THE WORKERS WINDOW
09–26 May
Opens Wednesday 09 May 6pm–8pm
Grands Luminaires
Grayden Shelley
Statement: Shelley explores a hybrid driven practice. Utilizing perception and ornamentation within the history of Painting and Sculpture, Shelley morphs specific sites to create contemporary spatial installations.
THE NIGHT SCREEN
09–26 May
Opens Wednesday 09 May 6pm–8pm
Myth
James Wright
This work explores the illusory and impermanent nature of truth. The artificial simulation of natural phenomena combined with the foregrounding of artifice problematises ideologies of the ‘landscape’ and natural world. Further applied as a symbol for our projection of ‘truths’ upon the world, the shrouds of knowledge cyclicly permeate and transform our perceptions. Collective mythologies are obstructed and revealed as subjective fictions.
PROJECT SPACE
09–26 May
Opens Wednesday 09 May 6pm–8pm
The Disciples
Ryan Ponsford
GALLERY TWO
09–26 May
Opens Wednesday 09 May 6pm–8pm
I am an artist / I am not an artist
Josee Vesely-Manning & Michael Needham
This exhibition reveals some of the outcomes of Michael Needham and Josee Vesely- Manning’s work at an inner city Melbourne housing estate over six weeks. By erecting a small makeshift stall we were interested in exploring themes of social inclusion, ethnicity, displacement, gentrification and notions of community in the context of public housing.
Not surprisingly, the outcomes were often unexpected and raised more self-referential questions of artist as ethnographer, the artist as a site of privilege or subversion and the sometimes banal, frequently humorous and often awkward encounters associated with this process.
For this exhibition we present some of our “interventions” which include transcribed conversations, photographs, film, sound, decoration, sewn banners, light and shiny things.
GALLERY ONE
09–26 May
Opens Wednesday 09 May 6pm–8pm
NAUSEA
Anna Higgins
“Evil is the ability of humans to make abstract what is concrete.” – Jean Paul Sartre
This exhibition is an exploration of the non-physical elements of perception and focus as an aesthetic. Our experience of the reality of our infinite world is closer to a delirium or a fever dream. The work explores our optical sense as well as ideas of mental and spatial hyper-stimulation. The collection of phenomena and noise in our environment pollutes our vision and distorts our understanding. It is distracting, exhilarating and seductive, but ultimately nauseating. Information engorges the world.
WORKERS WINDOW
The Workers Club
Opens Wednesday 02 May From 7pm
Co-Respond
Help us celebrate the launch of SEVENTH’s exciting new project, Co—Respond.
Co—Respond is a SEVENTH publication exploring the possibilities of collaboration and conversation between visual art and writing. Featuring written works by fifteen emerging writers, Co—Respond critiques, expands and documents Seventh’s exhibition program from June 2011 to January 2012.
The launch will feature DJs, art installations and live performances from SEVENTH gallery artists. Wednesday April from 7pm at The Workers Club, Cnr Brunswick and Gertrude St, Fitzroy.
THE NIGHT SCREEN
18 April–05 May
Opens Wednesday 18 April 6pm–8pm
Audo
Iolanthe Iezzi
This film documents the actions of Audo, a solitary character living alone and seemingly suffering from insomnia. Audo has lost faith in humanity and has removed himself entirely from the outside world. But as we can see he cannot function. He has lost even the ability to fall asleep, a most primitive of human functions. He spends his night times playing out absurd actions with the faint hope of one day falling asleep. He plants light bulbs in the ground with the hope of growing a tree of light. We know it will never happen because it is impossible. But for him, dreams of a life far beyond his own are all that are left.
PROJECT SPACE
18 April – 05 May
Opens Wednesday 18 April 6pm–8pm
Strange Friuts
Marianne Diaz
Marianne Diaz remixes Asian experience with popular culture. Her work relies on materials and visual sources that stand alone formally, but also have strong ties to childhood memories and social and political commentary. Through sculptural installations and video, Marianne seeks to challenge and subvert cultural tropes with humour. Despite her works’ kitschy facade, audiences are invited to consider their own latent stereotypes.
GALLERY TWO
18 April–05 May
Opens Wednesday 18 April 6pm–8pm
In search of where tigers are melting as butter…
Noriko Nakamura
I’m a Japanese born, Melbourne based artist. My practice explores the transformation of materials through a studio-based practice and has become an experiment in thinking about a larger relationship between humans and the material world. My work involves processes of transformation through an activation of materials in order to show their life-force. My spatial installation practice questions the place of humans in the material world by creating architectural framings of a zone where material transformations occur.
GALLERY ONE
18 April – 05 May
Opens Wednesday 18 April 6pm–8pm
Missed Connections
Amy Spiers
Many artists now work in a relational and participatory manner, requiring the activation of their viewer. Yet too often, it is assumed that participation in art will automatically achieve openness and inclusion, and enable new, emancipatory social relations. The selection and creation of a group of participants, however, can produce an inability to connect and an unintended exclusion. As a result, I seek to thematise the limits of participation and sociability in my artwork.
