PAST EXHIBITIONS . 2017
Constellations
LINSEY GOSPER
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Ups and Downs
THE RYAN SISTERS
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Once Upon A Time the World Wasn't Brown
JESSICA LEDWICH
Death, ritual and old Hollywood become re-mythologised on a personal level in LINSEY GOSPER's Constellations, captured as part of GOSPER’s own self-imposed rituals in directing and manifesting energy. Old symbols and architecture become portals to locations within GOSPER’s unconscious, and meditations to the stars.
The children’s playground is often seen as the embodiment of innocence and fun. In Ups and Downs, THE RYAN SISTERS introduce the viewer to something much more eerie, evocative and sinister, but also humorous in true Ryan Sister's style.
Once Upon a Time the World Wasn’t Brown presents a bizarrely sensual series of video works by JESSICA LEDWICH, set to the humorous musical suite Carnival of the Animals, distorting and objectifying our connection to 1980s childhood icons and our own complex relationship with the body. Nothing remains entirely familiar in this strange and twisted world.
The Macfarlane Fund presents
FAIRY TURNER
LOUISE TATE
STEVEN CHRISTIE
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The Surinam Toad
ANDREI DAVIDOFF
This group exhibition was jointly presented by the MACFARLANE FUND and STOCKROOM as the culmination of a series of residencies undertaken in 2017 by three recent graduate artists, FAIRY TURNER, LOUISE TATE and STEVEN CHRISTIE.
With this new body of work, ANDREI DAVIDOFF presents a series of ceramic in gallery 2, vessel-like forms that attempt to evolve from mundane, decorative ware to objects of ominous intent. Utilising images and decorative motives found in eastern European mythology, and combining these with popular imagery of momento mori, Davidoff creates forms that, whilst holding something of a narrative, contain no happy ending.
Stockroom Travels : Cremorne
ARA DOLATIAN
NICHOLAS IVES
EMMA LANGRIDGE
VANESSA LUCAS
KERRI MCCONCHIE
CAMERON ROBBINS
MARK RODDA
THE RYAN SISTERS
ROH SINGH
JASON WATERHOUSE
GREG WOOD
Stockroom is very proud to present its inaugural Stockroom Travels Exhibition Series beyond its permanent location in regional Victoria. To launch the newly completed Cremorne Studios and make welcome its new tenants, this exhibition brings together a selection of artists who regularly show at Stockroom’s Kyneton gallery.
CREMORNE STUDIOS
17 William St, Cremorne 3121
14 OCTOBER / 5 NOVEMBER 2017
gallery 1
Liminal
ERIKA GOFTON
Erika Gofton’s work is fundamentally about empathy. About how we respond and feel for another and in turn how we then connect to ourselves. She is especially interested in exploring the intersubjective relationship of mother and child, in particular that liminal state of adolescence; the heightened internal fear and anxiety of being close yet distant in the same breath. Her work sits somewhere precariously between the light and the dark, the beautiful and the ugly, the lucid and the ambiguous. The work is a catharsis, a way to confront the discomfort both through the image and the process. It has become the nadir, the threshold, the point of letting go. The mark has become both the conduit and the counsel.
14 OCTOBER / 5 NOVEMBER 2017
gallery 2
SIRI HAYES
Botanical Backdrop V . 2017
giclee print
110 x 128 cm
Botanical Backdrop
SIRI HAYES
"Botanical Backdrop continues my ongoing intrigue with investigating the essential components that contribute to creating pictures and, in particular, photographs alongside a pervading interest in place and landscape. The new work stems from a video work I made last year that is also included in the exhibition."
Siri Hayes, 2017.
14 OCTOBER / 5 NOVEMBER 2017
project space
Ok I'll do angels instead
SAM PETERSEN
Sam Petersen's work stems from the self and all that is close to her. She is interested in what can be done with one's fluid self and the space around it. The artist work relates to body as well as mind, exploring everyday feelings between the rational and the playful. Click on the audio link below to listen to the artist speaking about her work.
Remote Drawings
CAMERON ROBBINS
Cameron Robbins has been presenting his work to our Stockroom audience for many years. Stockroom regulars will know his permanent work on site; Atmospheric Test Rig which has been a constant source of fascination. Remote Drawings was an exhibition in September 2017 of Robbins work, across our three gallery spaces. This significant project was Robbin's first solo exhibition since his highly successful Field Lines, a major exhibition over nine galleries at The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Cameron is the first Australian artist invited to present a large-scale solo exhibition at MONA.
Cameron Robbins work makes tangible the underlying structures and rhythms of natural forces. Robbins’ inquiries employ structural devices including kinetic wind or water powered mechanical systems. Their aesthetic is the result of both careful engineering and resourcefulness. The outputs of these site-specific installation include wind drawings and sound compositions. These interpretations of the dynamics and scale of the physical world suggest the complexities of the unknown. He has produced site-specific installations and exhibitions in art spaces, disused buildings and outdoor sites in Australia, Switzerland, Japan, Norway, China, Denmark, Germany and the UK.
Remote Drawings at Stockroom, presented a combination of large scale working drawing machines, video, field drawing, photography and intimate sculptural works encompassing the gallery spaces. A large Drawing Machine created a wall-drawing in real time alongside a survey of sculptures, instruments and outcomes from recent site-based projects.
For the launch event on the 9th September at 4:30, Cameron Robbins, along with fellow musicians performed improvised music in response to the sculptures. This one-off event offered an opportunity to engage with the work in a dynamic and immersive manner.
World to the Unseen
Curated by KAREN WOODBURY
World to the Unseen showcases artists working with ideas of the microcosm and macrocosm. The exhibition delves into the notion of correspondence between the universe and man.
LIONEL BAWDEN
MARION BORGELT
HOSSEIN VALAMANESH
ANGELA VALAMANESH
MONIKA TICHACEK
Birdsong
ROH SINGH
Roh Singh’s exhibition, birdsong, draws upon the alluring motif of birds provides rich links to numerous metaphors, symbols and themes of death, fragility or freedom. They can be read as spiritual, totemic or as avatars. Birds also serve as national emblems and are endemic to a region and it’s identity. Hearing the song of a specific bird has the ability to trigger a memory of place akin to a unique smell reminding you of a childhood location. A bird’s song is call and response, a territorial declaration. birdsong is a suite of works exploring a collection of imagery from my two disparate cultural backgrounds.
Singh's practice has often sought to play with an intangible space of sorts – one where two opposing factors present a conundrum. Like the space between positive and negative forms, where neither and both exist simultaneously. This series of cross-cultural mash ups continues this examination of a place where neither can exist wholly.
In Defence of Optimism
MICHAEL NEEDHAM
Back to the Woods
KERRI McCONCHIE
Inhabit.
CAMERON GILL
CAMERON GILL
Blue Water . 2017
oil on canvas
120 x 168cm
This exhibition Inhabit. by Cameron Gill explores the loose documentation of place inhabited by the artist; a small cottage surrounded by tall pines, tucked behind the Wombat State Forest. In creating these works on canvas he pays homage to this area, to its darkness, it's density, openness, and it's light.
Cameron Gill is an emerging artist from Melbourne Australia, whose studio practice is currently based out of the defunct Daylesford Abattoir. Gills practice is project based, working predominantly with paint, in one style or another, depending on the nature of the project.
Personal photographs are often the starting point from which works evolve in his studio, however paintings and painters, past and present, wanderings, and chance, help move his paintings away from photography to talk more about painting itself.
Gill is interested in what it means to be an Australian painter, if that's even important, can you avoid it, would you, why, how do you paint an Australian idea, what the hell is an Australian idea, its perhaps not so important to answer these questions, but to grapple with them.
A new interest in the natural landscape has dominated his practice of late, however this shift from suburban to rural landscapes still holds at its heart a quiet celebration of the ordinary.
Bajka [bye-ka]
KASIA FABIJAŃSKA
KASIA FABIJANSKA
not the end ~ Gariwerd . 2015-17
graphite and charcoal on paper
280 x 152cm
Bajka, [bye-ka], means fable or fairy tale in Polish.
Kasia Fabijiańska takes us back to her childhood in Poland where she spent memorable days in forests making cubby houses, in the fields (flattening a neighbour's wheat crop to make mazes), collecting feathers, flowers, berries and mushrooms. These are some of Fabijiańska’s most vivid memories that feed into this body of work.
