Platform Program

Welcome

Words from The Inside

Platform might be the world’s most unlikely arts institution.

Exhibiting contemporary art in city rail underpasses, it has offered dynamic programs for 20 years, often providing formative opportunities for artists who are part of the dynamic Melbourne arts environment. Never shirking the challenges of presenting diverse media and critical thinking in public spaces, Platform has given hundreds of thousands of viewers the chance to engage with contemporary art since its commencement.

These achievements have been realised with a keen curatorial focus and the dedication of largely part time and volunteer staff. This year Platform offers an exceptional program that embraces a range of diverse practices and creative intentions, and supports the work of more than one hundred artists and an ongoing residency across its spaces. In addition, Platform continues its professional development initiatives by fostering emerging curators and in its work with interns, volunteers and of course the participating artists.

Since taking over the reins of management in 2006, we have continued to develop and rethink the structure of our organisation. We have faced several tough decisions including breaking away from Sticky to allow the lovechild of Platform to successfully stand on its own, we have given ourselves a new identity and implemented a shift toward a new curatorial direction. We have seen some internal shuffling and expanded our team to increase the efficiency and expertise within the organisation, and we have been rewarded in 2009 with the full and generous backing of our funding partners. We are most grateful for the ongoing support of the City of Melbourne and the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria and welcome the support of the Australia Council for the Arts in 2009.

providing exhibiting opportunities for emerging and established artists.

Artists have never found Platform’s sites implausible, and this year our returning audience will be rewarded with new art and site specific projects designed for Platform’s underground and inner city spaces. Living up to both its history and its potential, Platform in 2009 is a site of cultural currency that activates public enjoyment, discussion and debate.

With a 20-year legacy of presenting contemporary and refreshingly experimental art to a diverse public audience, Platform Artists Group continues to thrive. This year we will again deliver a full and varied artistic program informed and influenced by contemporary art practices. With a new board in place, a budget that reflects our needs as an organisation, a new office and an expanded team, we can now actively provide more professional and physical support to our artists.

Platform is Melbourne’s only exhibition space that offers free public exhibition opportunities for artists. This is a model we have actively fought to maintain, seeking to rebalance the structure of art support and relinquish the burden from artists who are so often the sole sponsors of cultural production.

At a time when funding is being spread thinly across a vibrant local art scene we maintain this as one of our greatest achievements. With each funding increase we have obtained, our artists are the ones we endeavour to support, toward a situation in 2009 where we are able to offer small artist grants.

Zara Stanhope Chair

Exhibiting contemporary artworks to a public audience can be fraught with controversy. Our public audience is a massive cross-section of the social diversities within our community; work shown in this context is subject to great scrutiny. This is a particularly challenging situation for artists as they attempt to re-imagine ideals whilst commenting on global situations. Censorship is an ominous trend we seek to oppose in our critical role within the area of contemporary public art. We have a role to play and that is to facilitate the presentation of exciting and challenging contemporary art, we aim not to merely ‘aestheticise’ or ‘groom’ space but to stimulate thought and provoke discussion whilst

Working outside traditional ‘white-cube’ presentation modes, artists at Platform are forced to think of new ways to exhibit artwork. Art is not placed onto walls but ideas and objects sit amongst the subway architecture to be seen and experienced by the 35,800 commuters who use the space each week. As artwork is organically incorporated into this unique environment, the experience and ritual of viewing is re-imagined, the audience encounters the artwork through transient behaviour. Artists can engage a diverse public, people not always consciously looking for art or perhaps unaccustomed to stepping inside a gallery space.

So after 20 years, Platform remains an excellent and challenging site for the presentation of art.

We maintain our commitment to developing relationships with festivals and to supporting independent projects by encouraging the creative use of our site for public openings and events. We once again thank the ongoing support of our funding partners, our designers Pandarosa, our volunteers and of course our artists; with an exciting new program ahead, we launch into 2009.

Anita King Executive Director

Site Documentation

Floorplan Map

MAJORCA BUILDING

Platform Vitrine Sample Majorca Underground Garden Frame

Platform, Vitrine, Sample & Frame: Degraves Street Subway, Melbourne.

Majorca: Majorca Building Cases, Centre Place, Melbourne.

Artistic Program Big & Dirty

Our 2009 Program will feature new work from artists who attempt to unravel the jumble of complexities in a world that appears to be in a state of economic, ecological and psychological collapse. Our selected artists bring a sense of empathy to this state of affairs, mixed with an unassailable desire to reconnect people to deeper truths –sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbing truths that lay buried beneath the stifling morass of waste and misinformation that now confronts us. So be warned: there is some heavy work coming. If you want safe, pretty or inoffensive art, then perhaps you should visit another gallery. We’re not making any apologies or excuses this year – our artists are telling it as it is.

Most of our artists directly critique concepts and events through their choice of subject matter, but often the format of presentation is as much a part of the overall meaning. So, in a reflection of our world today, the work you will see this year at Platform will include broken façades, imperfect results, deliberate mistakes, incomplete objects and semi-abandoned ideas.

Platform often attracts artists wanting to critique the assumptions and historiography of public institutions.

This year our artists will challenge the authority of the cultural display; appropriating the curatorial techniques of the museum to explore the deserted optimism inherited from the twentieth century.

The inevitable death of Utopianism as imagined by modernist desire, has left a disarray of shattered dreams from broken people suffering the aftermath of sanctified war, economic disenfranchisement, over consumption, technological reliance, environmental devastation, breakdown of social communities, and transparent hypocrisy of political economies. These factors now inform young artists in the twentyfirst century. Unsurprisingly, we are not too happy about the world we are inheriting, so these dark and confrontational subjects are now the stuff of art – like it or not.

This is not an attempt to barrage the public with depressing subjects but rather a deliberate strategy on our part to qualify a certain kind of humanism

– unique handmade attributes in a world of uniform mass production and consumption. It is a curatorial attempt to offset the tradition of the white cube and clean lines celebrated by modernism and instead offer a place for creative resolutions that give precedence to the more urgent and realistic concerns facing all of us in this new century.

The 2009 Program can be loosely divided into a number critical subject areas: gender identity and feminist criticism; ecological and social interventionism; mapping systems and social networking; critical and relational theories; social and political activism; process art and new materialism; art therapy; and apocalypticism. These are chunky conceptual clusters for the kinds of serious thinking that inform the work of our artists. We hope that the public presentation of these ideas will engage people in the broader critical conversations currently taking place in contemporary art.

Meanwhile, the work of many artists is hindered by attempts to battle the new anti-intellectualism that blemishes our cultural development. Revisionism is now building a dangerous new version of our past, and so our future, placing artists in a position where they not only have to struggle for survival, they now have to fight for relevance. Growing public fears of the current global meltdown are underpinned by religious and mythological concepts of the end of days where art hardly seems important. Many of our artists this year are actively critiquing this cannon of apocalypse, in the etymological and psychological sense but also directly through challenging the inherited fears of past generations.

So again, if you are looking for comfortable art then you will need to look elsewhere. This is not to say that all the work on show will be dark or ugly, much of it will be quite aesthetically beautiful, but this year we are grabbing the big dirty challenges of our endangered world by the throat, and we’re not planning to let go.

Din Heagney Artistic Director

2009 Artists

PLATFORM

VITRINE

MAJORCA

Freddie Jackson, Jombi Supastar, Jason Lingard (12-30 Jan, opening:19th Jan, p8-11)

Linsey Gosper (12-30 Jan, opening:19th Jan, p28)

Sam Wallman (12-30 Jan, opening:19th Jan, p48)

Leon Van De Graaff (2-27 Feb, opening:6th Feb, p29)

Adam Cruickshank (2-27 Feb, opening:6th Feb, p49)

Brad Haylock (2-27 Mar, opening:6th Mar, p30)

Kate Moss (2-27 Mar, opening:6th Mar, p50)

Leanne Shedlezki, Naomi Shedlezki (1-30 Apr, opening:3rd Apr, p31)

Ness Flett (4-29 May, opening:8th May, p51)

Dave McDonald (2-27 Feb, opening:6th Feb, p12-13) Paul J. Kalemba, Van Thanh Rudd, Marc De Jong, Tom Sevil (2-27 Mar, opening:6th Mar, p14-15) Anusha Kenny, Stuart Bailey, Kaori Kato, Azlan McLennan, Rosie Miller, Carl Scrase, Chris Andrews (1-30 Apr, opening:3rd Apr, p16-17) Kate McIntyre, (4-29 May, opening:8th May, p18) Nicole Breedon, Ace Wagstaff, Rachel Ang (1-26 Jun, opening:5th Jun, p19-20) Thomas O’hern (1-31 Jul, opening:3rd Jul, p21) Dell Stewart, Adam Cruickshank, Annika Koops, Carly Fischer, Natasha Frisch, Rachael Hooper (3-28 Aug, opening:7th Aug, p22-23) Julie Shiels (1-25 Sep, opening:4th Sep, p24) Lynda Roberts, Neil Thomas, Sam Keene, Anthony Magen, Ceri Hann, Cye Wodd (1-30 Oct, opening:2nd Oct, p25) Fiona Trick, Lucinda Swift, Matilda Brown, Emma Morris, Louise Klerks (2-27 Nov, opening:6th Nov, p26) Sacred Heart Mission (1-31 Dec, opening:4th Dec, p27)

Sue-Ching Lascelles (4-29 May, opening:8th May, p32) Andy Hutson (1-26 Jun, opening:5th Jun, p33) Sarah Bunting (1-31 Jul, opening:3rd Jul, p34) Dominic Kavanagh (3-28 Aug, opening:7th Aug, p35) Rebecca Delange, Aleisha Boddenberg (1-25 Sep, opening:4th Sep, p36) Aly Aitken (1-30 Oct, opening:2nd Oct, p37) Amy Alexander, Luke Ryan (2-27 Nov, opening:6th Nov, p38) Hugh Davies (1-31 Dec, opening:4th Dec, p39)

