Everyday Research by Deakin University Art Gallery

Everyday Research

Everyday Research Rachel Hanlon Victoria Holessis Todd Johnson Maddie Leach Kirsten Lyttle Jan Nelson Lynda Roberts & Venetian Blind

Deakin University Art Gallery Deakin University Downtown Gallery 24 July â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 30 August 2019

You had me at hello

The Deakin University Art Gallery is pleased to present Everyday Research, an exhibition that showcases current Higher Degree by Research candidates from the School of Communication and Creative Arts. This year the exhibition has been co-curated by Associate Professor Jondi Keane, Professor David Cross and myself and is the eighth iteration in a long running series of collaborative exhibitions between the Deakin University Art Gallery and the School of Communication and Creative Arts. The strong research culture at Deakin in the fields of the visual arts and performance and the diverse interdisciplinary approaches to creative research is reflected through the practices of artists Rachel Hanlon, Victoria Holessis, Todd Johnson, Maddie Leach, Kirsten Lyttle, Jan Nelson and Lynda Roberts. The exhibition also introduces artworks from the Venetian Blind project. This major Deakin initiative has invited 23 researchers and PhD candidates from the School of Communication and Creative Arts to deliver a series of creative provocations to various locations, histories and stories around the city of Venice. In this context artists Anindita Banerjee and Jane Bartier, Kari Lyon and Sandy Gibbs, Jondi Keane and Patrick Pound have collaborated in differing and responsive ways. The exhibition highlights the ambitious scope of the artist’s creative endeavours and the new discourses, knowledge and cultural expressions that have resulted in surprising and intuitive outcomes. To mention a few, Lynda Roberts’ Making Art Public is a series of interventions creating discourse around

art in the public sphere; Rachel Hanlon’s research investigates the archeologies of communication technologies with her Hello Machine project; to the deep thinking of monument making, remembering and colonial legacies in the work of Gothenburg based artist Maddie Leach; to the impact of digital technologies in image making and our social and cultural relationships in the works of Jan Nelson, Kirsten Lyttle, Todd Johnson and Victoria Holessis. While the creative arts have become an established part of University research, I have also been thinking of the ways research ‘like’ activities have become a normalized part of everyday life. With unlimited data and information available online even the most mundane activities like buying a fridge or choosing an energy provider can become an intimidating task of careful study and consideration. As time rolls on and the cost of political inaction on our future becomes greater, making even the most simple and straight forward choices in our lives has reached new levels of intensive focus and energy. It is in this new context and dynamic that these artists are working, finding their way through the complex ontologies and ideologies of the past and present and navigating us toward new beginnings and conversations. James Lynch Curator, Art Collection and Galleries Deakin University The title was sighted by the author as advertising on the side of a Hello Fresh delivery truck 31 July 2019. It is also a line from the film Jerry Maquire directed by Cameron Crowe, Tri Star Pictures, Los Angeles, 1996.

The blurring of art and research

The series of post-graduate exhibitions at the Deakin Art Gallery have highlighted specific aspects of contemporary arts research and the role of art practice in communities and culture. This show in particular focuses on the increasing move towards social practice which is participatory and looks to engage community concerns. Increasingly over the last decades, the arts have recognized and embraced the fact that the sites and processes in which knowledge is acquired and produced impacts upon collective values. The Art and Performance group at Deakin, both staff and students, understand the challenges faced by practitioners, to collectively shape the environment and interrogate the way value is assigned. All contributors to collective knowledge are tasked with these challenges however, the creative arts offer a particular approach to practice-led research and to the co-creation of meaning. Specifically, creative arts practitioners at Deakin, investigate meaning in the site where meanings are produced, know that context is everything, recognise the lived-experience of ideas, question the reduction of boundaries, borders, identities and interactions to fixed positions, and advocate for nuance and complexity. This is why contemporary art programs are not only interdisciplinary but multi-modal, which is to say, they address the issues of our time through collaboration and generate ways of understanding that cannot be quarantined to humans and human goals, let alone disciplines and disciplinary methodologies. The alternative, the approach that creative arts has adopted, is to consider knowledge positions, techniques and the technologies of thought to be nodes in a network of relationships. The challenge is to activate the potentialities the network holds and/or to transform the network. The creative arts approach is generative; the outcome, emergent; the goal, collective. It is difficult to hold a space open without unconscious bias or a desired result. It is difficult to produce continuity without foreclosing on unsettling ideas. But this is the role of contemporary arts—not to foreclose in any idea— complicated significantly when art becomes research and research become everyday life.

