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The Aesthetics of Joy – The Infinite International of Poetics
Slot 1
29 January – 13 March
Opening: 28 January 6-8pm
Artist Talk: 11 February 12.30-1.30pm
The Aesthetics of Joy – The Infinite International of Poetics
Curated by Bernhard Sachs and Brad Haylock
Featuring: Kel Glaister, Brad Haylock, Hit & Miss, Veronica Kent, Lizzy Newman, Simon Pericich, Paul Quinn, Bernhard Sachs, David Simpkin, Brie Trennery, Kellie Wells, Nicki Wynnychuk
The Office of Utopic Procedures is concerned with the circulation of symbolic language as a political problem and with discourses of civil space and its representations. It grew out of an event entitled Office of Utopic Procedures at West Space in 2001; the Office now returns to West Space with a new project, The Aesthetics of Joy: The Infinite International of Poetics.
The previous major exhibition organised by the Office was Endgame: Late-Capitalist Realism, which focused upon the question of the dystopic. After the dystopic, there is only one place to go: revolutions in poetic language.
The Aesthetics of Joy interrogates the possibilities of a poetic international, repercussions from a history in art of exuberance and its complications, including Tatlin's Monument to the Third International — only ever a marquette — Yves Klein's famous Yves Klein Blue (YKB) and the propositional poetics of Marcel Broodthaers. The exhibition considers resistances to the authoritarianism of definition as a politics embodied in questions of transcendence and excess, the carnivalesque and jouissance, notoriously double-edged notions. Even as a cynicism, these are the ciphers of a universalizing, utopic imaginary.
Wanda Gillespie | Torie Nimmervoll | Shay Minster
Slot 2
19 February – 13 March
Opening: 18 February 6-8pm
Artist Talk: 11 March12.30-1.30pm
Gallery 1
Wanda Gillespie
Tana Swiwi
Located deep in the Java Sea, the long lost island of Tana Swiwi has caused great curiosity over the past few centuries. In the Museum of Lost Worlds’ latest uncovering, this mystical realm is visited through reconstructed artefacts and ritual.
An ornate, twisted, dragon-like periscope and a lawnmower-shaped carriage are evidence of the island’s existence. A re-enactment of a traditional trance-inducing Tana Swiwi ceremony will draw viewers in through its hypnotic effect.
Rather than taking an orthodox museum approach, the Museum of Lost Worlds displays these items in a more theatrical fashion in an attempt to engage viewers to dream about the gaps in what is already a highly conjectured piece of history.
Wanda Gillespie is a Melbourne-based conceptual artist interested in the malleable nature of history, materialising the immaterial, and narrative. Wanda has recently completed an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts and was recipient of the Vulcan Steel sculpture award. This project began on an Asialink residency to Indonesia in 2007 and has been gratefully funded by Arts Victoria and the Anthony Ganim Postgraduate Award.
Gallery 2
Torie Nimmervoll
Objecthood: Study C
Objecthood; Study C is the final part of a three-part series of works interested in objects located in the home and exploring different household environments. Prior to the exhibition Nimmervoll sent out a survey to people asking them about certain objects they possess in their home including the quantity and colour of these objects. Objecthood; Study C is a collection of grouped objects that represent the results of several surveys. Each object will be made of different materials, however the surface finish is uniform and they will be coloured in vivid soft pastels, appearing like a three-dimensional statistical graph.
Torie Nimmervoll’s practice covers a diversity of mediums such as drawing, sculpture, installation, durational process and performance. Nimmervoll’s work is concept-based and explores the physical and poetic experience of space. She also works as an industry artist making props and sets.
Gallery 3
Shay Minster
Slow Dance
Slow Dance examines the tragic comedy of the human condition. Appearing familiar and amusing at first, the project explores the suppression experienced when a personality is radically altered through the manipulation of their environment. A clown motif – drained of its usual high colour and its joyous free dance restricted – flails about in a futile attempt to fulfill its intended purpose. Stuck in endless repetition, Slow Dance confronts, in an absurd manner, the existential vacuum.
Shay Minster completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006. Since then she has been short-listed for various prizes and exhibited in artist-run spaces across Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include I Can Stand You at TCB art inc, We Love Each Other and Resocialisation – The Wentworth Gaol Project as part of The Murray Darling Palimpsest #7.
