CONTENTS Message from the Mayor of Joondalup
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Selection and Judging Panels
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Introduction by Olga Cironis, Artist
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ARTISTS Andy Quilty
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Anna Sabadini
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Anna Louise Richardson
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David Brophy
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Emma Buswell
Page 15
Fiona Gavino
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Gera Woltjer
Page 19
Lee Harrop
Page 21
Lyle Branson
Page 23
Matthew Thorley
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Peggy Griffiths
Page 27
Rebecca Jensen
Page 29
Serge Tampalini
Page 31
Shannon Lyons
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Tim Burns
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Cover (detail): It’s not a party without the devil by Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty Overall Winner of the 2015 Community Invitation Art Award.
MESSAGE FROM THE MAYOR It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the City of Joondalup’s Community Invitation Art Award (CIAA) for 2016. This prestigious Award was inaugurated in 2013 and presents an opportunity to celebrate the artistic, creative and innovative work of professional Western Australian artists. All exhibiting artists are either residents of the City or a member of the Joondalup Community Art Association (JCAA). The CIAA showcases a series of three artworks from 15 solo artists. This prestigious Western Australian Art Award confirms the City’s reputation as a major supporter of the arts and home to an active and vibrant local arts community. The CIAA also enhances the City’s status as a local government dedicated to encouraging and fostering culture and the arts for the betterment of its community. I hope you enjoy this exhibition of work by some of Western Australia’s most outstanding contemporary artists. His Worship the Mayor Troy Pickard City of Joondalup
SELECTION PANEL Gemma Weston, Curator Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, University of Western Australia Jana Braddock, Curator, Heathcote Museum and Gallery Ron Nyisztor, Artist, Director of Nyisztor Studio
JUDGING PANEL Olga Cironis, Artist Clothilde Bullen, Curator Mark Stewart, Curator Murdoch University Collection
INTRODUCTION Art has more fans than we think By Olga Cironis This year’s Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award, now in its 18th year, is going off with a bang. This is an exhibition that artists and art lovers look forward to each year, presenting new artworks by established and emerging artists, who in different ways, challenge our place in the world with their artistic vision and creative thinking. Inevitably this year’s exhibition delivers plenty of thoughtprovoking work that confronts the realities that shape our daily lives. The selection process is rigorous. Only fifteen artists are selected via a panel of externally appointed peers and industry professionals, from a highly competitive field of over one hundred applicants, most of whom are highly regarded Western Australian artists. It is no easy task to make this selection, and the panellists spend many hours deliberating on the final list. The selected artists are then engaged to spend six months creating three new works. During this time the City’s curator visits the artist’s studios, ensuring that works are suitable but also that a relationship exists between the artist and the City that fosters and supports discussions about the history of the work, its development, and the artist’s directions, influences and processes. Each year the winning artwork is acquired into the City of Joondalup Art Collection, adding cultural and economic value to the City of Joondalup. To date this important collection proudly features artists such as Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty, Teelah George, Mark Parfitt, Kate McMillan, Susanna Castleden, Graeme Burge, Brenden Van Hek, Erin Coates, Nicole Andrijevic, Shane Pickett, Concetta Petrillo, Paul Hinchliffe, Gosia Wlodarczak- Sarneka, Bevan Honey, Rodney Glick and Lynette Voevodin, Richie Kuhaupt, Jon Tarry and Trevor Richards.
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All these artists have continued to develop their art practice and represent our Western Australian arts in many national and international exhibitions. The City of Joondalup Art Collection is an important although relatively young art collection, and its holdings contribute to the enrichment of our state’s cultural archives, and showcase the richness and excellence of the creative pluralism of Western Australia. Significant art collections can become important history makers, marking evolutions of taste and interests over time. The Joondalup Art Collection is one such collection, a jewel in its community and an ongoing testament of an important local voice. The City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award is an open platform for Western Australian artists to explore our local political and environmental terrain. Through their unique style and conceptual strengths, working across numerous media such as print, photography, sculpture, painting,
film, ceramics and mixed media, the individual imprint of the artist communicates a sense belonging to place. The award is a perfect forum for artists to share with us their unbridled approaches to contemporary thought, ideas and experiences. This exhibition is an opportunity to escape from the everyday into a world of exploration, conversation, debate and reflection. To take art out of the traditional gallery space and locate it in a place that people use every day breaks down barriers between what is assumed to be public and private. This subtle act of defiance breaks down the public perception of art being elusive and exclusive. This may be because historically art galleries have been seen as venues for the privileged, a thought that still prevails amongst much of the public today, a sort of patriarchal remnant of the past still finding its way into our consciousness. Yet statistical evidence from the Australia Bureau of Statistics shows us that in fact 37% of the Australian population visited an art gallery over the past 12 months, in contrast to spectator attendance at sports events being much lower (Aussie rules being 16%, Horse racing 11% and Rugby league 9%). Such numbers prove that people are curious, engaged and interested in arts and culture and when art is made accessible to the public. To have art exhibitions in public spaces such as retail centres opens up conversations on the importance and value of art in our society. What is important is engendering a response, whether it varies from genuine interest to indifference or contempt. Access to art shapes the understanding of our surroundings and vice versa. Familiarising ourselves with a broad catalogue of visual language gives us another communication tool that transcends the spoken and written word, as well as cultural dividing lines, to foster and enable a richer understanding of ourselves and the world we live and engage in daily.
ANDY QUILTY Andy Quilty was born and resides in Rockingham, Western Australia, and works out of a large storage shed/makeshift art studio in the Rockingham industrial area. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts – Fine Art from Curtin University in 2003, Quilty spent the following nine years working as a labourer in the surfboard manufacture industry before focussing on his art practice in 2012. Quilty is a sessional tutor at The University Of Western Australia, and Program Patron and tutor in the Military Art Program Australia. Quilty’s work has been selected in a number of significant exhibitions including the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize, Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Kedumba Drawing Award, Albany Art Prize, Black Swan Portrait Prize and the Salon des Refusés. He has exhibited in solo and group shows interstate and abroad and his work is held in a number of state, corporate and private collections. Upcoming projects include a 2016 solo exhibition in Perth and 2017 joint exhibition with an inmate at Casurina prison currently studying in the Curtin University Justice and Equity through Access/Art program.
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Photography by Peter Le Scelle
Artist website: andyquilty.com
Working primarily in the disciplines of drawing and painting, Quilty’s work explores notions of status, belonging and sense of place within the banality of suburban Australian culture. Interrogating personal histories and exploring the role of observer, participant and perpetrator, Quilty’s current series burnout paintings examines ideas surrounding notions of ‘hooning’ in the framework of European settlement, and the post-colonial Australian experience. These works examine the allegorical kinship between the Anglo Australian mind-set and that of the ‘hoon’ as personified in the act of the burnout: the marking of burnt rubber altering both the physical and psychological landscape of the environment in which the act is committed. The burnout is contextualised as a form of post-colonial ‘tagging’, a forceful marking of territory made with aggressive disregard to the occupants.
Burnout Painting #17 (detail), 2016. Motorbike burnout, electric sander polisher, oil, aerosol and pop rivets on aluminium composite panel.
ANNA LOUISE RICHARDSON Anna Louise Richardson was born in 1992 in Perth, Western Australia. Richardson is an artist and curator whose practice focuses on rural identity in a contemporary Australian environment. Richardson is part of the sixth generation living on a 3,000 acre beef cattle farm south of Perth. She works primarily in drawing and installation. Her work explores the relationship between subjective and pragmatic approaches to the natural world by bringing together elements of personal history with broader rural narratives. Her practice encourages dialogue on Australian rural mythology by creating opportunities for audiences to consider the cultural parallels between urban and rural outlooks. A 2013 graduate of Curtin University, Richardson is represented by MARS Gallery (VIC) and her work is held in the City of Busselton and Horn Collections. She has been a finalist in the Paul Guest Prize 2014 and 2016, The SHIRL National Youth Portrait Prize 2015, Fisher’s Ghost Art Award 2015, Shirley Hannah National Portrait Award 2016, and the Glencore Percival Portrait Painting Prize 2016 and won the Emerging Artist Award for the Busselton Art Awards in 2014. Anna has been a recipient of several Development Grants from the Department of Culture and the Arts, City of Perth Cultural Sponsorship,
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Artist website: annalouiserichardson.com
NAVA Australian Artists Grant and the Copyright Agency Career Fund. Anna’s curatorial practice focuses on issues of regional and marginal identity, as well as providing effective platforms for inter-generational communication. She has curated exhibitions with Moana Project Space (WA) 2014, Chapter House Lane in association with the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival (VIC) 2015, Galerie pompom (NSW) 2015, the Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery (WA) 2016, Spectrum Project Space (WA) 2016 and Next Wave Festival (VIC) 2016, working with a broad variety of established and emerging practitioners. Anna recently undertook a curatorial internship for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (SA), with curator and Assistant Director of Artistic Programs Lisa Slade.