The current exhibition, Everyday Research, suggest such an implicate order in which the dominant factors that determine autonomy or interdependence can no longer clearly identified but are enfolded and contextual. The group of exhibitors in Everyday Research, present a snapshot of the range of projects within our Art and Performance HDR program and the direction in which it is heading. The trajectory begins with an emphasis on process, and a commitment to an ethics of practice, a trajectory whose lineage might have any number of starting point in history and be defined through, for example, Claire Bishop’s ‘Participation’ (2006), Allan Kaprow’s ‘Blurring or art and life’ (1993), or Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics’ (1911/1996) or Diogenes’ contempt for the vanities, self-deception in the manifestation power and power relations (Dobbins 2012). Diogenes, the founder of cynicism, lived his principles both as the mirror of society and the stone in its shoe. Today the trajectory of social engagement that Diogenes initiated, touches ground in the art-life demonstrations of our youth such as egg boy’s (ill-advised) nonverbal protest and the eloquence of human right advocate Malala Yousafzai, climate change advocate Greta Thunberg or high school gun control activist Emma Gonzalez. Their techniques do not resemble Diogenes but they live their convictions and focus their action through citizen-of-the-world concerns. Civility and citizenship are apt concerns of the generative and reflective artist, who rallies information, experience and context into elements of social practice. The artists selected for the Everyday Research exhibition, carry forward a strong commitment to social practice and the importance of materiality and diversity across the human-non-human condition. The cohort demonstrates an intense understanding that art exceeds containment and increasingly enters into everyday activities of life. These days, the contested ground has more to do with capturing attention, inflecting perception and pre-empting decisions. This is compounded when the stress lines and tipping points, experienced when conducting research, are factored-in. More than simply the loss of grand narratives, the contemporary 5

Venetian Blind

moment confronts all cultural producers with the management of change in an environment that is undergoing continuous variation. When art blurs into life, it forces the processes and products of daily life to reset their expiration dates and ensures that all values are due for immediate re-valuation. Unpacking forms and process, values and context—on the fly, as it is happening—is a daunting task worthy of careful consideration in the “practice of everyday life” (de Certeau 1984). Albeit at different scales, social practice and reflective practice involve the noticing, tracking of and reflecting upon non-linear events. Re-absorbing the techniques of the past to infuse daily life with the ethos of creativity suggest that what we call ‘knowledge’ should really be called learning. The thing that feeds process is the ability to hold an idea open, in order to postpone form and formality taking hold in the order of things. The longer an investigation evades capture by an existing regime the more that can be gleaned and learnt. Research, everyday. Artists who take on further study are forced to encounter two precarious processes in the making of art. The first is the artist’s alibi, the assertion that art can take up a position outside of the world it observes and comments upon. The second is the assertion that it is impossible to stand outside the context in which one makes work. Anyone who has tried to make a creative work might have glimpsed the predicament of needing to be both separate and part of the events. Even the naming of the action or the artefact as creative sets up a disquieting separation, however fragile, between the creative activity and all others. Its tenuous nature is also its power, and artists who undertake PhD projects become keenly aware of the vulnerability of being a learner, the fragility of the art-life distinction and the necessity to move through oneself to contribute to collective sites of enrichment in everyday research. Dr Jondi Keane Head of Art and Performance, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University 6