The prints and drawings inquire into the ways one connects with nature and the land through culture, food, stories and myths during childhood. The artist reflects on the common ground between her experiences and the indigenous Australian cultural connection to Country.
The artist notes that “every time I am back on Polish soil, this connection to land floods back, despite being away for 32 years. Experiencing this country and getting close to it through nature is one way I can create new bonds, fragile like fresh connective tissue sewing together a wound. Tied to an interest in environmentalism, this exhibition is an inquiry into the mechanisms that elevate nature to a more important level on an intimate and individual basis. This connection is what fuels a drive to protect the environment and the art is part of my activism.”
Sports
TONY MAHONEY
ADAM MILLS
CARLY FISCHER
NICOLE BREEDON
TRAVIS MACDONALD
DANAE VALENZA
EMILY FERRETTI
ELVIS RICHARDSON
Sports is a Kyneton Contemporary Inc project.
Competition and collaboration are cultural currents that are neither at odds nor in complete partnership with each other. They are tendencies that are most clearly at play in the field of sports and find a particularly aesthetic expression in this terrain. Sports brings together the work of eight contemporary artists whose work delves into the complex character of this popular human endeavour.
Sports is a Kyneton Contemporary Inc project.
Even The Golden Ratio Can Make Me Feel Blue
JORDAN GRANT
This exhibition was presented by the McFarlane Fund
Jordan Grant is the inaugural recipient of the Kyneton residency of The Macfarlane Fund. A recent RMIT Fine Arts graduate, his painting practice inhabits a romantic, expressive sensibility as a form within which to explore our complex and ambiguous relationships with images and stimuli.
His recent body of work investigates apophenia (the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data), as a coping mechanism to distil the torrents of information the contemporary subject encounters on a daily basis. Depictions of found patterns interrupt the gestural surface as symbols of this human rationale, and sit within abstractions of landscape as well as references to various painters of influence, in particular Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich’s notions of the sublime are summoned as a counterpoint to the various decorative motifs, where order and pattern-cognition are eschewed and the infinitude of the natural world is all-consuming.
By apposing the ambiguous schema of the sublime and the geometric spirit of rationalism, the painting surface becomes a space for open contemplation as much as affective impetus.
In the midst of infinite births and deaths, in the midst of decay, leaves falling from trees, and waves on the sea—all the infinite chaotic events that randomly occur in the universe—the only stunning and unexpected thing is our inexhaustible craving for sense, harmony, and order.
-Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
This show is dedicated to Rhys Cauzzo, dear friend and author of the show’s title.
Anthropoetics of Space
ARA DOLATIAN
This work represents the relationship between cultural landscapes and the natural ecosystem. A hybrid ecosystem simultaneously resembles a semi functional apparatus, the model of a utopian city and a biological experiment. It also conflates a number of ideas around the themes of the studio and the laboratory and in turn social and environmental politics.
Obsession
NEIL MALONE
Neil Malone’s artworks use process as both method and subject. These works explore the synergy existing between the ideas of disintegration and renewal .
“Obsession”
By using pressure, reduction, replacement and repetitious mark making this exhibition explores “time taken” as a means of visual connection.
Real Life has so much Light
RENUKA RAJIV
Real Life Has So Much Light is a collection of works made over the last two years from different locations in India.
Family and friends who sat for these works became active participants in creating the scenes depicted.
Exploring personal narratives, these works use a docu-fiction approach to create an anthology of intimate constructed moments.
Kwality Chai
SAPNA CHANDU
Set in a hypothetical reality in which India has taken over Australia, Kwality Chai is a playful and subversive exploration of cultural imperialism in a distinctly Australian context.
Aftermarket
BASIL PAPOUTSIDIS
Whilst exploring the post-painterly and sculptural arenas of minimalist construction, Aftermarket is a product of Basil Papoutsidis’ aesthetic fanaticism with material behaviours and the applications of custom automotive culture. Formal experiments explore the introspective quality of material deconstruction, examining object hood in space in the form of rigorous formal experiments. These experiments exist three dimensionally, yet reference the platform of the image and linkage between the format of painting and dimension of sculpture.
Mine - Yours
ROBERT HAGUE
Robert Hague’s imagery plays on the (im)permanence of historical objects, the ambiguities of their meanings, and the cultural associations of their forms. His prints are immediately attractive but harbour contradicting layers that deepen the longer one considers them.