Macaroni the pony, 2016. Conte and crayon on Hardieflex.
ANNA SABADINI Anna Sabadini, born in Sydney New South Wales, is a Western Australian painter with an interest in textiles and curating. As the daughter of immigrants, Anna grew up speaking Italian at home. This multilingual experience seeded an interest in visual language at art school. Painting, sculpture and textiles employ separate languages, but even within the medium of painting there is abstraction, figuration, Romanticism, and Classicism, each with specific vocabularies. These vocabularies also change through time and across different art periods and can be so specific that sometimes it seems as though they represent different ‘countries’. As an emerging artist Anna experienced difficulty sticking to one ‘nationality’ or monolingual identity to paint from. This translated into the ability to paint across many styles, yet not feeling at home in any particular one. The bringing together of different visual languages is a focus of recent work and a legacy of her mother’s aesthetic. As well as growing and making most of the family’s food, Anna’s mother was a resourceful seamstress – she never bought the amount of fabric recommended on a pattern, but somehow patched a garment together with what was available. The resulting fashion aesthetic (brown with black, stripes with
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floral), visually expressed the coming together of life experiences from two countries. This way of making and being, previously embarrassing, now informs Anna’s painting practice. Inspired by her mother’s knack for putting together elements not normally considered compatible, she uses processes of collage, recycling, and making do to create something from what is experientially available. In the artists words, it’s a wog aesthetic - what her mother would describe as bello spezzato, nicely broken up, visually lively.
The Deposition, 2016. Oil on ply and found frames.
DAVID BROPHY David Brophy was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1981. Brophy completed an Advanced Diploma in Visual Art at Central Institute of Technology in 2013 before receiving his Bachelor of Fine Art from Curtin University in 2014. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and been commissioned to complete two public artworks that now form part of the Central Institute of Technology and City of Fremantle collections. He has also completed residencies in Spain, Indonesia and Western Australia. Brophy first sailed to Rottnest Island (Wadjemup) on his fathers yacht at the age of eight months and since then the ocean has been central to his life. His current practice stems from investigations into the phenomenology and subculture of surfing. His work meditates on the experiential, psychological and spiritual exploration of his experiences as a surfer and how these may be translated via the vernacular of visual art. Brophy uses minimal gestures to capture the momentary and sublime, drawing upon direct and memorised experiences. The works trace the perceptual split between the interior and outer impressions within a given moment. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, Brophy’s practice spans installation, sound, sculpture, drawing and painting.
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Artist website: davidbrophyart.com
David exhibited in Sculpture by the Sea Cottesloe and Bondi in 2013, was highly commended in the 2014 Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, selected to exhibit in Here and Now 2015 at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and a finalist in both the 2016 Blake Prize and the 2016 Wyndham Art Prize. David most recently exhibited in Frontier Surfing at Fremantle Arts Centre and has been invited as a representative Australian artist to show in Heritage Note in Denpasar, Indonesia as part of the Asia-Pacific Strategic Meeting on World Heritage.
Atlantic Void (detail), 2016. Digital print on Hanemuhle paper.
EMMA BUSWELL Emma Buswell was born in 1991 in Perth, Western Australia. Buswell is fascinated with systems of government, economies and culture, particularly in relation to constructs of place, identity and community. Her work is primarily preoccupied with documenting the interactions between art and the urban environment with a focused inquiry into architectural intervention, the role of art in urban place-making and the potential for built environment to directly impact upon the cultural makeup of a localised population. Much of Buswell’s work is drawn from a desire to establish art as a critical agent in the improvement and promotion of local communities and places. After time spent visiting family in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2013, and witnessing the mass destruction caused by several earthquakes, Buswell became inspired by the rallying efforts of artists and locals in recreating and building their city in their own image. Directly witnessing how art can aid in the construction of new places and sites, and the positive impact this can have on local communities, she began to direct her own arts practice as a vehicle for furthering an inquiry into art making and promotion as a constructive agent in the remaking and casting of place.
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Artist website: emmabuswell.net
Drawing upon content sourced from personal research and explorations of local architectural sites, her works tend to develop through a process of technical and visual inquiry. Starting with drawings and photographs she then approaches the conceptual premise of the idea in determining which media to move forward with. Rather than remaining medium specific for each work, a combination of materials and approaches will be implemented in order to present an idea from many angles, representing content and ways of interpreting information in the physical construct of each work.
Thanks for Visiting, 2016. Plaster, acrylic, glass, confetti.
FIONA GAVINO Fiona Gavino was born in Queensland, and now resides in Western Australia. Gavino graduated from Charles Darwin University with a Bachelor of Arts Visual Arts in 2006 and remained as a practicing artist in the North Territory for 12 years. In 2007 Gavino relocated to Western Australia and currently lives and works in Fremantle. Gavino has Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage, and has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. Her work exudes a unique ethnicity, the foundations of which lie within the artist’s family heritage and lived experiences, influenced by the idea of amalgamations in inter-cultural dialogues and across artistic platforms her work often conveys a strong sense of an Australian post-colonial identity.
Gavino’s work is features in Hot Springs; the Northern Territory and Contemporary Australian Artists (Macmillan Art Publishing). Earlier in 2016 she was a finalist in the Lorne Sculpture Biennial and Recently spent time at Beswick, Wugularr, Norther Territory working along side senior Indigenous fibre artists assisting them to develop their basketry work into sculpture and installation.
In 2007 Gavino was selected to exhibit in Hatched Perth Institue of Contemporary Arts. In 2014 Gavino was a recipient of an Asialink Residency where she spent three months in the Philippines studying rattan furniture making techniques to apply to her sculpture practice and post-colonial Filipino discourse in contemporary art. In 2015 she was invited to exhibit at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with a solo show, In-between-spaces.
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Artist website: pixelsandfibre.com
Bound & Stifled, 2016. Cane, rattan, packing strapping.
GERA WOLTJER Gera Woltjer was born in the Netherlands and moved to Western Australia in 2008. After living in Carnarvon and Geraldton, Woltjer is now based in Perth and works in Fremantle for Artsource. Woltjer studied in the Netherlands completing a Bachelor in Fine Art in Education and a Masters in Education in Arts and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Coordination of Cultural and Artistic Design. Gera works across a variety of media, mainly installation, photography, video, drawing, printmaking and textiles. She makes very considered and deliberate choices in deciding which medium would best communicate the concept and meaning she wants to display. In 2016 Woltjer will receive mentorship from artist Gosia Wlodarczak as part of a mentorship project funded by the Department of Culture and the Arts to further her artistic career. Currently Woltjer is a part of two collaborative projects; A Drawing Dialogue, is a collaboration with conceptual artist Christiane Fichter (Germany). The other project is a collaboration with Jos Verschaeren (the Netherlands) involving light and projections. Both projects will be exhibited in Germany and the Netherlands in 2017 and 2018.
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Artist website: gerawoltjer.com
She has exhibited in both Australia and in the Netherlands. Recent group shows include Call of the Sea, a Dutch Australian Maritime exhibition, Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery (2016); Between the Sheets, Artists’ Books, Gallery East and Central Gallery, Northbridge WA (2015) and My Own Executioner, Mundaring Art Centre (2014) . Woltjer has won ‘The GeraldtonGreenough Award’ in the inaugural Mid West Art Prize, and both the 2010 and 2011 Awards for the ‘Best Work In a Medium Other Than Painting’ at the Port Hedland Art Awards. Gera’s artworks can be found in the State Library of Queensland’s Artists’ Book Collection, the Geraldton-Greenough Art Collection, the Durack Institute of Technology Art Collection, and private collections in Western Australia and the Netherlands.
Hand Drawing #3 (detail from series), 2016, Digital Print.
LEE HARROP Lee Harrop was born in 1969 in New Zealand and now lives and works in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. She received a Masters of Fine Arts with first class honours in New Zealand in 2009 and emigrated to Australia in 2010. Alongside her art practice she is the director of The Basement Studio, an artist run contemporary art and project space in Kalgoorlie. Harrop’s artwork is predominantly text-based and non-medium specific. It is mostly site or context specific. She is interested in demonstrating the ability of the arts to offer an experience that also becomes a form of criticism. Harrop’s recent career highlights include winning the 2015 City of Busselton art award which included a five week solo show at the ArtGeo gallery which she under took early 2016. She was a finalist in the 2014 Fremantle Print Award, the 2015 and 2016 City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Awards, Noosa Art Award QLD 2016, Wyndham Art Prize VIC 2016 and the The Waterhouse Natural Science and Art Prize, South Australian Museum Adelaide in 2016.
Since 2010 Harrop has also been part of a project called The Imaginary Archive, Curated by Gregory Sholette in New York. She has exhibited work as part of The Imaginary Archive in New Zealand (2010), Ireland (2011), Ukraine (2014). In 2015 The Imaginary Archive was included in the Traces in The Dark exhibition, curated by Liz park (Whitney-Lauder Fellow), Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Later in 2015 The Imaginary Archive toured to Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. Her work has been included in local group exhibitions most recently Mine Own Executioner, Mundaring Art center (2014), Drawn from Sound, Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney (2014), PCWK6 Nyisztor Studio, Melville (2014), City of Perth’s TRANSART 2015: RED temporary public art commission, and PCWK7 Nyisztor Studio, Melville (2015).
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Artist website: leeharrop.com
Untitled (Abandoned mineshaft, Kalgoorlie) 2016, Digital image.
LYLE BRANSON Lyle Branson was born in Melbourne in 1980 and is based in Perth. Branson studied Visual Arts at TAFE and Edith Cowan University. He has held two solo exhibitions in 2012 at Central Tafe ShowCase Gallery as part FotoFreo Fringe and in 2015 at Free Range Gallery. Branson was a finalist in the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award in 2015 and the Perth Centre for Photography CLIP Award in 2016. Branson investigates the intersection of natural and human forces on the urban landscape in Perth. Through a process of dĂŠrive Branson discovers and documents areas such as nature strips, vacant blocks, and the edges of nature reserves, that are scattered with both organic and man-made waste. As the forgotten backdrop to the roads and footpaths we so often traverse, these areas exist as the fraying edges, boundaries, between the man-made and the organic, and at times suggest the failure of the landscape in our urban surroundings.
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Artist website: lylebranson.com
Untitled (work in progress), 2016. Digital print.
MATTHEW THORLEY Matthew Thorley was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1978 where he lives and works. Thorley is a multi-disciplinary artist with works spanning across painting, sculpture and performance. He has exhibited and curated locally at Melody Smith Gallery, Kurb Gallery and Artist Open House Fremantle as well as nationally last year in Brisbane when he was shortlisted as a finalist for the Brisbane Art Prize. He received commendation awards and the Vice Chancellors List at Curtin University and most notably winning the First Prize Open Category (acquisitive) in the City of Melville Art Award 2016. His work has been published by Life Art World Wide and Tincanvas (David Bromfield). Thorley investigates light and its effect on positive and negative space in the built environment, and focuses on detail while utilising automated precision and visual manipulation to shape and produce his works. Inspired by contemporary architecture’s reduction of elements and an emphasis on form, Thorley extrapolates selective aspects concerned with the study of light interacting with reflective surfaces.
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Artist website: matthewthorley.com
Striving for a contemporary evaluation of constructed space, he considers materials such as perspex and polycarbonate to develop other realms of appreciation and understanding. Through the use of these highly finished objects and a minimalist approach to dynamic form, he highlights the elements of light on a polished aesthetic. Thorley’s process becomes activated from the experience of engaging with a specific constructed space. After several visits to a site a relationship with detailed components of the constructed space and the viewer are established. The way these particular elements affect the viewer are then interpreted through several visual documentation processes, allowing various angles of inquiry to develop into abstracted representations. Matthew Thorley’s work attempts to engage the viewer to apply a softened focus and respond to a moment of contemplation. His work asks the viewer to consider the work as a static object that aspires to the act of movement, whilst simultaneously affording the viewer an appreciation of their own personal consciousness within a given space.
Process Image I. CIAA, 2016.
PEGGY GRIFFITHS Peggy Griffith’s arts practice resonates with the richness of her cultural heritage. The elegant imagery of her ‘country’ references significant sites, spiritual identity and cultural performance for which she is renowned as a dancer. Her works inspired by ethereal morning light capture the energy of the land, the flow of waterways and the power of significant sites while evoking the movement of wind through the open plains of spinifex. Born in 1950 at Newry Station east of Kununurra, Griffiths grew up learning from her cultural leaders while working as a housemaid on the station. She experienced many of the tragedies affecting Kimberley Aboriginal people as a result of police and welfare. Her deep green eyes reveal her mixed ancestry. She narrowly escaped her own capture by being cleverly hidden by her mother. At sixteen Peggy married her promised husband, Alan Griffiths and began working alongside him at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts in 1985, carving and painting boab nuts and artefacts. She progressed to ochre painting on canvas and working with limited edition prints. She is the first Indigenous artist to win the prestigious Fremantle Print Award in 1995.
Today she is a highly respected elder and artist awarded the Kimberley Art Award in 2014, and with works in national and international public and private collections. Her work was included in the prestigious Art Stage Singapore 2015. Griffiths’ recent evolving Daybreak series captures an early morning light as her world gently transitions between night and day. Her motifs of spinifex clusters, become jewel forms refracting light as she presents a delicate yet powerful examination of her precious traditional ‘country’ in subtle hues marked by the transforming power of river gorges and ancient escarpments. Having developed her practice over more than 30 years, Griffiths has learned to understand and respond to the natural environment; its subtle transitions and both its visible and often invisible connections.
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Artist website: waringarriarts.com.au
Larrgen, 2016, Natural Ochre on canvas.
REBECCA JENSEN Born in Canada in 1993, Rebecca Jensen migrated to Australia in the late 1990’s. Coming from several generations of migrants, Jensen adopted an affinity with language, heritage and their respective roles within immigration politics; this interest is now a central concern of her emerging practice. Jensen graduated with a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts from Edith Cowan University in 2016. During her studies she collaborated with visual artist Jason Dirstein and WAPPA graduate Sarah Chaffey, exhibiting their performance based work The Ephemeral Project at Spectrum Project Space in 2013. Jensen received the Artist in Focus Award as part of the 2014 City of Joondalup Community Art Exhibition and was awarded a solo exhibition at Joondalup Art Gallery resulting in Mei in 2015. Since Jensen has been selected to exhibit in Hatched National Graduate Show at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts and Fold at the 2015 Impact 9 Printmaking conference in Hangzhou, China. In 2016 as well as participating in the 2016 City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award, Jensen will be exhibiting at Heathcote Gallery, Spectrum Project Space, undertaking an artist’s residency at Edith Cowan University and a revisiting collaborative and performance work during her residency at Another Project Space in August 2016.
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Artist website: rebecca-jensen.com
Jensen utilises her practice as a form of social activism to provoke conversation about aggressive nationalism and racial intolerance. Primarily she focuses on social phenomena surrounding immigration within the Australian context and most recently has begun to explore the church group’s movement to offer sanctuary to community detained refugees. Jensen’s work incorporates slow processes, such as traditional handset Letterpress, making use of analogue modes of production in direct contrast to the immediacy of digital media. Often incorporating text, Jensen’s working process reinstates meaningful consideration into candid remarks presented on the internet. Through this creation of delicate and subtle works, Jensen plays with ideas of normalization that allow bigotry to pass unseen.
History’s Page, 2016. Cement.
SERGE TAMPALINI Serge was born in Kalgoorlie in 1950 to migrant Italian parents. Schooled in Perth, he completed his Doctorate at Murdoch University. In 2014, after a productive career in theatre and academia, Serge returned to his first love, painting. The work of de Chirico, Hockney and Warhol are influential in his artwork, as they were in his theatre designs (see wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~serge/). Serge’s work has been exhibited in a solo exhibition entitled Affective Space, and group exhibitions: Pure Contemplation Without Knowledge 6; Cossack Art Award 2015; Claremont Art Award 2015; Scene 2015 and Scene 2016. He is currently working towards another solo exhibition. The fundamental feature in all Serge’s works is the way the form retains and preserves the dimension of an idea. In theoretical terms he is more interested in holding open an object’s potential to have different meanings, rather than closing its potentiality by concretising it into a form that is immediately recognisable. It is the interstices between form and meaning in his work that demand a reconsideration of the coherent nature of reality, and all the while the spectator’s own subjective moments of intersection with colour, form and memory imbue the works with their own personal abstraction, moving the viewer between comfort and unease.
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Artist website: artserge.com
In applied terms, Serge’s works bring to the foreground a sense of recognition, making the viewer reach further into their memory/ interior to understand where those feelings come from. Is it personal memory, familiarity with a certain architectural style, or are these iconic moments in time that cause a sense of nostalgic unease? Is it the textures (so reminiscent of the popcorn ceilings and walls of the 1960s), the unforgiving fiercely Australian light that casts such brutal shadows, or is it the hint of sterile suburbia versus longing for simpler times?
She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, 2016. Acrylic on canvas.
SHANNON LYONS Shannon Lyons attempts to visually ‘unpack’ the complex relationships that exist between artistic content and context in her multidisciplinary practice. By continually adapting, drawing from and responding to specific gallery spaces, Lyons makes artworks in the form of sculptures, installations, gestures and interventions that directly reference and critically examine the sites they are produced and exhibited in. Lyons questions how the production and installation of site-specific artworks within art gallery spaces can challenge the conventions of these spaces, and illuminate the institutional specificities and particularities of a given place. In drawing on the material, architectural, atmospheric and institutional conditions specific to a gallery space, and producing artworks that may reveal, expose and illuminate these conditions, she explores post-studio alternatives to the production of artwork in one place (a studio) and its exhibition in another (a gallery). Lyons graduated from the School of Design and Art at Curtin University with a Bachelor of Arts (Art) in 2004 and later in 2008 with First Class Honours. She was selected to participate in the Fondazione Antonio Ratti Advanced Course in Visual Arts with visiting Professor Jimmie Durham in Como, Italy in 2004 and was a visiting scholar to the Ecole Nationale
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Artist website: shannonlyons.net
Supérieur d’Art de Dijon (ENSAD) in 2007/08. In 2012, Lyons participated in SOMA Summer in Mexico City, Mexico and since then, she has undertaken residencies at Moana Project Space (WA), Sydney Non Objective (NSW) and the Fremantle Arts Centre (WA). She has exhibited locally and nationally including recent shows at: the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (WA), Pet Projects (WA), Success (WA), PICA (WA), Sydney Non Objective (NSW), Fontanelle (SA), FELTspace (SA), Hugo Michell Gallery (SA) and The John Curtin Gallery (WA). Lyons completed a PhD in Visual Art in late 2015 and is currently a sessional academic in the School of Design and Art at Curtin University.
Research for You’ll grow while I’m gone, 2016
TIM BURNS ‘Tim Burns is a legendary figure in the history of Australian underground art. He rose to notoriety in the early 1970s with a series of (literally) explosive art actions, before decamping to New York, where he remained, on and off until the mid-1990s. He now resides on a large property near the town of York in Western Australia. Rather than identifying as a painter, filmmaker, karaoke videographer, installation artist, theatre director or performer (although he has done all these things and more), Burns calls himself “a context artist”. What unites the hugely varied set of projects Burns has worked on over the last forty years is a constant desire to set up situations that critically reflect on our hypermediated, industrialised western society. His interventions are usually created live, in the public sphere, rather than being quietly crafted in the privacy of a studio setting. More often than not, they result in some sort of dramatic surprise or shift in the participants’ attention.’ (Lucas Ihlein, Artists Profile, April 2011)
Baltimore Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW and South Australia, The National Gallery of Australia, the Sydney Biennale and numerous regional galleries in Australia. A conceptual survey of his work, Against the Grain is currently touring Australian cities and regional areas through Art on the Move. His work is archived in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia Screen and Sound, Canberra and Franklin Furnace, New York.
Burns was awarded an ArtsWA Fellowship in 1999 and an Australia Council Artists Fellowship in 1996. He has also been awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts Book Award, 1977, The New York State Creative Arts Award 1978 for CARnage! and the National Endowment for the Arts (US) for performance in 1984. Burns’ work has been exhibited in numerous major shows and art institutions, worldwide, including The Beaubourg, Paris, ICA London, ICA, Boston, MOMA New York, The Hirschorn Museum, Washington, the
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Artist website: tim-burns-3rddegree.com
Still from a video work, courtesy of the artist
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