SAMPLE Hannah Raisin (12-30 Jan, opening:19th Jan, p40) Stephanie Cheek (2-27 Feb, opening:6th Feb, p41) Christa Jonathan (2-27 Mar, opening:6th Mar, p42-43) Clea Chiller, Kimberly Summer (1-30 Apr, opening:3rd Apr, p44) Georgia Gillard (4-29 May, opening:8th May, p45) Chloe Vallance (1-26 Jun, opening:5th Jun, p46) Emerging Curator’s Program (July through December, p47)

Aaron Moodie (1-26 Jun, opening:5th Jun, p52) Bridget Radomski (1-31 Jul, opening:3rd Jul, p53) Caroline Ierodiaconou (3-28 Aug, opening:7th Aug, p54) Mr Dean & Ms Teen (1-25 Sep, opening:4th Sep, p55) Circuit 15 (1-30 Oct, opening:2nd Oct, p56) J. Kristensen (2-27 Nov, opening:6th Nov, p57)

FRAME Underground Garden (January through August, p58-59) Tape Projects Residency: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Sunday Ganim, Tanja Milbourne, Eugenia Lim, Michael Prior, Zoe Scoglio, Jessie Scott, Lee Anantawat, Nic Whyte (January through August, p60-61) Simon O’carrigan (1-25 Sep, opening:4th Sep, p62) Polly Dedman (1-30 Oct, opening:2nd Oct, p63)

Skin Idols

Jason Lingard

Opening Date : 19th January

Jason Lingard is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work mainly consists of pop-influenced collage, digital manipulation, video and installation. Graphical, highly stylised, confrontational, and sometimes sexual, Lingard’s work has explored themes of body image, self-perception, sexual identity, celebrity culture and cosmetic surgery. Lingard has studied both graphic art and fashion design. Originally from New Zealand, he has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand and Germany.

His worked has also been featured in magazines such as Dazed & Confused, Empty and Carousel.

Platform

Platform

Skin Idols is a series of work that explores the blurred line between pornography and art, absurdity and decency, abhorrence and worship.

Jason Lingard’s prints take pornographic imagery out of the privacy of his bedroom, reconfiguring them into fantastical characters and idols, redisplaying them in the public domain, a space usually reserved for the presentation of brash large-scale advertising.

Earthly Delights

10

11

Jombi Supastar

Opening Date : 19th January

Platform

Disco/nstruction Freddie Jackson

Opening Date : 19th January Darkness pervades every part of our lives and minds. Each and every one of us battle with dark forces, inner demons, secret feelings we would never care to admit to anyone, maybe not even ourselves. That darkness is just as much a part of humanity as our other more appealing faÇades.

With a little humour, a little sparkle, we can make that darkness seem less powerful and destructive than it appears to be. These recent works mess up some of the darker icons of popular culture.

Disco Death Star takes the planet-destroying weapon from the Star Wars franchise and emasculates it into a sad and broken mirror ball. Like a party queen after too many hard nights, the power and puff has gone but a little pazazz remains, ready to be reconstructed if loved enough, even if for the wrong reasons. Foxy conceals the world’s most powerful media baron behind a sequined guise,

part wrestling fatigue, part drag fetish, the work masks that which is already masked. This thing is hidden from us all is so devastating that even if we knew the whole truth we could never even say it aloud it. Masks and reconstructions in this way work to prefigure an innate and far greater power that can not be understood, only inferred.

Freddie Jackson is an experimental queer artist who works under various psuedonyms in an attempt to debunk the myth of individualism while planting a tongue firmly in cheek. His work has a high camp queer aesthetic that interupts in the patriarchal monologue with a secondary male, yet queer, voice that combines some fine feminine qualities with a solid dose of darkness to pack a glittery punch to the rather dull status quo. Feddie once studied art at RMIT University and has exhibited under various names in line with his deliberately fluctuating identity.

My own work is often narrative in nature, exploring the realms of the subconscious, the nether worlds and the sphere of the nature spirits. I think of my art as an expression of the multi-dimensionality of perception, and of the many-layered nature of my spirituality and sexuality. I seek to make my images dense and complicated, like life. I see no reason to limit

myself to paint alone. I take a child’s delight in glittery, shiny objects. They excite me. I want my work to communicate that sense of excitement, and to create excitement of its own.

Jombi Supastar has shown his work at galleries in Philadelphia, New York and San Francisco. A radical faery, he was the first African American to serve as a steward of the Short Mountain Sanctuary in middle Tennessee. He now lives in Berkeley, California where he was recently awarded a grant, with Alwyn de Wally, to produce an installation piece for the National Queer Arts Festival in The United States this June.

Platform

I’ve been enraptured by painting ever since my father took me to see work by Henri Matisse when I was a boy. Seeing works by Bosch, Blake and Basquiat in museums or galleries is vastly more wonderful for me than seeing them in reproduction. Even work you would think would reproduce well, like Walker’s or Haring’s, I find far more compelling in the original.

12

13

Platform

What We Now Know Resides Dave McDonald

Opening Date : 6th February

By ‘removing’ or ‘boarding up’ the Platform space, the artist is manifesting his concerns that Melbourne is becoming a ‘Lifestyle City’, whereby consumption lifestyle grows and cultural and community engagement wanes. Art (amongst other creative areas) becomes a prop for shopping and lifestyle. Platform, with its display cases that contain and constrain most exhibitions, is the perfect gallery and site to present these notions. When the known gallery is blocked out,

it is envisaged that questions will be raised on public space, art, lifestyle and the presentation of creative work to the Melbourne community.

Psychological thriller with carnal, primitive and sexual undercurrents – four and a half stars. (DM) Dave McDonald works primarily with sculpture/installation that invites viewer interaction. Over the last five years he has exhibited primarily in public spaces with installations produced for various Melbourne festivals including: L’Oreal Melbourne International Fashion Festival, Melbourne Design Festival, Next Wave Festival and State of Design Festival. In 2007 McDonald opened an experimental art gallery in the CBD, Rise and Fall – a parasite art space on the elevator, stairwell and cinema screen of Curtin House. The project explores human interaction in zones and thoroughfares between public and private space in Melbourne. In addition to his practice, McDonald lectures in Architecture and Design at Swinburne University in Prahran.

Platform

The installation What We Now Know Resides sees Platform extend its architecture as a sort of rift through the unconscious, between daily life and things shut out. A sculptural and performancebased work that probes the grease-traps of the mind, a suggestion that a malignant presence now resides in the Twenty-First Century human psyche.

14

Resisting Subversion of Subversive Resistance

Propositions towards urban (r)evolution

Marc De Jong, Paul J. Kalemba, Van Thanh Rudd & Tom Sevil ‘No, painting is not done to decorate apartments, it is an instrument of war.’

- Pablo Picasso, 1945 Resisting Subversion of Subversive Resistance features the works and collaborations of four contemporary arts-activists. Romantic illusions of freedom fighters aside, serious business meets tongue-in-cheek as a homegrown (r)evolution through urban edibles and the bicycle-peddling critical masses meet conscious consumption and political awareness.

The Twentieth Century saw exponential advancement in many areas of human activity. The image was by no means excluded from this refinement.

The total war of World War II saw not only mechanised militarism devastate European civilization but the Third Reich, and the allies alike, bred the image for a new purpose. The manipulation of desire and fear was refined and exploited through the image, with propaganda aiming for nothing short of changing the opinions, and thus the actions, of entire nations.

Enter the Twenty-First Century. Commercial advertising carries on this imaging tradition into this decade, promising a veritable Shangri-La of sensual pleasure, luxury and convenience, tied firmly to a treadmill of competitive individualism. Meanwhile, headlines scream climate change, peak oil, environmental collapse, over consumption, finite resources… the new ideas now firmly in the zeitgeist. At face value, it seems society is economy versus a sustainable future.

Resisting Subversion of Subversive Resistance seeks to defy this manipulation of fear and desire, employing a combination of loose, scale model propositions with the graphic image – where WWII-style propaganda meets readvertising, promoting consumer awareness and sustainable models via DIY culture. The artists create dialogues with the notations of propaganda and resistance through subverting emblematic symbology and imagery of contemporary art, advertising, politics and their concurrent histories.

Paul J. Kalemba (AKA thinblackline) is an urban edible (r)evolutionary and sustainability activist who takes a renaissance approach to art. Prior to completing a Master in Visual Art at the VCA, Kalemba’s career highlights include: The National Print Symposium at the National Gallery of Australia, 2004,; co-directing Alleys Not Telleys pubic space reclamation/multi-arts festivals, 2001-2004; Eyes For Other Skies Travelling Animation Festival, ACMI/South Korea; and creating propaganda and projections for the tree planting/reveg Tranceplant Festivals 2001-2005. Kalemba’s work also features in many independent publications amongst a prolific CV of community, public and white cube rah rah.

Van Thanh Rudd has been exhibiting since growing up on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Moving to Melbourne in 1995, his work has increasingly attempted to address issues surrounding social justice. He researched socio-economic systems and the role of art and politics by travelling to countries such as Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and France in 2005. One of his major projects, The Carriers Project (2004-2008), involved carrying his paintings on foot through public and private spaces in Australia’s major cities. He has taken part in major social actions such as the Anti-G20 Rally (2006), The Stolenwealth Games (2006), Industrial Relations Rallies (2005) and Free The Refugees Protests (2004). Current and ongoing works include the Residencies of Thought Project, taking place in The White House, Washington and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Marc de Jong (AKA marcsta) is one of Melbourne’s most notable illegal street artists. Prior to completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA, he studied under Howard Arkley at the Prahran College of Art. He has held over 15 solo exhibitions and was a finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in the 2008 Fleurieu Biennale. He also featured in the April-June issue of Australian Art Collector magazine. His work is held in various collections throughout Australia, including National Gallery of Australia, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Monash University and Artbank. His work has also featured in Australian Art Collector and on the cover of Adbusters.

