Dominik Mersch Gallery is pleased to present the Dominik Mersch Gallery Curator Award 2015, supporting aspiring and emerging curators. The award invites curators to explore their own perceptions and expertise in response to the brief provided by DMG. The aim is to give the curators of the future a platform for their early work and the opportunity to experience first-hand the realities of curating and realising an exhibition in a commercial gallery setting. Entries are encouraged to explore the gallery’s existing idiosyncratic themes while expressing their unique narrative style. Selected by a panel of judges including Gallery Director Dominik Mersch and guest judge Glenn Barkeley, the 2015 winning curators Bev Shroot and Louise Thoeming present their exhibition, 'OUTSIDERS, IMPOSTERS AND ALIENS’.
Outsiders, Imposters and Aliens Outsiders, Imposters and Aliens presents art that is created not by choice but by circumstance. It suggests that we are all, in some way, viewing our lives from the outside, pretending to be what we are not, forever destined to be alien. The exhibition presents works by eight artists who focus on individuals and groups who have been marginalized when the mainstream’s beliefs and interests dominate their own. The works featured encompass the feelings of alienation and detachment that human existence can bring. Internal battles, grapples with self-identity and unlikely sympathies arise as the artists reflect on their own beliefs and interests. This is more than an exhibition of purely aesthetic work. Each work hints at a greater story that remains hidden in the artist’s mind. However as a group exhibiting together, they are able to suggest that feeling like an outsider is, paradoxically, a common experience that binds us all. The gallery is a safe space. Don’t be scared. There is refuge in art. Bev Shroot and Louise Thoeming
Ching Hui Chou These large-scale photographic tableaux, recently exhibited in the Taipei Biennial, are carefully staged within the enclosures of Taipei zoo. Each image presents an aspect of urban dwellers’ sumptuous yet often perplexing modern life, questioning the status of their relationships against such a backdrop. Chou means to demonstrate how the rules of capitalism provide people with countless choices, simultaneously removing their rights to freedom and sense of belonging. Their spiritless lives represent our own lives; a strange and at times, absurd arrangement of time and space within a set of social limitations that trap us all.
Locust Jones Today’s media saturates us with human stories with political themes and high moral emotions. Chaos. Famine. Wars. Political upheaval. These subjects have become symbols for the universal stories of death and destruction we have grown used to encountering in everyday news. Jones’ works attempt to contextualize and comprehend specific world events yet the images presented are entirely interchangeable. By recognizing, drawing, moulding, scribbling and associating images with those seen as aliens in Australian society, Jones seeks to understand and tease out a common experience.
Meng-Yu Yan Largely inspired by the myth of Narcissus, Yan’s photographic works suggest that there is more to a reflection than what can be seen at the surface. The self-portraits and Chinese and Australian landscapes are at once beautiful and serene yet dark and tortured. They hint at the feeling of being an imposter in one’s own body, with one’s own identity and within one’s own world. For Yan, creating these photographs is a process of self-reflection akin to looking into a mirror. Her work attempts to evoke a mood whilst looking simultaneously at the self and through the self into imaginative visions of the world.
Yvette Hamilton Modern technology allows us to be in multiple places at one time suggesting that ‘being’ and ‘present’ are not the same and as human presence increases, Hamilton suggests that a sense of humanity is disappearing. Hamilton’s works are interactive portraits that allow you to see yourself appear and disappear. They question the notion of being-in-the-world in an age of the almost ubiquitous selfie and the ever-increasing influence of online and virtual worlds. The suggestion here is that perhaps we are not truly present in any of them and as such are imposters in all of them.
The Refugee Art Project The Refugee Art Project’s zines were born out of Safdar Ahmed's art classes in Villawood detention centre, for those in different stages of the asylum seeker journey. The drawings, paintings, short stories and poetry are collected in ten different issues each focusing on the difficult and often frustrating journeys that seem never ending. The zines are a triumph as the urgent stories hidden behind fences, laws, and personal barriers can be shared. With little or often no training in art, those that participate in Ahmed's workshops often come at first as a distraction and later as a passion. These people, denied a place and a purpose by circumstance, find both empowerment through their art and an avenue for overcoming their alien status.
Tim Johnson Johnson’s intricate paintings combine techniques and symbols drawn from Aboriginal culture, Eastern spirituality, Western histories and esoteric unknowns. Since visiting the Western Desert’s art communities at Papunya in 1980, his work has been deeply influenced by his collaborations with artists such as Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. More recently, Johnson has worked with science fiction enthusiast Daniel Bogunovic and Tibetan Karma Phuntsok. This work references the continuing Australian debate around post modern cross cultural referencing. For some, Johnson’s works spark tensions and suggest that he is an outsider. Can he engage wholly with so many diverse cultures? For Johnson, collaboration and an appreciation of such interconnection produces works that resonate deeply in our multifarious contemporary society.
As One Graffi+ art and street culture has always been viewed as provoca+ve. Marking or pain+ng property without the owner’s consent is also considered defacement and vandalism. Yet, it is an opportunity to present work to a large public audience whilst retaining complete ar+s+c autonomy free from compromise or restric+on. As One’s mural has been deliberately placed in the stairwell -‐ the space between the street and the gallery, never quite crossing the threshold and therefore ques+ons whether graffi+ art stops being street art when it enters the white cube. This work con+nues his interest in street art that goes beyond crea+ng leEers and abstract forms. The fragments of faces and masks represent the different personali+es that we all adopt in different facets of our lives.
Madeleine Preston These brightly coloured pots are an investigation into traditional sculpture and neoclassical vase forms. However, due to Preston’s limited formal training in ceramics the vases appear as imposters, approximations of their inspiration. The works suggest folk ceramics, thumbing their noses at technique and ceramic history. Ultimately, they are neither folk nor high art and instead sit somewhere outside expectations. Preston’s practice deals with the past in the form of archives, both real and imaginary. Her current focus is how people choose to remember and how the past is displayed and given status. Are these vases frauds, attempting to be something they are not or can they reference the past and reimagine how classical pieces can be presented and viewed?