James Kenyon | Prue Crome | Pip Ryan
Slot 3
19 March – 10 April
Opening: 18 March 6-8pm
Free Artist Talk: 8 April 12.30-1.30pm
Gallery 1
James Kenyon
The Lost City of Adelaide II
James Kenyon returns to Melbourne with newly recovered artefacts from the infamous ‘Lost City of Adelaide’, shedding new light on the downfall of this once great civilization.
James Kenyon completed his Honours Degree in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of Arts in 2006. He has exhibited at both commercial galleries and ARIs, and is a finalist in this year’s McClelland Sculpture Award. This is his third solo show.
Gallery 2
Prue Crome
Land Light Project #1 / after the burn
Land Light Project #1 is an immersive projection-based work investigating changes in the colour and quality of light refraction in a landscape. The bushfires on the 7th February 2009 stripped a landscape of its light filters leaving only charcoal stems and exposed earth. The gallery walls will be bathed in the light of the forest in its slow metamorphosis from dull grey tones through to soft lighter greens. Monthly photographic documentation of a site delivered the subtleties of regeneration, bringing the return of colour, birdsong, movement and dappled light.
The underlying philosophy driving my practice is encapsulated in this quote from The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson: ‘The matter and life which fill the world are equally within us; the forces which work in all things we feel within ourselves; whatever may be the inner essence of what is and what is done, we are of that essence.’
Prue Crome has been a practicing artist for 20 years. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in 2008 at RMIT University. Crome’s interest lies in the temporal and conditional nature of perception. Through her installations she uses the manipulation of light and colour to heighten the viewer’s experience and awareness of the interrelationship between themselves, objects, time and space.
Gallery 3
Pip Ryan
Collective Bad Luck
Exploring the moving image through video, film, photography and installation, Pip Ryan’s practice essentially involves the mirror and the camera, and the relationship between these two points of view as they are shown in the same frame, emphasising how these perspectives are constructed.
Mirror, movement, destruction, disorientation, distortion and reversion play a significant role within Ryan’s work. These elements are usually explored by filming directly into mirrors, within locations she has encountered in her everyday life, and are recorded on poorly constructed dollies or apparatuses that she has assembled out of junk, hard rubbish, modified robotics, toys and motors.
Pip Ryan is currently completing her Masters of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts with the assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Award. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions.
The Nothing
Slot 4
16 April – 8 May
Opening: 15 April 6-8pm
Artist Talk: 6 May 12.30-1.30pm
The Nothing
A West Space Project curated by Kelly Fliedner
Featuring: Damiano Bertoli, Lou Hubbard, Sanné Mestrom, Deborah Ostrow, Daniel Price, Matthew Shannon & Jackson Slattery
The Nothing explores realms of the unknown and potentially unknowable aspects of human understanding – the things that we can’t fully comprehend or for which words and recognisable forms simply do not exist. The exhibition’s title The Nothing is taken from the childhood fable The Neverending Story, wherein an indescribable ‘emptiness’ pervades Fantascia (the mythical land in which the story takes place), chronicling the ‘gap’ between islands of human knowledge and understanding. As such, the proposed exhibition. The Nothing addresses liminal spaces, transposing and transforming materials from the familiar to the foreign in order to explore themes of uncertainty and crisis.
The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism
Slot 5
14 May – 29 May
Opening: 14 May 6-8pm
Artist Talk: 15 May12.30-1.30pm
The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism
A Next Wave Festival project curated by Victoria Bennett and Clare Rae.
Featuring Jessie Angwin, Emilie Zoey Baker, Laura Castagnini, Brown Council, Madeleine Donovan, Rachel Fuller, Tamsin Green, Anna Greer, Mariam Haji, Kiera Brew Kurec, Jo Latham, Parachutes for Ladies, Hannah Raisin, Dunja Rmandic, Jessie Scott, Daine Singer, Nella Themelios.
