores the materiality of tangible communication and the virtual form through interactive installations. Using new media technologies to realise immersive environments, audiences are encouraged to transgress the behavioural codes within a gallery space in the form of movement, gesture, sound and touch.  

Re: materialise aims to create a synergy between the virtual and physical worlds in order to demonstrate the embodied and tangible capabilities of the digital. People are invited to explore the physical and conceptual potential of new media, as hosted by interactive and immersive artworks.

Image: TiFLTMNTN, 2016, Patrick Younis.

space one

At that exact moment

Angela Garrick

5 - 22 July, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 4 July 2017, 5-7pm

At that exact moment, a new exhibition by Angela Garrick, seeks to excavate the intricacies of both personal and public memory through the mirror of the contemporary event. After a research period in which the artist has collected a selection of responses from the public, the resulting exhibition will present a collection of written and verbal accounts detailing personal recollections and remembrances regarding two celebrity deaths. 

The exhibition will examine concepts of social archeology, excavating a sense of cultural personal correlation, family communication, generational difference and the role of the media in contemporary society. We see an evolution of modes of communication, processes of remembrance, and the uses of technology to disseminate information between the two dates mentioned.

At That Exact Moment continues the artist’s project of establishing situations that examine at the nature of public engagement and authenticity, collective and personal memories and how they coalesce with media and cultural history. Through these continued research and practical experiments, the artist will move towards questioning and revealing notions of ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ public knowledge and dissemination of information, especially from prior to the pre-24 hour news cycle and pre-internet era.

Read Gabrielle Chantiri's document confirming the opening of At that exact moment 4 July 2017 at Kudos Gallery produced as part of the Emerging Critics Award

Download

space one

Dislocation

Amanda Lim, Linda Sok, Sabrina Hugo, Sasha Mishkin, Sizhou Liu, Rumpa Paweenpongpat

Curated by Hannah Jenkins and Caoife Power 

26 July - 12 August, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 25 July 2017, 5-7pm

Hundreds of international students are welcomed to UNSW Art & Design each year as we work together to grow Sydney’s cultural diversity and global connections. With more than 50 countries represented on campus, students are drawn to Sydney’s vibrant, cosmopolitan lifestyle for periods of exchange, or entire programs of study. However, language barriers, culture shock, immigration bureaucracy, the cost of living and social isolation are realities rarely addressed when promoting international study. 

Dislocation invites international students to explore these experiences in an effort to convey how they navigate their time in Australia. Through photography, video, design, writing and more, this exhibition strives to uncover deeper understandings about the challenges and triumphs that come from being a part of the international student community at UNSW Art & Design. 

Image: Sasha Mishkin, An Itch You Can't Scratch

Writing and curatorial contributions from Dara Wei, Emma Wilson, Jens Cheung and Stella Tan

Space two

Warp Speed Relief

Lilium Burrow & Alexandra Russell-Floyd

26 July - 12 August, 2017

Opening Night Tuesday 25 July 2017, 5-7pm

Warp Speed Relief presents new work by Lilium Burrow and Alexandra Russell-Floyd exploring the use of fabric and surface as expanded painting mediums. From recycled fabric remnants to shiny new silk samples, Burrow and Russell-Floyd deconstruct and reconstruct materials to play with contour, camouflage, illusion, and mixed dimensionality. A shared engagement with physical and non-physical techniques of cutting and pasting, encourages a dialogue between their work. Warp Speed Relief includes hybrid prints, paintings, drawings and sculptures. 

Image: Left: Alexandra Russell-Floyd, skel, 2017, acrylic on stitched canvas, dimensions variable. Detail. Right: Lilium Burrow, Moss Forest, 2017, digital print on Tyvek, 84cm x 120cm. Detail 

Kudos Emerging Artist & Designer Award 2017

Launch and winners announcement: Tuesday 22 August 2017, 5-8pm

23 August - 9 September, 2017

The Kudos Award is an annual award that seeks to recognise, nurture and support innovation and excellence across all disciplines at UNSW Art & Design.

This award aims to promote excellence in visual art and design at UNSW, to encourage experimentation and development of process, material and concept, to display UNSW Art and Design to the broader community and to nurture creative activity and community within the Paddington campus of UNSW.

2017 Finalists:                

Space one

The Static Televisual Device in the Age of Rapid Technological Change

Miguel Felipe Valenzuela

20 September- 7 October 2017

Opening Night: Tuesday 19 September 2017, 5- 7 PM

The Static Televisual Device in the Age of Rapid Technological Change interrogates the cathode ray tube in an age where there are more screens than people on the planet. We live in a digital world where tube televisions and devices have come to be viewed as anachronistic forms in all their incarnations. The exhibition digitally reframes the cathode ray tube through speculative reconfigurations, exploring the complexities inherent in technologies that are deeply embedded in the social imagination, their propensity to evoke nostalgic responses and their place in a volatile ecological landscape.

