ART & AUSTRALIA / Credit Suisse PRIVATE BANKING CONTEMPORARY ART AWARD 2003-2016
Del Kathryn Barton
Del Kathryn Barton’s work has a strong foundation of drawing, although she has recently begun to work with painting. She cites artists Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, John Currin and Shirin Neshat as influences, as well as the drawings of Henry Darger, botanical art and fabric design. Her early works featured Egon Schiele-like drawings of naked female bodies entwined with rabbits but also birds and native animals. The explicit nature of the drawings – with the female genitals depicted in detail and the animals often emerging from the female body – have frequently been read as pornographic. However, rather than intentionally explicit or titillating, the drawings are the product of Del’s interest in the relationship between humankind and nature. She sees a spiritual presence residing in the natural world and is concerned with the effect of this on humankind’s physiological and metaphysical existence. – Claire Armstrong, Spring 2004
Del Kathryn Barton, girl #8, 2004, detail; gouache, watercolour and acrylic on polyester canvas, 121 x 85 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist
Nicholas Mangan
In Mangan’s distinctive work the by-products of consumerism are integrated with unique sculptural forms of the artist’s own making. Mangan’s sculpture shares an affinity with the work of many young contemporary artists – such as Ricky Swallow, James Angus and Tim Silver, for example – in which everyday items are deified in sculptural forms distinguished by aesthetic and technical proficiency. However, rather than re-creating objects of everyday use, Mangan incorporates them into new hybrid sculptural forms. – Claire Armstrong, Summer 2004
Nicholas Mangan, Untitled (nest), 2004, detail; aluminium ladder, Western red cedar, Tasmanian oak, 275 x 50 x 170 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Simon Hewson
Astra Howard
Howard\'s public experiments – which she classifies as \'action research\' ... – focus on transitional urban public spaces, such as streetscapes, commuter routes, abandoned infrastructure and pre-construction sites. Positing flux as a defining feature of local public space, these transit zones become a stage and testing-lab for Howard to categorise and characterise the general experience of public space. – Katrina Schwarz, Autumn 2005
Astra Howard, DomestiCITY, 2005; video stills, action research/performance, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, video, 41 mins 37 secs duration; Photograph and video documentation Astra Howard; Action researcher/performers Astra Howard, Todd McCoy, Greta Thiering;
Amanda Marburg
The journey Marburg takes in the production of her paintings is consequently a continual process of abstraction. This detachment from a depiction of the \'real\' is accentuated in the paintings by a lack of surface texture, in contrast to the malleable plasticine models in which the artist\'s hand, even her fingerprints, are visible. However, the flatness that this lack of texture might convey is counteracted by the unsettling focus in each of the paintings, with some features of the composition thrown into sharp relief and others into shadow and haze, giving an awkward, otherworldly sense of space. – Claire Armstrong, Winter 2005
Amanda Marburg, Giving the devil his due #19, 2004; oil on canvas, 102 x 133 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and OLSEN IRWIN, Sydney; photograph Simon Hewson
Selina Ou
What is striking about Ou\'s photographs is their stillness, frontality and precise compositional structure. For example, Ou\'s 2001 series \'Serving You Better\' uses the commercial settings of a pharmacy, butcher, travel agency and a convenience store. In these images, colourful boxes of medication, rows of bottles and bags of confectionery, stacked produce and the edges of counters and tables form lines parallel to the photographs\' upper and lower edges. These horizontal linear structures define a static matrix within which Ou\'s human subjects pose, facing the camera, motionless, like the inanimate objects around them. – Monte Packham, Spring 2005
Selina Ou, Young couple with deer, Nara, 2005, detail; type-C photograph, 100 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne
Jonathan Jones
The accumulation of light is, in Jones\'s idiom, an attempt to map the network of relations between communities and individuals. Independent light sources come together to create a larger body of illumination, whose interlocking nature ... signals the artist\'s interest in areas of commonality and connection, in overlap and symbiotic flow. It is a fascination Jones locates in his discovery of accounts of the Cadigal people night fishing, as recorded by early colonists observing from the shores of Port Jackson. – Katrina Schwarz, Summer 2005
