11 July—25 Aug 2013 ESTHER STEWART LACHLAN PETRAS TOBY POLA CLARE RAE KIRON ROBINSON FERGUS BINNS
VERONICA CUST CHARLIE TWEED AMY MAY STUART HANNA TAI JANINA GREEN RICHARD GRIGG
Presenting Partner
Cover image: Detail, Settlement Rd 2012, 13:25min single channel video, speakers, plywood benches and screen
Curator’s foreword
SuB12 is presented annually in partnership with Hobsons Bay City Council who established the project in 2009 as a major initiative to present contemporary art in Melbourne’s West. In its fourth year, The Substation is taking a different approach to the brief ‘Twelve Artists, Twelve Weeks, Twelve Ambitious New Works’. The six artists selected for the exhibition have each invited another artist to participate. This decision can be seen as: a survey of the current, an invitation for risk, a dissolution of curatorial control, an opportunity for nepotism, a prompt for collaboration or simply placing the exhibition into the hands of many. Thank you to all the artists for being part of a radically diverse exhibition. Will Foster
ESTHER STEWART lives and works in Melbourne Full Circle, 2013, Enamel on board.
Esther Stewart’s latest body of work springs from the contrasting of simple shapes and colours, shifting and repositioning them in order to produce optical effects and clashes within the layout. Her paintings engage with their environment, mimicking the lines of constructed architectural space and echoing the visual language used in the mapping and planning of such spaces. Eschewing conventional perspectives, Stewart produces an illusion of space within their flat surfaces.
Biography Stewart completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2009, completing first class honours in 2010 and graduating from a Master of Cultural and Arts Management at the University of Melbourne in 2013. Solo exhibitions include Makin’ Plans, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2013; Carton, Rearview, Melbourne, 2011; and Futurity, TCB Arts Inc, Melbourne, 2010. Recent group exhibitions include, New Babylon, Foldout, Next Wave Festival, 2012; Group Work, Mr Kitly, 2012; Obus Wall Project no.6, Craft Cubed Festival, 2012; Debut 2010, Blindside, Melbourne, 2011; House Me Within a Geometric Quality, Platform Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, 2011; and Annual Manual: A Guide to Australian Design Now, Object Space, Sydney, 2011. Stewart was finalist at the Incinerator Moonee Ponds Sculpture Awards, Melbourne, 2010; and the Craft Victoria Fresh! Awards, 2010.
VERONICA CUST Lives and works in Melbourne Settlement Rd, 2012, 13:25min single channel video, speakers, plywood benches and screen
Often cyclical and repetitious, Veronica Cust investigates task-orientated performance and the underlying sense of absurdity and futility generated from scripted action. Her work opens up a dialogue between material, site, and physical gestures that mutually inform one another and enable for a succession of generative encounters to occur. Settlement Rd, (2012) is a film work produced for her Masters research project Being Scripted. It forms a part of larger practice-led inquiry into the nature of objects, which inform and at times generate a processual language. With an emphasis on the framing of action through a camera lens, the work attempts to intensify and decode physical gesture. The use of sound and frame become agents of this punctuated performance for which, both artist as performer and audience develop an overall sense of embodied duration.
Biography Veronica Cust completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture and Spatial Practice) in 2009 and recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts (Research) 2012 at the University of Melbourne VCA. In 2011 she was the recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award. Selected group exhibitions include Victoria Harbour Young Artist Initiative, Docklands, 2009; Post Show, Y3K Melbourne, 2010; Can You Pass Me Something Please? Window 99 Melbourne, 2011; School of Art Masters Exhibition, Victorian Collage of the Arts, 2012.
LACHLAN PETRAS Lives and works in Melbourne Standard Models II, 2013
Lachlan Petras’ work is a search for unexpected configurations of events, experiences and affects that aim to deconstruct understandings of matter, technology, time and space. It is comprised primarily of a studio-based sculptural practice and a site-based video practice. The work attempts to restore technology and science to a place where they can be used to investigate subjectivity. Petras’ exhibition at The Substation explores ideas of movement across a range of media. Astrolabe, a major kinetic sculpture from 2012, has been re-presented alongside supplement drawings and models that evaluate and question its logic. This feature, along with the choice of materials indicates Petras’ regard for exhibition making as a variable but unifying format in which works are elaborated and presented with close consideration to the history, conditions and atmosphere of the exhibition setting.
