Upcoming
Exhibition Dates: April 24 - May 11, 2024
Aaron Perkins
One banana, two bananana, three banananana…
Fruit/berry/herb: an irregular plural holds up the banana as an absurd symbol of nuance through a series of text paintings that articulate an alternative grammatical numbering system for the plural form of banana.
Aaron Perkins is a Naarm-based artist with a conceptual text-based practice that playfully explores the role of language within knowledge formation through strategies of graphic, typographic and orthographic abstraction. He has a keen interest in fiction and holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the Queensland College of Art for his research into the potential of fiction and autofiction within painting.
Caitlin Rigby
‘Last Winter’ is an exhibition of paintings from seasons past. Night scenes of moonlit oceans, garden blooms, and vistas become a visual ballad of organic symbolism. Rigby's artistic explorations are embedded in intuitive painting techniques. Layered brushstrokes emerge and reveal as well as conceal and obscure. What remains is the evidencing of gesture in dynamic evolution: a composition that can only happen from building upon what was set down before. Harmonious interplay of a skilfully handled palette of blue hues, ‘Last Winter’ invites viewers to delve into the poetic landscape and melancholic beauty of Rigby’s imagination.
Dani Andree
Tethering now critiques a Western mode of relating to plant-life founded on the reductive, calculative predetermination of living beings through their usefulness as resources. With destructive material outcomes, the exploitative practices promoted by such worldviews compromise relations between living beings. Principles of extraction, cultivation, speed, and supersedence exemplified in the industrial production of textiles and clothing provide a context for understanding why and how the forms in Tethering now have been made.
At the centre of Tethering now is an ongoing practice called the nourishment ritual, undertaken since 2021 in the gardens of the artist and a Tagetes lucida plant’s changing residences. Observations and contemplations transmitted within this nourishment ritual are starting points for the mixed-media and time-lapse pieces in the exhibition. Here, the textile form is reclaimed as a palimpsest; tracing, tracking, and shaping the development of the plant-human relationship depicted in the nourishment ritual. These emergent material outcomes foreground the ontological difference embedded in such relations.
The requisition of the artist’s focus and movements necessitated by the nourishment ritual has been central to the cultivation of a disposition where meditative-contemplative thinking and its potentialities can be realised. A kind of vegetal training of human movement and thinking is realised through the repetition, duration, and location set apart from everyday demands placed on the technologically immersed body. The inverted plant-human relations of cultivation implicit in this training imagines a holding of the artist and viewer in place, on call for the Tagetes lucida.
Dani Andrée is an artist and research candidate at RMIT University, Naarm (Melbourne). She has an interest in the way that functional, everyday spaces enter our conscious awareness. Spatiotemporal manipulations, bodily endurance, and breakdowns in function are employed to examine ontological qualities of and relations between matter and bodies in space.
Past projects have included the phenomenal experience of time slippages while walking through city spaces and the domestic as a perpetual point of return. An overarching sensibility throughout her practice is a preoccupation with progression, forward or outward movement.
Her current research posits encounters with plants that consider the tension between their role within artworks as matter and their existence as intelligent, self-determining subjects. Artworks creating the conditions for dialogical relations between plants, the artist and the viewer provide a counterpoint to instrumentalist ways of interacting with plant life.
This exhibition follows Perennial series shown