Jonathan Jones, blue poles, 2004/10; fluorescent lights, transparent synthetic polymer resin, composition board, electrical cord, 168.9 x 285.3 x 65 cm overall; edition of 3 and one museum edition; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; National Gallery of Victoria Collection (purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2010); courtesy the artist; photograph NGV Photo Services
Christian de Vietri
Now that reality television is our surrogate for life experience, it is a truism that objects encountered everyday, on reflection, turn out to be double entendres. Certainty is a relative concept and it follows that relative certainty is as stable as things are going to get. With data circulating at ever increasing rates and in previously unimagined volumes, just how long any \'fact\' remains undisputed is no longer measured with a calendar but by a second hand ... Christian de Vietri ponders just such questions and his works quite literally revel in the specifics that signpost our uncertainty. – Gary Dufour, Autumn 2006
Christian de Vietri, 2nd law, 2004; polyurethane, fibreglass, metal fridge, 110 x 245 x 170 cm; installation view, Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist; photograph Acorn Photography
James Lynch
In James Lynch\'s hands, dreams come to life on the screen as beautifully rendered moments, moving from frame to frame as though the transition from dream-state to gallery has been filtered through a time lapse, the memory hazy in detail but powerful in theme. Lynch is a dream-catcher. He has been working with other people\'s dreams for some time now, dreams in which he is either a central or peripheral figure. These are not nightmares or sweat-soaked erotica, but rather the dreams of little or nothing that take on epic proportions in wakefulness. – Ashley Crawford, winter 2006
James Lynch, I was running and running, 2004; digital video still, 4 mins 17 secs duration; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne
Michelle Ussher
Alongside the foliage and vegetation in Ussher\'s delicately drawn and painted compositions are the paraphernalia of camping and picnicking. Tents, campfires, cars and picnic gear are all represented, beyond which the bush is safely at arm\'s length. Ussher is interested in temporary human occupation of the landscape. Hers is the visitor\'s or tourist\'s view of nature, one full of play and relaxation, a perspective further implied by the postcard-sized paper on which many of her works are completed and by the display of these works as a series of holiday snapshots. – Claire Armstrong, Spring 2006
Michelle Ussher, Picnichead II, 2006, detail; watercolour, aquarelle and pencil on paper, 208 x 130 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney; photograph Greg Weight
Rob McHaffie
There is something delightfully inscrutable in the work of Melbourne artist Rob McHaffie. His humble canvases are strikingly distinctive, revealing an unabashed focus on the figurative and a deliberate avoidance of straightforward narrative ... His works feature perfectly rendered images of everyday objects – unsettling in their clarity and realism – which are then skewed, moulded, displaced and juxtaposed in unlikely relationships. His all-too-human titles, such as I\'d rather be no-one than someone with no-one, 2006, add humour to his intriguing visual repertoire. – Jesse Stein, Summer 2006
Rob McHaffie, Everybody’s got baggage but nobody’s going anywhere, 2006, detail; oil on canvas, 62 x 52 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; photograph Viki Petherbridge
Louisa Dawson
Dawson\'s work is brave: her sculptures are envisaged as permanent fixtures and are often very big – a rare and significant trait in the practice of a young, female, urban sculptor. When I spoke to her in November 2006 she was finalising a large version of her \'rocking ladders’, titled Unsteady work. These ladders are aluminium and 5 metres tall, rocking on a curved base. Dawson is skilled in carpentry, and designed the structural basis for the rocking ladders, but states, \'as for making it rock without killing someone, I\'m leaving that up to the engineers\'. – Jesse Stein, Autumn 2007
Louisa Dawson, Temporary displacement, 2005; rubbish skip, swimming pool tiles, swimming pool ladder, water, 160 x 240 x 130 cm; installation view, Art Academy, Dresden, Germany; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist
Giles Ryder
Describing his work as a ‘hybrid between minimalism, abstraction, op and pop art’, Ryder suggests that his work is actually ‘more abstract’ than a direct reference to automobile culture and aesthetics. ‘It comes back to art and art history. It’s pop but it’s not ... it has more to do with Australian culture.’ With this comment, a whole new set of references emerge – from striped awnings to RSL Club decor. And unlike earlier modernist forms of abstraction, Ryder’s abstraction does not preclude references to popular culture and society. – Jesse Stein, Winter 2007