Image: The Static Televisual Device in the Age of Rapid Technological Change Installation View 2016. Photos: Finn Marchant and Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer

Space two

Kudos Live: Volume 2

Jenny Alaca, Ponnaya Devi, Sïan Kelly, Loc Nguyen, Bruno Panucci, Matthew Varnay

Curated by Audrey Pfister

19 September - 7 October, 2017

Opening Night: Tuesday 19 September 2017, 5-7 PMFor Kudos Live: Volume 2 performance is explored as a practice intersecting the persona, the spatial and the ephemeral. The exhibition frames the body as an instrument to activate and navigate the space of Kudos Gallery. Kudos Live: Volume 2 mediates what residue, marks, and material will remain following the body’s temporal engagement with the space.

Kudos Live in this second instalment will host a range of student work that assembles and plays with capacities and modes of the performative. This series proposes the gallery space as a site for investigating the codes present in the space and relationships of the spectacle and the spectator.

Kudos Live: Volume 2 will be presented over two Tuesday evenings:

Ponnaya Devi, Loc Nguyen, Bruno PanucciKudos Live: Volume 2, Part 2Tuesday 3 October 5-7 PMJenny Alaca, Sïan Kelly, Matthew Varnay

Image: Ponnaya Devi at Heaps Gay Masqueerade at Sydney Fringe by Satsuki Minoda.

Oh, it's a horror show

Joshua Bentley, Jessica Bradford, Beth Dillon & Anton Benois, Loc Nguyen, Luke Ryan O'Connor, Katy B Plummer, Jason Phu, Brenton Alexander Smith, Meng-Yu Yan

Curated by Luke Letourneau & Louise Zhang

11 - 28 October 2017

Opening Night: Tuesday 10 October 2017, 5-7 PM

Oh, it’s a horror show is a group exhibition that brings together recent works by artists in the early stages of their careers. This exhibition will present bodies and forms that court parallels with the aesthetic stimulations of the campier side of the cinematic horror genre.

Oh, it’s a horror show revels in the ambiguity of morality; space and forms are not what they seem, what may feel dangerous and shocking can also seem oddly familiar, cute even. This show works through the genre of horror and camp to articulate alternative aesthetics for ideal bodies and characteristics. Monsters are celebrated, but they are also parodied and caricatured as a way of undercutting the mentality that there are ever going to be absolutes when it comes to what is right and normal when it comes to the body or how it expresses itself.

You'll see all kinds of bodies in this exhibition; fat ones, hairy ones, discolored ones and transforming ones. They are all in states of becoming and you will see them in all their stumbling and fumbling, awkward glory.  

Image: (Clutches sun lounge, Supermoon rising), 2016

Realising Mother

Curated by Zorica Purlija as part of the Early Career Curator Award, supported by Kudos Gallery with Arc @ UNSW Art & Design and Art & Design Student Council.

Denise Ferris, Sally McInerney, Julie Sundberg, Ella Dreyfus, Anke Stäcker, Deborah Kelly, Raphaela Rosella, Miho Watanabe, Sarah Rhodes, Teena McCarthy, Clare Rae, Donna Bailey, Anne Zahalka, Rafaela Pandolfini, Theresa Byrnes and Lottie Consalvo.

1-18 November 2017

Opening Night: Tuesday 31 October 2017, 5-7 PM

Artist panel chaired y Serafina Lee (winner Emerging Critic Award 2017) Tuesday 14 November 2017, 5.30-7.30

Closing drinks and artist floor talk Saturday 18 November 2017, 1-3 PM

Realising Mother is a new exhibition presenting photographic, video and blog works by a collection of emerging and established Australian women artists. The exhibition investigates the role of the mother in our culture and the histories that continue to shape that role. 

The photographic image is, as always, in flux. We are experiencing a glut of imagery through social media. The photograph has chameleon qualities and can adapt itself to many forms. An excessive media-fed society impacted by globalisation and other causes distorts the image and its meanings.

Realising Mother looks at how this affects us all, and explores the issues surrounding the maternal experience. These artists question how we realise and frame images of motherhood and the way the medium of photography has the power to describe real experiences.

This exhibition aims to free us from preconceived ideas and myths around motherhood, replacing them with narratives more relevant to our contemporary experience. Issues explored by these talented artists include; marginalised young mothers, maternal ambivalence, mother daughter relationships, the aging mother, intergenerational inheritance, the loss of identity as mother, the centrality of the mother figure in the family, LBGTQ families and the role of the mother in indigenous cultures. 

This exhibition takes inspiration from the real experience of photographic artist, and the curator of Realising Mother, Zorica Purlija’s role as a mother of three. Purlija also recognises the Women’s Art Movement in Australia (formed in 1974) and Catriona Moore’s book Indecent Exposures (1994) as significant contributions to interpreting the role of women and mothers in contemporary society.The work of these important Australian feminist artists from the 70’s and 80’s was simultaneously serious and morally and ethically driven. Their aims were to create change culturally and socially regarding the female subject, and social and sexual freedoms, interrogating the idea of the male gaze. 

Realising Mother looks at what has changed in the last forty years because of this important work by feminist artists still in our midst, and the ways artists continue to reinterpret the role of mother.

Image: Rafaela Pandolfini '02-02', 2014-15. Single channel video piece 9.2 hours. Photos: Finn Marchant and Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer