Current
VACUUM
JANINA GREEN
From the series Vacuum, 1993
Type C photograph
Vacuum is a set of 14 vintage chromogenic prints made in 1993 and originally shown at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.
'The middle class white housewife is the dominant model of femininity and her role has been constructed around domestic cleanliness. Her home has been the setting for her performance as virtuous wife and mother. But housework also taints the character of the woman, linking femininity with dirtiness and linking dirtiness to the "abject" and to those things we are constantly spitting out and wiping away'.
This twin notion of the feminine as simultaneously pure yet intrinsically soiled is at the heart of Janina Green's densely collaged layered photographs with their richly retro modernist colour schemes of an idealistic era and a lone silhouetted figure in many of the works, drawing us into the present.
20 May - 11 June 2011
To be opened by: Naomi Cass,
Director Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
6.00 pm to 8.00 pm Thursday 19th May 2011
MARGARET LAWRENCE GALLERY
40 Dodds Street
Southbank Victoria 3006
T: +61 3 9685 9400
Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 12pm - 5pm
Saturday 1.00 - 4.00pm.
www.vcam.unimelb.edu.au/gallery
Plenty
TIM HANDFIELD
Romina Way, South Morang, 2010
Type C photograph, 126cm x 160cm
Tim Handfield's new exhibition, Plenty examines the landscape at the intersection of Melbourne's outer urban development and the grassy eucalypt woodland of the Victorian Volcanic Plain.
Tim's photographs made along the margins of Plenty Road discover a strange and compelling mixture of excess and decay, opportunity and loss, as the landscape undergoes dramatic change. Mac Mansions jostle with faux Victorian and Federation style houses. Gigantic retail barns emerge from grassy paddocks, and majestic red gums are conscripted to serve as marketing icons for fast food chains.
This new work by Tim Handfield draws on his long fascination with the man altered landscape in Australia and overseas. Tim has a particular interest in the unique forms of Australia's ubiquitous gum trees and has photographed them in Australia over many years, and more recently expatriate eucalypts in Ethiopia and California.
May 6 to 29, 2010
To be Opened by Stephen Zagala,
Curator Monash Gallery of Art
6.00 pm to 8.00 pm Thursday 6th May, 2010
Artist Floor talk Saturday May 22, 2.00pm
COLOUR FACTORY GALLERY
409 - 429 Gore St
Fitzroy, Victoria 3065
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 8.30am - 5.30pm
Saturday 1.00 - 4.00pm.
www.colourfactory.com.au
A one legged schoolteacher, two anarchist bullfighters and a poet
CHRISTOPHER Köller
from Site of Execution, Alfacar 2009
Eco solvent print on adhesive fabric, 220 x 260 cm
Christopher Köller's exhibition at Seventh is a video and photographic installation exploring the circumstances and the location where leading Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
After being rounded up and taken to a site between two villages in the foothills of the Sierra de Alfacar north east of Granada, Lorca was killed along with a one-legged schoolteacher who was a staunch republican and two anarchist bullfighters. Lorca was singled out because of his anti-clerical statements, his founding of Barraca a travelling theatre group which entertained and educated the Spanish peasantry and his opposition to the Nationalist (fascist) cause. The poet's body was reportedly mutilated in a manner that communicated his killers' disdain for his homosexuality.
A one legged schoolteacher, two anarchist bullfighters and a poet, continues Köller's interest in the drama of the final moments of people's lives begun in the series of videos - A Time to Die exhibited in 2005. In the video at Seventh, rather than show the protagonist, Köller shows the scene as if through his eyes - as he did in A Time to Die - with the sound providing all-important indications of the circumstances.
September 1 - September 19, 2009
Opening: Tuesday September 1, 6.00 - 8.00PM
SEVENTH
155 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy Victoria 3065
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12pm - 6pm
Night Screen: Tuesday - Saturday 6pm - Midnight
www.seventhgallery.org
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and
advisory body.