The View From Here pairs eight writers with eight artists to examine contemporary feminist ideas and their application to emerging arts practice. Over the past 10 months the artists and writers have built a discourse that directly feeds into the outcomes of this project, an exhibition and publication. New relationships were forged, opinions navigated, in some cases collaborations formed. The View From Here sees a range of visual and written works exploring themes of identity, sexuality, gender politics, representation, “post” feminism, and femininity. The works are indicative of an emerging perspective on feminism – a view that is non-prescriptive, that references the past whist carving a future. The result is a cacophony of voices that represents the myriad of feminisms being negotiated in our time.
Adam Cruickshank | Oscar Ferreiro | Tim Hillier
Slot 6
4 June - 26 June
Opening 3 June
Artist Talk: 24 June 12.30-1.30pm
Gallery 1
Adam Cruickshank
Domestic Death Rattle Cult
An Installation exploring elements of Contemporary consumer culture and our disconnection from cohesive existence, through the employment of some ridiculous musical instruments.
Adam Cruickshank is an artist working across a broad range of media and installation techniques. Having worked as an art director and designer in advertising and magazines, the corporate generation and manipulation of culture is central to much of his artistic practice. The dialogic nature of his approach attempts to examine hierarchical definitions of so-called 'fine' and 'applied art' practices. Cruickshank attended the Queensland College of Art in the early 90’s and exhibited at various Brisbane artist run spaces of that time. He has lived in London, Berlin, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, Sydney and currently lives and works in Melbourne.
Gallery 2
Oscar Ferreiro
Present tense
Present tense probes the tension between two ways of experiencing phenomena. One way is to experience things as happening in a linear sequential fashion across time; another is to experience things as happening simultaneously, where time and space subside.
The work is an assemblage of 20-30 functioning dismantled transistor radios, speakers and aerials that can be activated by the viewer. The radios are set to different radio stations and operate simultaneously when switched on. It’s a large ungainly device activated by a foot switch.
Oscar Ferreiro is a Melbourne based artist who is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at RMIT. For more information visit www.no-thing.com
Gallery 3
Tim Hillier
Point Break (AKA: Give Me Convenience, or Give Me Death)
Tim Hillier presents a video piece starring Keanu Reeves in two of his finest moments. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journal and Point Break. Through editing the two films together, Keanu falls into the moment where given the chance to kill Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t. Reagan is seen burning petrol, the greedy US President doing what they tend to do best – burn oil. Keanu knows this, but does nothing to stop it, even when given the chance. Give me convenience or give me death.
Tim Hillier is a Melbourne artist who has lived and exhibited in New York, Vancouver, Auckland and London.
Liquid Architecture Festival
Slot 7
2 July – 17 July
Opening 1 July
Liquid Architecture Festival
Liquid Architecture is a sense specific festival, as opposed to art form specific. Occurring annually since 2000, Liquid Architecture celebrates the diverse methods of sound making and sound theory. It is our belief that listening is a vital activity, and one that is often overlooked within the dominance of visual media in our environment.
Simon MacEwan | Nick Waddell | Mila Faranov
Slot 8
23 July – 14 August
Opening 22 July
Gallery 1
Simon MacEwan
The Devil’s Mountain
An exhibition of watercolour drawings and sculptures exploring concepts that have been used to order and explain the physical world and to justify architectural systems. The Devil’s Mountain looks at the relationship and tensions between these ideas and the chaotic, entropic reality of the real world, considering their alteration and failure in physical manifestations and the more subtle ways in which they distort the world.
Simon MacEwan completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture at RMIT University in 2002. He has held solo exhibitions at Bus, Seventh Gallery and RMIT First Site in Melbourne as well as participating in group exhibitions at Utopian Slumps, Kick Gallery VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery and as part of Next Wave.
Gallery 2
Nick Waddell
This exhibition explores the relationship between art, sport and religion through the reconfiguration of trophies and found objects. Utilising items that are emblematic of success and achievement, Waddell deconstructs these elements to form new compositions that suggest collaboration, participation and even failure.
Nick Waddell is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts of the Victorian College of the Arts. He has exhibited his work in numerous solo exhibitions in Melbourne as well as participating in group exhibitions in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands and Poland.
Gallery 3
Mila Faranov
An Installation of giant water-colour and acetate illustrations of the family of carnivorous plants known as Nepenthaceae.
Mila Faranov is a Melbourne-based artist who also works in costume design.
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