Venetian Blind is an art project featuring 23 Australian and New Zealand artists. Developed by Public Art Commission at Deakin University and curated by Cameron Bishop and David Cross, this hybrid exhibition/public art event currently taking place at the Palazzo Bembo in Venice, sees six projects commissioned (one per month) over the duration of the exhibition Personal Structures from 8 May until 24 November 2019. All of the works are being produced by a team of artists who will work collaboratively in situ in Venice responding to one of six provocations developed by the curators. Each team has been invited to make a site-based, or performative intervention, into the city of Venice that addresses a unique aspect of Venetian history while focusing on specific locations. While the experimental nature of the curatorial frame and its attempt to synthesise public art and gallery research is foregrounded, another key dimension of Venetian Blind is its focus on HDR research. Each of the six project teams has at least one Deakin PhD embedded in them highlighting the curator’s interest in bringing together faculty researchers and doctoral candidates to develop research outcomes collaboratively. Where such an approach is a staple feature of many academic disciplines including science and engineering, the creative arts has been less focused on building research partnerships that allow for such relationships. Venetian Blind highlights the important mentoring role researchers have in building resilient creative arts research practices while offering a unique professional development opportunity to make work in conjunction with the worlds leading bi-annual visual arts event, the Venice Biennale Three of the works in Everyday Research highlight the contributions to Venetian Blind made across the first iterations of the project by HDR candidates. Sandy Gibbs, Kari Lyons, Anindita Banerjee and Jane Bartier have each made work that draws on an aspect or aspects of their collaborative work in Venice. The assorted objects made across two, three and four-dimensional forms highlight the

diverse ways in which each artist has sought to mesh their own PhD scope and approaches with the research practices of their group collaborators. What they share is a complex and contextually rich response to each of the provocations. Articulated as banners in the Palazzo Bembo space, the provocations ask very specific things of the researchers. Gibbs, along with her team was asked to respond to a curious architectural structure called a ‘spacer’ that was placed between two buildings near Rialto Bridge. Their project took the form of a video that mapped the use of the space using the quirky mode of table tennis as an organizational system. Kari Lyons was part of a large team of researchers who were asked to investigate the assorted meanings of Venice’s remarkable Boche De Leon or Lion letterboxes. These curious letterboxes dating back centuries are built into a number of civic and religious buildings and feature lion heads with open mouths into which were placed letters by concerned citizens. The letterboxes served as a special surveillance mechanism of the Venetian state whereby supposed crimes could be reported anonymously to the authorities. Lyons sound work draws on opera and storytelling to offer a meditation on the letter as an instrument of power. The third work in this suite by Anindita Banerjee and Jane Bartier responds to the seemingly banal subject matter of two Venetian paving stones. One white and one red, these small stones, both located in different parts of the Castello region of Venice, speak however to remarkable stories about the plague, miracles and the political battle between church and state. The red stone marks the point at which the deadly 17th century plague did not cross, saving the inhabitants of the square, and the white stone outside San Pietro cathedral marks the precise spot where the doge and archbishop would meet on what was considered neutral ground to then enter the church together.

Each of the works from this exhibition demonstrate the ways in which the artists have been encouraged to interpret the provocations in any way they want with the only proviso being that whatever is produced, performed or conceptualized is captured and documented in the Palazzo Bembo gallery space. These are clearly work in progress that capture a highly processual focus and should be seen as experimental components of a much bigger investigation. What they highlight is the skills by which the HDR candidates are able to make art work blind so to speak without preparation or prior knowledge, to respond situationally and contextually to a given brief in a compressed time period. And furthermore, to do so with other researchers they have not worked with before Venetian Blind as a model of curatorial and artistic research, prefaces the importance of site-based research, teamwork and a compressed temporal register as productive constraints in the making and documenting of public art works. And importantly, it offers a model for how HDR research can be connected to creative arts research more broadly while offering a unique opportunity for internationally significant work integrated learning. Dr David Cross School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University

Works cited by Jondi Keane: Bishop , C. (Ed) (2006) Participation. London and Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Certeau, Michel de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. Dobbin R. (introduction and Translation) (2012) The Cynic Philosophers: from Diogenes to Julian. New York : Penguin Books. Jarry, A. (1911/ 1996 ) Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Simon Watson Taylor (Trans.) New York: Exact Change. Kaprow, Allan (1993) Essays on the blurring of art and life. Berkley CA: University of California Press.

installation view

installation view 10

Kirsten Lyttle Dollar Bird (Native Kingfisher) 2018

Kirsten Lyttle Cloncurry Rosella (Parrot) 2018

Kirsten Lyttle Major Mitchells Cockatoo 2018

Rachel Hanlon Conversation Repository Spectrogram (One-and-a-half Million Seconds of Hello Machining) 2019 15

Rachel Hanlon Hello Machine 2016

Jan Nelson Walking in Tall Grass: Bag 2003

Jan Nelson Walking in Tall Grass: Forest 2003

Jan Nelson Walking in Tall Grass: Storm 2003

Maddie Leach The Grief Prophesy 2017 Mapping and interpreting the historical specificity of a particular site, Maddie Leach’s project for the Göteborg International Biennial concentrated on places in Gothenburg and the town of Strömstad, delving into the phenomenon of black metal subculture in Sweden and the wider Nordic region. In particular, Leach looked at the story of renowned band Dissection who formed in Strömstad before moving to Gothenburg, becoming recognised as black metal pioneers in the 1990s. As typical within black metal culture, the group’s identity adopted images and symbols of darkness associated with the occult and the satanic, such as the inverse pentagram or inverse crucifix. On the evening of 22 July 1997, the band’s lead singer Jon Nödtveidt together with his friend Vlad murdered Josef Ben Meddour, a homosexual and Algerian national, in Keillers Park at Ramberget in Gothenburg. Meddour was found dead near a stone water tower, having been shot with a gun through the heart and the head. Registered as a homophobic hate crime, both men eventually confessed and were imprisoned for the murder. Nödtveidt was released in 2004 and briefly reformed Dissection, with a new lineup, before committing suicide in 2006.

The title of Leach’s project, The Grief Prophesy, refers to Dissection’s first demo tape The Grief Prophecy released in 1991. Leach has collaborated with the artist Kristian Wåhlin (Necrolord), who produced a suite of album cover artworks for Dissection, asking him to create an image depicting Keillers Park and its water tower. In Leach and Wåhlin’s view, we also see the more recent addition of Gothenburg’s Mosque, symbolising the pluralisation of beliefs and backgrounds of people in Sweden over recent decades. This image appears on the cover of a new vinyl recording containing slowed-down versions of a Dissection instrumental called Into Infinite Obscurity performed on vevlira and oud. Vevlira (or Hurdy Gurdy) is strongly associated with the kind of Swedish folk music positively promoted as ‘Swedish culture’ by groups such as Sverigedemokraterna. Oud is an instrument originating in North Africa and the Middle East. As a form of lament, these elongated recordings sit in relation to ideas of continued invisibility and memory that underpin The Grief Prophesy project. Maddie Leach and Nav Haq Reproduced with permission from the Göteborg International Biennial of contemporary Art (GIBCA) 2017.

pages 22-23 Maddie Leach The Grief Prophesy 2017 photo by Hendrik Zeitler 21

Victoria Holessis Material Responses, Responses to Material 2 2019

Victoria Holessis Material Responses, Responses to Material 3 2019

Victoria Holessis from left: Skin-like Dripped in Silver 2019 Material Responses, Responses to Material 1-3 2019 installation view 26

Todd Johnson 3 weeks, 2 days, 4 hours 2018

Sandy Gibbs, Jondi Keane and Patrick Pound The Spacer 2019 pages 30-31 Lynda Roberts The Public Field Office presented at Testing Grounds, Melbourne and the Melbourne Knowledge Week 2019 photo by Bryony Jackson 32

