REMNANTS

WENDY TEAKEL

14 May - 11 July 2022

Audience: 1854

Remnants was an exhibition that recognised Wendy Teakel’s ongoing engagement with Arte Povera and Environmental Art, as well as our spatial and temporal relationships with the land. The exhibition consisted of a series of installation pieces that investigated the nature and fragility of ecotones between bush, farm, and garden landscapes. To create the individual works, detritus such as fencing wire, guttering, corrugated iron, broken tools, and furniture were collected, manipulated, and fashioned to form the main structures. These hand-made elements were combined with soft materials such as fabrics and living plants to evoke vulnerable relationships and tensions that occur between human and natural systems. The installations employed the technique of Kusomono or miniature gardening, which provided a sense of resilience and a physical shift in scale for the viewer while implying a fragile tenacity and endurance that can exist in ecotones.

Public programs and audience engagement:

Remnants exhibition e-catalogue available on the CCAS website; Exhibition opening event (29 April 2022); In conversation event with CCAS Director Janice Falsone and artists Wendy Teakel and Noelene Lucas (2 July 2022).

“Canberra Contemporary Art Space has one of the most scenic locations of any gallery in Canberra, looking out onto Lake Burley Griffin and positioned between the National Gallery and the National Library. It is a most appropriate location for an exhibition that deals with our threatened and constantly changing natural environment… Wendy Teakel, a local artist who for about a decade was the head of the sculpture workshop at the ANU School of Art, presents a complex installation consisting of eight individual pieces that in various ways comment on a particular environment… The intriguing quality of Teakel’s art is its apparent simplicity of means that conceals a free-flowing complexity of possible associative meanings.”

Excerpt from Sasha Grishin’s exhibition review, published in The Canberra Times May 2022.

Entanglement

NOELENE LUCAS

14 May - 11 July 2022

Audience: 1854

Noelene Lucas' practice focuses on investigating the land from both environmental and historical perspectives, with particular attention to the impact of Climate Change on land, birds, and water quality. Entanglement aimed to raise awareness of these issues and emphasise our involvement in the ongoing crisis. The exhibition also points to where hope resides; in contact with life beyond the human, in seeing and valuing and not being indifferent to the plight of life on this damaged planet. At the base of all Lucas’ video work is the exploration of time, ephemerality, and absence.

Public programs and audience engagement:

Entanglement exhibition e-catalogue available on the CCAS website; Exhibition opening event (29 April 2022); In conversation event with CCAS Director Janice Falsone and artists Noelene Lucas and Wendy Teakel (2 July 2022).

COME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN

JUSTIN ANDREWS, STUART BAILEY, LEAH BULLEN, TREVELYAN CLAY, HELEN SHELLEY, NOËL SKRZYPCZAK, BRYAN SPIER, CURATED BY ALEXANDER BOYNES

16 July – 28 August 2022

Audience: 1913

In the last decade, Canberra has gone from not only being an excellent place to study and cut your teeth in the visual arts, but as somewhere to put down roots and develop a career. Come Back, All is Forgiven brings back some of the strong and talented artists who graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design (then Canberra School of Art) in the late 90’s and early 00’s. These artists first exhibited at CCAS as fresh-faced graduates, before leaving the Capital in order to ‘make it’. The exhibition features original works from their formative years in Canberra, alongside new and recent works produced after two decades of working as practising artists.

Public programs and audience engagement:

Exhibition opening event (15 July 2022); Curator floor talk by Alexander Boynes for The Lime Flamingo Collective (24 July 2022), and Canberra Institute of Technology Visual Art Professional Practice students (27 July 2022).