Opening: 6pm-8pm, Wednesday, 10 August, 2022

Exhibition: 11 August – 10 September 2022

Artists

HELEN GRACE

Helen Grace is a new media artist, filmmaker, writer and academic whose work has played an active role in the development of art, cinema, photography, cultural studies and education in Australia and regionally for 30 years. Elements of art and politics intertwine in her work as she draws on the past to reflect on the present. Her work has featured issues relating to women in public and private lives and has been instrumental in interrogating the manner of structuring living spaces; the ways of organising working and living within them, and how to exercise freedom in the everyday.

GRANT STEVENS

Grant Stevens is an Australian artist based on Bidjigal and Gadigal lands (Sydney). Working predominantly with computer graphics, moving image, and photography, his practice explores the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds, social realities, and interpersonal relationships. His recent works tap into therapeutic responses to today’s cult of speed and hyperactivity. Stock photography, mood music, guided meditations, and borrowed phrases remain important reference points, as Stevens uses the tools of visual culture to reflect on its ironies and paradoxes.

KAY ABUDE

Kay Abude is an artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice spans diverse media, including sculpture, large-scale installation, photography, performance, video, and silk screen printing. Her works, often utilising text, function as provocations and explore themes of work, labour and money.  Abude questions the ways in which we value different kinds of work and worker, the sustainability of present-day systems of manufacturing and trade, and the possibility of supporting oneself as an artist or arts worker long-term. With her garments often worn by workers, Abude acknowledges the artistry that these individuals bring to their professions.

LEYLA STEVENS

Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within moving image and photography. Her practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters and transculturation. Working within modes of representation that shift between documentary and speculative fictions, her interest lies in the recuperation of counter histories within dominant narratives. She finds and tells alternative histories, tracing the spectres and remnants of forgotten or willfully erased stories, most often about Bali’s colonial and diasporic past (and present).

SARAH RODIGARI

Sarah Rodigari’s work is an ongoing practice of wrong reading, continually ‘off-script’, Rodigari seeks to elaborate the gap between the performative and the social, creating text-based performances and installations which address the social and political potential of art. Often minor in scale and poetic in address, through site-specific encounters, Sarah’s work takes a variety of forms, from endurance actions, to performance scripts, sculpture, audio-visual, and text-based works, creating new readings from multiple sites and perspectives.Through strategies of humility, absurdity and contradiction, Rodigari’s practice seeks to both render visible the given conditions of labour – the common sense that prevails, or the ‘script’ – and the potential for this script to be otherwise. Within their work, ‘wrong’ becomes contested and contingent – perhaps resistance, perhaps critique, or something else all together.

SHAN TURNER-CARROLL

Shan Turner-Carroll is an Australian artist of Burmese descent. Deeply fascinated with unearthing tacit knowledge, his practice integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The artist’s practice interrogates both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer: sending and receiving signals. His work can sing to snakes, serenade and signal with aliens, and barter with islands, rivers, and oceans. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his practice, not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location. Turner-Carroll sees art-making as ritualistic and transformative, using play, humour and experimentation as key elements within his current practice.