List of works

All works are listed as they appeared in the exhibition. All works are courtesy and copyright of the artist.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY DOWNTOWN GALLERY Kirsten Lyttle Laughing Kookaburra (Native Kingfisher) 2018 Blue Princess Parrot 2018 Dollar Bird (Native Kingfisher) 2018 Cloncurry Rosella (Parrot) 2018 Major Mitchells Cockatoo 2018 all works archival digital prints on Kodak lustre paper 59.5 x 84 cm (each) 1 of 5 edition courtesy of the artist Lynda Roberts Making Art Public: Expanded Field Notes 2017-2019 various research initiatives and performance nodes such as The Public Field Office presented at Testing Grounds, Melbourne and the Melbourne Knowledge Week 2019 digital print on paper and peg boards with collateral materials courtesy of the artist and Testing Grounds, Melbourne Jan Nelson Walking in Tall Grass: Bag 2003 type C photograph 113 x 136 cm Walking in Tall Grass: Forest 2003 type C photograph 130 x 167 cm

Walking in Tall Grass: Storm 2003 type C photograph 130 x 164 cm courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Venetian Blind 2019 Curated by Dr Cameron Bishop and Professor David Cross this project is a series of creative interventions and public provocations across the city of Venice by Deakin HDR candidates and researchers forming part of the larger European Cultural Centre exhibition, Personal Structures at the Palazzo Bembo. Anindita Banerjeea and Jane Bartier Not yet titled 2019 found plastic twine and cord from the Barwon river and Indian sari fabric, bleached courtesy of the artists Kari Lyons Desdemona Ave Maria 2019 What Lips My Lips have Kissed 2019 mp3 audio files, sound and voice courtesy of the artist Sandy Gibbs, Jondi Keane and Patrick Pound The Spacer 2019 video of public actions in Venice, table tennis ephemera and drawing on paper courtesy of the artists

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY Todd Johnson Snail slime on film 2019 digital inkjet print on Dibond 90 x 50 cm 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days 2019 digital inkjet print on Dibond 70 x 70 cm 3 weeks, 2 days, 4 hours 2018 digital inkjet print (framed) 104 x 104 cm Film placed inside a kangaroo carcass for 6 days, 2 hours 2019 positive film transparency and light 15 x 13 x 9 cm courtesy of the artist Maddie Leach The Grief Prophesy 2017 unreleased 12” LP pressed on 180 gram black vinyl (417 copies) 2 x 04:17 audio recordings performed on oud (Filip Bagewitz) and vevlira (Anders Ådin); commisioned album cover by Kristian Wåhlin courtesy of the artist, first commissioned for the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden, 2017 Victoria Holessis Material Responses Responses to Material 1 – 3 2019 digital scan, gelatin silver print 84 x 61 cm (each) Skin-like and Dripped in Silver 2019 stainless steel bench, liquid emulsion on latex, plastic and water various sizes courtesy of the artist

Lynda Roberts Making Art Public: Expanded Field Notes 2017-2019 Situated City 2019 a series of 12 conversations with creative practitioners for Melbourne Knowledge week, chalk on black board drawings Making Art Public Kiosk 2017-2019 book trolley with associated items for the NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair Public Field Office 20172019 mobile van, studio, office and tactical base, digital prints on paper Pattern Interrupt: Propositions for Making Art Public 2017-2019 playing cards, table and chairs courtesy of the artist Rachel Hanlon Conversation Repository Spectrogram (One-and-a-half Million Seconds of Hello Machining) 2019 archival inkjet print on cotton rag 122 x 87 cm Hello Machine 2016 vintage telephone, lightbox and electronics. 237 x 64 x 66 cm (approx.) All works courtesy of the artist

Anindita Banerjee and Jane Bartier Not yet titled 2019

Biographies

Rachel Hanlon

Victoria Holessis

Rachel Hanlon is an artist looking at our complex relationships with communication technologies. Hanlonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hello Machineâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Hello Human was developed within the Ars Electronica Futurelab and are situated in ever-changing locations and time zones connecting people and places across the globe via a nostalgia for the now obsolete analogue handset. Her research interests lie in the complex intimacies these technologies create and the legacies they leave behind after obsolescence. Past and current locations have included: Ars Electronica Center, Austria; Science Gallery, Dublin; National Centre for the Blind, Ireland; Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto; Volkswagen Drive, Berlin; Science Gallery, Venice and the Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne.

