foreword The School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts is one of Australia’s oldest. Since its beginnings as the National Gallery school in the nineteenth century it has attracted talented artists from across Victoria. Likewise, many of our past students have done much of their interesting work in the regional and rural areas of our state. The VCA is a Victorian institution and thanks to generous financial support from the Victorian Government, we are now engaging with regional and rural parts of the state more than ever before. The Future Now exhibition showcases some of the most exciting work by our honours students from 2013. It has been developed and curated by The Substation, with whom we enjoy an ongoing and fruitful partnership. The exhibition is one of a range of initiatives that the Victorian College of the Arts and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music are rolling out across Victoria in partnership with local communities and arts organisations. These projects foster an important dialogue and exchange between Victorians from across our state and the VCA. Enjoy the show and I look forward to welcoming you to your VCA at the next opportunity. Professor Su Baker Director, Victorian College of the Arts
Cover image: Alex Purchase, Loft, 2014
future now The Substation is one of Melbourne’s newest and most exciting art spaces and prides itself on bringing innovative contemporary arts to Melbourne’s western suburbs, and The Substation Gallery has become a focal point for visual art audiences from across Melbourne. Future Now is an annual award exhibition awarded to a selection of Victorian College of the Arts’ School of Art’s Honours students, and we are thrilled to be able to partner with the VCA to deliver Future Now to three centres across regional Victoria in 2014-15. The Substation believes that all Victorians deserve to be able to access the arts, and this touring exhibition will bring some of Melbourne’s most exciting artistic talents to new audiences across the State. Immerse & enjoy! Jeremy Gaden Director, The Substation
The seven artists in Future Now present diverse individual practices, ranging from painting, architectural construction, sculpture, photography, drawing, installation, to sound and text. Shown first at The Substation, Future Now initially takes shape as a collection of solo projects. As the exhibition travels on to regional art spaces, works are adapted and the show is reconfigured at each venue. Through this process, the conversations between and around the artists’ works have a chance to percolate, connections resonating and revealing over time. Isabelle Sully’s work in Future Now is designed for this process of unfolding and reconfiguration. Emerging from the memory of a lost artwork, Sully’s sculpture This Time Around is shown turned on its head, leaning or propped up rather than fixed to the wall, in an act of quiet transformation. At times a replica may stand in for the original, or a written piece may accompany the objects, exploring the translation between visual and verbal language. Distilling research and personal narratives into his work, Daniel Belfield deals with the human systems imposed onto the natural world, such as measures of time and geography. Dateline Isle points to the arbitrary logic of time zones, while the altered maps of Our Meridian inscribe a personal line into the official mapping of the world, conceptually joining two friends across continents. Kenny Pittock often focuses his observational practice on the everyday sites of social interaction, such as public transport or beaches, highlighting shared experience and personal connections. Pittock’s portraits of the six other Future Now artists are presented alongside Friends (Season Two), a ceramic sculpture of the TV series DVD, emphasising the social group over the individual artist. Drawing on appropriated imagery and stylistic devices, Dan Petersen creates works that reformat and process information
and common concepts into orderly sets and categories. Fictional character types and narrative genres are referenced in his works SWF and Names – the demographic shorthand of the former and the list of monosyllabic male names in the latter appearing equally stereotypical. Worlds of fiction, narrative and characterisation inform Christina Hayes’s paintings. Recalling theatre production, her scenes are carefully constructed, with costumes and props helping to build drama around the posed subjects. The art of storytelling and its impact on our sense of identity, history and place, is foregrounded in Hayes’s works. Alex Purchase references literature, theatre, film and virtual reality in her constructed architectural spaces. For Future Now Purchase has constructed Loft, an inaccessible room at The Substation, which is then excavated for the following venues of the exhibition tour. The excavation documents and brings to light elements of the previously hidden interior. The hidden or inaccessible spaces of buildings become subject material for Sarah Duyshart. Working on-site to navigate architectural boundaries, Duyshart creates kinetic installations of labyrinthine string and pulley systems. Shift Beneath cut through, under and between the gallery spaces, basement and wall cavities of The Substation. In other modes of practice, Duyshart makes field recordings and drawings that refer to the same dynamism and articulation of space. From its beginnings at The Substation in Newport, Future Now travels to The Artery, a funeral parlour turned gallery in Warrnambool, to the old hospital ICU and morgue buildings at Castlemaine’s Punctum, and the converted butter factory of Cowwarr Art Space in Gippsland: Appropriately reinvented buildings for a shape-shifting exhibition. Rosemary Forde, Exhibition tour curator
Daniel Belfield Born Melbourne, 1992 List of works: Our Meridian, 2013 wood, glass, altered maps Dateline Isle, 2013 digital video Time Relative to the Sun (6 - 6), 2013 LED screen, wood, arduino board Untitled (Dateline), 2013 inkjet print
Sarah Duyshart Born Melbourne, 1976 List of works: Shift Beneath, 2014 pulleys, string, motor
Dan Peter Petersen Born Melbourne, 1989 List of works: SWF, 2014 inkjet print on satin fabric, fans, chain, wood Names, 2014 embroidery on wool
Christina Hayes
List of works:
Born Billings, Montana, 1983; arrived Melbourne, 1986
Blood is Thicker than Water, 2013 Curses like Chickens Come Home to Roost, 2013 Little Red Wing, 2013 Little Sharp Shooter, 2013 The Woodcutter, 2013 The Daughter, 2014 Little Magician, 2014 – all oil on linen
Kenny Pittock Born Melbourne, 1988 List of works: Friends (Season Two), 2014 acrylic on ceramic Alex, 2014 Christina, 2014 Dan, 2014 Daniel, 2014 Isabelle, 2014 Sarah, 2014 – all acrylic on paper
Alex Purchase Born Capetown, South Africa, 1985; arrived Melbourne, 1989 List of works: Loft, 2014 constructed room, audio, text
Isabelle Sully Born Melbourne, 1991 List of works: This Time Around, 2014 recycled and renamed sculpture, turned on its head, plywood, pine, polymer paint Take Two, 2014 replica of a past artwork, plywood, pine, polymer paint Take One (or Three), 2014 instructive poster, Perspex
Future Now The Substation 13 June – 6 July 2014
Presented by
Supported by Future Now is a Regional Training & Engagement project of the Faculty of VCA & MCM, funded by the State Government through Arts Victoria and delivered in partnership with Regional Arts Victoria.
Curator, The Substation: Will Foster Exhibition tour curator: Rosemary Forde Interns: Beatriz Salinas Jack Halls Installation: Lachlan Petras Installation photography: Kirsty Milliken Catalogue design: Atticus Design
Touring venues:
Catalogue published by:
The Artery 224 Timor Street Warrnambool 3280 fproject.org.au
The Substation 1 Market Street Newport VIC 3015 Tel: (03) 9391 1110 www.thesubstation.org.au
Punctum 1 Halford Street Castlemaine 3450 www.punctum.com.au
© 2014 The Substation, the artists and authors.
Cowwarr Art Space 2730 Traralgon Maffra Road Cowwarr 3857 www.cowwarr.com Image: Sarah Duyshart, Shift Beneath, 2014
Daniel Belfield Sarah Duyshart Christina Hayes Dan Peter Petersen Kenny Pittock Alex Purchase Isabelle Sully An annual award exhibition of VCA Honours graduates presented by The Substation and the VCA visiting regional Victoria.