From 19 June to 5 July, Gosia Wlodarczak will be enclosed in a specially designed cube in the gallery, drawing without any exposure to the outside world – literally ‘drawing’ what she can see in the space around her, within the sensory limitation box from 10.30 am to 5 pm daily. Audiences can view the drawing in progress via the live web cam streaming onto a screen within the gallery. The unique creative situation is in contrast to the artist’s socially focused practice.

 

On Friday 5 July from 1 to 2pm, Gosia emerges from the enclosed drawing cube after 17 days to talk about her experience. Audiences will be able to enter the space to reflect on the work.

 

Event
A Room Without A View
Dates
19 June to 5 July: Monday to Friday from 10.30am to 5pm (break from 1.30 to 2.30) and Saturday from 12 to 5pm (break from 2 to 3pm). Unveiling on Friday 5 July from 1 to 2pm.
Location
RMIT Gallery
344 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000

Event
Pattern, a group exhibition curated by Diane Soumilas
Dates
Opening Wednesday 19 June from 6.30pm.
Location
Glen Eira City Council Gallery
Corner Glen Eira and Hawthorn roads
Caulfield VIC 3162

In what has rapidly transpired to be a tumultuous 12 months, Melbourne artist Sonia Payes has been awarded first prize in the Perth Centre for Photography’s annual CLIP Awards for her Ice Scape Series #13.

The fiercely competitive and internationally recognised prize is awarded to “images which are original, stimulating, and that challenge traditional notions of landscape photography”.

“The PCP is a really strong contemporary art scene. I’m really excited to be part of it and to have my work recognised,” Payes says. While the prize is a fairly humble $3000, Payes says the prestige that it represents is “priceless”.

The work was inspired by her witnessing the destruction of the natural environment during a visit to Papua New Guinea.

“I had never felt the need to voice my concerns for the environment before that experience but it compelled me to express that aspect of my interest,” Payes says.

The work was followed by a period of time in China in 2012 where Payes undertook the Australia China Art Foundation Residency in Beijing. Payes took the opportunity to travel widely, again witnessing widespread environmental degradation, leading to her most recent body of work,Interzone, which is showing in Melbourne.

The panel of judges for the award consisted of Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts curator Leigh Robb, photographer and co-founder of FotoFreo, Graham Miller, and John Barrett-Lennard, curator, critic and adjunct associate professor at the University of Western Australia.

Last year Payes was also a featured artist as part of the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.

An exhibition of the CLIP Awards finalists’ works is on at the Perth Centre for Photography gallery until June 9.

- Ashley Crawford, ‘Sonia Payes ‘inspired’ by environmental destruction‘, Australian Financial Review (30/05/2013)

ARTIST Ash Keating says there’s something “liberating” about eschewing the traditional tools of his trade, like brushes and easels, and simply lobbing hundreds of litres of paint around instead.

He’s pictured working on West Park Proposition - a huge abstract mural, 50m wide and 8m high, on the side of a concrete warehouse in Melbourne’s west. With only one morning to complete the work he resorted to radical tactics, filling buckets and fire-extinguishers with 350 litres of diluted paint and showering the wall.

The 32-year-old Monash graduate first noticed the tilt-slab concrete warehouses that were “popping up like mushrooms” on Melbourne’s urban/rural boundary while driving to Ballarat one day. “I thought they looked absurd,” he says, “and I wanted to make a comment about that by creating a painting on one of the warehouses that would reflect the landscape it was taking over.” His artistic “intervention”, as he calls it, would use a palette mimicking colours of the local environment – the dirt, the grasses and native flowers, the trees and the sky – so that from a distance, the warehouse would melt away into its surroundings.

It wasn’t easy getting permission – he rarely got past reception when trying to pitch the idea to various warehouse owners – but he finally found an online sports retailer in Truganina who was amenable.

Keating, whose early inspirations were Fred Williams and John Olsen, executed the painting on the morning of September 1 last year. The “physically exhausting” process was recorded by a film crew, and turned into a video installation that was bought by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Monash Museum of Art.

The warehouse owner liked it too, Keating says. Punters aren’t always so pleased. Another of his recent public art projects involved intercepting 50 tonnes of industrial waste on its way to a landfill, and dumping it in the centre of Penrith, west of Sydney. The intention was to spark a meaningful debate about society’s profligacy – but not everyone saw it like that. “Some people were very unhappy,” he says.

- Ross Bilton, ‘Heart of the Nation: Truganina 3029‘, The Australian (01/06/2013)

New Horizons surveys methods and approaches to landscape painting in the early twenty-first century. Common to each of the works is a modification of the natural world, and a sense in which the world has become magnified, artificial and constructed.

While still retaining connections to the familiar, New Horizons proposes an alternate reality where things are not always what they seem.

