28 May – 28 June 2013
ON A ROLL
opening drinks Saturday 1 June, 4pm
The convergence of music with digital processing had its genesis in the early 1900s with the invention of the player piano, aka pianola. The binary perforated music rolls directly influenced development of early computer punch card technology, leading to the proliferation of computers in our surging digital age. On A Roll explores this connection with a series of 2D images and 3D forms made from pianola rolls, computer punchcards and copper wire. The copper wire is used metaphorically for its significant role in telecommunications and mass transmission of information. The mass production and distribution that pianola technology spearheaded is contradicted here with a collection of one-off works for inoperative mailboxes.
Myfanwy Alderson is a contemporary musician and visual artist. She has performed nationally and internationally with the likes of Chamber Made Opera, Improv Melbourne, dancers Alice Cummins and Janette Hoe, and with her trio Daquqi. Recent solo exhibitions include Three Thousand Holes in October 2012 and One_To__Zero___ in January 2013. In 2011 and 2012 Myfanwy participated in the Solo Residency artists program at Victoria University, and is currently completing a Bachelor of Creative Arts Industries at Victoria University.
www.mavanui.blogspot.com
review by Penny Modra
23 April – 24 May 2013
Field Lines
Doilies and camouflage designs are my stencil templates. I begin by mapping out in pencil an airy skeleton; a blueprint resembling a geographical map to be filled with a language of tiny coloured circles. It is an uncertain language, sensitive to the vagaries of a time consuming, handmade process.
Field Lines reveal a rich and varied tapestry of intricate patterning and imagery. Notions of time and space are stretched in these small abstracted gardens, hung as if on a loom of white tracery: a web at once organic and geometrical.
Although of a small scale a sense of space is inherent in the work as each minute circle, scribed into the papers’ surface, encloses its own mysterious emptiness.
L-R: Jan Berg, Lichen; Heart Strings from a Green Land, 2013.
19 March – 20 April 2013
A Temporary Museum of Permanent Objects: including pieces from both a Foreign Excursion and a Quondam Collection.
Opening drinks on Sunday 17 March at 4pm with remarks by Harold Mitchell, erstwhile President of the Museums Board of Victoria
Closing Drinks Tuesday 16 April at 6pm with the artist.
12 February – 15 March 2013
Cabinet of Cities. Invisible Curiosities.
What do you get when you cross an invisible city with a cabinet of curiosities?
Well, a cabinet of cities and invisible curiosities, of course.
This exhibition combines the imagined world of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the primitive visual representation of Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The animals within Seba’s collection were preserved and then once removed through the process of illustrative documentation. Like making a copy of a tape from a tape, sometimes some of the detail gets lost. Similarly, Calvino’s novel used the travel diaries of Marco Polo as a foundation to re-imagine into his own fantastical narrative.
Everything here is a representation of itself, lost from the imagination of its creators and reformed once more through another means of interpretation. Rather than constructing tiny landscapes, tiny objects that transcend imagined landscapes and connect back to naïve notions of existence on earth have been created.
sue-ching.blogspot.com
8 January – 8 February 2013
Gay bash up!
This Midsumma will see us witness the most anticipated match-up in the history of art. Are you ready? Ladies and gentlemen… Lllllllllllllleeeeets get ready to rrrrrrruuuuuummmmmboooooooooool!!!!! Rat vs Jimwah in the battle of the century! Style against style, brush against can, who will be triumphant?
Part of the 2013 Midsumma Festival – celebrating 25 years.
forevermore
20 November 2012 – 4 January 2013
At the pre-burial “viewing”, the bereaved are often confronted with the sight of their loved one in an artificially beautified state of what appears to be perpetual preservation. Artificial flowers, found in abundance in our cemeteries, ironically appear to be in a similar kind of suspended animation. Many of these plastic gardens are tended with great love and devotion. These flowers however, don’t really blossom into their fullest beauty until they have weathered at the grave for several years.