Giles Ryder, Silver strutter (daze of disco), 2006, detail; video still, HD stop-motion animation, 1 min 29 secs duration, edition 1/5; installation view, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Simon Strong
Mark Hilton
Vast and luminescent, Mark Hilton’s exquisitely detailed lightboxes belie the Melbourne artist’s fascination with the darkest recesses of contemporary experience. As the most striking examples of an expansive and rigorous practice, which incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Hilton’s lightboxes document unsettling topical events – sexual assault, murder, and impropriety in the AFL. Hilton’s further achievement is to represent and re-situate these events within a historically specific aesthetic, expressive of a wider concern with the ‘writing’ of history. – Katrina Schwarz, Spring 2007
Mark Hilton, Champion, 2006, detail; lambda duratran on double-sided lightbox, 180 x 120 x 5 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne
Helen Johnson
Johnson’s works are not what they appear. Their steely strength lies in the way they welcome viewers into a delicately rendered realm, luring us with a false sense of security, only to pull the rug from under our feet. At which point the work’s ‘wallpaper’ is removed, to uncover the gritty grain of life ... In Johnson’s world, appearances are both deceiving and revealing. – Michael Fitzgerald, Summer 2007
Helen Johnson, Assembling a propositional register: individual action in society as environmental science; a dream of the forest (nothing happened in the dream, there was only the complex, wet smell, leaf litter and dimness. He was a part of it), 2006, detail; acrylic, pencil and mixed media, dimensions variable; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; photograph Andrew Curtis
Grant Stevens
Stevens treads a fine line between irony and sincerity, and the artist would be the first to admit that his work seeks transcendence from the usual default positions of popular culture: ‘There’s always a contradiction.’ With his short video works, Stevens has cut to the very quick of western culture: Hollywood. Having completed his PhD on notions of editing and text, and believing Hollywood to be ‘the primary myth-making place in terms of film or narrative’, the artist seeks to demystify it. – Michael Fitzgerald, Autumn 2008
Grant Stevens, The way, 2007; lambda print, custom cabinet, car stereo, sound by Rex Goh, 23 mins 37 secs duration, 75 x 197 x 39 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney; photograph Richard Glover
Jamil Yamani
Spanning video and sculptural installation, and with a tight, trained focus on the tropes of exilic experience, Yamani perforates and displaces borders of law, imagination and form. In a single-channel video work from 2005, All quiet on the Western Front ... the artist – now split in two, now literally beside himself – points to the complexity of political and cultural identity in a simple gesture of reciprocity: he takes himself out to dinner ... Although Yamani’s two selves never speak, the artist nevertheless locates surprising spaces of exchange and mutuality. Yamani’s eastern incarnation occupies the western sphere of the screen image; westernised Yamani, the east. – Katrina Schwarz, Winter 2008
Jamil Yamani, family/familiar, 2008; video still, aluminium, fabric, projector, HD video, stereo/audio, approx. 300 x 300 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist
Ash Keating
Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating intercepts and manipulates discarded waste to highlight the ecological fallout of mass-production and global capitalism. Having worked for a waste audit and consultancy company for the past five years, Keating is a self-described ‘witness to the hidden waste that industry creates and disposes of in landfill daily’. His process-based practice thus exposes industry’s gross acts of environmental exploitation and mismanagement, but transcends allegory or mere finger-pointing to present alternative models for environmental reclamation and sustainable living. – Ulanda Blair, Spring 2008
Ash Keating, The uprising #5, 2009, detail; from the series ‘Activate 2750’; type-C photograph, 66 x 100 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
Sara Hughes
Sara Hughes is a heat-seeking device, an artist in search of a pulse in this digitally-enhanced, computer-generated, image-downloadable age. With her abstract wall works of collaged commercial vinyl brightly coloured by consumerism, Hughes calls attention to the connective impulses underlying contemporary life. Her suggestive swirls and painted pixelations illustrate our competing urges to consume or be consumed, for instant gratification or more serious satiation, to delineate or decode the tropes of visual language. – Michael Fitzgerald, Summer 2008
