2023 Exhibitions
A&A
Florescence
A new design collection for Melbourne Design Week by A&A.
A&A is an ongoing collaboration between Sydney-based industrial designer Adam Goodrum and French straw-marquetry artisan Arthur Seigneur, who now lives and works in Melbourne.
On display in Gallery 2, the suite of three pods and one table is inspired by the process or period of a plant’s flowering, known as florescence.
Each pod is composed of three intersecting sphericons – a sphericon being a ‘paradoxical solid’ made from the combination of four half-cones. This shape-shifting form embodies the changes that occur when a flower opens or becomes sexually functional, known as anthesis.
Viewed from above, the pod is a perfect equilateral triangle. From the front, converging circular edges. And from the side, dimensionally spliced sphericons.
The transformational effect is amplified by the luminosity of the straw marquetry’s bloom-like geometric pattern, which mimics a flower’s sequential colour changes during anthesis.
Each pod has a removable lid and comes in a different colourway – red, yellow, blue.
Complementing these unorthodox shapes is the hemispheric ‘Lotus table’ with a flat top, similarly resplendent in an all-over geometric pattern of pink, red, purple, blue and black. The table echoes the lotus-flower design of A&A’s ‘Bloom cabinet’, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.
Eschewing editions in favour of highly collectible unique works, A&A were awarded Furniture Design of the Year at the 2022 Dezeen Awards and were finalists in 2020.
Kieren Karritpul
Texere: New Woven Surfaces on Fabric
A new design collection for Melbourne Design Week by KIEREN KARRITPUL
The designs form an overall story of going out into the bush hunting for our food. For example, we use fishnets in waterways to catch fish, prawns and turtles. When we go out, I am reconnecting with the past and the ancestors – doing what they did, walking where they walked.
Kieren Karritpul, 2023
Amos Gebhardt
Night Horse
Night Horse examines the powerful currents between horses as they negotiate consent and desire during mating season. The viewer is drawn inside the kinetic swirl of the herd where hooves, flicking tails, and outstretched limbs offer an intimate encounter across the species divide. Shot in the heat of a February summer’s night, on the artist’s birthday, the charged atmosphere is palpable. Modern equine reproduction is now often a supervised insemination process, or between a mare and stallion who are performing on cue. Night Horse captures a rarely seen ritualised courtship, where the protagonists experience heightened states of being ‘for themselves’.
Gebhardt says, “The images are raw, showing the mess of body fluids and muscle, giving vivid dimensions to the physical language of the body as an archive of story, to suggest a dramatic arc in horse terms.”
The image titles – Midnight, Fetlock, Halo, Parallax, Zenith, Umbra – evoke the night, the horse, or the universe, interweaving the anatomical with the universal, the body with the stars. In observing these complex dynamics, Night Horsechallenges the dominant anthropocentric view, capturing the undeniable force of non-human narratives.
Night Horse (2019) continues themes explored in Gebhardt’s recent video installations Lovers (2018) and Evanescence(2018), both selected for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and There Are No Others (2016) presented at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. They thread a trajectory of connected ideas concerning nakedness as the barest form of identity, deep time cycles of matter – life, death, decay.
In 2022 Gebhardt was winner of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Australia, VIC and a finalist in both the National Photography Prize, Murray Albury Museum of Art, NSW and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, HOTA, QLD. Gebhardt was the recipient of the inaugural Adelaide Studios Artist Residency 2019, presented by the South Australian Film Corporation. The resulting moving image work, Small acts of resistancepremiered at Samstag Museum of Art and the Adelaide Film Festival 2020. Gebhardt’s video installations Lovers and Evanescence, were both selected for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and There Are No Others 2016 premiered at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne.
A Sidney Myer Creative Fellow and Masters graduate of AFTRS, Gebhardt has exhibited at M+ Museum, Hong Kong; ACMI, Melbourne; MONA, Hobart; Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, Carriageworks, Sydney, Melbourne International and Sydney Film Festivals and screened on SBS and ABC. Gebhardt created visuals for Kate Miller-Heidke’s 2016 Helpmann Award-winning concert with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at Hobart’s MOFO Festival. Gebhardt directed Second Unit on Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth (2015), premiering in competition at Cannes Film Festival.
Hannah Gartside
Gorgeous
Embedded in feminism and material culture, Hannah Gartside (born 1987, London, UK; currently based in Naarm/Melbourne) works across sculpture, installation and video.
Reimagining vintage and found textiles to create installations, sculptures and costumes, her skills of dress-making, patchwork quilting and fabric dyeing accrued during her former career as a theatre costumier at Queensland Ballet are elevated to the conceptually rigorous. Both deeply personal and fiercely communal, Gartside’s sensual and poetic works engage fundamental experiences and emotions of our human condition: longing, tenderness, connection, desire and wonderment.
