PAST EXHIBITIONS . 2018
8 DECEMBER / 6 JANUARY
ALL THE DEVILS IN ME
IRENE WELLM
Irene Wellm is drawn to the underworld journey, exploring hidden and ambiguous narratives in her art. The ancients knew it as the Underworld, where the spirits dwelt. Today it is the inner, or psychological realm, where creative activity is still uncanny and mysterious.
The framework surrounding her art is one that explores fairy tales, myth and religious stories as symbolic maps for the psyche. A life-long interest in the theories of psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) also informs the method by which the artist explores her imagery.
Using the trope of childhood Paper Dolls, these dream-like, large-scale gouache paintings on paper explore the artist’s deepest identity formatted as playful and surreal fables. The collage-like layers, originating from explorations using digital collage, aim at communicating the multi-layered and symbolic language of the unconscious. Here both beasts, heroes and heroines move in the tides of life below the surface.
WOUNDED DEER
MARTIN HODGE
Martin Hodge paints and draws toys and porcelain models to describes a possible future in which technology and biology redefine hierarchies of power and absurdity.
10 NOVEMBER / 2 DECEMBER
Mcfarlane Fund 2018
ANGELA CHAUVIN . HARRY HUGHES . JOSEPHINE MEAD
The Macfarlane Fund was established with the primary focus to offer financial support across the career span of artists with three main funding streams at graduate, mid-career and senior levels.
This group exhibition was the culmination of a series of residencies provided by The Macfarlane Fund for recent 2018 art graduate students, Angela Chauvin, Harry Hughes and Josephine Mead.
Breath
ANN HOLT
When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins
at the earth. We are walking through it…we breath it deep within us.
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (1990)
‘From the perspective of painting landscapes, Ackerman’s proposition is synonymous with the understanding that we are immersed in our environment as opposed to being observers of a distant sky, as if we could somehow be separate from it.
With each breath we take in an infinitesimal part of the sky just as when our eye catches a glimpse of the sky it can induce a feeling of ‘breathing space’,
The paintings in this exhibition were made with this in mind, working on location, immersed in the elemental aspects of inclement weather, light and beauty on Bruny Island.
They offer a glimpse into the dialogue between the immediacy of painting on an intimate scale and proximity to the experience of being absorbed in a time and place: the seeing, the feeling, the breathing it in.
Each painting, like the transience of a single breath, echoes the fluidity of the surrounding environment, the rhythm of nature and passing time.’
Ann Holt - November 2018
13 OCTOBER / 4 NOVEMBER 2018
Super Ecology
JASMINE TARGETT
”Dark Wonders are made visible as climate and time converge to reclaim the environment, perhaps independently or hostilely from humans.
From the Future Fossils series, crystallized Coke bottles and Nike shoes highlight that “in hindsight consumerism will appear to be a culture so contagious it created an unquenchable thirst that halted natural life cycles, changing the course of nature and its governance over the natural world, heralding the beginning of the Anthropogenic era.”
– Artist Jasmine Targett
Knowing that the impact we have on the environment is far greater than first anticipated, Super Ecology calls us to see the much larger Super Ecological universe to which we all belong.
A Leaf Blower in the Garden of Eden
ADAM STONE
A Leaf Blower in the Garden of Eden comprises of two new sculptural works by Stone, referencing the artist’s ongoing interest into the Garden of Eden myth. Perhaps accountable as the ‘first’ instance of hubris, Adam and Eve’s tale of seduction by the devil and forbidden fruit provides a poignant historic reference to the engrained self-destructive, yet extremely seductive qualities of high risk, high reward behaviour. Using this story as its starting point, the exhibition is a continuation into Adam’s ongoing investigation into hubris, jouissance and schadenfreude.
Greener Pasture
LAUREN DUNN
Artist Lauren Dunn presents Greener Pastures. Exploring underlying codes within photography, advertising and ethnography, Dunn’s practice is deeply rooted in engaging in contemporary questions surrounding photographic practice through a material outcome. Her work particularly investigates the politics and ethics relating to popular consumptive trends and habits and often associates these as an indicator to broader ecological issues.