Platform

Platform

Opening Date : 6th March

Tom Sevil (AKA Civil) is a community graphic designer and artist. Since completing a Bachelor of Environmental Science in 1999, he has gone on to become involved in the independent media and publishing community. Tom has worked as a graphic designer for many political and community organisations including 3CR, Seeds of Dissent Calendars, The Big Issue, Voiceworks Magazine, The Paper, Melbourne Indymedia, and Stolenwealth Games. His stencil work has been featured in Melbourne Stencil Art Capital, the film Rash, as a feature artist in Melbourne Stencil Festival, and most recently as part of the London Cans Festival. Tom is one half of Breakdown Press.

16

Ham Strung

17

Creativity within Constraints Stuart Bailey, Kaori Kato, Azlan McLennan, Rosie Miller, Carl Scrase & Chris Andrews

Sometimes it is so hard to write the first word. There is too much to say and too many ways to say it. If you are a contemporary artist, there are even more problems. You have to decide on a medium, an aesthetic, and before that you have to decide whether to decide on any of these things at all. This can be paralysing, and you might decide that it is easier to become a scientist.

If you are lucky, you will have limits imposed on you. You may only have watercolours available, for example. This constraint will open up a world of opportunities because you now know you will be a contemporary watercolorist. But what if you want to paint photorealist portraits in the style of Chuck Close? Well, then you will have to beat the limits of your medium.

Stuart Bailey graduated with first class Honours in Bachelor of Art (Visual Art) at Canberra School of Art, ANU, and has exhibited widely across Australia, New Zealand, and America. Solo exhibitions include: Desert Mouth at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Building Self Esteem at Fremantle Arts Centre and Party HQ at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington. His work was included in the Bon Scott Project at Fremantle Arts Centre, Old Skool (never lose that feeling) at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Australia Council’s Los Angeles Studio Residency.

Kaori Kato completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) at the VCA in 2008. Her Drawing Machine was included in the 2008 Melbourne Art Fair, and her work has been exhibited at Victoria Park Gallery, Brunswick Gallery and Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Kaori was the 2008 Recipient of the Wallara Travelling Scholarship.

Azlan McLennan is currently completing his Master of Fine Art at the VCA. He has recently returned from a residency in Scotland.

Selected solo projects include Proudly unAustralian at Trocadero Art Space and Pay Your Way, funded by Urbanart. His work was included in Flux Capacitor, curated by Pilot at Utopian Slumps in 2008 and Rules of Engagement, curated by Mark Feary at West Space in 2007.

Rosie Miller graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Printmaking) from the VCA in 2007, receiving the National Gallery Women’s Association Encouragement Award. In 2008 her work was

included in the curated group shows TYPECAST at Sophie Gannon and Exploration at Flinders Lane Gallery, and was shown in DEBUT IV at Blindside. Miller is represented by Lindberg Contemporary Art. Carl Scrase is a graduate from Fine Art (Painting) at the VCA. In 2008 his work was included in House Proud, a curated project during the Next Wave Festival that was included in the Melbourne Art Fair. He has exhibited at TCB, Shifted, Seventh Gallery and Bus Gallery, and was also a founding member of Oprojects Gallery. He is represented by John Buckley Gallery and is having his first solo show there in June 2009.

Chris Andrews completed his PhD in French Poetry at the University of Melbourne in 1994, and has since worked as a Lecturer in the Department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies.

He has translated several books from Spanish to English, and is the leading translator of the work of Roberto Bolano. He is the author of two books of poetry, Cut Lunch and Septuor. His translations, critical articles and poems have been widely published including The Age, Antipodes and the Australian Literary Review.

Anusha Kenny is currently completing the Art & Australia and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces Emerging Writer’s Program.

In 2008 she was the inaugural Curator in Residence for Platform’s Sample exhibition space. She has curated exhibitions for TCB and the Melbourne University Arts Festival. Her writing has been published in Australian Art Collector, Art & Australia and UN magazine. Anusha is the gallery manager for Platform Artists Group.

Platform

Platform

Opening Date : 3rd April Curated by Anusha Kenny

Apocalypticism

18

19

Nicole Breedon, Ace Wagstaff & Rachel Ang Opening Date : 5th June

Platform

Apocalypticism is a multi-disciplinary work investigating the concepts and themes of secrets, and their relation to ideas such as: truth, government secrecy and conspiracy, mysticism, illusion and magic, reality, revelation, and the metaphysical. Apocalypticism is a collaborative work showcasing the work of three local artists: Ace Wagstaff, Nicole Breedon and Rachel Ang.

Roots

Kate McIntyre Opening Date : 8th May By now we are used to vandalism and graffiti being entrenched in the visual vocabulary of our everyday environment. In this exhibition, however, it will have an unusual perpetrator.

Kate McIntyre creates installations that draw forth a potential hidden history, future or present from the banalities of a space, allowing the viewer to rediscover meaning in what surrounds us. The viewer is the vital catalyst for McIntyre’s work, and acts as a reference point for her architectural creations, inversions and destructions.

Running together the real space with its fictional possibilities, McIntyre intends to render an improbable growth down beneath Flinders Street – tree roots puncturing through the white walls of the Platform cabinets and growing within the spaces. What will be set forth is nature’s triumph over the sturdy structural concoctions of concrete, steel and wood, laid by man.

McIntyre works mainly with artificial materials to construct her scenarios, often massmanufactured, construction goods such as polystyrene, wood-patterned linoleum, perspex and mirror. In this work, these materials will make a paradoxical statement on the process in which they have been gathered, rematerialised, and now utilised in the portrayal of a ‘natural’ object.

Kate McIntyre is a New Zealand artist recently relocated to Melbourne. Along with graduating from the University of Canterbury’s Sculpture Studio in 2005, McIntyre has exhibited her work extensively in Christchurch, as well as in Auckland, and Kurashiki, Japan as part of a sculptural exchange. She has also acted on the Board of Trustees for Christchurch’s HSP Gallery, and adapted ideas from her practice into the production design for several short films. Recently McIntyre has shown in the Physics Room Gallery’s public art site in Christchurch, The Kiosk, and held a solo show, Lost in Space at HSP Gallery.

Shifting the normal viewing position of Platform’s glass display cases, the small-scale installations are instead hidden behind a paneled wood façade, reminiscent of a fine door or wooden chest. Emerging from the darkness, the installations are made visible via a peephole, manipulating the viewer in the uncomfortable position of voyeur, violating a mysterious and unexplained privacy.

Platform

The term ‘apocalypse’ is one that has been used extensively in the media and arts of late – the coming to an end of the human species, and the monumental grief and suffering involved. Apocalypse literally translates to ‘lifting of the veil’ and traditionally refers to the disclosure, to certain people, something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today, however, the term is often used to refer to the end of the world.

Ace Wagstaff is interested in the unknown and theoretical: space, time and love. His practice involves the creation of tributes or homages to these ideals, like three-dimensional sonnets of representation to certain scientific and philosophical theories and concepts. These loving tributes are often realised in a variety of forms including and certainly not limited to: photography, installation, social or relational acts, painting and sculpture, to name a few. Ace graduated from the VCA with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2007. He has been included in group exhibitions, social interventions, collaborative projects with other artists, residencies at various schools and solo exhibitions including Aesthetic Laboratory at George Paton Gallery in 2008.

Rachel Ang’s work is concerned with experience, curiosity, discovery – a logic of the senses, which lends itself to the pursuit of freedom and romanticism. Her work is made by bringing seemingly incongruous elements together to explore relations and restraint – a material-based practice resulting in objects which embody the discourse which is their orbit, a kind of play which is both ebullient and scientific in scope. Her creations are constantly being broken down and reconstructed; physical inversions catalyse conceptual ones. Rachel completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the VCA in 2008. She has previously shown work at Platform, Mailbox 141 and the Sydney College of the Arts and has an upcoming show at Blindside, To Boldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before in 2009.

Bone Bed

21

Tom O’Hern

Opening Date : 3rd July Bone Bed is an exhibition of large, meticulous drawings depicting the bones of Melbourne’s past; a cross section of the sediment deposits beneath the city. The work will portray skeletal remains, and artefacts of the inhabitants of Melbourne, from ancient mega-fauna specific to the area, through to pre-colonial Aboriginal life and then onto the skeletons of stressed office workers and the remains of artists, still clad in tight black jeans.

Tom O’Hern is Melbourne based artist and dish pig. He has Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the University of Tasmania and has presented numerous exhibitions, murals and workshops across Victoria and Tasmania.

Platform

Platform

Nicole Breedon employs painting, woodwork, video and installation to explore the esoteric nature of our cosmos and the human psyche, such as the mind, the origins of the universe and creation, the future, time and space. Her work examines mankind’s infinitesimal position within the orders of magnitude, in contrast to the richness and depth of the human experience.

Aside from various collaborative ventures, duo shows and group exhibitions, such as Lateral Investigations at George Paton Gallery, Nicole is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA.

Repeat Repeat

Dell Stewart, Rachael Hooper, Natasha Frisch, Carly Fischer, Annika Koops & Adam Cruickshank Opening Date : 7th August We repeat to process what surrounds us.

We repeat to reinvent what came before us.

We repeat to erase our mistakes.

In a contemporary culture of increasing information overload, unlimited access and hyperproduction we are presented with a paradox: we have free reign to access and do anything possible but because of this freedom we are unable to do anything at all. In the nauseating amount of stuff that surrounds us on a daily basis, how do we find our place as individuals? Everywhere simulation builds upon simulation, everything we do has been done before. Leaving a mark and making ourselves visible takes on slightly humorous tones in amidst the sheer amount of stuff. Any attempt is bound to be futile, redundant and perverse. In a valiant attempt to be part of this drive, we find ourselves swept up continually processing and regurgitating the multitude of images ad infinitum.

Repeat Repeat looks at how six artists,-Dell StewartRachael Hooper-Natasha Frisch-Carly FischerAnnika Koops-Adam Cruickshank-deal with some of the anxieties and humours in such a climate.

All of these artists employ obsessive processes of production, or observation, perhaps to mimic the drive that surrounds them and also to provide an escape through the meditative qualities of work.

Within each artist’s process is also the element of analogue copycatting, an upside-down reversion to hand-crafted production at the expense of faster, more efficient means. Floating in between regressive nostalgia and progressive eradication, these artists deal with the strange place that the culture of repeat finds them in.

Dell Stewart has organised and participated in numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions, working with sculpture, drawing, animation and installation, most recently exhibiting at Utopian Slumps in Melbourne, Project(or) in Rotterdam and Takt Gallery in Berlin.

Rachael Hooper has exhibited in artist run spaces and galleries in Melbourne and Darwin. She has been short-listed for several prizes including the Brett Whiteley Traveling Scholarship, and won the Albany Art Prize in 2008.

Natasha Frisch likes making objects out of tracing paper and other translucent materials. She has exhibited widely in Melbourne and has contributed four years as a committee member at West Space.

Carly Fischer has exhibited widely in Melbourne including Helen Gory Galerie, Bus and Platform, primarily practicing in the area of sculptural installation. She recently relocated to Berlin for artistic research/work.

Annika Koops was a recipient of the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Traveling Fellowship in 2007 and has recently returned to Melbourne after a residency in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Adam Cruickshank is a Melbourne based artist who has shown extensively in Melbourne and overseas, including shows in Berlin, Antwerp and Dordrecht.

Platform

Platform

22

The Interventionist Guide

24

25

(Public|Assembly) Neil Thomas, Sam Keene, Anthony Magen, Ceri Hann & Cye Wood

Rubbish Theory Julie Shiels

Opening Date : 4th September At the beginning of 2006, I picked up the casing of a strange looking object that had been dropped on the pavement between the sex shop and the local hardware in St Kilda. It wasn’t the packaging that interested me but the empty space that was left after an object had been consumed. This single act turned out to be the catalyst for a collection of other plastic packages that held more mundane objects: toys, office supplies, hardware stuff. I then started plaster-casting the empty spaces in the packaging and flocking them in luminescent colours. I produced hundreds of these objects and attached them directly to the wall in patterns that suggested three-dimensional wallpaper in a site-specific installation called Flock.

Rubbish Theory extends and relocates this work into the Platform display cases that were once the advertising space for a now defunct department store.

Each window will be hung to suggest the typologies of a department store such as kitchenware, bathroom and menswear. The new work will explore some of Michael Thompson’s ideas from Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, which is an investigation of material culture in relation to circulation and scarcity, transience and durability and how changing tastes affect the meaning and value of objects.

Julie Shiels likes to think her work draws attention to the small gestures and stories of everyday life.

She makes work for the gallery, the street and the web. She also teaches at RMIT University in the Art and Public Spaces Post-Graduate Program.

‘It is not about indiscriminately weaving sites of interim use into a context but about making gaps visible and activating them by means of freeing them.’

- Barbara Holub & Paul Rajakovics During the month of October 2009, Platform will transform into a virtual map of Melbourne, revealing sites for individuals and groups to creatively intervene within the existing urban fabric.

The exhibition is based on the zine The Interventionist Guide to Melbourne, and will present a suite of publications edited by twelve artists whose practice interrogates the urban fabric in some way – including temporal performance, installation, light and sound events.

The Platform cabinets will document an exemplary intervention event within the CBD that has been created by each artist via photographic, mapping and new media devices, illustrating the creative opportunity of a particular space. In this way, each intervention can be visited by Platform

audiences – extending the exhibition beyond its subterranean location to become a map and guide to potential creative scenarios for the city above.

Lynda Roberts is currently completing a Master of Architecture (Expanded Field) at RMIT exploring temporal installation projects, urban curation and modes of engagement within the city. Over the last three years, Lynda has been the Artistic Director for the arts program at The Great Escape & Cockatoo Island Festivals. Her artistic and curatorial work includes: radio walking tours of the city with Sydney Architecture Walks and FBI Radio; sound installations for the Historic Houses Trust, Sydney Botanic Gardens Future Gardens and MCA’s Primavera exhibitions. More recently, Lynda created immersive audio visual environments at Underbelly Arts Festival, Carriageworks Sydney and Art in the Open for the Sydney Harbour Trust in 2007.

Platform

Platform

Opening Date : 2nd October Curated by Lynda Roberts

26

Unlocked

27

Fiona Trick, Matilda Brown, Emma Morris, Louise Klerks & Lucinda Swift Unlocked is an all-female collaborative project between five artists: Fiona Trick, Matilda Brown, Emma Morris, Louise Klerks and Lucinda Swift.

Unlocked predominately consists of photography and video documents that capture uncanny and banal actions in public. The artists undertake roles in an array of street characters immersed in domestic rituals. Through video and photography, we capture these performances as well as the bemused onlookers’ responses to the personal, intimate, and private lives of these strangers.

Fiona Trick is a practicing filmmaker and designer who experiments with a wide range of mediums. She is currently studying Professional Screenwriting at RMIT and has completed an Advanced Diploma in Events and Entertainment Design. Fiona has directed student film, designed and produced experimental music and theatre performance at Newtown Theatre in Sydney and is working on several documentaries.

Matilda Brown is a graduate of Film and Television at Swinburne University and is currently studying Professional Screenwriting at RMIT. She has exhibited at The Art Gallery of New South Wales through Art Express and at the CCP in Fitzroy. Matilda currently works as a freelance filmmaker and has been involved in several films and television series since finishing school in 2004.

Emma Morris graduated from Macquarie University with a Bachelor of Media and Multimedia in 2004. She worked as a producer on award-winning projects in digital and interactive media for two years in Sydney. At the beginning of 2008, Emma moved to Melbourne to complete her Master of Radio Broadcasting at Swinburne University and worked at PBS FM as a news journalist and interviewer. Emma is passionate about telling people’s stories through audio documentaries and digital media.

Louise Klerks graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2005 where she completed her Honours Degree in Sculpture, Performance and Installation. Since relocating to Melbourne in 2007, Louise has completed a Diploma of Education at Melbourne University and works as the education coordinator at No Vacancy Gallery. Her particular interests include illustration, performance art and public interventions.

Lucinda Swift is currently studying fashion design. She has recently collaborated in a collection for the Recreate 08 Salvation Army fashion show. Her passion lies with immersing bold, rhythmic colourful textiles with the intricacies of construction.

Mind the Gap

Platform

Platform

Opening Date : 6th November

Sacred Heart Mission Opening Date : 4th December Curated by Gail Hart Mind the Gap is a multi-staged project using art as the format to achieve social inclusion. The exhibition features work from 12 residents of Sacred Heart Mission’s Queens Road Hostel.

Curated by art therapist Gail Hart, the exhibition demonstrates the ways that people who have experienced homelessness use their creativity to reconnect with the wider community.

It also aims to raise community awareness about people who have been marginalised due to economic factors, mental illness or disability, and to demonstrate the positive outcomes of creativity as a vehicle for resilience.

The 12 artists will also attend workshops with professional artists to develop their skills in both traditional fine art and contemporary art practice.

Queens Road Hostel offers 64 self-contained units in central Melbourne. It provides accommodation for 29 residents who require assistance with daily living and emotional support. The remaining 35 residents live independently with staff providing general support. The aim of the hostel is to help people break the cycle of homelessness by providing residents with stable, long term accommodation and support to maintain their housing.

The hostel, run by Community Housing Limited and Sacred Heart Mission, creates social inclusion by using art to heal and to provide people with ways to explore and develop their artistic skills.

Black Widow

OK, Commuter

Opening Date : 19th January

Opening Date : 6th February

Linsey Gosper

The focus is the femme fatale, as an alternative feminine persona that is contradictory, fluid and liberating. She is the object of desire and a vehicle for feminist empowerment. Her role, particularly in the context of film noir, establishes her as the antithesis to other feminine stereotypes, yet she is an image of ultra femininity. This portrayal of femininity may be a masquerade, veiling her more masculine qualities of explicit sexuality, violence and assertiveness. Her independence and lack of interest in men often present her as a self-absorbed narcissist. Narcissism is linked in the popular imagination with femineity and lesbianism. I propose imagining a female Narcissus: ‘a woman whose belief in her own self-cultivation might result in significant cultural production.’*

Leon Van de Graaff The artworks will be super flat, life size, and freestanding cut outs – similar to cinema or video display posters, and reinforced by the shopfront aesthetic of the Vitrine. The audience can visibly see their construction and limited depth. *Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Tate Publishing, London, Jersey heritage Trust, 2006, p. 37.

Linsey Gosper completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from The University of Newcastle while working as a photographic demonstrator for the School of Fine Art. She exhibited extensively during this time in Newcastle, Sydney, the Gold Coast and Perth. Gosper was the recipient of the Jennie Thomas Traveling Scholarship from The University of Newcastle and winner of the Newcastle Art Space Emerging Artist of the Year. Images from her Honours exhibition Bad Taste were published on the covers of Real Time and Jet, and she was commissioned to produce a body of work for the exhibition Autofetish: Mechanics of Desire, at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery in 2004. Gosper was a recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award from The University of Melbourne and completed her Master of Fine Art at the VCA in 2008. She has recently held shows Trocadero Art Space and Kings ARI.

