For your convenience I have listed below other posts on thie blogspot that features Melbourne Now exhibitions:
Melbourne Now - Part I
Melbourne Now - Part II
Melbourne Now - Part III
Melbourne Now - Part IV
Melbourne Now - Part V
'Melbourne Now' was an art exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014. It takes as it premise the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work in its midsts. The aim is to explore how Melbourne's visual artists and creative practitioners contribute to the dynamic cultural identity of this city. The result is an exhibition that celebrates what is unique about Melbourne's art, design and architecture communities.
The intention of this exhibition is to encourage and inspire everyone to discover some of the best of Melbourne's culture. To help achieve this, family-friendly activities, dance and music performances, inspiring talks from creative practitioner's, city walks and ephemeral installations and events made up the public program.
This and other posts in this series will concentrate on the participating artists rather than on other features of the exhibition event (e.g., family friendly commisions developed especially for children and young audiences that aimed to encourage participatory learning for kids and families etc.)
Melbourne Now - Part I[1]
Geoff Lowe and Jacquelin Riva
Title: A Constructed World.
'A Constructed World' is the moniker of the influential artistic collaboration between Geoff Lowe and Jacquelin Riva. Active since 1993, and currently based in Paris, A Constructive World's projects encompass painting and video, publishing and performance, workshops and events. Often involving improvisation, free association and choeography of multiple participants and perspectives Lowe and Riva's practice encourages risk, response and unexpected encounters in an investigation of the act of making art.
For Melbourne Now, 'A Constructed World,' reflects on the shift towards neoliberalism and economic rationalism that has occurred over the past decade, during which Lowe and Riva have mostly lived abroad. Informed by a period of research undertaken with French philosopher, Fabien Vallos, and arists extended collaborative group 'Speech and What Active', 'A Constructed World' explores Aristotle's notion of the Chrematistic: the process of accumulating wealth through money and goods regardless of their use value. The resulting collaboration of works, one painting, one video and one sculpture - references the parable of the talents from Mathew 25: 14-30 and explores the embarassment and conscious duplicity of this story and it's implications [1].
ALLYOURWALLS - Hoiser Lane
Located in central Melbourne (between Flinders Lane and Flinders Street and running parallel to Russell Street), Hoiser Lane, along with its cobbled 'anabranch' Rutledge Lane, first came to prominence as a venue for street art in the 1990s. Since then, the walls of the lanes have functioned as an exhibition site for local and international street artists. Recently, several organizations have been working with local artists to invigorate Hosier Lane with a diverse range of projects. Among the organizations fostering dynamic art events within Hosier Lane are notable Melbourne street art blog - Land of Sunshine, Invurt - one of Australia's leading online underground art magazines - and Hosier Inc., a community association comprising of residents, property owners and artists.
ALLYOURWALLS has been organized by Land of Sunshine and Invurt in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and Hoiser Inc., and forms a key component of 'Melbourne Now.' It brings together some of Melbourne's finest street artists and graffiti crews in a major makeover of Hosier Lane that celebrates the significant role street art and graffiti continues to play in the cultural life of this city.
Rick Amor
Title: Mobile Call (2012).
Rick Amor has been involved in artmaking, more specifically painting, sculpture and printmaking, for many decades. Amor's world is a rich composition of his life aesthetic and experiences played out through his work. He has held numerous solo shows and is represented in major public and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Best known for his brooding urban landscapes, Amor's work in Melbourne Now, 'Mobile Call' (2012) stays true to his theme. The painting speaks to the heart of urban living in its depiction of a darkened city alleyway, with dim, foreboding lighting. A security camera on the wall surveys the scene, a lone austere figure just within its watch. The camera represents the omnipresent surveillance of our modern lives, and an uneasy air of suspicion permeates the painting's subdued, gray landscape. Amor's reflections on the urban landscape are solemn, restrained and often melancholic. Quietly powerful, his work alludes to a mystery in the banality of daily existence, 'Mobile Call' is a realistic portrayal of a metropolitan landscape that opens our eyes to a strange and complex world.
Brook Andrew
Title: Vax: Beyond Tasmania (Detail, 2013).
Brook Andrew is an artist of considerable daring and flair whose works often unsettles or destablizes conventional readings of the world. His shifting, interdisciplinery practice challenges stereotypical notions of history, identity and race, without apportioning blame or guilt. The seductive beauty of his work entices the viewer to confront repugnant acts of racism, voyeurism and oppression and to address dangerous ideas and taboos.
Andrew's, Vox: Beyond Tasmania (2013) renders palpable contemporary art at a central preoccupation of his humanist practice - the legacy of historical trauma on the present. Inspired by a rare volume of drawings of fifty-two Tasmanian Aboriginal crania, Andrew has created a vast wunderkammer containing a severed human skeleton, anthropological literature and artifacts. The focal point of this assemblage of decontexturalized exotica is a skull, which lays bare the practice of desecrating sacred burial sites in order to snatch Aboriginal skeletal remains as scientific trophies, amassed as specimens to be studied in support of taxonomic theories of evolution and eugenics. Andrew's profound and humbling memorial to genocide was supported in its first presentation by fifty-two portraits and a commissioned requiem by composer Stephanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe.