Melbourne based artist Victoria Holessis explores representations of the body in relation to new imaging technologies: capturing the haptic sensations of touch on the body, skin, latex and the changing effects of light through both the analogue darkroom and digital scanning. Holessisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; research also considers the possibilities of photographic materials and processing such as liquid emulsions as autonomous agents having transformative effects on the human.

rachelhanlon.com

Todd Johnson

Maddie Leach

Todd Johnson is a Melbourne based visual artist and educator who employs analog techniques to investigate the malleability of photographic images. His photographs result from a physical exchange between film, objects, insects and detritus gleaned from the natural environment. Rather than photographs merely representing an image, his creative processes reveals photography as an intrinsic part of the entropic cycles of deterioration and transformation. Johnsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s PhD at Deakin University considers issues of image making, photography, authorship and materialism in the digital age.

Maddie Leach is an artist from New Zealand currently based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her approach to art making explores place based specificity through a process of establishing relationships between forms, materials, locations, histories, events, individuals and communities. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Project Anywhere: Art at the outermost limits of locationspecificity Centre of Visual Art, University of Melbourne and Parsons Fine Art (2019); Lowering Simon Fraser, Canada (2019); Projection Series #11: An Oceanic Feeling, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand (2018) and WheredoIendandyoubegin: On secularity, GĂśteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden (2017).

Johnson has exhibited his work nationally and internationally including the group exhibitions Environment Documenta, Millepiani, Rome (2019); The Found Object, Praxis Gallery, Minneapolis (2018); Materialist Photography, Jarvis Dooney, Berlin (2017) and the Fotofilmic International Juried photography exhibition in Vancouver (2016). Recent solo exhibitions include Fossils, SomoS Art House, Berlin (2018), Fossils, Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania (2017).

maddieleach.net/ www.gibca.se

todd-reece-johnson.com/

Biographies

Kirsten Lyttle

Jan Nelson

Kirsten Lyttle is a multi-media artist of Māori descent. Her Iwi (tribe) is Waikato and tribal affiliation is Ngāti Tahinga, Tainui A Whiro. Lyttle was born in Sydney, spent her childhood in Wellington, New Zealand before moving to Melbourne, where she is currently based.

Artist Jan Nelson is well recognized as a painter of realistic portraits of young adults and children which have the seamless appearance of high definition screen based photographic images. Achieving these levels of perfection and finish in oil paint requires an artistic practice utilizing strict material and conceptual methodologies. Her PhD at Deakin University looked at the wider strategies for painting in the digital age and how new technologies are changing the ways we perceive the world. Making sculptures and photography have also been an integral part of Nelson’s creative process, shifting and translating between artistic forms. More broadly her works create emotional, textural and chromatic intensities.

Her creative research combines expressions of Maori customary cultural and artistic practices, in particular, weaving with digital technologies such as photography and scanning. Lyttle explores the impacts of diaspora for First Nations artists and the power relations between traditions, culture and the new technologies of representation. Kirsten Lyttle trained as a photographer completing a Fine Art Degree from RMIT (2008) and is currently a PhD candidate at Deakin University where she also teaches in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Lyttle has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the Indonesian Contemporary Art Network, Yogyakarta; Galleria 291 Est., Rome and Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland. Recent exhibitions include: In Her Words, curated by Olivia Poloni, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham (2019); Love Exhibition, curated by Isabel Smith and Dr Moya McFadzean, Immigration Museum, Museums Victoria, Melbourne (2018-2019); Digital Mana, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2018) and Octopus 18: Mother Tongue, curated by Kimberley Moulton, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2018).

Nelson graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (1983). Her works are presented in major public collections in Australia including the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, National Gallery of Australia, GOMA / Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2004 she was the recipient of the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize and in 2009 won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Analogue Art in A Digital World, RMIT Gallery (2019), The Public Body .01/.02/.03, Artspace, Sydney (2018) and Hyper Real, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2018). jan-nelson.com

kirstenlyttle.com.au

Lynda Roberts

Venetian Blind 2019

Artist Lynda Roberts works at the interface of design, curation, artistic research and arts management. This unique perspective has informed her PhD which looks to create new knowledge around the possibilities of creative actions in the public sphere. Over the last two years Roberts has used the city of Melbourne as the key artistic site for various collaborations and activities. These have often involved her mobile van as a roving office/ studio and other devices such as printed talking cards, blackboards and a book trolley to initiate conversations and discussions with other creative practitioners and audiences.

