Sacred Geometries
Xavier Burrow
August 8, 2019 — October 10, 2019
Is mathematics invented or discovered?
Mathematics provides us with elegant tools for making sense of our experience, yet its scope extends far beyond describing the world. From simple, fundamental axioms unfolds a vast and uncharted landscape, brimming with numbers and patterns, relationships and contradictions, traps and pitfalls. For aeons, humans have chipped away at this inscrutable landscape, like archaeologists brushing dust from ancient relics, in an effort to understand the structure and form of this abstract space.
Sacred Geometries is an exhibition about numbers and patterns, algorithms and automata -- an exploration of the hidden world of mathematics through its manifestation in nature and the senses.
Is mathematics invented or discovered? Sacred Geometries explores the inscrutable world of numbers and patterns through their manifestations in nature and the sensorium.
Flat Earth Society
Cement Fondu X Closed on Monday
October 11, 2019 — December 7, 2019
Lauren Dunn, Sarah Edmondson, Adrian Hobbs, Alasdair McLuckie, Meagan Streader, Sean Wadey, Lydia Wegner, Grace Wood
Closed on Monday presents a parallel and alternative exhibition to Cement Fondu’s Flat Earth Society. An exhibition within an exhibition, the show plays off the same curatorial premise, delving into the murky space at the boundary of the material and the digital.
Handmade works intended to appear digital, and digital works intended to appear handmade, are further mediated and confused by presentation in Closed on Monday’s virtual space, and its subsequent re-materialisation projected in Cement Fondu.
Grace Wood’s digital collages are presented alongside Alasdair McLuckie’s paper collages; Lauren Dunn’s analogue altered photographs are presented alongside Lydia Wegner’s meticulously staged photographs; and, in Sean Wadey’s work, painting and digital painting are blurred. Visualisations of portals and windows within Adrian Hobbs’ works suggest alternate dimensions and act as literal representations of the incidental, recurring and persisting to-and-fro of ideas within the exhibition.
Sarah Edmondson’s tactile needlepoint tapestries, which explore text, warp, pixels and glitch, are flattened and rendered untouchable in this digital context, mimicking their usual presentation in galleries when framed and behind glass.
Meagan Streader’s Response VII (Partition IV), continues a series of site-specific works that are constructed with neon lights in response to their physical locations. In Closed on Monday, Streader’s work maps and fragments the mezzanine space with an animated light installation, influenced directly by the surrounding architectural geometry. The structure moves and can be freely moved-through in ways that would be impossible in real life.
Certain aspects of Closed on Monday’s space also bleed into Cement Fondu’s; the unexpected meeting of projected and physical floor boards, the mirroring of mezzanines, the warehouse architecture and the immersive experience of interacting with artwork.
Special thanks to Xavier Burrow of Closed on Monday and Josephine Skinner, Megan Monte and Sep Pourbozorgi of Cement Fondu. These projects are supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Lauren Dunn, Sarah Edmondson, Adrian Hobbs, Alasdair McLuckie, Meagan Streader, Sean Wadey, Lydia Wegner, Grace Wood
Flat Earth Society presents national and international interdisciplinary artists working at the intersection of abstraction and screen-based digital culture. Speaking both to the flat plane of canvas and the flat-screens of daily life, the artists consider how technology expands the possibilities of painting and infuses the way we experience and frame reality.
You, this space.
January 31, 2020 — December 30, 2020
Submissions for our 2020 exhibition program are now open! Head to the Submissions tab to apply.
Olivier Rasir
July 9, 2019 — August 4, 2019
This exhibition examines the site of the artist’s studio and the incidental marks collectively built while creating new work.
Rasir’s painting process is a dance-like performance and focuses on energy and movement. His studio walls and floor contain the material remnants and the trace of his performance. Along with purposeful, new marks, his works pick up these incidental remnants and traces. Discarded canvas scraps also make their way into Rasir's works, finding new purpose again and again. The brick walls and floor are imprinted in some works, as Rasir pushes oil pastel and spray paint into unstretched canvas sprawled across the floor, or draped from nails in the walls.
In a way, the studio which houses the production, can’t be separated from the work and is an extension of both the artist and his practice. If a surface contains traces from many (if not all) of the artist’s work created in that space, then is that surface of the same or greater value than all the works combined?
For this exhibition, Rasir's works were photographed with the walls and floor visible. On display in Closed on Monday, there becomes an interesting play between the digitally rendered wall surfaces and the digitally photographed surfaces. In some instances a concrete texture may seamlessly bleed into a photograph, or a photographed brick may perfectly align with a rendered brick.
This exhibition examines the site of the artist's studio and the incidental marks collectively built up while creating new work.