Benjamin Armstrong
Title: Conjuring (2011).
Prolific multidisciplinary artist Benjamin Armstrong was born in Melbourne in 1975. He graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1996, and since then he has widely exhibited his work, ranging from sculpture to works on paper, in Australia and abroad. Amstrong's distinctive style is intriguing, adventureous and also slightly unsettling: his expermentation and play with visceral, sensual forms, patterns and materials provokes strong reactions in the viewer.
The large scale works on paper by Armstrong included in Melbourne Now are no different. These pieces are charged with mysterious energy that is pregnant with potential, signifying transformation, turbence and instability. Each work carries loose, swirling watercolor forms, which suggests hovering emotional and physcical forces to be contended with. The charged and powerful tentacles in Conjuring (2011), reveal a vastly different tone to his work Victory, 2011, where beams of light crack through a looming, dark sky, elicitng slight optimism. Individually and collectively these works pose big questions about our world, our geographies, and our origins.
Janet Beckhouse
Title: Portsea (2013).
Janet Beckhouse is one of Melbourne's foremost contemporary ceramicists. Her sculptural forms are influenced by the aesthetics of Baroque and Rococo ornamentation, fifteenth-century majolica ware and early twentieth-century Australian ceramic traditions. Beckhouse completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University in 2000, and a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2012. She has exhibited widely in Australia.
Beckhouse's elaborate creations often have a melancholic air and impart a sense of dark forelore. Skulls and bones - symbols of the fragility of human existence and the inevitability of our mortality - are recurring motifs and lend her oeuvre a contemporary streetwise currency. References to the natural world, from lizards, snakes and sea creatures, to intricate plants and elaborate corals also punctuate her work. Characterised by a visual cacophony of forms and references, Beckhouse's art is one of contrasts. As fellow ceramicist Peter Pilven observed, 'Like the music of Jimi Hendrix, whom she admires, [Beckhouse's] creations often convey a discordant spikiness that can contrast and clash, creating a visual disharmony that is not always pretty or comfortable.
Stephen Benwell
Title: Statue, Arm Raised (2011).
Stephen Benwell's practice, which has spanned many decades, includes printmaking, drawing and painting; however, he is best known for his distinctive hand-built and feely created decorated ceramic forms and figures. Benwell began his professional career in 1975 and since then he has held numerous solo exhibitions including an exhibition in 2013 at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. His work typically integrates elements of classical history with a lyrical artistic aesthetic and unconventional approach to the ceramic medium.
Throughout his career a major preoccupation of Benwell's work has been the depiction of the male figure. In 2006 he commenced a series of figurative sculptural works that explore issues relating to masculinity, naked beauty and sensuality. These works, initially inspired by eighteenth century figurines and Greco-Roman statuary, have become significant aspects of Benwell's recent practice. The artist contributes a group of these evocative figures for Melbourne Now.
Reference:
[1] T. Ellwood, Director, National Gallery of Victoria.
Melbourne Now - Part I
Melbourne Now - Part II
Melbourne Now - Part III
Melbourne Now - Part IV
Melbourne Now - Part V
'Melbourne Now' was an art exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014. It takes as it premise the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work in its midsts. The aim is to explore how Melbourne's visual artists and creative practitioners contribute to the dynamic cultural identity of this city. The result is an exhibition that celebrates what is unique about Melbourne's art, design and architecture communities.
The intention of this exhibition is to encourage and inspire everyone to discover some of the best of Melbourne's culture. To help achieve this, family-friendly activities, dance and music performances, inspiring talks from creative practitioner's, city walks and ephemeral installations and events made up the public program.
This and other posts in this series will concentrate on the participating artists rather than on other features of the exhibition event (e.g., family friendly commisions developed especially for children and young audiences that aimed to encourage participatory learning for kids and families etc.)
Melbourne Now - Part I[1]
Geoff Lowe and Jacquelin Riva
'A Constructed World' is the moniker of the influential artistic collaboration between Geoff Lowe and Jacquelin Riva. Active since 1993, and currently based in Paris, A Constructive World's projects encompass painting and video, publishing and performance, workshops and events. Often involving improvisation, free association and choeography of multiple participants and perspectives Lowe and Riva's practice encourages risk, response and unexpected encounters in an investigation of the act of making art.
For Melbourne Now, 'A Constructed World,' reflects on the shift towards neoliberalism and economic rationalism that has occurred over the past decade, during which Lowe and Riva have mostly lived abroad. Informed by a period of research undertaken with French philosopher, Fabien Vallos, and arists extended collaborative group 'Speech and What Active', 'A Constructed World' explores Aristotle's notion of the Chrematistic: the process of accumulating wealth through money and goods regardless of their use value. The resulting collaboration of works, one painting, one video and one sculpture - references the parable of the talents from Mathew 25: 14-30 and explores the embarassment and conscious duplicity of this story and it's implications [1].
