2022 ARTISTIC PROGRAM
TALIA SMITH
‘MONUMENTS TO MOMENTS’
17 January – 23 February
Talia Smith, (detail), Collective Moments, found objects, plaster casts, original lumen prints, plywood, 2018. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Monuments to moments was a solo exhibition of new photographic and video work from my research into the landscape and memory. This project will use geological sites such as Bombo Headland Quarry in Kiama, NSW to investigate the physical and emotional traces and marks that are left behind from human interaction.
JUSTIN BALMAIN
‘A WAY TO SYNC, LIVE IN THE WORLD, AND THE OPPOSITE OF RELAX’
17 January – 23 February
Justin Balmain, The problem with the future is that it turns into the present, 2018, HD video with audio, 11.57min, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Defense Distributed is an online open-source hardware organization that develops digital schematics of firearms in CAD files, or "wiki weapons” that can be downloaded in the comfort and privacy of your own home. Designed and conceived by founder of Defense Distributed Cody Wilson, The Liberator was the first printable weapon available for domestic download in the US. Wilson has called the Liberator his “only original idea.” The often-faulty weapon has now been surpassed by more sophisticated semi-automatic weapons but stands as a manifesto for Libertarianism and Second Amendment rights. Defense Distributed now also sells their own 3D printer – the Ghost Gunner.
The problem with the future is that it turns into the present is narrated by Sophia, an AI robot developed by Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company. The video captures the process of 3D printing The Liberator from a file downloaded in the US. The work follows the data file as it moves from peer-to-peer networks, enabled by distribution through the internet, reaching physical and ideological capacity as an actual object. The video considers the value of objects as they become manifest in newer and more widely distributed systems, challenging geo-borders and laws, and representing alternate means of distribution and production.
ANNA KRISTENSEN, JAKE PREVAL, SANNE MESTROM, TOBY POLA, ALASDAIR MCLUCKIE, ALAN CONSTABLE, KIERAN SEYMOUR, LAUREN DUNN, LYDIA WEGNER, COLLEEN AHERN, TULLY MOORE, AND JACKSON SLATTERY.
‘STILL LIFE PT. II’
CURATED BY ADAM STONE
28 February - 6 April
“Still Life Pt.II”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The exhibition is the second iteration of an ongoing exhibition series investigating the historically significant genre of still life through a contemporary lens. The exhibition brings together an otherwise disparate group of artists working from ‘life’ or ‘fiction’ to meditate on the notion of what a still life is in our current times.
MARILYN SCHNEIDER
‘DISAPPEAR HERE’
28 February - 6 April
Marilyn Schneider, “Disappear Here”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Art critic Robert Hughes argued that “architecture is the only art that moulds the world directly. Of all the arts, architecture is the supreme expression of politics and ideology.”
Yet, we have become conditioned into the belief that the architectural environments in which we live our lives area fait accompli. Static, immovable spaces formed by processes from which the public itself is disengaged or excluded. However, architectural environments are not a given. They are indeed shaped by people, culture, politics and ideology.
Marilyn Schneider’s installation Disappear Here invites us to question these suppositions by revealing the constructedness of both architectural spaces and exhibition environments.
ELLEN DAHL, IZABELA PLUTA, and YVETTE HAMILTON
‘RESURFACED GEOGRAPHIES’
11 April – 18 May
Yvette Hamilton, Survey, LED lights, acrylic, microprocessor, coal dust, custom frame, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Resurfaced Geographies is an artist-led exhibition by Izabela Pluta, Ellen Dahl, and Yvette Hamilton that charts the intersections between topography, place and photography in the age of the Anthropocene.
Topography, place and photography are all defined by their unstable relationship between the real and the imagined. While topographical elements of a landscape are considered to be real - a fixed point, the concept of place fluctuates between memory and cultural construct. However, in a time when our natural environment is marching towards inevitable change, destruction and disappearance, the landscape’s topography is moving into a state of flux and the ability to map the human self to the land is on shaky ground. Photography echoes this uncertainty, its indexical relationship to the ‘real’ a tenuous one prone to slippage and disruption.
AKIL AHAMAT
‘A WORLD THAT BREATHES OUT’
11 April – 18 May
Akil Ahamat, sonic shower (remnants), curved glass, cast concrete, solid drive transducer, laser cut plywood, oil-based enamel, peat coir,, pvc piping, concrete, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A world that breathes out is comprised of an installation made up of the traces of a speculative therapeutic
technology. In a duet with the water that it superceded, the sonic shower sings a slow lament before it is washed back into the earth.