RUNNING DOGS: AUSTRALIA'S MEDIA MAGNATES (A DRAMATIC RECONSTRUCTION)
PETER MILNE
Destruction (after Thomas Cole), from Fairfax and Sons -
The Jacobean Years, 2009
C Type Photograph
(Photo Montage)
March 3 - March 29, 2009
Peter Milne casts his sardonic eye over the Australian media landscape in Running Dogs: Australia's Media Magnates
(a dramatic reconstruction).
The exhibition brings together two previously seen bodies of photographic works: Reptiles - A History of the Packer Dynasty and The Explainer - Rupert Murdoch Wins Friends and Influences People, along with two new series of photomontages scanned and printed as type C prints: Fairfax and Sons - The Jacobean Years and A Flock of Seagulls.
March 3 - 29, 2009
To be opened by Maurice Ortega, Director of the Queensland Centre for Photography
6pm Tuesday March 3, 2009
Turbine Hall,
Brisbane Powerhouse
119 Lamington Street New Farm Queensland 4005
(07) 3358 8600
www.brisbanepowerhouse.org
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm
Saturday - Sunday 10 - 4 and During Performance Times
MAID IN HONG KONG
JANINA GREEN
Though bonded by their keepers all week, Philippino maids in Hong Kong find joy and freedom on Sundays. They take over public spaces around the city where they picnic, dance, sing, chat and gossip under bridges, in parks and around department stores. Since participating in a West Space Project in Hong Kong in 2003, Janina Green has been fascinated by the study of femininity that such a congregation of women affords and has made a series of celebratory hand - coloured sepia images in response to it.
from Maid in Hong Kong 2008
hand - coloured chromogenic print
February 10 - March 10, 2009
To be opened by Dr Shaun Lakin, Director of MGA
3.00pm Saturday February 14, 2009
Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
Wheelchair accessible
61 3 9562 1659
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday - Sunday 12pm - 5pm
www.mga.org.au
Artist's talk with Janina Green
3.00pm Friday February 27, 2009
Bookings 03 9562 1569
CAN'T TAKE MY EYES OFF YOU
A two-week late night season of video by:
Jane Burton/Fabrice Bigot, Christopher Köller, Brendan Lee, Narinda Reeders, Darren Sylvester, Brie Trenerry
Curated by Helen Frajman
Jane Burton and Fabrice Bigot : Still from Tarraleah, 2007, DVD
Rooftop Cinema, Curtin House,
252 Swanston Street Melbourne 3000
10.30 pm - 12.00am / March 2 - March 15, 2008
Bar will be open and snacks available.
FREE ADMISSION
The common thread uniting the works in Can't Take My Eyes Off You
is the idea of fixation or obsession. For the artists involved this covers
a spectrum of notions from a passionate and possibly deranging dedication
to Pokeman characters in Darren Sylvester's Don't Lose Yourself in Tomorrow,
to the magnetic pull of a wooden house in Jane Burton and Fabrice Bigot's
Tarraleah - but more generally refers also, to the hypnotic appeal
of the moving visual image.
Program details:
www.rooftopcinema.com.au
Exhibition launch: Monday March 3, 9.30 - 11.30pm
This exhibition is supported by a City of Melbourne Arts Grant.
TRUST
Christopher Köller
Elizabeth Pressa, 2008
Type C Print 85 x 107cm
Christopher Köller's latest exhibition,
TRUST consists of 16 large - scale black and white photographic portraits of people
who are significant contributors to Melbourne's rich contemporary culture.
The focus is both on those who are well known, together with emerging practioners
from divergent backgrounds including the visual arts, craft, film, dance and music.
Köller is interested to see whether fresh vigour and energy can be breathed into the
photographic portrait, going beyond the simple well-lit description of the sitter's
features.
His subjects collude and collaborate with him in the presentation of their image, with
a singular aesthetic emerging, whose influences run the gamut from Andy Warhol's
Interview magazine to Japanese photography of the early 1970s.
February 20 - March 8, 2008
Opening: Wednesday 20th February 5.30 - 7.30
UPSTAIRS FLINDERS
First Floor, 137 Flinders Lane (Entrance off Oliver Lane)
Melbourne 3000
www.flg.com.au
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday 11 - 6pm
Saturday 11 - 4pm
This exhibition is supported by a City of Melbourne Arts Grant.