ALLYOURWALLS - Hoiser Lane
ALLYOURWALLS has been organized by Land of Sunshine and Invurt in association with the National Gallery of Victoria and Hoiser Inc., and forms a key component of 'Melbourne Now.' It brings together some of Melbourne's finest street artists and graffiti crews in a major makeover of Hosier Lane that celebrates the significant role street art and graffiti continues to play in the cultural life of this city.
Rick Amor
Rick Amor has been involved in artmaking, more specifically painting, sculpture and printmaking, for many decades. Amor's world is a rich composition of his life aesthetic and experiences played out through his work. He has held numerous solo shows and is represented in major public and private collections in Australia and internationally.
Best known for his brooding urban landscapes, Amor's work in Melbourne Now, 'Mobile Call' (2012) stays true to his theme. The painting speaks to the heart of urban living in its depiction of a darkened city alleyway, with dim, foreboding lighting. A security camera on the wall surveys the scene, a lone austere figure just within its watch. The camera represents the omnipresent surveillance of our modern lives, and an uneasy air of suspicion permeates the painting's subdued, gray landscape. Amor's reflections on the urban landscape are solemn, restrained and often melancholic. Quietly powerful, his work alludes to a mystery in the banality of daily existence, 'Mobile Call' is a realistic portrayal of a metropolitan landscape that opens our eyes to a strange and complex world.
Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew is an artist of considerable daring and flair whose works often unsettles or destablizes conventional readings of the world. His shifting, interdisciplinery practice challenges stereotypical notions of history, identity and race, without apportioning blame or guilt. The seductive beauty of his work entices the viewer to confront repugnant acts of racism, voyeurism and oppression and to address dangerous ideas and taboos.
Andrew's, Vox: Beyond Tasmania (2013) renders palpable contemporary art at a central preoccupation of his humanist practice - the legacy of historical trauma on the present. Inspired by a rare volume of drawings of fifty-two Tasmanian Aboriginal crania, Andrew has created a vast wunderkammer containing a severed human skeleton, anthropological literature and artifacts. The focal point of this assemblage of decontexturalized exotica is a skull, which lays bare the practice of desecrating sacred burial sites in order to snatch Aboriginal skeletal remains as scientific trophies, amassed as specimens to be studied in support of taxonomic theories of evolution and eugenics. Andrew's profound and humbling memorial to genocide was supported in its first presentation by fifty-two portraits and a commissioned requiem by composer Stephanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe.
Benjamin Armstrong
Prolific multidisciplinary artist Benjamin Armstrong was born in Melbourne in 1975. He graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1996, and since then he has widely exhibited his work, ranging from sculpture to works on paper, in Australia and abroad. Amstrong's distinctive style is intriguing, adventureous and also slightly unsettling: his expermentation and play with visceral, sensual forms, patterns and materials provokes strong reactions in the viewer.
The large scale works on paper by Armstrong included in Melbourne Now are no different. These pieces are charged with mysterious energy that is pregnant with potential, signifying transformation, turbence and instability. Each work carries loose, swirling watercolor forms, which suggests hovering emotional and physcical forces to be contended with. The charged and powerful tentacles in Conjuring (2011), reveal a vastly different tone to his work Victory, 2011, where beams of light crack through a looming, dark sky, elicitng slight optimism. Individually and collectively these works pose big questions about our world, our geographies, and our origins.
Janet Beckhouse
Janet Beckhouse is one of Melbourne's foremost contemporary ceramicists. Her sculptural forms are influenced by the aesthetics of Baroque and Rococo ornamentation, fifteenth-century majolica ware and early twentieth-century Australian ceramic traditions. Beckhouse completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University in 2000, and a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2012. She has exhibited widely in Australia.
Beckhouse's elaborate creations often have a melancholic air and impart a sense of dark forelore. Skulls and bones - symbols of the fragility of human existence and the inevitability of our mortality - are recurring motifs and lend her oeuvre a contemporary streetwise currency. References to the natural world, from lizards, snakes and sea creatures, to intricate plants and elaborate corals also punctuate her work. Characterised by a visual cacophony of forms and references, Beckhouse's art is one of contrasts. As fellow ceramicist Peter Pilven observed, 'Like the music of Jimi Hendrix, whom she admires, [Beckhouse's] creations often convey a discordant spikiness that can contrast and clash, creating a visual disharmony that is not always pretty or comfortable.
Stephen Benwell
Stephen Benwell's practice, which has spanned many decades, includes printmaking, drawing and painting; however, he is best known for his distinctive hand-built and feely created decorated ceramic forms and figures. Benwell began his professional career in 1975 and since then he has held numerous solo exhibitions including an exhibition in 2013 at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. His work typically integrates elements of classical history with a lyrical artistic aesthetic and unconventional approach to the ceramic medium.
Throughout his career a major preoccupation of Benwell's work has been the depiction of the male figure. In 2006 he commenced a series of figurative sculptural works that explore issues relating to masculinity, naked beauty and sensuality. These works, initially inspired by eighteenth century figurines and Greco-Roman statuary, have become significant aspects of Benwell's recent practice. The artist contributes a group of these evocative figures for Melbourne Now.
Reference:
[1] T. Ellwood, Director, National Gallery of Victoria.
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