Sara Hughes, Torpedo, 2008, detail; paper tags hand dipped and painted, acrylic paint, dimensions variable; installation view, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland; photograph Simon Harper
Kushana Bush
Bush’s aesthetic – with its use of small scale, decorative aspects and stylised figures – permits her often shockingly sexual and gruesome imagery to sneak past our cultural sensitivities. Viewers move closer before they even realise what they’re seeing. And once there, they might as well ask: who and what and why? Yet unlike many of today’s artists and celebrities, Bush is not out to shock. She seeks new ways of discussing the clichéd or contentious. And against the barrage of contemporary imagery and debate, a little artistic sleight of hand is often necessary. – Talia Linz, Autumn 2009
Kushana Bush, Pressed open hook, 2009, detail; gouache and pencil on paper, 100 x 70 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin
Noël Skrzypczak
Skrzypczak’s formalist approach exerts the full power of her materials in psychedelic free-form works, encouraging the kind of everyday transcendental moments that one might experience in finding figures in clouds. Though one could happily remain lost in her technical mastery and the joy of seeing her animated materials frozen in time, Skrzypczak’s clear and often dooming titles generate pathos and push her work into the realm of environmental discourse. – Marni Williams, Winter 2009
Noël Skrzypczak, Cave painting II, 2006, detail; acrylic, dimensions variable; installation view, Grant Pirrie Gallery, Sydney; courtesy the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne; photograph Jenni Carter
Jordana Maisie
Maisie’s work promotes a degree of intimacy and playfulness that comes from engaging with the exhibition space. Her self-prescribed task is to make her conceptual ideas manifest in direct experience, honouring human-to-human contact and presenting alternate pathways for interacting with technology. One senses that she achieves her aim by tapping into an irresistible childlike curiosity where movement precludes thinking and technology is made to talk back. – Marni Williams, Spring 2009
Jordana Maisie, The real thing, 2008; mirror acrylic, ice acrylic, aluminium, timber, wire, black tat cloth, HDV camera, Mac mini, data projector, 220 x 220 x 750 cm; installation view, Black and Blue Gallery, Sydney; Ipswich Art Gallery Collection; courtesy the artist
Gregor Kregar
From live sheep to ceramic piggy banks and giant, floating geometric shapes, Gregor Kregar’s sculptural menagerie suggests that he is not an artist seduced by a single subject. Nor can one material tie him down; he picks and chooses between glass and steel, plastic and terracotta, cardboard, video, photography and livestock. Like the varied combinations of polyhedrons he creates, this Slovenian-born, Auckland-based artist is indeed multi-faceted. – Talia Linz, Summer 2009
Gregor Kregar, Piercing the clouds, 2008; stainless steel; video and lambda print photographs; two sculptures, 300 x 250 x 150 cm and 300 x 200 x 150 cm; three wall sculptures, 180 x 120 x 110 cm, 150 x 130 x 100 cm and 80 x 60 x 40 cm; three photographs, 200 x 125 cm each; video, 60 secs duration, dual projection; installation view, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney
Peter Madden
Tenderly lifted from the pages of National Geographic, thumbed encyclopedias and found photographs, old images find new life in the airborne works of Peter Madden. The artist has a consuming passion for visual recycling, dedicatedly pilfering second-hand bookshops and internet trading sites for his library of photographic imagery. Rescued from a life of garage mildew or stagnation in a dentist’s waiting room, Madden imbues these pictures with renewed purpose. In his hands they are painstakingly cut out, pinned, balanced, layered and juxtaposed to create paper microcosms bursting with colour and form. – Talia Linz, Autumn 2009
Peter Madden, She, 2007, detail; found photographs, pins and archival glue, 79 x 54 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
Susan Jacobs
Unlike an artist who might present objects to encase artistic truths, Jacobs is not particularly concerned with conclusions. She sees her work as a series of exercises in problem-solving and resourcefulness that inevitably develop their own sense of logic. This approach has led her to work in a plethora of mediums incorporating architecture, sculpture, installation, works on paper, video and photography. The sum of her work adds up to a common line of inquiry rather than a signature aesthetic. – Marni Williams, Winter 2010
Susan Jacobs, Side effect, 2008; charcoal, lead, wood, epoxy adhesive, graphite, dimensions variable; installation view, The Narrows, Melbourne; courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout, Melbourne; photograph Jonathan Doncovio