OHNI BLU
‘OBLITERATION, CREATION’
23 May – 22 June
Ohni Blu, “Obliteration, Creation”, installation view, 2019. Photography Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Momentary obliterations, meditations and creations of a body. These practices play an important part in Ohni’s life and function as a survival strategy as a chronically ill and disabled transgender person. These works explore ritual practices that create a collapsing of stable categories into a production of new truths.
CONNIE ANTHES
‘BETA BLOCKERS’
23 May – 22 June
Connie Anthes, Beta Blockers, 2019. Installation view. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Beta Blockers is an exhibition of wearable/tactile sculptural installations exploring political, fleshy and spatial resistances. It is important that acts of resistance and refusal are remembered as acts upon or with bodies, not simply historical accounts – this exhibition seeks to create linkages and leave traces upon the bodies that these objects encounter.
KATY B PLUMMER
‘ARMOUR FOR FLOWERS’
27 June – 3 August
Katy Plummer, (detail), STRUCTURAL MYSTERIES, timber, glitter, dimensions variable, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Armour For Flowers is a video installation project that considers the unstable, entropic relationship between a mystical and a prosaic encountering of the world, through the lens of spectator sports. Three women, dressed as flowers, first encounter each other in an viscerally embodied way. As their encounter is retold, it degrades and becomes encoded into a ritualised performance of their original encounter. At the end of the cycle, the memory of their embodied interaction has become purely decorative.
MIN WONG
‘KARMA IS A BITCH’
27 June – 3 August
Min Wong, “Karma is a bitch”, installation view, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Karma is a bitch examines metaphysical and utopian impulses of the recent past, such as the visual cultures associated with 1960s and 1970s American West Coast counterculture, ‘New Age’ spirituality and more recent tendencies towards self-help and therapeutic culture.
ATONG ATEM, ALI GUMILLYA BAKER, PAOLA BALLA, WITCH BITCH, HEATH FRANCO, EO GILL, SHANA MOULTON & NICK HALLETT, LIAM O’BRIEN, PHEBE SCHMIDT
‘IN CHARACTER’
CURATED BY TESHA MALOTT AND PETER JOHNSON
8 August – 23 September
Liam O’Brien, Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1), Ultra high definition single channel video 16:9,17:34 min duration, 2018. Photography Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In Character brings together Australian and international artists who use character and personae as a way to critically explore identity and social relations. Grounded in performance and portraiture, the exhibition poses questions around authenticity, sovereignty, personal histories, gender and cultural identity. By taking on or creating a variety of alternative identities, artists are able to explore heightened versions of themselves and the world around them—revealing truths about power, selfhood and the forces that bind us together.
‘USU CREATIVE AWARDS’
3 October – 10 October
SIMON BARÉ, SIMON COOPER, SABELLA D’SOUZA, SUZY FAIZ, DANICA KNEŽEVIĆ, JAQUELINE LARCOMBE, BERNADETTE SMITH, ROSIE THOMAS, TAMARA VONINSKI
‘NURTURE’
17 October – 29 October
Jacqueline Larcombe, Columns and Roses: a Neighbourhood Study, 2019. Gouache acrylic, oil sticks, raw canvas. Photography by Zan Wimberley
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
This exhibition will explore the theme of nurture and the act of nurturing. Each artist has a conceptual link to a familial or cultural nurturing pertinent to their personal experience. More than this, visually they all connect as the artists have all employed a more subdued palette within their works and, compositionally, each work appears to want to engage and nurture the viewer directly.
CAROLINE GARCIA & JD REFORMA
‘THE FULLNESS OF TIME’
7 November –14 December
JD Reforma, Pacific Sebum, series of 16 coconut oil paintings of the Philippines on manila paper, 22 x 30 cm each, 2019. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
In this new collaborative exhibition, each artist explores, through two distinct yet interrelated approaches, the way that time is recorded in material and language. In her new installation PrimeTime, Garcia has developed a choreography of transliteration, oscillating between Tagalog and English languages, spoken and written, distorting the perception of time through different tenses. In his new series of works , Reforma has utilised accretive, durational gestures to distill products and materials associated with Asia and Pacific cultures into a series of installations that explore form, mark and composition.