Venetian Blind is an international art project featuring twenty three Australian and New Zealand artists that is currently taking place at the Palazzo Bembo, European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. Developed by the Public Art Commission at Deakin University and curated by Dr Cameron Bishop and Professor David Cross, this hybrid exhibition and public arts project forms part of a larger exhibition titled Personal Structures which includes six works commissioned from 8 May to November 2019. The works are produced by teams of artists working in situ in Venice responding to one of six provocations. Each team has been invited to make a site-based, or performative intervention into the city while engaging with a unique aspect of Venetian history based on specific locations across the city.

From 2014-17 Lynda was Senior Public Art Program Manager at the City of Melbourne. In this role she developed the Public Art Framework and delivered a suite of new temporary projects including Test Sites and the Biennial Lab. Drawing on her formative studies in architecture at Sydney University and Masters of Architecture (Research) at RMIT, Lynda often approaches projects in-situ, developing frameworks and spatial conditions that support creative thinking through action as an expanded form of architecture. She is an enthusiastic participant in public forums, advisory panels and has co-facilitated a range of interdisciplinary art laboratories and exhibitions including: Belconnen Commons, ACT (2015); Situate Art in Festivals, Tasmania (2013)/ Splendid Lab (2010-11) and Underbelly Arts, NSW (2011). publicassembly.com

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to the artists for lending their works and sharing their creativity for this exhibition. Many of the artists have loaned their works at a very busy time in their research and have had competing deadlines, so I sincerely thank them for collaborating on the project and their enthusiasm. Thanks also to Ilana Russell for facilitating the artists and artworks from the Venetian Blind Project with special thanks to Anindita Banerjee, Jane Bartier, Sandy Gibbs, Jondi Keane, Kari Lyons and Patrick Pound for displaying artworks as they developed. Further thanks to artist Lynda Roberts for attending the Burwood campus open day with her mobile van and Public Field Office for the day.

A special thanks to Leanne Willis, Senior Manager Art Collection and Galleries and the art gallery team: Julie Nolan, Claire Muir, Vanja Radisic and exhibition technician Julian Di Martino. Further gratitude goes to my colleagues Jessie Imam and Victoria Holessis for their technical assistance with the exhibition and to Deakin Photographer Simon Peter Fox for his images. Thanks also to Matthew Gardiner for his technical support of the Hello Machine. I also wish to thank designer Jasmin Tulk for her continued fantastic work. James Lynch

The Deakin University Art Collection and Galleries team have enjoyed working closely with the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Thanks to Associate Professor Jondi Keane and Professor David Cross for co-curating the exhibition and thanks also to the SCCA executive for supporting the exhibition.

Everyday Research Rachel Hanlon Victoria Holessis Todd Johnson Maddie Leach Kirsten Lyttle Jan Nelson Lynda Roberts & Venetian Blind Exhibition dates 24 July to 30 August 2019 Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Burwood Campus. Deakin University Downtown Gallery, Collins Square 727 Collins Street, Melbourne ÂŠ 2019 the artists, the authors and publisher. Copyright to the works is retained by the artists and his/her descendants. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder(s). The views expressed within are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views held by Deakin University. Unless otherwise indicated all images are reproduced courtesy the artists. Photography is by Simon Peter Fox unless otherwise stated. Image measurements are height x width x depth. Exhibition Curators: Dr David Cross, Dr Jondi Keane and James Lynch. Published by Deakin University 978-0-6483226-9-6 400 copies Catalogue design: Jasmin Tulk Cover Image: Kirsten Lyttle Blue Princess Parrot 2018 Inner front and back cover image: Lynda Roberts Pattern Interrupt: Propositions for Making Art Public 2017-2019 photo by Bryony Jackson

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