Chantal Fraser
Shrouding her face and body with fabric of varying colour and pattern, at times delicately folded and others tightly bound, Fraser conjures a range of imagery from Magritte’s bound lovers to the Muslim burqa to hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While challenging the traditional meaning and use of this culturally iconic object, the artist also flirts with the idea of body as sculptural form, herself becoming another object to be manipulated within the work. – Talia Linz, Spring 2010
Chantal Fraser, Maiden militia, 2009, detail; type-C photograph, 130 x 110 cm; private collection
Pat Foster and Jen Berean
Observable in Foster and Berean’s recent bodies of work is a strong current and critique that revolves around the politics and impacts of urban planning. Increasingly our public spaces are controlled and monitored through environmental design, closed-circuit cameras, and lighting and sound interventions. Lattices, flat planes and sharp angles are frequently seen in Foster and Berean’s practice, reflecting the idealised ‘grid plan’ of urban design which, far from being a modern phenomenon, stretches back to antiquity. – Kate Warren, Summer 2010
Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Can’t stand up, for falling down, 2010; safety glass, polythene sheet, 130 x 90 x 80 cm; installation view, Murray White Room, Melbourne; courtesy the artists; photograph John Brash
Emma White
Viewers might be forgiven for thinking they have arrived at Emma White’s exhibitions on the wrong day: used coffee cups linger idly next to panes of glass on the gallery floor; Blu-Tack clings to the walls. Yet on closer inspection, these items reveal the sturdy physicality and slightly blurred edges that give them up as artworks. While Post-it notes, packing tape or Mars Bar wrappers might not seem likely harbingers of a sculptural trompe l’oeil, they duly lure us into their details ... These polymer clay ciphers sit stagnant, but just like White’s practice as a whole, they harbour a fragile tension. – Marni Williams, Autumn 2011
Emma White, The plastic arts, 2011; neon, transformers and epoxy enamel on timber panels, 204 x 77 x 20 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and BREENSPACE, Sydney
Sarah Ryan
Sarah Ryan’s photographic imagery is drawn from the unconscious gaps that are created when humans shift their visual attention from one thing to another. Time and movement is therefore prominent in her work, generating subject matter that seems arbitrary in spite of its relative consistency. Ryan’s images appear to have been captured by a photographer in flux; as if created from wandering around her studio or a nearby park, searching not for a conspicuous picture but for a quality of in-betweenness. – Wes Hill, winter 2011
Sarah Ryan, Untitled (detail), 2008–09, detail; digital lenticular photograph, 80 x 117.5 cm; courtesy the artist and Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney
Peter Nelson
From the business district of La Défense in western Paris to the geomorphology of southern China, Nelson is constantly gleaning forms and suspending them within curious non-places. The effect is a kind of surrealist temporal freeze, both enchanting and inhospitable in effect. And so his work not only plays with the perceived permanence of urban architecture, or the impending spoil of natural forms, but also suggests an internal, melancholic terrain – a further example of his work’s intriguing and seemingly infinite heterogeneity. – Talia Linz, Spring 2011
Peter Nelson, Mountain drawing (the first time I felt at home), 2011; perspex and glue, 265 x 420 x 200 cm; installation view, Kudos Gallery, Sydney; courtesy the artist and Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
Laith McGregor
Long, fantastical beards punctuate Laith McGregor’s blue-biro-on-paper renderings of men with metronomic regularity. Set against starkly empty backdrops, these self-portraits and portraits of friends and family members are usually densely detailed, integrating figuration, abstraction, patterning and sometimes text into the hirsute subjects. What begin as facial studies slowly morph into strangely hypnotic representations as McGregor alters the scale of certain features and allegorically combines his photographic realism with fragments of history, fiction, popular culture and other mythologies. – Helen Hughes, Summer 2011
Laith McGregor, Opal, 2011, detail; permanent marker on tarpaulin, 300 x 240 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney; photograph Jeremy Dillon
Rebecca Baumann