Decades ago, we were sold the idea of the paperless, portable, work-fromhome office. We were seduced by advertising images of happy people using portable computers by the beach, in bed or at cafes; a holiday atmosphere for every working day and no need to waste time going into the city. What we got was more people travelling further and more often for work and the capacity to waste vast amounts of paper and other resources at the click of a button. For most people, portable information technology has become about making tedious travel time more productive or just merely distracting.

In OK Commuter three human-sized robots (with their phones, PDAs, handheld game platforms in hand) occupy Vitrine, now morphed into a train/tram carriage. Each robot is made from found objects and technologies from a specific era indicative of each robot’s fictional age.

The public can direct the robot passengers to perform clichéd actions and monologues from commuter life via text messages chosen from a predetermined list on the Vitrine window.

Leon van de Graaff studied science at ACT TAFE and sculpture Canberra School of Art, ANU before fleeing to Brisbane where he exhibited extensively in artist run spaces and festivals. In 2005 and 2006 he was invited to exhibit mixed media sculpture with multimedia/interactive components in the QUT staff and student showcase exhibitions Journey and RE-active. He now lives in Richmond and works at the National Gallery of Victoria as a multimedia technician.

Vitrine

Vitrine

Black Widow is an exhibition of photographic selfportraits of female cinematic personas portraying multiple identities. The conceptual link between my research and studio work is based on one of the most important contributions feminist film theory has made to the larger field of feminist inquiry, that the image of woman is a ‘construction’.

29

People Make Places

30

31

Match Box Projects Leanne & Naomi Shedlezki Opening Date : 3rd April

wanted to know about fashion

(but were too afraid to ask) Brad Haylock Opening Date : 6th March

Continuing the artist’s fascination with public communication, Everything you never wanted to know… responds to the spatial qualities and the location of Vitrine, and particularly to its visibility and the passing foot traffic. The work offers to passers-by a commentary on the world of fashion and its underlying logic, whilst adding to the cacophony of signage with which commuters are barraged. The textual content of the work takes inspiration from critical theory and from the most hyperbolic and vacuous of fashion advertising, and from combinations of the two. The resulting commentary spans the incisive and the absurd, the pithy and the banal. The form of the work also takes cues from the world of fashion; this form is a reflection upon the fetishism of the object that is characteristic of the worlds of fashion and art alike.

Brad Haylock is a lecturer in Visual Communication in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. He variously practices as an artist, designer, writer, and curator. Recent projects include the solo exhibitions Crazed and Defused and A Beginner’s Guide to Politics, design for Making Space and Objects in Space, the curation of The Art of the Bicycle and the co-curation with Mark Richardson of Advance/Retreat.

As well as the Melbourne launch of Match Box Galleries, the artists will conduct a series of talks and performances to create a multimedia diary of their travels through Australia and Japan that will

be presented in Sydney and Osaka.

Look out for event dates on their website www.matchboxprojects.com Artists involved in People Make Places include: Monika Behrens, Mark Brown, Simon Cooper, Benedict Ernst, Adam Hill, Mary-Anne Kyriakou, Helena Leslie, Zoe MacDonell, Luis Martinez, Louis Pratt, and more.

Match Box Projects are a Sydney based artist duo working across performance, installation, multimedia and collaborative exchange. They draw on the dynamics of everyday life and human interactions to explore issues of identity and perception.

Leanne and Naomi have been awarded various grants for their projects, including an Arts NSW Project Grant, the Japan Foundation Emerging New Visual Artists Grant, a Federation of Australia Japan Societies Grant, and the National Association of Visual Artists (NAVA) Marketing Grant. Their work will also appear in the upcoming Sydney ARI Guide, spotlighting Sydney’s numerous artist run initiatives.

Vitrine

Vitrine

Everything you never

Leanne and Naomi Shedlezki (aka Match Box Projects) will work in collaboration with the people of Melbourne to create a portrait of the city during April at Platform. For the last three years, Leanne and Naomi have travelled extensively in Australia and Japan with Match Box Galleries, their portable, handheld cases filled with small works made by a diverse range of contemporary artists. Leanne and Naomi take photographic portraits of their guests and are inviting them, together with local people they will meet, to create small-scale works for empty matchboxes by responding to the theme “Melbourne – My City”. All works will be installed in Vitrine to create an evolving portrait of Melbourne.

33

I’m Lichen You A Lot

Unnatural History

Opening Date : 8th May

Opening Date : 5th June

I’m Lichen You a Lot is the most beautiful fungal disease to infect the city of Melbourne. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of felt lichen, spanning many species, of which some are real and others invented. Replicated and seemingly growing from the walls of this inner city subway, these curious objects will both be overwhelming in mass and fascinating in their forms.

Unnatural History utilises Vitrine as a site for a miniature diorama, as one would encounter in a museum of natural history – at least, a museum based on the empirical classification of ‘historical’ or ‘natural’ artefacts. In this case, the papier-mâché and cardboard artefacts presented highlight the increasing difficulty with which we differentiate between the constructed and natural worlds.

Sue-Ching Lascelles

Intricately crafted from felt, this soft sculpture installation will appeal to an observant eye, leaving the viewer in awe. I’m Lichen You a Lot is an attempt to impact our increasingly screen-dependent society, change the city’s landscape, and inject a beautiful and fragile synthesised form of nature into the subway.

Sue-Ching Lascelles is a Brisbane based textile artist specialising in the creation of everyday objects from felt. Her collections of soft sculptures are based on the perception and memory of childhood. Inspired by a playful, childlike vision of the world around us, she rejects so-called ‘grown-up’ forms of aesthetic naturalism. There is a keen sense of novelty that resonates in her desire to transform the banal into the fantastical. Sue-Ching is presently artist-in-residence at Juggler’s Art Space in Fortitude Valley, Queensland.

Andy Hutson

Although these objects are archaic in both their construction and content, they represent the shape of things to come – an entirely fabricated nature.

Unnatural History critically questions the cultural apparatus through which our perception of ‘the natural’ is formed, and simultaneously alludes to humankind’s own willful and inevitable destruction of the environment.

Andy Hutson is a Melbourne based artist, working primarily in sculpture and installation. He has exhibited both locally and interstate, and recently completed his Master of Fine Art at the VCA. In 2008 he was the recipient of the ANZ Visual Arts Award. Andy is also an active member of Seventh Gallery, an artist run space in Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Vitrine

Vitrine

32

34

Volcano God/ Warrior of The Tephra Sarah Bunting Opening Date : 3rd July

Sarah Bunting studied Visual Communication at Monash University and has lectured in the field of 2D Design and Design History and Theory at RMIT TAFE for the past three years. During that time she has taken part in group exhibitions, including No Excuses at FAD Gallery, I Wear My Heart on My Tee at Boroondara Town Hall, and a 2007 Platform show with Dale Nason, Free Meat Economy. Sarah is also involved in performance art, working again with Dale Nason as part of Boutique Irrational and in 2008 formed the all-female performance collective LeoTards.

She was published in Desktop Magazine as part of their 2004 graduate showcase of emerging designers and also self-publishes in zines and on her blog, www.thetephra.blogspot.com. ‘Volcano God/Warrior of the Tephra’ is her first solo show.

35

Dominic Kavanagh Opening Date : 7th August

The Myth A preserved, three and a half metre wooden leg was recently found half buried in desert sands just south of the Moroccan city, Tangier. Due to a series of severe desert storms, much of the covering sand had been removed, exposing the leg for the first time in what is believed to be around 1650 years. There has been much controversy over the leg’s origin. Mobile in design and consisting of several carved, interlocking pieces, many baffled archaeologists have suggested the leg functioned as a component to a large, primitive, mechanical farming device. Professor Perkins, who discovered the leg, believes its origin to be far more significant. Perkins speculates that the remnants belonged to an apparent creature of mythical renown: Nemorosus Aroxus (Wooden Horror).

Perkins’ Leg is the fantastical discovery of a large limb belonging to an unknown creature.

Constructed almost entirely from wood, the artefact is half buried in sand in order to portray

the desert scene of its apparent discovery and its display is designed to provoke curiosity about its origin. This kind of installation is reminiscent of ‘nature’ displays in museums and theme parks.

Fake environments like these are created in a variety of ways to depict and inspire speculation about the life of the subjects placed within them.

I want to create my own myth surrounding the existence of a supposed artefact or relic. In this case, everything has been fabricated, from the relic itself, to the brief publication of its history that accompanies it.

Dominc Kavanagh graduated with first class Honours from the University of Newcastle before moving to Melbourne in early 2007 to pursue an art career. Dominic held his first Melbourne solo show, The Rebellious Garden Shed, at Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy in 2008. He received the Jennie Thomas Traveling Artists Scholarship in 2004, and was short-listed for the Brett Whitley Traveling Artists Scholarship in 2003 and 2004.

Dominic is currently completing a Master of Fine Art degree at Monash University.

Vitrine

Vitrine

My current practice lies in deconstructing the use of advertising and consumer goods, which create a sort of ‘promised life’, one which never quite lives up to its expectations. Combined with a fascination for religions, both old and new, and the idea of the altar, this has lead to an imagining of a post-apocalyptic society, in which old faiths have curiously blended with the debris of our ceaseless consumption to create strange, psychedelic new visions of both community and worship. Altars, costumes, weapons and masks recall pagan societies of the past, but the materials used to construct these items are all too clearly from our own present.

Perkins’ Leg

Things From the Edges

Alyshia Boddenberg & Rebecca Delange Opening Date : 4th September

For one month, in the depths of Melbourne, viewers will be able to observe these elusive forms. Materials such as wood scraps, office supplies, fabric, plastic, paper, carpet, tape, rope, household items, string, dirt, clay, feathers, glitter and paint are combined to create work that is simultaneously compelling, repulsive and optimistic. The artists will both utilise the Vitrine cabinet to create a dialogue between two

37

Aly Aitken practices to form a semi-abstract installation as they converge.