8 SEPTEMBER - 7 OCTOBER 2018
INTERRUPTIONS
JAMES CAREY . MICHAEL GRAEVE . JOANNE MOTT . SARA RETALLICK . CAMERON ROBBINS . ROBBIE ROWLANDS . JASON WATERHOUSE
Interruptions is a group exhibition featuring some of Australia’s most notable contemporary artists – James Carey, Michael Graeve, Joanne Mott, Sara Retallick, Cameron Robbins, Robbie Rowlands and Jason Waterhouse. Interruptions explores notions of object, site, time, space and sound through a series of site specific and responsive interventions.
This exhibition occupies and transforms all three established gallery spaces at Stockroom. It also launches a new, fourth gallery space in a recently converted, former factory workers room which has until now, been restricted from public access. This expansive exhibition will showcase a suite of installations, inhabiting and interacting within the peripheral zones of the fascinating and layered space that is Stockroom gallery.
11 August - 2 September 2018
Fantasy of virtue / All things and nothing
BECC ORSZAG
Fantasy of virtue / All things and nothing features intricate works on paper by Victorian-based artist BECC ORSZÁG. In this ongoing body of work, ORSZÁG explores 'sehnsucht', a German noun which describes an individual’s unfulfilled longing for an idealistic, unattainable alternate experience, combined with the phenomenon of paramnesia (déjà vu); the distortion of memory in which fantasy is confused with reality. ORSZÁG examines these ideas in relation to concepts of sacred space and religious experience, questioning notions of existence, ritual, pilgrimage and idolatry.
Since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT University in 2010 ORSZÁG has exhibited widely, including the recent exhibitions ‘Mirror Drawing’ at Neon Heater (Ohio), ‘Sanctuary’ at Nicholas Projects (Melbourne), ‘Dark Symmetries’ at PS Projectspace (Amsterdam) and ‘Improbable Journey’ at Gippsland Art Gallery. ORSZÁG was the winner of the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Emerging Artist Award (2015), Highly Commended in the National Churchie Emerging Art Prize (2013) and a recipient of an Australian Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant (2013). ORSZÁG has been featured in Art Collector as one of the 50 Things Collectors Need to Know, her work is held in private collections around the world and public collections including Artbank, Siemens and Gippsland Art Gallery
In Case of Emergency
EMME ORBACH
Fragments of safety glass from a broken bus shelter are neatly contained in a glass vitrine, suspended precariously from brackets and chain. Drone footage reveals the vast scale of illegal stockpile sites housed by various recycling plants throughout Victoria. A mechanical arm repeatedly batters an emergency hammer against safety glass until nothing is left. In case of Emergency presents a series of sculptural installations in reaction to Australia’s current recycling crisis. In this solo exhibition, EMME ORBACH references the illegal stockpiling of recyclable glass, and plastics in Victoria.
EMME ORBACH is a sculptural installation artist concerned with the anthropocene. Her work explores the way in which systems of nature co-exist and collide with manmade structures over time: “I’m interested in the possibilities of nature – not as mere objects to be utilised by the artist, but as living organisms with artistic agency: as collaborators in the creative process”. Among her best-known pieces are those that comprise her ‘crystal’ series in which her minimalist aluminium sculptures are submerged in a liquid chemical solution; allowing the residual growth of crystals to take over and encompass the form. ORBACH has a background in visual arts and design, and completed her honours in 2014 specialising in fine art, spatial practice.
Poked by a bone in a cupboard
SIYING ZHOU (curator) . BRIDGET GRIFFITHS . KA-YIN KWOK . LOU HUBBARD . PIA JOHNSON . SANJA PAHOKI . MIN WONG
Stockroom presents Poked by a bone in a cupboard, a group exhibition of video works, curated by artist SIYING ZHOU and featuring BRIDGET GRIFFITHS, KA-YIN KWOK, LOU HUBBARD, PIA JOHNSON, SANJA PAHOKI, Min MIN WONG and SIYING ZHOU. These works, from seven Australian artists who vary in art practices, career status, and socio-cultural upbringing. explore family, immigration and relationships. In their respective careers, the artists have been independently drawn to explore family relationships in video work. Poked by a bone in a cupboard brings these videos together, showing diverse family portraits through a range of video narrations. This exhibition intends to offer a space where the relationship between parents and their children are perceived and contemplated through video medium and an art means.
