Hello everyone! We hope all you had a happy and restful break over the long, long weekend. We've been busy getting ready for our next round of exhibitions, and it gives us great pleasure to invite to this evening's opening.
Please join us in celebrating the opening of solo exhibitions by Michelle Hamer, Kate Just and Chaco Kato from 6-8pm today. PS, did we mention that there'll be some fine red and white wine courtesy of Baddaginnie Run for you to enjoy?
Keep on reading for information about these shows...
Michelle Hamer, Dangling Carrotswith projections by Cat Wilson
Gallery 1
Dangling Carrots is Michelle Hamer’s tenth solo show in just five years of exhibiting. Her hand-stitched tapestries on perforated plastic explore personal, suburban and urban limits. The works, based her own photographs taken during the Global Financial Crisis, continue her interest in socio-historic documentation through signage.
This new series questions the ‘suburban dream’ ideal. Large tapestries of signage within everyday suburbia are accompanied by smaller tapestries of ‘No Road’ signage. Taken at different suburban edge locations these signs literally mark edges and raise personal questions of how to proceed when life appears to be a series of challenges. Dangling Carrots explicitly questions the contemporary relevance of the ‘suburban dream’ in a post GFC climate. How do we reconcile edges and endless sprawl with environmental ideals of greater density? Do our dreams have limits or is that just reality?
Hamer’s works explore the small in-between moments of apparent ‘nothingness’ that characterise everyday life. She is particularly interested in contemporary societal edicts/ideals and the impermanent and in-between spaces as represented through signage and billboards. The traditional technique of hand-stitching is used to explore an ironic romanticism present between tapestry and the digitalisation of imagery in contemporary society.
To be opened by Stuart Harrison, architect, writer and Triple R broadcaster.
Kate Just, Unearthed
Gallery 2
Unearthed continues Kate Just's sculptural explorations of historical, personal and iconographic objects relating to women's bodily and cultural history.
Responding to her recent research in the Egyptian, Medieval, Greek and Roman collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, Just will create a faux archaeological display of real and fictional tools historically used to reflect, probe, cut, mark and sculpt the female body. Modelled in resin-based clay, and later carved and sanded, Just's gently curved objects, comprising interpretations of mirrors, sculpture tools, surgical and gynaecological tools, tattoo tools and domestic tools will, under her nimble hands, be crafted in ways that reflect not just the tools but the bodies that have been altered by their touch.
Presented in two low trays near to the ground, Just's stone-like tools will appear to have been recently 'unearthed', providing clues about a not so long-lost people.
To be opened by Martha McDonald, artist.
Chaco Kato, Pulp FictionGallery 3
Pulp Fiction presents a microcosmic world of plant-based materials shaped into mobiles, weavings, small objects and web structures, with each thing connected to another. Utilising the site itself as an integral component of the work, Pulp Fiction explores the meaning of 'ephemerality' in contemporary practice. The exhibition aims to describe the world we live in: eating and being eaten, the food chain, the life cycle.
Kato's art always emerges from her everyday life, and this work builds on her previous explorations of mundane materials like grass, cotton, string and compost; here she recycles the apparently worthless skin, seeds and pulp of fruit and vegetable into unique, humorous or precious art objects.
Born in Japan, Kato completed a Fine Art degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1999. Kato has been a recipient of a French government scholarship at the Paris Cite des Arts, and was a former studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.
A founding member of The Slow Art Collective, Kato's practice encompasses many genres from process-based installation, to drawing and picture book making.