Rebecca Delange’s work explores ideas of uncomfortableness, disgust, waste and optimism. She is interested in exploring how immaterial things, such as emotions, memories, ideas and attitudes, can actually manifest into three-dimensional forms and exist tangibly in our reality. Delange has recently completed her Honours year at the VCA and has exhibited in a wide range of group and solo exhibitions, including Seventh Gallery, 45 Downstairs, The Counihan Gallery and First Site. She won the Ephemeral Award at the Wangaratta Sculpture Biennale in March 2008.

Alyshia Boddenberg’s work explores the transition of mundane, average, unassuming objects into seductive and dangerous formations that, gaining strength on mass, form a terrain entirely unto themselves. Boddenberg has recently completed her Honours year at the VCA. She was awarded The Casama Group Award, 2008, was short listed for the Dowd Travelling Scholarship, 2008, and selected to participate in The Filippo Raphael Fresh! exhibition at Craft Victoria in 2008.

Opening Date : 2nd October My work is always about running away. Most recently, my aim has been to evoke the hidden spaces of the psychological bolt-holes we build for ourselves and the escape tunnels we use to reach them. The creatures I build are inhabitants of a fabricated world; a world crafted from the in between twilight spaces, cobbled together with bits and pieces of reality.

They belong to a landscape in limbo; hybrid things, a mongrel mix of art, human, animal and vegetable. My installations are riddled with absence and longing and try to recreate the secret places where everything is strange but oddly familiar. The current works are constructed from found objects, leftover things and fabric oddments, layered and reassembled. The forms are modeled using hundreds of tiny seams and scars – almost to the extent that the scar tissue becomes the sculptural medium.

Aly Aitken has been making things in a cupboard at home for a long time but recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at RMIT. Aly was the winner of the 2008 Entrepreneur Motivator Award and she was short-listed for the Siemens Scholarship. Aly’s work has appeared in The Melbourne Sustainability Festival, Blindside’s DEBUT V, and Craft Victoria’s Fresh! 2008.

Vitrine

Vitrine

Things From the Edges is an experimental installation work, consisting of a series of relationships and dialogues between objects, materials and ideas. Alyshia Boddenberg and Rebecca Delange have teamed up to collaborate on their shared explorations into ideas pertaining to growth, excess and mutation. Detritus from the streets, artefacts from dreams, unconscious manifestations, things glimpsed in peripheral vision, denied fears and buried moments are articulated in their sculptural assemblages.

Can you See My Imaginary Friends?

Inside Out

39

Luke Ryan & Amy Alexander Opening Date : 6th November

The content of the images explores the idea of fragmentation of perspective through both moving and static time. The aim of the work is to force the audience to view the content from multiple, predetermined and restrictive points of view, requiring the viewer to interact with the installation in order to view the content.

The intimacy and fragility of work within the

contained space involves the audience as active participants in the installation.

Luke Ryan has a background in animation and is currently studying illustration. Through his work he explores the concept of kinetic energy. Luke has exhibited in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Amy Alexander has a background in painting and illustration and is currently studying animation. The majority of her work deals with themes based around time. She has exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Vitrine

Vitrine

In their first exhibition together, Luke Ryan and Amy Alexander will utilise images, mirrors and light to create an installation that explores the concept of perception. The aim is to create an inside-out exhibition in Vitrine, with all the work facing inwards. Building an enclosed space, the artwork will be suspended in the centre and mounted on the walls where the audience can view the work through windows and peep holes.

Geograffiti

Analogue Art Map Opening Date : 4th December Analogue Art Map invites all of Melbourne to draw maps to miscellaneous locations around the city. Just come along and draw your own maps for someone else to follow. The maps can point visitors to favourite hidden city spots, lead followers on a treasure hunt or be directions to stashed objects of desire. All maps, mappers and map followers welcome. Materials provided for the unprepared.

Analogue Art Map works invite creative participation from audiences and passers-by. Through architectural interaction, mapping social networks and psycho-cartography, the group seeks to both record and generate connections between creative individuals and the spaces in which they live. Analogue Art Map strives to continue its groundbreaking work using only obsolete technology.

Works have been presented previously in Melbourne, Singapore, Copenhagen and New York.

Suggar Mummas Part 2

Croydon, Victoria

Opening Date : 19th January

Opening Date : 6th February

Hannah Raisin

Milking the symbols of a synthetic femininity.

Is an embarrassment a rejection of oneself?

A rejection can be a starting point, a reaction to a negative force. Why is it that if we believe we become somebody else we will be happy? Through the dismissal of our natural bodies, a synthetic and sterile beauty can often become the epitome of what is considered sexy. But who can measure the unnatural?

Every thought has a perfect image encapsulating its essence, binding it to the world. The ideas and key icons we attempt to mimic (the heightened

colours and flavours) are as unstable and artificially enhanced as packeted cereal. Unfortunately the highly addictive, sugar-coated death pill is ultimately unsatisfactory.

Hannah Raisin completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) at the VCA in 2007. Raisin has exhibited throughout Melbourne in both solo and group shows including: Eat My Spider, TCB; Wallara Travelling Scholarship, Margaret Lawrence Gallery; Somewhere to Run, Loop Bar; Provisional Investigations, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University; Do It, Margaret Lawrence; and Do you like me? at Kings ARI. Raisin was a finalist for the Wallara Travelling Scholarship and received the Proud second year art award.

Stephanie Cheek

Croydon, Victoria is a photo-based installation, incorporating quotations, objects, articles and statistics found in, or referring to, the eastern Melbourne suburb of Croydon. These elements are arranged strategically to reveal moments of tension, dysfunction and violence in our suburbs.

Visually the work resembles a geographical profile, much like a crime map police use for tracking criminal activity. The work focuses attention on events that are deeply disturbing and close to home.

Stephanie Cheek is an emerging artist, with a Diploma of Visual Arts from RMIT and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the VCA. Cheek lives and works in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

Sample

Sample

40

42

You’re alright, love

43

Christa Jonathan Opening Date : 6th March

You’re alright, love is a social commentary on and about two sides of Melbourne. The lovely side, the one we all take pride in and acknowledge: that laid-back, friendly, multi-cultural and multi-racial city that welcomes everyone regardless their appearances. And the other, often dismissed and ignored side, that drenched in offensive mockeries and insults from racists, which in few occasions are so idiotic that they’re borderline hilarious.

Inspired by the situations I experienced first hand, I will create a series of illustrations made out of wood, found images, photographs, patterned papers, fabric off-cuts found in op shops, markets and paper recycling bins of the city. These small collages are layered up to create one huge image – transforming the Sample window into a visual manifestation of my observation, exploration, experience and memories of Melbourne for five years and counting.

Sample

Sample

Christa Jonathan is an Indonesian-born, Melbourne based emerging graphic designer and artist.

She completed her Bachelor of Visual Communication with First Class Honours at Monash University in 2008. When she’s not designing and illustrating she can be found exploring op shops, scouring markets and taking photographs of letterings in Melbourne. This is her first art show in the real world outside of university.

Those Were the Days of our Lives

45

Clea Fraser Chiller & Kimberly Summer Opening Date : 3rd April This work explores the false sense of perfection and identity created in a glossy, conservative, Cold War tone using highly digitalised and manipulated portraits of youths that reflect the 1950s and 1960s hope for the future. The photographs have been retouched to have the same idealised look; their faces glow with the aspirations of the era. We are detached by the perfection of these flawless young people. This was a time in Australia’s history when we were quite closed off, culturally, from the rest of the world. There was a rampant fear of communism and the Menzies government felt the need to shield us from “dangerous” outside influences.

Clea Fraser Chiller recently graduated with a Bachelor of Contemporary Art from Deakin University. As a Melbourne based artist she explores themes of urban alienation and youth.

With a background in painting and illustration, she has lately branched out into multimedia, installation and film.

Kimberly Summer is currently completing a Bachelor of Film and Video at Deakin University while working on VCA productions and local independent films within the art department. Due to her short attention span and fidgety manner, she enjoys exploring other mediums, including digital photography and installation.

Paint Job

Sample

Sample

The entire space will be remade with retro wallpaper, twee photo frames, inane newspaper clippings and trophies, to emphasise this

overblown optimism. It has a shiny, nostalgic gleam, yet the scene has an uneasy presence. It is a sanitized space, kept safe behind the glass of Sample. The extreme cleanliness of the work is to be viewed with suspicion.

Georgia Gillard Opening Date : 8th May To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

- Susan Sontag, On Photography 1977 These photographs directly explore rural and urban landscapes and architecture, which promise much but await change. Mortality, truth and the fragment are themes which reappear in my work and which share a vital relationship with

photography. There is an interesting relationship between photographer and subject; the power of the photographer, the vulnerability and mutability of the subject and, furthermore, what becomes of the subject once it has become an object or commodity.

Georgia Gillard completed her Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) in 2008 and is currently completing her Honours year at Monash University. Her photography has appeared in various student exhibitions and will be featured in the upcoming publication Stab Your Brother in 2009.

Emerging Curator Residency

46

Platform’s Emerging Curator Residency provides an emerging arts worker with the opportunity to curate six one-month exhibitions in the Sample exhibition space. The Sample site is reserved for artists and curators aged under 25 years old and gives them an opportunity to develop their work before a broad public audience.

Fables of the familiar, the forgotten & the found

Chloe Vallance

The idea of sequencing imagery to suggest an underlying notion of a narration is a recurring theme in my art making. I have become increasingly interested in familiar and forgotten moments of intimate human interaction, as well as the notion of scale – very small drawings allow the imagery to become more personal. I am also fascinated by the simplicity of intimacy experienced by a solitary figure, a moment at a time.