The conceptual initiation of this exhibition comes from SIYING ZHOU’s relationship with her parents. After living apart from her parents for almost a decade, ZHOU experienced a growing detachment from her parents. ZHOU’s parents moved to Australia in 2014 following their retirement. Through making videos of her parents, ZHOU noticed an improvement in her relationship with them. This led ZHOU to wonder: is this experience unique to a family of immigrants? What kind of relationships do her friends have with their families? With this inquiry, she began her search, among her peers, for video works on families. This exhibition is a result of this questions: how may video-making be used by children understand their parents and themselves? How may this process be used to examine the psychological attachment between parents and their children and to gain emotional support from social community outside the family?
14 July - 5 August 2018
I-STONE
MARK STONER
With these works MARK STONER refers to the material of rock and stone as a storyteller of history, location and time.
The stone is simultaneously prehistoric and of the moment. There are multiple stories present: a geomorphology comprising its age, its mineral composition, its formation; and then, its physical location, its quarrying, transport, cutting, commodification, resale, transport, carving, transport and now exhibiting. STONER illustrates his preoccupation with the detail of the colour, the layering and texture, and of the contrast between, ‘as found’ and the highly worked and polished surface that reveals the internal richness.
The deliberate holes, cutting and chipping illustrate this by delving into the interior of the stone. Finally as a viewer we can now look at these stones and experience an imagined intervention and an actual intervention where the transformation of the stone takes us deeper into the material and yet further away from its reality.
Crooked Timber
FAIRY TURNER
FAIRY TURNER’s practice involves the collection, assemblage and construction of objects which are animated to embody various sensations of human experience. In her latest body of work, TURNER experiments with a variety of processes to explore material idiosyncrasies as a reflection of the uncertain nature of humanity.
In Crooked Timber, TURNER presents a staging of irrational and self-conscious structures that differ in narrative and complexity. The exhibition title specifically refers to Kant’s proposition of humanity to be made of crooked timber and as such, inherently flawed.
9 June - 8 July 2018
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
MARK RODDA
Melbourne-based artist MARK RODDA creates both abstract and figurative paintings. This work often features combinations of both painterly and geometric forms, and more recently incorporating thick impasto paint to form shallow 3D/relief elements within the composition. RODDA’s figurative paintings usually take the form of romantic or magical landscapes – fabricated worlds, often uninhabited, sometimes stages for interactions between people, animals, or enchanted entities.
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral explores the classic role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, its layered narratives and the moral choices and personalities of the many characters within it. Examining the grand scheme of his exhibition experience and oeuvre, RODDA sees himself in this context more as an actor, or the director of a movie, as opposed to someone who is exposing their true soul. Some of his exhibitions are clean and neat, some are brash, some subtle. Chaotic neutral is the theme for this group of paintings in which RODDA has decided that "WHIM IS KING” whilst using 'neutrality' to signify that he doesn’t have, and has never had, any inclination to teach any moral, social, scientific, or philosophical lessons to the viewer.
Misty Morning
GREG WOOD
Visibility, or the lack of it, is key to WOOD’s ongoing engagement with landscape. Rather than a descriptive outline of the places Wood frequents, he encourages a more ambiguous reading and seeks an emotional response to his paintings. Hence, the landscape is purposely obscured and often further abstracted by mist suspended somewhere between imagination and location.
For Misty Morning GREG WOOD has sourced imagery from traversing Victorian landscapes from gardens and parklands in Melbourne to more regional locations where the boundaries between public and private space merge. These morning meanderings have facilitated this new body of work, where diffused light and flattened forms suggest a human presence. Figurative forms may appear but their intention is unknown as fog-like shapes float in and out of focus and reside in imaginative spaces of the canvas. Landscapes are narrow in field and intimate in their atmosphere, depicting a dense fog that creates hidden pathways and secret clearings. The works act as a journey and invites the viewer to find their own place within the canvas.
