2020
23rd January - 9th February
Gallery One: Hannah Fox – Città. Terra.
Opening Jan 23rd from 6pm.
Meaning — “Town. Earth.”
This new body of work is a product of my recent artist residency in northern Italy and continues my exploration of documenting felt experiences.
I observed a softer light fall on the facades of historic buildings and surveyed the textures and shapes of stone walls. The warm tones of Italy’s earth featured heavily both in the transforming autumnal trees and in the township itself.
This exhibition encompasses a fusion of my aesthetic responses. The ‘still response’ — paintings; and the ‘adaptable response’ — the interactive ceramic works. Both work together in unison yet provide alternate experiences.
The Canning Room: Alejandro Casas - In-Between
Opening Jan 23rd from 6pm.
The everyday is divided. It is divided amongst our distractions, our obligations, our sense of purpose and our sense of boredom. Technology has come to occupy a large piece of this division, to the extent that our perspective of the world around us is infinitely smaller. However, as the everyday becomes continually repurposed, something slips, something goes unnoticed and falls into the in-between.
This group of photos explores the boundary between connection and perspective at the limit of our daily experience. These photos view the in-between as a mode of being that goes from place to place, as a concrete fact of the everyday that might otherwise go unseen.
13th February - 1st March
Gallery One: Virginia Cummins & Bettina Willner-Browne
Opening Feb 13th from 6pm.
Cummins and Willner-Browne use photography and sculpture, respectively, to convey a symbiotic relationship with the natural world and to mark the passage of time. Pathways, totems and coral-like formations serve as monuments to memory and desire.
Image: Virginia Cummins
The Canning Room: Linda Studená - A Mountain of Fallen Monuments
Opening Feb 13th from 6pm.
In A mountain of fallen monuments Linda Studená presents a series of collages combining drawing, photography and experimental camera-less processes. These works reference and appropriate shapes of public sculpture from former communist Czechoslovakia between 1969 and 1989, loosely termed as ‘normalisation’ abstraction. The collages aim to challenge the ideology of the style, opening new dialogues both personal and collective.
This exhibition is part of an ongoing interest in monuments as cultural anchors and the implications of objects serving ideological and aesthetic functions in the community. These collages experiment with notions of femininity, materiality and form, and reimagine alternative narratives for the historical sculptures they depict; repurposing their metaphysical potential by placing them in new contexts and in a different medium.
5th - 22nd March
Gallery One: Amaya Iturri – Tira del Hilo / Pull the Thread
Opening Mar 22nd from 6pm.
Fashion is embedded in our social and political world, implicating us all in issues of identity and ethical practice.
I take fashion's aesthetics and lexicon to comment on a range of subjects that are of my concern: fast fashion, mass production, impact of fashion on environment, ethical issues concerning human resources and animal treatment.
The Canning Room: Samantha Clark - Obscene Anthology
Opening Mar 22nd from 6pm.
The penultimate chapter in her series ‘Performing Fetishism’, Samantha Clark presents a series of objects and garments that explore the inherently tactile expressions of material fetishes. Fishnet knits, patent leather and glittering latex are all reimagined in craft-centric textiles and techniques. The artist utilizes the audience’s common experiences and familiarity with craft to engage in conversations with them about the societal taboos surrounding fetishes. Taken away from the sparseness of a traditional gallery setting, this exhibition is a cheeky take on a BSDM closet tucked away in the apartment of the modern fetishist and through this is a meditation on post-fetish design and the disintegration of subcultural style markers.
Both exhibitions presented in conjunction with the 2020 VAMFF
