2020
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 works combining drawing, photography and experimental camera-less processes. The works reference and appropriate shapes of public sculpture from former communist Czechoslovakia between 1969 and 1989, loosely termed as 'normalisation' abstraction and aim to challenge the ideology of the style, opening new dialogues both personal and collective.
This series in part of an ongoing interest in monuments as cultural anchors and the implications of objects serving ideological and aesthetic functions in the community. Studená experiments with notion of femininity, materiality and form, and reimagines alternative narratives for the historical sculptures they depict; re-purposing 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 5th 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 5th 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.
Presented as part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival's Arts Program
26th March - 12th April
Gallery One: Doug Kirwan – Pattern and Ornament
Opening March 26th from 6pm.
This body of works consists of paintings showing how natural forms have been transformed into the stylized motifs often found in lace. The sources of these images are varied, maybe Chantilly lace, the design from a table cloth or even a strange insect that sparks a series of transformative possibilities.
The Canning Room: Hope Lumsden-Barry - LOOM
Opening Mar 26th from 6pm.
LOOM is an ongoing series of 'weavings' created using python and photoshop. Presented as prints, LOOM explores the demateralisation of making; the historical relationship between programmable looms and computer science; and the design approaches of the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Drawing upon these lineages, LOOM positions the computer not only as a tool but as a site for making: as a communal workshop or personal studio, in and of itself.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue of contextual writing by designer Bida Abbasi, activist and artist Tilde Joy, design researcher Ryley Lawson and the programmer of LOOM's python code, Bobby Ly.
16th April - 3rd May
Gallery One: Geoff Hogg, Nick Blackmore, Alasdair McKinnon and Paul Candy - Two Lines and Three Blocks
Opening April 16th from 6pm.
Beginning in Cuba, around the famous Hershey train line, this exhibition focuses on Melbourne’s Upfield Line and asks: How can the character of the railway line, its communities and the experience of the journey help us understand and contribute to expanded sites of social engagement, dialogue, and creativity?
Image: Geoff Hogg
The Canning Room: Adam Boyd – An Endless Succession of Monsters
Opening April 16th from 6pm.
An Endless Succession of Monsters is a set of drawings that take their impetus from the moment of realisation when a system or language allows its own inner working to embrace the inevitable flaws created by itself; or not.