RESIDENCY 2023
Mikala Dwyer
Mikala Dwyer’s practice is predominantly installation-based, in which she constructs idiosyncratic, personal spaces within the conventional architecture of the gallery, using plastic, fabric, plywood, plants and sound - selected for their qualities of materiality or immateriality, and display an intentional lack of finish. Her installations and sculptures are experimental and experiential architectures that play with the permeable and changeable nature of objects and our relationship with them. She is interested in ritual, sexuality, magic, memory and history. Influenced by early 20th-century art movements, including dada, constructivism and arte povera, her work pushes at the traditional limits of performance, sculpture and installation.
Paul Yore
Paul Yore has gained attention for his provocative and multidisciplinary approach to art across sound, installation, video, collage, assemblage and textiles, often employing needlepoint, quilting, and appliqué techniques. Narratives of kitsch Australiana collide with sexually and politically loaded images, and popular culture reference to make up Yore’s uniquely garish, playful, provocative and politically astute works. Yore's practice is deeply influenced by his experiences growing up in regional Australia and re-centres radical and emancipatory queer expression against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the material excesses of capitalism.
RESIDENCY 2022
Greatest Hits
Greatest Hits is the collaborative practice of Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn which uses two seemingly different approaches – though are frequently combined.
The first consists in recontextualizing for exhibition elements of building, display, storage, informational and other systems in their everyday forms. Examples include a selection of wall-hung acoustic blankets, a series of images made with a kind of printing technique using the bleaching effect of high-UV arc lights, and a number of alterations to gallery spaces across different exhibitions, such as exposed framing of interior walls, the partial closure of rooms, the addition of mirrors at entryways and alike.
The other approach is typically more straightforwardly sculptural, but still quotational, often drawing from media and entertainment sources associated with children and teenage consumers. The style can express wry humour but adds crude, sometimes cruel and childish jokes, nostalgia, and more indecipherable content that, beyond the jolts of comedy and familiarity, lead to more abstract reflections and feelings. The unique qualities of materials and technical or craft processes are important aspects of their work. This can be seen partly in the professional services of animators, taxidermists, modelers, perfumers, and various tradespeople which are involved in GH works alongside their own processes which they have developed.
https://www.greatesthitswebsite.com/
Gavin Bell – Instagram @gavinbellgavinbell
Jarrah de Kuijer – Instagram @de_kuijer
Simon McGlinn – Instagram @simon_mcglinn
RESIDENCY 2019
Karen Black
Through painting and ceramic assemblages, Karen Black’s work negotiates a unique visual language of figuration and abstraction alongside a tension between two and three-dimensional spaces. Her works move rapidly between gestures of exposure and obfuscation; the characters and spaces operate within a certain material ambiguity; her vibrant colours variously dripped and daubed and scraped. Traversing mythical, historical and contemporary narratives, her works disclose tales of separation, isolation and loss.
Virginia Leonard
Leonard’s stacked ceramic works operate within the framework of self-portraiture. Addressing the bodily scarring and experiences of chronic pain that resulted from her injuries in a serious motorbike accident in 1986, Leonard’s vivid exploration of the materiality of clay is hinged upon her experience of the body’s precarity. Attending at once to the highly visceral experience of sickness, her works are equally observant of the estrangement of self and body which attend trauma.
RESIDENCY 2018
Andre Piguet
Andre Piguet works across painting, drawing, sculpture, and site specific installations that consider the relationship between architecture, the body, and their transformation through photography. Utilising the graphic language of drawing with an expanded material repertoire including epoxy resin, steel, wax, synthetic liquids metals, ceramics and found objects, his works act as scale models for psycho-architectural spaces.
Jackson Slattery
Jackson Slattery's practice operates within the grey area between external and internal realities, tantalising the viewer with what is depicted and what is implied. In collecting disparate and diverse images then meticulously reconstructing them with watercolours, Slattery alludes to a narrative of events, one that is concerned as much with the fiction as with the realities that they are extracted from.
RESIDENCY 2017
Adam Lee
Adam Lee works from his studio in the hills of the Macedon Ranges, Victoria, and he works mostly with traditional painting and drawing materials. His work references a wide range of sources including historical and colonial photography, biblical narratives, natural history and contemporary music, film and literature to investigate aspects of the human condition in relation to ideas of temporal and supernatural worlds.
