2022 Exhibitions
Dan Moynihan
Out of Interest
Dan’s show was delayed once (covid), delayed again (gallery construction) then delayed a third time (gallery moving to another floor). In that time, almost two year’s worth of delays, the idea for the exhibition morphed from one thing to another until Dan came up with the high concept of a group show by a solo artist. So it’s like a group show, but all the work is made by Dan. I know group shows usually have an underlying theme that pins all the work together, but in this instance I take it to mean that it is an exhibition of disparate works that aren’t necessarily connected in a way that you might expect from a solo exhibition. It is as if Dan is giving himself his own survey show. We are presented with works familiar from Dan’s oeuvre: new versions of works we’ve seen before, bits of old works repurposed into new works, and new never seen before works.
– Simon Zoric 2022, from the catalogue essay Out of Interest (Dan Moynihan’s Suspension of Disbelief)
Image: Dan Moynihan No Need for Alarm 2022
Andrew Browne
silver
This ethereal collection of silver paintings launches Gallery 2, our new intimate exhibition space.
With their reflective surfaces the paintings flip between the organic and the industrial, the abstract and the playfully anecdotal.
Image: Andrew Browne O 2022, aluminium pigment, alkyd, acrylic, oil on linen, 92 x 64 cm in aluminium artist’s frame
Kieren Karritpul
Making the Ancestors Smile
This is the first major solo exhibition by 28-year-old, Ngengi’wumirri artist Kieren Karritpul who lives in Nauiyu Daly River, NT.
In this exhibition Karritpul continues his investigation into his culture and the land around him. Karritpul speaks of being woven into the land, the place his ancestors have lived for generations. Karritpul uses the metaphor of the woven surface to speak of the breathing land and its importance to indigenous identity and ongoing culture.
Image: Kieren Karritpul Fish Basket in the Water (detail) 2022, acrylic on canvas, 178 x 270 cm
Georgia Spain
Time is the thing a body moves through
A suite of new and ambitious Georgia Spain paintings, in her debut exhibition at Tolarno Galleries.
Image: GEORGIA SPAIN Transit 2022, acrylic on canvas, 97 x 87 cm
Brent Harris
Monkey Business
Painting can be a forcefield, a place with edges, finitude—even if what plays out within its borders is a kind of absurd, stuttering chaos. For Brent Harris, painting is a place to frame and momentarily circumscribe shifting psychological states and philosophical questions that threaten to overwhelm us at times. This is why their forms are inexhaustible, always requiring recombination, reassessment, another painting.
Harris chose the exhibition title “Monkey Business” (with its allusions to playful, mischievous, or even inappropriate behaviour) as an umbrella term that encapsulates divergent subject matter, allowing for more ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning than in some of his earlier series, such as a recent reworking of the orderly narrative of the fourteen Stations of the Cross.
– Helen Hughes, from the Monkey Business catalogue essay, 2022. Senior Lecturer, Art History, Theory and Curatorship, Monash University
Image: BRENT HARRIS Large Apron of Abuse 2022, oil on linen, 244 x 175 cm
Elizabeth Willing
Forced Rhubarb
A solo exhibition with hand-printed and embroidered linens, accompanied by a floorwork made from sherbert-filled straws.
Food is the catalyst Elizabeth Willing uses to translate the ineffable body, to reflect on the performance of eating, and facilitate multisensory experiences.
Image: Elizabeth Willing Necklace of birth scars 2021, linen, cotton, thread, acrylic paint, 110 x 105 cm
Danie Mellor
redux
Part of the PHOTO 2022 international festival of photography exhibition program.
Visit Danie Mellor redux exhibition online (April 2022)
Listen to Danie Mellor interview on ABC RN The Drawing Room (11 May 2022)
Read an interview with Danie Mellor in The Age (28 April 2022)
Images have a powerful way of revealing connections between disparate histories and experiences. redux is an exhibition that assembles, re-assembles and sequences parallel and divergent narratives, curating archival and recent photographs in a way that evokes a pictorial and studied chronology. History repeats itself and redux shows how we are implicated in those cycles.
The ecological destruction portrayed in many of the images is an uncanny reminder of our current global and environmental impacts and contrasts acutely with intact rainforest ecologies shown alongside them. It is a reminder as well of the often-violent displacement of Aboriginal people and knowledge systems, with civilising enterprise failing to acknowledge the value of cultural systems embedded in story, Dreaming and Country.
Selected images are printed on highly polished surfaces, the viewer reflected and brought into the work as witness to changes that unfolded in and on our landscapes. redux aligns the splintered narratives of past and present experience into a compelling arrangement of large and intimately scaled photographic works. – Danie Mellor
Image: Danie Mellor, Redux 2021
A&A
Mother and Child
Part of the Melbourne Design Week program, 17 – 27 March 2022, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria.
A&A is industrial designer and Rigg Prize-winner Adam Goodrum and straw marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur. Their latest collaboration is the Mother and Child cabinet, exploring the dual definitions of emergence – as processes that make something visible after being concealed, or to bring something into existence.
The former finds expression in the opening of the cabinet, in the disruption of the undulating form to reveal the recognisable figures of a mother and child. The latter through the symbolism of the lines in the closed form representing a continuum of energy, which is transferred to the mother and child making their existence possible. The space in between, the opening of the cabinet by the viewer, enacts the mystery of this process, evoking palpable surprise and wonder.
This piece is a departure from the riot of colour usually present in their work, as seen in their debut exhibition Exquisite Corpse at MDW 2020. The concentric lines are amplified, accentuating form, while the properties of straw direction create a spectrum of tone and texture within the confines of black and white. The use of graphic, vivid contrast and emergence processes echoes the sensibilities and metamorphosis theme in the work of M.C. Escher and a shared love of visual puzzles.
Image: A&A Mother and Child cabinet 2021-22. Photography by Andrew Curtis.
Benjamin Armstrong
Pictures for Thinking
Pictures for Thinking has a wide breath of subjects: light, body, history, time, and measurement. Combinations of these subjects are used to elicit insights or to raise questions. In Bones III (pictured) penetrating light becomes the source illuminating the shared structures of our varied bodies.
The making of these artworks is akin to a chemical spill. It is an accident with an unpredictable result, but one in which chance and intuition coalesce. The entangled methodologies that bring these pictures to fruition include, in no particular order or hierarchy, the conventional mediums of print, drawing and painting.
– Benjamin Armstrong, February 2022
Image: Benjamin Armstrong Bones III 2021, pigment and binder on polyester , 174 x 143.5 x 4 cm