Event
New Horizons, a group exhibition curated by Simon Gregg
Dates
Opening Friday 31 May from 6pm. Exhibition runs until 25 August.
Location
Gippsland Art Gallery
68-70 Foster Street
Sale VIC 3850

Last week, Phaidon released Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing, the sequel to the influential Vitamin D. Of the four Australian artists included in this survey of contemporary drawing across the world, two are our own artists: Richard Lewer and Gosia Wlodarczak. Copies are available for purchase at Phaidon and Amazon or to read at our gallery.

Local artist Sonia Payes’ latest exhibition, Interzone, presents her vision of China, the nation she visited on an artist residency program. Her photographs display the world’s most populous country devoid of people. Evidence of industrial civilisation remains, including high-rise buildings, smog and power lines, against the backdrop of a subjugated natural environment.

- Sean Wilson and Lachlan Cooper, Out and About (27/04/2013)

The Interzone to which Sonia Payes’ new exhibition of photographic and animated works refers doesn’t exist in some far-off future. Though distinctly sci-fi in its aesthetic tenor, much of the work is set in the here and now. Indeed, her industrial scapes and smog-scarred skies were photographed while on residency in Beijing. Things take a turn when Payes introduces a bald, ashen, re-imagined Hindu Brahma, which grows from the earth and sways in the breeze. The work seems to bear witness to the atrocities humans have imposed on the environment and the earth. But instead of matriarchal saviours, these generally creepy all-seeing idols resemble the horror of a mass organ harvest.

- Dan Rule, Your weekend: in the galleries (15/05/2013)

…

Finally, Sonia Payes at Fehily Contemporary makes a jump in the new digital geometries of 3D virtual imagery. Based on the image of her daughter, Payes uses the copy facility of 3D modelling to clone the face to make a solid of four Janus-like visages. She then multiplies and stacks the quadrangular heads to construct a flexing totem pole, as if each vertebra supporting the head is another head. Replicating these bendy poles almost infinitely, she lays them out upon a mountainous scaffold, also a grid that bends.

In jumpy frames, the virtual camera then jerks over this terrifying terrain, where the head-grass becomes a forest of freakish fodder, a GM crop bio-engineered with human DNA, an organic field colonised by geometry.

- Robert Nelson, When art goes geometric, appreciation comes on a higher plane (15/05/2013)

Fehily Contemporary is excited to announce that David Ralph has joined our gallery.  His solo exhibition Dissolve will run in our Glasshouse Gallery from 20 June to 6 July.

David Ralph is a Melbourne-based artist whose paintings explore how environments, cities and dwellings shape our minds and identities and vice-versa. In his hands, architectural spaces reveal secret pasts and aspirations. Similarly, the mental and imaginary states we live in – for example, the digital world – are rebuilt and represented as places.

David Ralph’s recent solo exhibitions include Threshold (Block Projects, Melbourne 2010), Salvage (Boutwell Draper Gallery, Melbourne 2010) andExtensions (Arc One Gallery, Melbourne 2009). Recent group exhibitions include The Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria 2011), The Albany Art Prize (Albany Art Gallery, Western Australia 2011) andFletcher Jones Art Prize (Geelong Gallery, Victoria 2010). This year, David was awarded a Skills and Art Development grant by the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board and a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany. His work is held in collections both local and international, including Port Phillip City Council, Victorian College of the Arts, Artbank, National Gallery of Victoria, British Airways Collection and Fondation D’Art Contemporain Daniel & Florence Guerlain.

Veils have been used in the art world for centuries – both literally and metaphorically – to explore concepts of concealment, sanctuary, holiness, illusion, deception and more.

On show from 6–29 June, the exhibition features works by a host of international artists hailing from Australia, New Zealand, France, Afghanistan, Japan, Turkey and Iran.

Event
Burqas, veils and hoodies: Identity and representation
Dates
Opening Thursday 6 June from 6:30pm. Exhibition runs until 29 June.
Location
Walker Street Gallery & Arts Centre
Corner Walker and Robinson Street
Dandenong VIC 3175

A selection of paintings that variously interpret the natural environment, represent imaginary vistas, or reference specific traditions of landscape painting—from Arthur Boyd’s depiction of the Shoalhaven region, and Sally Ross’s jewel-like rendering of an artificial topography, to Peter Daverington’s merging of grand landscape traditions with the pictorial conventions of digital imaging, and Damiano Bertoli’s appropriation of Caspar David Friedrich’s early 19th century painting Sea of ice.

Event
The lie of the land: contemporary landscapes from the collection, a group exhibition
Dates
20 April to 26 May 2013
Location
Geelong Gallery
Little Malop Street
Geelong, Victoria