BRIEF SHINING MOMENT
Peter Milne
From A Kind of Love, 2007
Giclee Print, 400 x 600mm
Peter Milne continues to pursue his interest
in the construction and consumption of history in his latest exhibition Brief
Shining Moment.
Composed of six separate but related suites of photographs installed across six spaces at
69 Smith Street Gallery, Brief Shining Moment focuses on some of the key players and episodes
from the highly charged 'Whitlam era' of Australian politics.
Brief Shining Moment is a kind of visual 'mythopoeia'. It is an attempt to create mythic
narrative out of 'factual' history and in doing so, highlight the ways in which history
and myth both operate as 'cautionary tales' to articulate societal values and guide
moral behaviour.
The narratives are operatic, fuelled by human dynamics of loyalty, hubristic ambition,
envy and betrayal. Throughout the work there runs a central motif of futile idealism and
of grand utopian dreams frustrated, foiled, diluted and corrupted.
Brief Shining Moment is intended to be a series of morality tales,
more emotional than evidentiary. Like the actual historical events and documents
it interprets, it is supposed to be comically improbable (and perhaps also
a little sad).
July 11 - July 29, 2007
69 Smith Street Gallery
69 Smith St Fitzroy Victoria 3065
Gallery hours: Wed - Sat 11 - 5pm
Sunday 12 - 5pm
info@69smithstreet.com.au
www.69smithstreet.com.au/
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Gardens (1997 - 2007)
Christopher Köller
Shugakuin: Imperial Villa, Kyoto 1998
Type C Photograph 86cm x 107cm
“The exhibition Gardens (1997-2007) is a sampling
of Christopher Köller’s photographs of gardens taken over the past
10 years with a $7.00 plastic Diana camera. In the manner of a compulsive
collector, Köller has travelled to a number of famous gardens and sought
out all kinds of gardens wherever he happened to be. From the autumn haze
in the medieval cloister garden of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan,
to the surrealist topiary framing Sleeping Beauty’s Castle
at Paris Disneyland and the dreamy seclusion of the octagonal pond at Edna
Walling’s Mawarra in the Dandenongs, Köller has created a series
of images inspired by the work of gardeners and the art of garden designers.
….There is always something about the viewpoint and technique in Köller’s
garden series that makes viewers feel that they are lifted out of their everyday
perspective; we are forced to re-orient ourselves according to an unfamiliar
system. It is seeing anew, in the manner of another species. We are required
to slow down, to stop, to wonder at the construction of the world we’re
shown….”
Nanette Carter from Exhibition catalogue
April 4 - May 13, 2007
Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
61 3 9562 1659
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday - Sunday 12pm - 5pm
www.mga.org.au
To be launched by:
PAUL BANGAY, Garden Designer
Tuesday April 17, 2007
6pm
WINTER WALLING
Christopher Köller and Sophie Knezic
Christopher Köller, from Winter Walling (detail), 2006
Type C Photograph 110cm x 110cm
Sophie Knezic, French Grammar (detail), 2005
Paper, gouache, silk
Ignored for decades, but reclaimed in recent years, Edna Walling's
landscape architecture proposed a particular vision of the Australian Garden.
In the exhibition Winter Walling, Christopher Köller and Sophie Knezic - two
artists with an ongoing interest in landscape architecture - come together for the
first time, to explore Edna Walling's gardens. Focusing on the local site of Mawarra
during the season of winter, Knezic and Köller reinterpret the garden in light of
its change, decay and restoration over the years.
Using the media of photography and paper sculpture, Winter Walling creates a dialogue
between the two very different material practices of each artist. The combination of
colour prints and paper cut-outs embodies alternate interpretations of the site; in
its original proposition and contemporary incarnation.
September 8 - 23, 2006
WEST SPACE
1st Floor, 15 - 19 Anthony St, Melbourne Vic 3000
61 3 9328 8712
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Friday 12pm - 6pm
Saturday 12pm - 5pm
www.westspace.org.au