Naomi Oliver
Selected Errors
April 30, 2019 — June 16, 2019
Naomi Oliver is a multi-disciplinary artist based in the Blue Mountains, Australia. Through digital video, animation, sound, and performance art, Oliver examines the 'glitch' in both digital and non-digital environments.
In 'Selected Errors', Oliver has used databending techniques (altering images and video coding information in computer programs not intended to work with visuals e.g. Word Pad) to ‘break’ files. Through a laborious trial and error process, Naomi corrupts image files just enough to transform them visually, while retaining the information needed for the file to remain useable.
"Growing up with VHS and audio cassette tapes, I learned at an early age to embrace the fragility and failings of taped image and sound. Inspiration and innovation comes from being limited by resources, and from a young age I sought out experimental ways to push these and other everyday lo-fi mediums (toy video cameras, walkie talkies picking up truckie conversations, experimenting with different computer programs to see how far they could be pushed - or used in a manner not intended - such as sound pieces produced by exporting Microsoft Word files as audio.
In this era of promoting advanced, smooth technology, I enjoy it when something goes wrong (especially unintentionally). Visual and audio glitches show us the human, fallible side of technology. I find it endearing and often funny, but mostly I see it as accidental random art. I collect ‘real’ glitches I come across, in computer games, on digital television, YouTube, train station information boards, shop signs and more." - Naomi Oliver
Naomi Olivier uses databending techniques (altering images and video coding information in computer programs not intended to work with visuals e.g. Word Pad) to ‘break’ files. Through a laborious trial and error process, Naomi corrupts image files just enough to transform them visually while still retaining the information needed for the file to remain useable.
Brenton Alexander Smith
I feel like a nervous wreck
March 31, 2019 — April 29, 2019
Content Warning: please note that this exhibition contains simulated crashed cars that some viewers may find confronting.
Brenton Alexander Smith is a Sydney based artist who manipulates components from the driving video game, BeamNG.drive, to produce videos and 3D models of simulated crashed cars, which he has coined ‘crashforms’.
Despite the grizzly association with the car accident, Smith’s crashforms are isolated from the terror and chaos that accompany physical car crashes on our roads. The human influence and control (or lack thereof) is absent, leaving bare the crashforms to take on their own uncanny personalities.
BeamNg.drive is a game known for its ability to simulate realistic car crashes. By pushing the limits of what the game engine allows, Smith forces it to create car crash scenarios that would be impossible in the real world. The software often produces wild, almost organically chaotic shapes in response to Smith’s input, coupled with strange twitching movements that afford them their sense of liveliness.
In 'I feel like a nervous wreck', we encounter the crashform in two different incarnations: as 3D objects; and within the short, looped videos that ‘hang’ on the gallery walls. The virtual space allows for the crashforms to exist outside of the BeamNG.drive environment, but to remain in a digital realm.
With peculiar sentimentality, the shape and movement of the crashforms defy the physics of an actual car crash and exude vulnerability. Writhing, jittery and fragile, they appear nervous and their behaviour vaguely resembles that of an animal and/or human. As you move towards the crashforms, their motions become faster and more vigorous, almost like cries for help to piece their strewn parts back together. The qualities of their movements are difficult to categorise: conflicting feelings of familiarity, sympathy, and uneasiness become as entangled as the crashforms themselves. It engenders a strange technical anthropomorphism: the way in which they quiver and struggle seems to evoke the same reaction one might have to a wounded baby animal.
By modifying assets from the driving game BeamNg.drive, Sydney based artist Brenton Alexander Smith presents a world populated by crashed cars moving through a virtual space. Their movements have a vaguely human and/or animal quality to them, yet they can also appear like new creatures with their own unique behaviours.
Tiyan Baker
One Million Views
January 31, 2019 — February 28, 2019
One Million Views by Sydney-based artist Tiyan Baker examines the emotional transactions between three Australian YouTube celebrities and their fans.
The YouTubers are singer and vlogger Damielou Shavelle, political commentator Angry Aussie and ASMRtist Lauren Ostrowski Fenton.
Through a series of video portraits Tiyan captures the YouTubers and fans going about their daily mundanities in their own homes. The portraits show the disparate offline moments that frame their online lives, laying bare the relationships in their physical, tangible forms to explore what it means to be present yet also absent.
Tiyan questions how intimacy is transformed when transmitted through a mass medium like YouTube. Is the internet is simply a heaving mass of human intimacy?
Tiyan Baker is an early career Indigenous Malaysian-Australian artist who practices across video, sound and installation. Baker's practice mostly engages communities where contemporary Western crises around power, exploitation, neoliberalism, neo-colonialism, environmental degradation and psychospiritual alienation are staged. Her work is heavily based in field-research, drawing on documentary techniques to explore the emotional experience of the self as embedded in greater socio-political contexts.