Resisting the urge to depict the picturesque, GREG WOOD’s Misty Morning has engaged a process of making and interpreting paint in reverse, where details gleaned from field trips are mapped out on canvas to be further dissolved.
Being Buoyant
LUCY FAHEY
Illustrator LUCY FAHEY's work Being Buoyant features an animation that has been developed from of a series of illustrations Fahey made for an ABC News story documenting journalist Britta Jorgensen’s experience of caring for her father who has Parkinson’s disease. Britta describes in the story how her dad’s disease has isolated her parents:
It's like their whole world has been caught in a rip, and mum won't let go of dad, so they've been pulled out together.
The image FAHEY made for Britta’s story was of two figures cast out to sea. It’s unclear in the image as to whether the figures are in struggle or peacefully floating, but it’s a decidedly melancholy picture. The image Britta’s words conjured resonated strongly with FAHEY. In the months after she lost her own father to illness last year, LUCY FAHEY took refuge in the sea, swimming and surfing - being immersed in the water felt therapeutic. This animated version of the original illustration shows a lone figure floating, with life of all kinds moving around it. The two versions tell a narrative of illness and grief and eventual relief.
12 May - 3 June 2018
The Space Between
curated by Romani Benjamin
HANNAH BERTRAM . SARAH ANNE COX . SIMON DOW . MORGAN HICKINBOTHAM . AKIKO NAGINO . SIMON PERICICH
Opening event featured two performances from 4:40pm: Morgan Hickinbotham featuring Gemma Tomlinson & Chiara Anderson (30min) and Simon Dow - Glitch 1 (30min)
Glitch 2, an extended performance by Simon Dow took place on Saturday 2 June, 4pm (1hr)
Simon Pericich was represented by [MARS] Gallery
14 April - 6 May 2018
Stockroom hosted Meagan Streader and Chee Yong as part of the Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial program alongside eight other artists who exhibited work in unusual indoor and outdoor sites across Kyneton.
An end to approachable space
MEAGAN STREADER
Meagan Streader’s work pushes the limits of light within sculpture and installation. The Melbourne-based artist manipulates, reinterprets and extends upon the boundaries of constructed spaces. Through site-specific interventions, Streader’s multidimensional use of light re-orientates the viewer’s relationship to the pre-existing architecture and scale of a given space. In this way, Streader’s work reveals the pervasive role of light in governing physical and social navigations of fabricated spaces.
An end to approachable space presented works that acknowledge, prohibit or re-evaluate the physical gallery space and one’s movements within it. Responding to three-dimensional space and architecture, Streader used line and light within sculpture and installation to communicate distinctions between existing spatial elements and physical experience.
Ghosts
CHEE YONG
Chee Yong is a Tasmanian-based interdisciplinary visual artist currently interested in the ambiguities of mark making in abstract and representative paintings.
In Ghosts, his series of miniature paintings for KCAT 2018 and Stockroom, Yong presented past histories, self-identity and philosophy in recent social contexts with formal austerity and the economy of marks.
10 March - 8 April 2018
ROBERT HAGUE
What father knew (detail) . 2018
marine grade stainless steel, paint . 280 x 600 x 90cm
JOY
ROBERT HAGUE
“Notionally this is a look at the myth of Icarus but more personally it is about my father who died in May (my childhood home was beside the airport where he worked) and what he knew and didn’t about the perils of art and life, and how he unwittingly led me to things both of great value and things of peril. In giving Icarus the freedom to fly close to the gods, Daedalus also killed his son. We like to blame Icarus but did he have any real choice. It may not be possible to know the ecstasy that drove him high above the clouds, but we can imagine the fall.”
HAGUE is an artist who brings an impeccable skill set to the contemporary art scene. Throughout his work he revels in ambiguity, simultaneously conveying elements of the heavy and light, the fixed and fluid, the brutal and gentle. HAGUE works across numerous media including printmaking, video, painting and installation but with a focus on sculpture in both stone and metal.
From his studio in Newport, Melbourne, HAGUE has exhibited widely and is represented in major public collections including the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2010 his work was the subject of a ten year retrospective at Deakin University (Burwood). Recent exhibitions include ‘Common Ground’ at NGV International, ‘Porcelaine’ at Turner Galleries (Perth), the Blake Prize (awarded the Blake Residency), ‘CRUSH’ at Fehily Contemporary (Melbourne), the ‘Wynne Prize’ at AGNSW and ‘Inaugural’ at Nicholas Projects (Melbourne).