My current art practice deals with intimate imagery of figures, both together and solitary.

When sequenced together, these images allude to the concept of a narration in the form of a storyboard, family album or still from a film.

The ideas for my drawings stem from my observation of people, close friends and family, and are developed from photographs and life.

Fables… will consist of a series of small-scale drawings, paintings, objects and artist books.

I am working predominately in coloured pencil on paper, colour swatches, pine and MDF board to create my drawings and objects, while using oils to produce my paintings. The artist books consist of traditional book-making materials, such as card, fabric and paper. A lot of my materials, especially the colour swatches and timber, are found objects that relate in terms of scale.

Chloe Vallance is a young emerging visual artist, currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) Drawing at RMIT University. During 2007 Vallance had her first solo show, Human Interaction, at RMIT First Site Gallery followed by Narratives of the Personal the Playful and the Peaceful at Seventh Gallery and Chapter 12 at Brunswick Street Gallery in 2008.

Vallance was invited to be involved in various group exhibitions including As Made in Italy, Phillips House of Fine Art Drawing Prize and the Siemens RMIT Fine Art Awards. She was one of five winners of the Siemens RMIT Fine Art Undergraduate travel scholarships for 2007.

Platform Artists Group’s Sample space is in the unique position of publicly exhibiting the work of developing artists that would otherwise only be accessible to those inclined to visit university student art spaces. This exposure enriches the public’s understanding of the development of contemporary Australian artists, and challenges the artists and curators to engage and connect with a broad cross-section of the general public.

Platform’s Emerging Curator’s program and Sample space encourages those interested in working in the public arts sector to begin their careers with these principles in mind.

The value of such a program is significant, as it provides a structured and remunerated internship opportunity allowing emerging curators to develop their networks in an industry that often requires professional contacts. In addition, it allows the participants to understand the differences between public and private art institutions, and the legal and social responsibilities of those working to contribute art to the public domain.

Anusha Kenny Applications for the 2009 Emerging Curator program close on 27th Feburary 2009. For application information email anusha@platform.org.au

Sample

Sample

Opening Date : 5th June

The Curator in Residence works with Platform Artists Group to select young emerging artists whose work relates to the rest of the Platform program scheduled for that time period. This requires the curator to research, source and approach artists then liaise with Platform Artists Group and the selected artists to co-ordinate the exhibition. This provides the emerging curator with an understanding of their role within an arts organisation, as well as developing skills such as effective communication and time-management.

While Platform offers full support, advice and assistance with installation and de-installation, publicity, documentation and opening nights, it is the curator’s responsibility to co-ordinate each aspect of the exhibition and to meet each deadline.

47

Philosopher Kings

48

49

Adam Cruickshank Opening Date : 6th February

A comment on the over reliance of critical theory in the justification of much contemporary art was the initial impetus for these prints. Bringing the actual image of the philosopher or theorist to the foreground in preference over their theories and combining that with hip hop lyrics seemed both comical and relevant. Hip Hop is usually a very visual medium; image is often (almost) everything. This is in direct contrast to theorists, whose ideas are paramount, the concepts of which are often hard to describe without the use of convoluted language. Or are they? Can they be summed

The Fat Love Sam Wallman

Opening Date : 19th January Sam Wallman is not actually homophobic, racist, or sexist. He just likes making fun of those who are by stealing their humour and pretending to laugh along with them. We know this because Wallman’s catalogue of grotesque, wrinkled, characters include people just like him, and he would never really laugh at himself.

up and/or directly opposed by a few choice lyrics? Will the image of the thinker combined with the words of the MC still make sense? Does this conjunction somehow debase critical theory or does it conversely point out how universal some philosophies can be? Personally, I just want to see Rene Descartes wear a fat gold rope and Friedrich Nietzsche bust a move.

Adam Cruickshank went to the Queensland College of Art in the early 1990s and, after a period of exhibiting, was lured by a liveable wage into advertising and magazine art direction. Two years ago he began a rededication to full time art practice. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and Australia, has had work published in numerous anthologies and magazines, recently held a solo show at TCB in Melbourne and co-curated the Grow Wild show at Utopian Slumps.

Majorca

Majorca

Sam Wallman is 23 and currently works as an advocate for young people with disabilities, while living with his partner in Collingwood. At the moment he is producing a collaborative book called Stab Your Brother, a follow up to 2006’s Go Home Abos. He draws pictures of the grotesque people in his head, in attempted exorcism.

50

Hey give me a break

Kate Moss

Opening Date : 6th March Hey give me a break is a site-specific installation in the display cases on the Majorca Building. The cases will comprise of a 2D work replicating existing and imagined sites of socially motivated, anti-aesthetic graffiti found within the public domain. The work will adopt the aesthetic of these sites.

For example, on a brick wall on a street in Fitzroy someone has spray painted ‘hey give me a break’. I will replicate this site using brick veneer and text enclosed within the cases on Centre Place.

I am intrigued by the ambiguity of this statement and wonder at what point an individual is motivated to commit such a statement publicly. I am interested in public space as a vessel for free expression whether social, political or personal. The gallery space is a platform for artists to freely express ideas, beliefs and concepts within a controlled environment. I am interested in replicating these graffiti statements and to see how they can be recontextualised in a gallery space within the public domain.

Kate Moss lives and works in Melbourne. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA. In 2006 she was the recipient of an Excellence Award at The Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Her practice utilises a variety of media and stems from her interest in 1960s and 1970s counter culture and the failure or abandonment of structures within society, whether physical or ideological. Her installations involve re-working these abandoned ideals in the context of the now.

A Pictorial Essay of Devolution Ness Flett

Opening Date : 8th May

A Pictorial Essay of Devolution is an exploration of interference by mankind, and the modern condition of flora and fauna. ‘Devolution’ as a term is widely argued as only appropriate for science fiction, as a species is only able to ‘evolve’ and does this through natural selection.

What then, when humanity interferes so heavily with domestic and captive animals, along with popular garden plants and the effects of introduced species? If it isn’t pollinating an orchid to create a completely dependent hybrid that has no means of reproduction, it’s inbreeding a domestic pet such that it is almost guaranteed hip dysplasia and physical malfunction.

Having trained horses for over a decade, Ness Flett’s pursuit of understanding animals and their architecture comes as no surprise. Ness studied painting at RMIT before traveling to Portugal to continue training horses while exhibiting her work on the anatomy and movement of animals.

More recently, her work has begun including botanical elements in more detail, and her two separate studies began to collide. Ness has exhibited widely in Melbourne and interstate, and she has been a finalist in the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery Drawing Award, Churchie National Emerging Art Award, Queensland Darebin Acquisitive Art Award. Ness lives in Melbourne and is a member of Artback, the roaming regional artist group.

Majorca

Majorca

Using medical illustration conventions, these anatomical studies take an investigative, scientific approach, whereas the opposing windows deal with human intervention in a more lyrical manner. The delicate lines and children’s story book-style soften the blow of the road kill we interrupted on its daily journey by a bumper bar.

as

52

I pass

53

Bridget Radomski Opening Date : 3rd July

Non Particular Aaron Moodie Opening Date : 5th June Non particular consists of a series of large works in ink, pen and pencil on paper, which explore social and mental space, the modern world and the interaction between them. I spend a lot of time inside my head, and use my work as a way to document and express the thoughts and feelings that are generated as a result.

Aaron Moodie is a Melbourne based graphic designer. He likes making things and trying to comprehend infinity. This is his first ever exhibition.

Bridget Radomski explores the simple notion of catching parts of conversation. As one stranger’s words fade, another one interrupts shaping a strangely unsystematic string of sentences of mashed up meanings and themes. Changing daily, a strange flow of words combined with black and white images decorate the Majorca cabinets illustrating a slightly voyeuristic and often humourous pastime of the artist.

Based in Melbourne, Bridget Radomski has curated and exhibited in Melbourne and Japan.

Bridget is a graduate of the Photography Studies College and Fine Art (Photography) at RMIT. She works as a commercial photographer while maintaining a studio practice exploring various mediums and specifically installation pieces.

Majorca

Majorca

as I pass is a collection of photographs and words, which string together snippets of overheard conversations as strangers pass.

The Photobooth Project

54

Misster Dean & Ms Teen Opening Date : 4th September Photo booths are found in bars, airports, train stations, malls, games arcades and walkways around the world. They are the everyday person’s photographic studio and a portal in which one enters to become a model, actor, documentary photographer or artist.

Role Model

Caroline Ierodiaconou Opening Date : 7th August

Caroline Ierodiaconou’s work explores both personal and political landscapes as well as the isolation of the individual. It depicts humanity as increasingly fragmented and incomplete. At war with both itself and the rest of nature, humanity is often depicted as a threatened species.

Caroline graduated from the VCA in 2002 and has been involved in numerous group and solo exhibitions. She won the Leader Art Prize in the Toorak Village Festival of Sculpture in 2006 and has been short-listed for numerous awards. In 2009, Caroline is taking up temporary residency at a studio based in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), Vietnam.

The Photobooth Project is an interactive touring exhibition and an installation that invites the public to produce their own photo booth strip.

On their return to Australia, they produced Peripheral Vision, a time-based film installation for the St Kilda Film Festival and produced several more super-8 films. Misster Dean made a short film Katfite, which was selected for MUFF in 2004 and The Photobooth Project was also completed in the same year.

The following year, Misster Dean & Ms Teen were invited to participate in a travelling exhibition throughEurope.

Currently residing in Melbourne, Misster Dean and Ms Teen continue to collaborate on queer time-based installations and short films. They have spent the last five years writing GoldCoast, an epic 12-part puppet comedy series. Misster Dean’s most recent film, Princess Trouble, screened at Mix Festival in NYC and the Crosswave Festival in Berlin. Misster Dean & Ms Teen are currently involved in the pre-production of GoldCoast.