The strength of Baumann’s work lies in the density of her materials and the concentration of human experience – the fleeting orchestration of parts en masse. We can’t get enough of the heady coloured clouds of smoke or avert our gaze away from the glints of light refracting on gold tinsel curtains and yet, at the same time, it is all far too much. Formally her work relies on repetition and return, but there is always the threat of deflation, of being brought back down to earth, or being rudely interrupted by the squeaky surrender of an obnoxious cog in one of her machines. – Leigh Robb, Autumn 2012
Rebecca Baumann, Untitled cascade, 2010/12, detail; tinsel curtain, domestic fan, 1.2k Selecon Zoomspot, dimensions variable; installation view, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art Collection; courtesy the artist; photograph Bewley Shaylor
Tom Polo
When talking about Polo it is hard to resist quoting his work, so catchy are the titles. It is also hard to circumnavigate the rhetoric of success and failure, which has dominated writing on it. With a practice based in painting, and extending to installation and performance in its investigation, Polo’s work is typified by a self-conscious reflection on art production and its value. More broadly, this is applied to how we seek worth socially. – Susan Gibb, Winter 2012
Tom Polo, A painting of you as me as you looking at me, 2012, detail; acrylic on linen, 60 x 45 cm; courtesy the artist
Alasdair McLuckie
The ritualistic nature of McLuckie’s work is emphasised by his use of folk aesthetics, signature patterning and symbolism. However, instead of beginning with such grand narratives of life and death, his work often has a more simple and formal catalyst: for instance, a straightforward interest in how biro ink appears on the surface of wood ... McLuckie’s work draws on primitive abstraction while his formalist aesthetic tendency is strong, with a scrupulous focus on design, materials and process. – Kelly Fliedner, Spring 2012
Alasdair McLuckie, The sun as my witness, 2010; woven glass seed beads, glass vessels, Perspex, glass beads and timber, 143 x 60 x 55 cm; installation view, West Space, Melbourne; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Murray White Room, Melbourne
Britt Salt
The materiality of Salt’s artworks is both innovative and deceptive. Sourcing material largely from industrial and hardware stockists, Salt both utilises and subverts the inherent ‘heavy-duty’ qualities of commercial products, such as powder-coated aluminium and industrial mesh, to create instead sculptural and light-based interplays of patterned forms. An heir to a tradition of optical and kinetic art, her practice contains elements of chance and unpredictability. – Jane Button, Summer 2012
Britt Salt, Puzzlethèque, 2012; hand-painted PVC, vinyl, steel, dimensions variable; installation view, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne; courtesy the artist and Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne; photograph Jeremy Dillon
Patrick Francis
Francis is a prolific painter who finds his primary source material in the visual culture of his city and in the art history of western civilisation. A huge range of images attracts his attention and from this basis he is ready to focus and delve into the essence, to the bedrock, of these images. Francis has been drawn especially to the work of Michelangelo, Goya, Raphael, Munch and Gorky, and has a true gift for finding in the paintings of these artists the essential humanity of the subjects as well as showing the attitude and point of view that is often hidden or masked in the pictorial plays of the artist. – Peter Fay, Autumn 2013
Patrick Francis, Not titled (Napoleon), 2012, detail; acrylic on paper, 50 x 70 cm; ARTAND Australia Emerging Artist Collection; courtesy the artist and Arts Project Australia, Melbourne; photograph Penelope Hunt
Tim Woodward
Woodward wants us to think about why we do the things we do, how we can explain the things we do, and how our explanations of the things we do relate to the act of doing. His ostensibly commonplace objects portray a confounding world in which the creative process and its analysis are fundamentally irresolute. This emphasis on indeterminacy is also suggestive of peripateticism; the off-handed and performative qualities of Woodward’s work foreground the artist’s biographical journeying. – Wes Hill, Winter 2013
Tim Woodward, Master baker, 2012; bread, adjusted aluminum easel, speaker horn, audio commentary, 106 x 89 x 89 cm; installation view, the artist’s studio; courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Sanné Mestrom
Woven throughout Mestrom’s installation-based works are explicit allusions to modernist art history. Iconographic artworks of the twentieth century are appropriated and reconfigured, transformed into something at once naggingly familiar and yet new and strange. Materials are substituted; paintings are reimagined as sculptures. ... This process of translation through which Mestrom shifts and alters her source material allows for a fresh engagement with these modernist masterpieces. – Andrew Purvis, August 2013