One Million Views by Sydney-based artist Tiyan Baker examines the emotional transactions between three Australian YouTube celebrities and their fans.
Botanicals from the MET
December 31, 2018 — January 30, 2019
In early 2017 The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET) released over 400,000 public-domain images from its collection, available for unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use. The open access collection dates back to 8000 B.C. and includes objects from 100 geographical locations.
'Botanicals from the MET' curated by Lilium Burrow presents a selection of objects from the MET’s open access image collection. The exhibition includes botanical watercolours, 19th century photography, a Minoan gold hairpin, etchings and a 17th century silk textile fragment.
One highlight from this show is Spiraea aruncus (Tyrol), a cyanotype from British artist Anna Atkins which marks an important historical acquisition by the museum, its earliest photograph by a woman.
By clicking on the images in this exhibition, you will find links to their sources on the MET's website where further information can be found about the origins of each unique object.
An exhibition of historical botanical illustrations, photographs, samples and studies from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's open access image collection.
Jack De Lacy
Model/Modal
November 30, 2018 — December 31, 2018
Jack De Lacy is an emerging Sydney based artist working across digital and non-digital platforms. He is interested in self-portraiture and how the image can be manipulated to provide a curated version of the self. ‘The image’ refers to not only 2-dimensional representation (photographs, paintings, drawings etc.), but to physical and behavioural characteristics that are outwardly projected. Jack’s work attempts to portray the self as an increasingly bodiless manifestation that can exist in both virtual and non-virtual dimensions.
Model / Modal is an exhibition of digital self-portraits created through processes of 3D modelling, drawing, painting and photography, with many of the works also incorporating screen grabs and text. Jack identifies ‘the veil’ as a recurrent aspect within Model / Modal. In the traditional sense of the word, a veil is a piece of material or a physical boundary used to conceal/reveal. In Jack’s self-portraits however, he uses layering, opacity and image/data saturation to obscure and make illegible already ambiguous imagery.
“Model/Modal looks at images as contested surfaces of fiction, communication and identification. Increasingly the image tacitly separates inner contents from outside realities. I am interested in self-portraiture that darts around the peripheries of the physical and non-physical, around a desire to be noticed, yet a growing need for privacy and to be unseen.”
Model/Modal combines painting, drawing, photography, and 3D modelling in a way that attempts to navigate the self as bodiless, existing increasingly in the margins of physical reality and non-physical (cyber) spaces. The images center around two central identifying themes, that of a veil and that of transparency.
Ariana Ross / Emmy Walsh / Susanna Carter
FLEETING MOMENT
October 31, 2018 — November 30, 2018
From travel photographs of a grandmother’s adventures, to vintage magazine cut-outs and botanical illustration, the artists in Fleeting Moment use both analogue and digital assemblage to explore moments of material, environmental and societal change.
Susanna Carter examines temporality and mimicry within wildflowers, foliage and gardens. Through analogue and digital collage, she uses imagery from second-hand book pages to form new compositions that seamlessly obscure and camouflage the end of one image and the start of the next. More recently Susanna has been using found text to form poetry as she looks at the temporary nature of her subject matter (both the physical collages and the subjects within the images themselves). Many of the collages in this body of work exist only as digital images that were scanned and later destroyed/rearranged to make new works.
The theme of temporality continues across the work of Emmy Walsh. In our obsessive, image saturated era, Emmy considers the consequences of human interference on dream travel destinations and idyllic natural environments (in the rise of social media exposure and location trending). Emmy sourced old fading Kodak film photographs from her grandmother’s travels that depict pristine landscapes of Hawaii, Japan, Canada and New Zealand. These then served as a backdrop for her to overlay photographic documentation of an acrobatic performance, seeking to rouse conversation on the true cost of “#wanderlust” and the authenticity of our curated travel experiences.
Ariana Ross creates narratives of everyday experiences and dreams associated with living in major cities. Filled with abundances of freedoms and inescapable struggles, these places are fast paced and ever-changing. Ariana uses magazine cut outs and her own photographs of people, urban cityscapes, seascapes and animals. You can click on each of Ariana’s works to read her stories associated with each piece.
From travel photographs of a grandmother’s adventures, to vintage magazine cut-outs and botanical illustration, the artists in Fleeting Moment use both analogue and digital assemblage to explore moments of material, environmental and societal change.
Lilium Burrow
Recent Work
September 30, 2018 — October 31, 2018
Lilium Burrow is a Sydney based artist working with textiles and photographic mediums. She explores different ways of representing the image and is interested in the illusory and mimetic qualities of the copy. Lilium's work investigates post-digital modes of creating, where the desire to hand-make contends with the use of digital technologies.
This is an exhibition of recent work and works in progress by Lilium Burrow.