Majorca

Majorca

This exhibition will be a series of drawings exploring the homogenisation of culture, beauty and aesthetics, as well as the politics behind this process.

The artwork will also explore the subversion of the feminine ideal, which is used to constantly attack a woman’s sense of identity and self.

In 1999 we decided to make the photo booth our public art laboratory and made a pact to take one photo booth strip every week for five years. As the weeks turned into years, we continued to enter photo booths all over the world and experimented with everything from traditional portraiture to stop motion animation; we created comic strips, puppet shows, and installation art works. We were often challenged with inconsistent lighting and poor quality developing chemicals and always restricted by the three metronomic seconds between each shot and the limited depth of field.

Misster Dean met Ms Teen at a Brisbane film school in 1993 but it wasn’t until they reunited in London in 1999 that they began working together. Their first collaboration was a queer super-8 film called Bunnygirl, which travelled international festival circuits and marked the start of The Photobooth Project. Moving to New York in 2000, the artists created another super-8 film, Mama Simmy’s Roadtrip. This cult film screened with success in queer film festivals in New York, London, Berlin and Sydney.

So Queer

56

57

J Kristensen

Opening Date : 6th November We live in world that is heavily influenced by the marketing and branding of large corporations. Public spaces, cultural events and lifestyles are being consumed by brands more than ever before, so could this influence how we perceive and express ourselves? We live in a branded world and I feel inspired to explore branding and marketing in relation to gender and sexuality.

J Kristensen recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Communication Design. Kristensen’s work explores gender and sexuality in relation to consumer society and mass popular culture, evident in the three can images Can of Hetero, Can of Poof, and Can of Dyke exhibited at Platform in 2008. Previously Kristensen worked in mediums such as sculpture, drawing and painting. These mediums aren’t obviously evident in the work on display in So Queer, but those ways of working still continue to influence the creative process through effects and composition.

Circuit 15

2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival A keynote project of the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Circuit 15 is a celebration and virtual exploration of artist run spaces in Melbourne and across Victoria. Exhibitions of emerging contemporary artists, across a variety of media, will be filmed and projected live into another gallery space, creating virtual and visual connections between a series of physical spaces. Wander past the Majorca building and be transported into the curatorship of an artist collective five to 500km away. Utilising image and sound, projected images will focus on the artworks displayed, as well as the audience reaction to the works, promoting and expanding dialogue about contemporary visual art, and visualising a strong network of people engaged with artist run spaces in the Melbourne.

Led by Mathew Gingold.

Join us on Wednesday 23rd September as we simultaneously launch the newest exhibitions from artist run spaces throughout Melbourne and Victoria.

The 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival 23rd September – 11th October 2009 Various locations See www.melbournefringe.com.au for details.

Majorca

Majorca

Opening Date : 23rd September

58

The Underground Garden Matt Shaw

From 19th January through 7th August The Underground Garden installation at Platform is a living project that was devised to creatively deal with the leaky cabinet in the rundown subway.

Following road works in Degraves Street above the subway, pipe damage led to a water leak problem that destroyed artwork and led to the closure of the end cabinet of Platform’s exhibition space. When artist Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman began experiments in 2008 for her exhibition with botanical specimens in the leaky cabinet, she discovered that certain plants could survive underground for many months under fluorescent light.

Matt Shaw is a garden designer with more than ten years experience working in horticulture and landscaping. He also has an established practice in sculpture, in which he combines reclaimed industrial waste with hardy, drought-resistant plants to create unique and sustainable garden creations for Australia’s harsh climate.

Frame

Frame

After local designer Matt Shaw worked with Trench-Thiedeman on the living garden wall in Melbourne Central for French horticulturalist Patrick Blanc, the pair devised a plan to create a completely underground garden.

Matt created the first experimental garden in mid-2008, which survived through much of year. This year Matt will create Boxed In, a new installation for The Underground Garden designed to remind us of nature’s enduring strength, and our opportunity for future sustainability.

Frame Residency

61

Tape Projects

Sunday Ganim has been weaving much, making pop up books and hasn’t managed to switch her computer on for about a year.

From 19th January through 7th August Tape Projects seeks to promote the wealth of talented and underrepresented young and emerging artists, in Melbourne and throughout Australia, who practice media art and hybrid forms not necessarily suited to the traditional gallery format. As young and emerging artists ourselves, we believe in supporting our highly skilled community by creating new opportunities for the screening and showcasing of accomplished experimental art.

Tape Projects is comprised of the following individuals: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Sunday Ganim, Tanja Milbourne, Eugenia Lim, Michael Prior, Zoe Scoglio, Jessie Scott, Lee Anantawat and Nic Whyte.

Tanja Milbourne (Kimme) is a photographer and media artist often working collaboratively. Her work incorporates an ongoing investigation into the conceptual and formal properties of photographic documentation, often employing the existing site as the subject for enquiry.

Lee Anantawat was born in Thailand and currently lives in Melbourne. She draws pictures of love-lorn robots, science experiments in nature, mermen/women and is trying to live her life as an animator.

Eugenia Lim works predominantly in video and photography to explore issues of identity, race, and culture. She is a founding member of Tape Projects, an artist run initiative championing experimental cross-disciplinary art in Melbourne and beyond.

Nic Whyte works in the realm of moving image, video installation and interactive art. Recent years have been spent scaling ladders to install projectors whilst facilitating temporal media through Tape Projects.

Michael Prior is a media artist interested in creating interactive installation works that attempt to distort time perception via sound and architecture. He also produces publications and performance work with Tape Projects as well as soundtrack work for film and TV.

Jessie Scott is an artist who works primarily in video. At the moment she is preoccupied with the human tendency to embroider mundane tasks, making them unnecessarily complex and beautiful.

Frame

Frame

For our Frame Residency at Platform we have several delights up our sleeve: each month we will alternate between shining a light on our previous output, as well as creating brand new site specific works to best take advantage of the

strange and unique Frame space. Hidden away in the appendix of Campbell Arcade, furtive noises and flickering lights will draw passing pedestrians into an unexpected revolving side show, where they can come across some of Australia’s least recognised, most talented temporal practitioners.

Expect to see Flip Books and Locked Grooves, 123TV Preview, Best of Tape Projects, plus lots of new work.

Zoe Scoglio experiments with moving image, sound, torches, triangles and the human body to create works that have been performed both locally & abroad.

62

Terminal

Simon O’Carrigan Opening Date : 4th September The root origin of the word terminal is terminus, the end of a line.

A terminal is also an external computer station that allows input to an internal network. A terminal is a point of connection that closes the loop of an electric circuit. A terminal disease is that which is predicted to lead to death, especially slowly. A terminal velocity denotes the constant speed an object reaches when the resistance of the medium through which it falls prevents further acceleration.

Simon O’Carrigan works across animation, collage and painting and has exhibited in various galleries around Melbourne since 2005. Simon’s work has been included in Hatched National Graduate exhibition at PICA, and earned him the NAVA Ignition Award. His animations have been commissioned for the City Museum in Melbourne, screened in Taiwan, Canberra Short Film Festival, Brisbane International Animation Festival, This Is Not Art’s Electrofringe, and included in various DVD zine compilations by Tape Projects.

Polly Dedman

Opening Date : 2nd October An ordinary man on an ordinary day falls into the gap between the train and the platform. Losing himself in a dark underground world, the discovery and recognition of his own creative voice is his one hope, leading him forward. With hope comes light…

This two-dimensional animation visually explores the changing landscapes, chance encounters and illumination of one person’s mental and physical association with the modern city. Through pencil drawings and collage, this animation will attempt to represent the delicate, multi-layered and multi-textured journey of those who ‘fall through the cracks’ – and the ways in which creativity and self expression can provide an outlet for those who are otherwise deserted by a society driven by consistency.

Polly Dedman is a Melbourne based illustrator and animator. She graduated from the Melbourne University School of Creative Arts, but really just spent a lot more time and energy pursuing life with pencil to paper. Polly’s background in visual arts and media theory/practice led her to explore the possibilities of animation as a means of visual storytelling.

Frame

Frame

In this work, Terminal, we see the daily life of a worker in a modern day ‘electronic plantation’. Falling through his viscous life, a terminal velocity is reached. Repetitive tasks and repetitive days keep him on a loop, his position being a terminal, closing the loop of his office network circuit.

The worker is slowly reaching the end of the line, a terminus at which he’ll not burn out, just fade away.

Fallen Through The Cracks

Š 2009 The artists and contributors.

Printed in Australia.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced without written permission from Platform Artists Group Inc.

Designer: Pandarosa

Published by Platform Artists Group Inc. www.platform.org.au

Editor: Din Heagney Contributors: Zara Stanhope, Anita King, Anusha Kenny, Din Heagney and artists where noted.

The views and opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the editor, designer, Platform staff and board, or funding partners.

Acknowledgements Pandarosa (Andrea Benyi and Ariel Aguilera) who give us great face.

The Australia Council staff especially Robyn Chiles and Jane Gillespie.

The City of Melbourne Arts & Culture team, who constantly support us particularly: Michele Ely, Morris Bellamy, Andrea Kleist, Candy Mitchell and Dawn Ayres.

The Flinders Street Station Master’s Office and Connex staff who put up with us.

Arts Victoria staff particularly Christabel Harvey, Linda Lucas and Jossi Clyde.

Our many artists, who work extremely hard with limited resources to bring their work to the public.

Our interns and volunteers who offer their time to help make Platform what it is.

Our visitors, supporters, sponsors, and festival partners.

Platform Artists Group Inc. is supported by the City of Melbourne through the Arts & Culture Triennial Program 2009-2011, by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria Programming, and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.