Sanné Mestrom, Soft kiss, 2011, detail; cast styrofoam, found object, timber, 120 x 80 x 55 cm; installation view, ‘The Reclining Nude’ (2011), Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; courtesy the artist, Chalk Horse, Sydney, and Utopian Slumps, Melbourne
Karen Black
When I look at Black’s works I find myself searching: for figures, faces, meaning. That’s the power of these paintings – they make you look closely and contemplate the large issues. At a time when art can be so physically demanding, so active – it moves, it makes noise, it requires participation – it can be difficult for a painting to command attention in the same way. Black’s paintings do this by referring to the wider world in which they are produced. They raise questions, create fictions, tell stories, arouse our curiosity, and all the while demonstrate Black’s desire to investigate the properties of colour, surface and paint. – Miri Hirschfeld, November 2013
Karen Black, Flower’s grave, 2013, detail; oil on marine plywood, 67 x 116 cm; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney
Jane Brown
Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne, 2012–13, depicts Brown’s former workplace, but could equally depict a library a century earlier. Her use of aged film stock causes the photograph to appear as an object from another time, while also suggesting the library itself to be somewhat mildewed and dusty. A neat connection exists between the deterioration of film stock leading to the beautiful effects in Brown’s works (initially accidental, now deliberate but still experimental) and the sense of urgency the artist feels in documenting what is sometimes rapidly disappearing subject matter. – Chloé Wolifson, February 2014
Jane Brown, Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne, 2012–13, detail; from the series \'Not Before Time\' (2011–13); fibre-based, gelatin silver print, 27 x 33 cm
Liam O'Brien
Intentionally ambiguous in both form and function, The glaze, 2013, is littered with visual signifiers, art historical references and red herrings, leaving it open to interpretation. From an artist’s perspective, O’Brien tests whether satisfaction can be gained from wilfully investing in the pursuit of an action that he knows to be meaningless. And if there is no such meaning, and all that remains is aesthetics, is that alone enough? – Annika Kristensen, May 2014
Liam O’Brien, The glaze, 2013, detail; high-definition single-channel video, 18 mins 27 secs duration; courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney
Zoë Croggon
Subtly alternating between image and object, Croggon introduces a slight gap, as one image, the figurative element, is overlaid onto the other, touching its edge. As before, the lines still converge – line meets pole, shadow meets leg – yet there is this pause that allows for oscillation between connection and disconnection, dependence and independence, as the viewer moves through the space of the gallery. – Aodhan Madden, December 2014
Zoë Croggon, Comalco aluminium used in the construction of the National Gallery of Victoria (after Wolfgang Sievers), 2014; photo-collage, 87 x 60 cm; courtesy Daine Singer, Melbourne
Wanda Gillepsie
This is the productive tension at the heart of Gillespie’s work, the dynamic between physical and imagined dimensions. On viewing her signature diminutive sculptures we are seduced into contemplating the invisible, the imagined and the possible. Yet the objects remain, and their peculiar physical qualities inevitably draw us out of our reverie and back into the physical world. – Julian Murphy, December 2015
Wanda Gillespie, Of masters and spirits, 2013, detail; stoneware, glaze, silver leaf, 25 x 15 cm; courtesy the artist
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah
Trying to expose the polemic – why something is feared, sensational, sacred or profane – is key to Abdullah’s practice. His immersive installations explore the elastic borders of a multicultural society hooked on mythology. – Chloe Mandryk, December 2014
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, The obstacle, 2014; Jelutong, buffalo horn, woollen carpet, 48 x 130 x 235 cm; courtesy Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne; photograph Valerie Sparks
Julian Day
In both his solo practice and his collaborative work with Super Critical Mass, Day tests the ways sound makes spatial and social impacts by setting strict parameters for its production within unstable situations, heightening our awareness of its infiltration into our environments and bodies. – Eleanor Zeichner, December 2014
Julian Day, Super Critical Mass (Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste), AURA, 2012; delegated sound performance at Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney; photograph Alex Wisser, image courtesy Super Critical Mass