ADAM CUSACK
slideshow . 2018
hydro stone, paint, metal . dimensions variable
sideshow
ADAM CUSACK
"To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom1"
ADAM CUSACK is an artist whose practice traverses multiple media including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. His work explores ideas of authenticity and identity in popular culture. CUSACK is interested in showing real things in provocative ways; assembling unrelated objects together to bring about relationships that challenge the perception of the original items.
"The act of making something to 'look real' is not what's necessarily important to the work. However, I have found that spending time on the rendering of the subject gives value to the idea, which in turn allows the audience to consider it's 'unrealism' and engage with my practice."
sideshow focuses CUSACK’s interest in society’s prevailing hunger for celebrity ~ and the images which feed a seemingly insatiable audience. Countless media and news companies procure photographic imagery which is published for profit without consent. What does this mean to the subject’s personal freedom? And what are the implications for a society that participate in such an exchange?
Conversely, an interesting philosophical exercise would be for the audience to flip it’s focus of attention back on itself. Let the sideshow begin.
1. This famous quote is often attributed to Socrates.
AL COOPER
Gifts As Beautiful As Horses . 2017
single channel HD video . dimensions variable
Prelude to a Fugue
SAL COOPER
Prelude to a Fugue presents video work by Melbourne-based animator and illustrator SAL COOPER, part of a larger work for live performance with musicians called While You Sleep - a fugue. COOPER works with with animation and video, exploring the uncertain landscape between the real and the illusion. Prelude to a Fugue is an investigation into the musical structure of the Fugue and the psychological state of a Dissociative Fugue, and references notions of flight and escape, loss and disassociation. These are these de-contextualised objects - the earthly, the beautiful, the captive, suspended like offerings or fragments of a larger narrative above an urban landscape.
10 February - 4 March 2018
Defending the Nest
BRAD RUSBRIDGE
a solo show by painter BRAD RUSBRIDGE evoking familiarity and the comfort of home with the rose-tinted nostalgia of youth. RUSBRIDGE's works explore the clutter of a parents’ garage, his mother’s ever-evolving archive of wrapping paper, a brother’s colouring in completion win which used random colours instead of the traditional blue-for-sky, green-for-grass approach, and the ubiquity of wood veneer loungerooms and feather-dustable surfaces cluttered with bric-a-brac.
Centrifuge
JIMMY LANGER
a solo exhibition by Melbourne-based multimedia artist JIMMY LANGER transfers digital images into physical space, creating an expression of undulating movement and freedom. LANGER breaks down digital images to their base pixel components; exploring the concepts of time and space though the colours and patterns that result from this formulised process.
FRAGMENTS
in the deceptively small Project Space comes an expansive experience, FRAGMENTS by emerging young artist ALEX WALKER. Recently one of the featured artists in Mixed Tape 2018, WALKER is a recent graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts with a growing strength in photographic art. She has been a finalist for several awards and received the Lowenstein’s Arts Management Award upon graduating her Honours year. In FRAGMENTS, WALKER explores perception and perspective as a window into a new and alternate reality.
13 January - 28 January 2018
Mixed Tape 2018
JAMES CAREY . ADAM CUSACK . ANN HOLT . JIMMY LANGER . JESSICA LEDWICH . JOANNE MOTT . BECC ORSZAG . MARK RODDA . ROBBIE ROWLANDS . BRAD RUSBRIDGE . JASMINE TARGETT . ALEX WALKER . IRENE WELLM . GREG WOOD
Mixed Tape 2018 offers a diverse selection of works by a number of artists featured in the 2018 exhibition schedule at Stockroom. Mixed Tape 2018 artists present approached including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, assemblage and photography.
I AM THE GODDESS
PAULINE HUPE
I AM THE GODDESS was an installation by South American-born artist PAULINA HUPE. This work spans various mediums including photography, sculpture and performance. I AM THE GODDESS explores female archetypes, the womb and nature's cycles.