Missed Connections explores the complex conditions and contingencies required for people to meet and come together. As such, failed moments of connection are as integral to the work, as are the possibilities for surprising engagement.
WORKERS WINDOW
28 March–14 April
Opens Wednesday 28 March 6pm–8pm
The Vietnam Archive Project
Phuong Thai Hoang Ngo
The Vietnam Archive Project started out as a simple curiosity with imagery from the Vietnam War. An ever-growing collection of slides negatives and photos; it has become an obsession in owning history that defines my existence.
PROJECT SPACE
28 March–14 April
Opens Wednesday 28 March 6pm–8pm
I hear voices
Saskia Pandji Sakti
‘I hear voices’ is a photographic series that explores our ideals and obsessions around the paranormal and ‘Mediumship’. The exhibition addresses the phenomenon of psychic mediums and trance by recreating and dramatizing these acts. These photographic portraits depict ‘spirit mediums’ in the moments leading up to or at the time of a spirit possession. The orchestrated characteristic aims to employ the concept of authenticity as an analogy for those boundaries between reality, fiction and the spirit world.
THE NIGHT SCREEN
28 March–14 April
Opens Wednesday 28 March 6pm–8pm
Circling Absence
Laura Carthew
“We would really like to know the wave [responsible for the shipwreck], but in fact we are that very wave.”
—Georges Didi-Huberman
Circling nothingness as a gesture may provide a structure for reflecting on the past. The absence brings forward a sense of loss within the infinite ocean. The memorial ritual of living bodies gathering to remember the past, revives it, even if only temporally. The gesture of the formation injects itself into the amnesiac sphere of memory, allowing a forgotten world to surface.
GALLERY TWO
28 March–14 April
Opens Wednesday 28 March 6pm–8pm
Body and Elements
Kawita Vatanajyankur
My series of video and performance work “Onto Fabrics” is focused on the female body, fabrics and household object within darken, unknown spaces, unfamiliar environments and uncomfortable atmosphere. As a medium under different distressing circumstances, my own body is affected and forced by the elements, objects, spaces and other human actions to transform, merge, become a part of these ambiguous surroundings, objects and environments Eventually, the merged body as well as the fabrics covering it is mingled and turned into a sculpture.
The body action, reaction and movement within the spaces towards the pressure by the elements and objects reflects feminism, violence, endurance communication in a cultural way and indicates a psychological and corporeal aspect of viewing the human condition.
GALLERY ONE
28 March–14 April
Opens Wednesday 28 March 6pm–8pm
To share and hopefully understand
James Murnane, Cal Watson, Alexander Ouchtomsky
In the midst of an utter saturation of information from every possible direction and source, Alexander, Calllum and James take different creative approaches to navigating through the virtual, natural and spiritual worlds that we all encounter.
Sifting, gleaning, recreating, evolving, or transcending this information by:
- scanning, and collaging from endless sources of old and new imagery
- collecting, infusing, and manipulating found materials
- isolating and enhancing simple forms.
Each of these processes is a type of ritual, seeking to create anew from the old, to understand what is in the present, and to hopefully encounter what has always been.
PROJECT SPACE
7 March–24 March
Opens Wednesday 7 March 6pm–8pm
New Frontier
Thomas Breakwell
‘New Frontier’ is a video installation exploring ideas of ‘wilderness’ within the Australian landscape and the notion of a sublime experience in nature.
By playing with the traditions and expectations of landscape art history, Breakwell attempts to create a new experience within the environment.
GALLERY 2 & THE NIGHT SCREEN
7 March–24 March
Opens Wednesday 7 March 6pm–8pm
Dyeing Waters
Leela Schauble
The most sacred thing in existence is existence itself. Life is something that needs to be cherished but to accomplish that death must be acknowledged. These works seeks to capture the moments of becoming in touch with one’s own mortality. Using my own body, these performative experience leads to my profound acceptance of emptiness which offers solace towards my own mortality. Water is a tangible, malleable, and almost sculptural medium. With this element I aim to capture the meditative state of mind that is key to accepting the ephemeral quality of life.
GALLERY ONE & THE WORKERS WINDOW
7 March–24 March
Opens Wednesday 7 March 6pm–8pm
Constructing comfort
Rowan Moyle and Nickk Hertzog
“Constructing Comfort” explores ideas of the controlled environment and the ways in which technological elements both compete with the natural and emulate it.
We live in heated and air conditioned houses, with lighting that allows us to ignore our circadian rhythm. Once, the function of architecture was to respond to the environment to create a liveable situation in hostile or uncomfortable surrounds. In contemporary society, architecture no longer has to directly respond to the environment; instead we create our own isolated environments governed not by the weather, the light, the season, but by the switch.