Gorgeous
I am fascinated with the potential connection between a viewer and an artwork. What could we ask of viewers beyond their attention, and as artists, what can we offer? What is possible when both artwork and viewer have skin in the game?
In this group of works (which I think of collectively under the name Gorgeous), I want to share the pleasure and delight that I feel in making art and in art being a form of communication and connection. I think of my art practice as a lover, one that is consistent, generous, surprising and true. So, in part this is a show of gratitude for this relationship.
These works consider the physical gallery space as an abstracted version of a lover’s body. The sculpture Wall Kisser is hand-cranked by the viewer. On turning the handle the wall receives the repetitive, kiss-thud, kiss-thud of the velvet hearts. The lamp light here is a way-finder, illuminating a rendezvous. The name for this imaginary place is ‘Gorgeous’. It’s spelt out in fabric, thread and paint, the font enlarged from a 1970s coat label.
Hannah Gartside 2023
Justine Varga
End of Violet
The title of my exhibition, End of Violet, is taken from a diary that Mary Somerville penned in 1845, detailing her experiments on the colour spectrum and vegetable juices. These words are not to be found in the body of the text, but instead are inscribed within the table of contents, a voice from the margin that sets a tone for what is to come. Violet is at the end of the colour spectrum, and therefore at the very edge of vision. In other words, Sommerville’s experiments with colour photography strove to push the limits of what can be perceptually known.
Justine Varga, March 2023
Wanapati Yunupiŋu
nilŋnilŋ (the spark)
Tolarno Galleries, in partnership with Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre, is delighted to present Yolngu artist Wanapati Yunupingu’s first solo exhibition.
Melbourne, Australia: For his debut solo exhibition with Tolarno Galleries, Yolngu artist Wanapati Yunupingu has transformed an array of found road signs and scrap metal into 24 sculptural works etched freehand with a rotary drill.
Cleverly exploiting the colourways of yellow/black and red/white, Yunupingu has etched over the existing words and symbols a series of sacred designs and narratives relating to his clan, the Gumatj, for whom yellow is a ceremonial hue.
A common feature across all of the works is a lattice-like design of repeating diamonds, which represents gurtha (‘fire’ in Yolngu) and refers to the ancestral story of the “first fire”.
As David Wickens explains in the accompanying catalogue essay:
“[The first fire’s] regenerative sparks continue to birth and rebirth itself – investing its deep knowledge in the land and the sea as it sparks the next generation into life.
“As a member of the Gumatj clan, Wanapati Yunupingu has been nurtured at the hearth of this fire. His father passed down the sacred knowledge of its ceremonial power and visual representation – a legacy treasured by all Yolngu leaders.”
Yunupingu has utilised this dynamic and flexible design to create a series of visually arresting patterns indicative of gurtha, and to delineate the forms of animals, objects and sites the Gumatj hold to be sacred and of special significance.
These include bäru (crocodile), birimbira (lightning snake), wan’kurra (golden bandicoot), wurmarri, gawanalkmirri or gapirri (stingray), ganiny (digging stick) and gulun (billabong).
In so doing, Yunupingu has literally erased from the ubiquitous Western road sign those visual elements he doesn’t need, coopting the rest into a Gumatj worldview with the aid of a highly demanding technique that requires equal parts dexterity, precision and patience.
The exhibition also includes the artist’s second larrakitj, or memorial pole, comprising earth pigments on hollow stringybark. Etching clan designs into the bark with the same rotary drill he uses on metal, Yunupingu seamlessly fuses tradition with innovation to propose new ways of sharing cultural knowledge.
Yunupingu lives in the remote Gumatj homeland of Biranybirany, Northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, a coastal community three hours by road from Yirrkala. He is the son of deceased artist and spiritual leader Miniyawany Yunupingu from whom he inherited rich ceremonial instruction.
Yunupinu was also trained in the art, Law and cultural practices of his clan, Gumatj, and related clans while living between the homeland communities of Waṉḏawuy (his mother’s clan land) and Biranybirany.
The artist only began etching designs onto found metal in 2020, yet
his works are already in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW. In fact, two of Yunupingu’s etched metal works are currently on display as part of the inaugural hang of the new Yiribana Gallery in the latter’s SANAA-designed North Building.
Yunupingu is among a number of Yolngu artists who have gravitated towards found road signs and scrap metal as supports on which to etch designs, following in the radical footsteps of senior Yolngu artist Gunybi Ganambarr.
Ganambarr, who is 15 years older than Yunupingu, has been a mentor to the younger artist, and both were included in the 2021 group exhibition Murrniny: A Story of Metal from the East at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art and Salon Art Projects in Darwin.
Image: Gurtha 2022, mixed media 77 ×53 cm
Andrew Browne
silver
ANDREW BROWNE
silver
11 February – 4 March 2023