Biography Lachlan Petras completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Monash University in 2011. Petras was the 2012 recipient of the Dr Harold Schenberg Prize for his work Aggregate. Recent solo exhibitions include Standard Models, Place Gallery, 2013; Trial and Error, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, 2012; and Outliers, ARC ONE Gallery, 2011. Astrolabe (aluminium, steel, step motor, electronics, LCD Screens)
For SUB12, Petras has invited Charlie Tweed to show his 2011 work, Archimeters alongside Standard Models II. The works intersect through their exploration of spatial, temporal and geographic cartographies being overlaid. The idea of mobility becomes central to the relation of the works. In Archimeters the peculiar economic and social implications of a prefabricated city are juxtaposed with computer programming language. In Standard Models II the fabrication of objects and ideas exists within processes of institutional collaboration and conventions of portraiture and display.
CHARLIE TWEED Lives and works in LONDON, UK Archimeters, 2011, DVD Video
Archimeters focuses on Ordos – a near empty ghost town in Inner Mongolia, China which has been newly built but remains almost entirely empty. The work lays out a plan for appropriating the town and constructing “a fully integrated autopoietic and auto-effective mechanism”. From a central point within the empty Ordos Art Museum the plan is described, particularly focussing on ‘effects’ and ‘affects’ referencing both the physical and virtual structure of the town and the video’s own construction. The digital effects used at certain points within the editing software are exposed in textual form “signal blur at 30%” – as if the video is itself becoming an auto-poietic mechanism. The text that forms the voice over is appropriated from software testing handbooks and has been used due to its focus on creating a fully integrated and predictable, self-sufficient system, that continually improves itself and enhances its method of control over all things.
Biography Charlie Tweed is an artist and curator based in London. He graduated from Goldsmiths Master of Fine Art Practice in 2008. He was the winner of the ECO 09 prize in 2009, was selected for dragged down into lowercase (Sommerakademie) at the Zentrum Paul Klee in 2008, was the winner of the Galerie Klatovy Klenova prize at the Start Point European Academy Awards 2008, and selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2007. In 2010 he had solo shows at Spike Island, Bristol and Animate Projects, London and was selected for the 2010/2011 residency programme at Grizedale Arts. In 2011 he had a solo show at Alma Enterprises, London, was selected for The Box Season 5 at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales and selected for Emergency 5 at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth. In 2012 he was selected for the London Open at Whitechapel Gallery, London and Experimentica and Chapter Arts, Cardiff. In 2013 he had solo shows at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth and Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre. He received an AHRC PHD Studentship from Kingston University in 2011 where he is currently a PHD Researcher.
TOBY POLA Lives and works MELBOURNE Mullet (30/100) and Mullet (0/100), Gouache on Balsa Wood
Toby Pola’s work revolves around carving and painting balsa wood sculptures and figurines. His work explores an interest in Australian suburban vernacular and subverting cultural symbols and ideals. His use of colloquialisms and trash culture take form in carved out items of clothing, food, caricatures and other miscellaneous symbols of growing up in suburban Melbourne .The sculptures often are placed on the line between sincerity and irony, celebration and cynicism and hilarity and the disturbed. The often lurid, kitsch or pop exterior of the works intersect with their uncanny, ugly and absurd underpinnings. The works Mullet (0/100) and Mullet (30/70) were prompted by series of illustrations of ‘mullets throughout the ages’ found by Pola on the back of a skateboard circa 1990. The appropriated designs take the form of two carved busts of caricatured men sporting these iconic hairstyles. Mullet (0/100) represents the familiar archetype of the sunburnt ‘occa’ male stuck in the era of the mullets’ 1980’s glory days. The balding Mullet (0/100) depicts a melancholic aged punk painted in a peeling blue finish, clinging to whatever hair he has left, still addicted to smoking. His whisp of ponytailed hair is his last relic of his thinning bygone youth. The works demonstrates how the nuances of a personality and history can be expressed in this dated hairstyle. They speak of time, fashion and the pressure of having to keep up with contemporary hairstyles that are age, class and decade appropriate.