The flowers in this exhibition are significant, as they are each taken from the graves of people I once knew. Most of the flowers have been at the gravesites for many years and, like the body at the viewing, have now been treated to preserve their current transient state – in perpetuity.
http://sarinalirosi.com.au/
Images-Sarina Lirosi, forevermore, 2012, detail, found flowers, dry florist foam, gloss acrylic glaze.
ROBYN PHELAN
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough – Milestones for Two Centuries of Women Climbers, 2012
An installation of ceramic sculpture.
Hidden in the rare books collection in the State Library of Melbourne is a collection of 800 books on mountaineering. These books primarily record the domination of mountain peaks by males. However the collection also reveals the extraordinary achievement of women climbers since 1808. I Can See For Miles commemorates these women.
Each of the 19 cabinets will be filled with a separate art object creating an overall contour of a mountain.
Artist Practice
My sculptural practice records in clay, observations of art history and culture, experienced through travel, study or in museum collections.
It is my challenge to bring together sculptural forms and pictorial content to create narrative associations, tell stories and raise questions for the viewer.
I am drawn to the qualities inherent in the hand-built vessel. My sculptures are made by the direct and individual mark and pressure of my hand. I exploit the evocative and tangible beauty found in the craft of the ceramics process.
Images L-R: Lucy Walker, American mountaineer, 1871; Louise Shepherd, Australian Climber, 1994; 2012, watercolour on paper.
www.robynphelan.com.au
11 September – 12 October 2012
CURIO
Curio 1, oil on canvas board, 10.5 x 22.5cm.
Stefanie Carnevale’s work explores themes of human existence – birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration, conflict, ageing and mortality. Her work has been exhibited throughout Australia and overseas, including Monash University (Melbourne), Linden Gallery (Melbourne), The State Library of Tasmania (Hobart), and the University of Tasmania’s Plimsoll Gallery (Hobart).
Curio is an exhibition of new oil paintings. The thematic of human existence is reflected in the realistic, still-life aesthetic. This exhibition at Mailbox 141, a series of wooden antique mail boxes, creates a ‘cabinet of curiosities’.
Whichever way is fine
7 August – 7 September 2012
In Whichever way is fine, Camila Galaz explores the premise that aesthetic and painterly space may be used to express states of anxiety experienced by an individual in both the public and private domain. Whichever way is fine incorporates static and moving elements and a restrained use of colour mimetic of government building interiors.
Camila Galaz is a visual artist working in Melbourne, Australia. Her work explores the reflexivity of anxiety between individuals and the spaces they inhabit through drawing, sculpture and installation. In 2011 she presented two solo exhibitions, An Ideal Half, at Hand Held Gallery and that’s not really an option, at RMIT Artspaces, both in Melbourne. She is currently studying Fine Art (Honours) at RMIT University.
How to make a meadow
3 July – 3 August 2012
Shall I tell you a story?
The meadow in a quiet winter, so cold, bristling with grass stalks, criss-crossed by relentless ants and purposeful joggers, looped with tattered spiderwebs and lined with roosting birds, the meadow dreams about the spring.
And as September draws closer and the skies clear, the dandelions begin.
A lone yellow star, then a radiant constellation. Weeks pass and new grass grows greenly and long. Each golden face follows the sunlight across the day. Downy balls of seeds appear, dancing on hollow stems. Time is held in these dandelions. To follow these flowers is to retrace the flight paths of bees and butterflies. Their scattered growth echoes the wanderings of children and warm afternoon winds. These patterns reflect a 16th century observation by Renaissance botanist Paracelsus, who recognised that the world is ‘a text, legible to all who will read without the divisive bifocals of language.’
Sarina Noordhuis makes drawings that map seasonal changes in the landscape. A graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, she is currently undertaking postgraduate research at the Australian National University. Her practice includes drawing, printmaking and painting.
Sarina Noordhuis is a current PhD candidate at the Australian National University.
Images L-R: HG 01.09.11; HG 12.09.11; HG 14.09.11, 2011, stickers, paper, each 42 x 30cm.