15 February–03 March
Opens 15 February 6pm–8pm
Window Pictures
Daniel Stephen Miller
In each of the videos in this series, a fixed camera shows a shop window displaying goods for sale. Seduced into looking but not buying, the artist, armed with a camera, walks into the shop. After undertaking whatever negotiation is necessary, he eventually appears in the window, makes several photographs and exits the premises. The projection of these videos in an old shop window on Gertrude Street is obviously really profound and, like, totally meta.
15 February–03 March
Opens 15 February 6pm–8pm
Freeloader
Pippa Makgill
The work for the installation Freeloader came about after thinking about the notion of ‘lazy sculpture’. I have alot of bottles, objects and spray paint just skulking around in my garage. After work we hang out not doing much. I asked them if they wanted to be in an exhibition and none of them were particularly keen. The spray paint showed a bit of interest. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
15 February–03 March
Opens 15 February 6pm–8pm
Inside is outside, Outside is inside
Yuria Okamura
Inside is Outside, Outside is Inside explores the duality of the physical and the metaphysical worlds through examining the relationships between geometry and figuration, the interior and the exterior, as well as perception and illusion of space.
Yuria draws her inspirations from Zen architecture and their gardens in an attempt to construct a meditative pictorial space, through which the viewer can imagine the spiritual world within the realm of the material world, while exploring the ways in which the geometry can inherit the nature of meditative spaces.
15 February–03 March
Opens 15 February 6pm–8pm
Artefact
Chantel de Latour, Antonia Ellis, Olivia O’Donnell
Interpretations of the ‘Artifact’ provide a conceptual groundwork for this group show by three Melbourne artists, Antonia Ellis, Chantel de Latour and Olivia O’Donnell. Across a variety of media, each investigates the complex relationship between the object/artifact and contemporary art.
Antonia’s practice references a nostalgic longing for high academic art and classicism. Her work uses pieces of iconography to reference idealism and the pursuit of perfection in the antiquity.
Chantel’s small landscapes conjure archived memories re-presented as artifacts. The elusive search for identity through recognition of place, links these fragments in an expansive geography of its own.
Olivia’s practice interrogates the relationships between travel and exploitation. Working in temporal installations that question the simulated and real, authenticity and replica, fragility and structure.
Fiona Estelle Blandford
‘Still life for 2010’, is a photographic series that investigates political and historical references from
traditional ‘still life’ painting. A farm sticker, a rubber band, cling wrap and a gauze bag are signs
evoking the production and marketing of food. The work reflects our indulgence and eroticisation
of food and the accessibility of an increasing season-less market.
Fiona Estelle Blandford, A Tableau for 2010, 2010
Alice Parker
In No Direction Home Alice Parker reflects on a continuous and meticulous refinement of a vocabulary of colour and its relationship to space and object. This work explores how subverting the plane of a geometric form through the use of colour, surface and light informs the public space.
Alice Parker, No Direction Home, 2010
Kelly Manning
Big Wigs is a series of portraits utilising images from the public domain representing individuals who are presently influential in the Australian Contemporary art scene.Through the political and economic connotations in Big Wigs, the artist aims to challenge commercialization and highlight the difficulties facing art in a consumer society where changes in the art world are dependent upon the social elites, politicians and urban planners.
Kelly Manning, Ben Quilty, 2011
Angeliki Androutsopoulos
Oil on board
June I – VI
25 January–11 February
Opens 25 January 6pm–8pm
In No Direction Home, Alice Parker reflects on a continuous and meticulous refinement of a vocabulary of
colour and its relationship to space and object.
This work explores how subverting the plane of a geometric form through the use of colour, surface and
light informs the public space.
Anita Belia
EVERYTHING IS A COPY OF A COPY
Video text piece
Words appropriated from the film scripts Taxi Driver, 1976 and Fight Club, 1999.
Everything is a copy of a copy, questions the split between what society thinks is morally correct versus what
is truth and what is reality. Whilst investigating how capitalism, cultural propaganda and the consumer
dominant undermine the notion of self.
How does one capture the reference points that are meaningful?
Anita Belia, Everything A Copy, 2011
03–05 January
Opens 03 January 6pm-8pm
Our Swedish resident JOHANNA NORDIN will open her MALE EGO EXORCISM BUREAU (MEEB)
Do you identify yourself as a male? is your ego in need of an exorcism?
Then this might be your chance! The bureau will commence operations with a demonstration
(featuring The Last Tuesday Society and List Operators Richard Higgins) at ca 6.30.
Males with Egos wishing to have them exorcised are encouraged to contact the Bureau at jnsmaleexorcismbureau@gmail.com.
After the grand opening the Bureau will be open for business from 10am-5pm Wed and Thurs providing full or partial Male Ego Exorcisms with a convenient and “while-U-wait” service.