Biography Toby Pola completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1993. Notable recent solo exhibitions include life sux then you die, West Space, 2012; They hate us, we hate them, Utopian Slumps, 2012; and dropout, Craft Victoria, 2013. Pola has also participated in numerous group shows in spaces around Melbourne including Utopian Slumps, West Space, Death Be Kind and TCB art Inc. He has received awards from the Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria (1991), the Theodor Urbach Encouragement Award (1992) and the George Hicks Award (1993). Pola is currently making work in Melbourne and exhibiting locally and interstate.
AMY MAY STUART Lives and works MELBOURNE Untitled, 2013, Digital Slideshow
Paper money was debt money, pure speculation, combined working day, Design my card - Credit Cards - ANZ cards, I made Japanese curry for you.
Biography Amy May Stuart completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA in 2012, at the completion of which she was awarded the Irene Sutton Award. Recent exhibitions include the co-ordination of The Kenneth Biennale across TCB and Rearview galleries, Melbourne, 2013 and The Third/ Fourth Artist Facilitated Biennale, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, curator: Chris LG Hill, 2013.
I. Physical thinking The unlikely impression I took from Richard Grigg’s presentation for SUB 12 was of the artist’s body as performer. Unlikely, because in an exhibition that features documentation of a number of actual performances and images of artists’ actual bodies, Grigg’s work is largely abstract and non-figurative. Instead it is a conglomerate of traces; gestures inscribed by the artist in the performance of the creative act dictated by the body’s limitations. The dimensions of Grigg’s sculptures were determined by these bodily limits: distances – from elbow to wrist; the span of a hand – became the units of measurement for the work, echoing an observation by Daniel Buren that “Every work is in reality the result of a sometimes substantial number of interactions. Of interferences”1. The kind of physical thinking manifest in Grigg’s sculptures speaks to a method of understanding that goes beyond the logic of everyday reason to render an experience of being in the world more akin to poetic indeterminacy. This form of physical thinking is present in a number of the works in SUB 12, aligning Grigg’s presentation with those by Kiron Robinson, Veronica Cust and Clare Rae who each invoke the body as site for the production of extranoetic meaning. Kiron Robinson offers up his own body as a symbol for anxiety and doubt. No, no, no comprises a sound recording that pokes fun at the reflexive speech habits he has developed as a new father; a drolly punning photograph of two cocks – not
so much fighting as mindlessly jostling; a photograph of his own penis ‘hiding’ under the covers and two small canvases: one referencing a long tradition of doctor jokes, the other presumably illustrating, abstractly, the source of the patient’s complaint – a hapless, inky dribble of a painting. All semblance of assuredness in the command No, no, no gets lost in its stuttered delivery; the temerity of the cocks are undermined by the artist’s timid self-exposure: there is no bravado here. Robinson’s self-effacing self-portrait mediates contradictions between inner and outer states of being. In a similar fashion, choreography, as an abstract syntax of movement, locates the body at the threshold between internal thought and external environment. Veronica Cust’s video Settlement Rd documents a scripted performance of procedural and repetitive gestures while Claire Rae uses the body’s movement to articulate space (The Substation’s dance studio). If choreography organises the body in time, meaning unfolds here according to an internal temporal logic. For Cust this sense of time harbours a Beckettian futility in which “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful”2. By ramping up the monotony of her scripted action she approximates a sense of time-lag. By contrast, Rae describes the dynamic space left between performance and photography by documenting her performance through a succession of still-images, like time-lapse or stop-motion animation. In this way, Rae unpacks the illusions of movement and stasis at the heart of the photographic act.
“ Like the idiosyncratic network of spaces that make up The Substation’s sprawling exhibition rooms, the final selection of twelve artists range in their ideas and approaches as to what it means to be making art today.”
II. This is the time When Laurie Anderson wrote “This is the time. And this is the record of the time”3. She may well have been talking about the future. Given the current theoretical focus toward re-imagining time in our spatiotemporally condensed era it is perhaps not surprising that more than half of the artists in SUB 12 work with time-based media. But rather than ask what this focus on time represents – it may prove more fruitful to question how it represents. Like choreography, photography can be better understood as a time-based medium. Photography extends moments in time but also hinges on an untimeliness such that the present is simultaneously experienced first-hand and reflected upon from a distance; at once the time and the record of the time. For Janina Green the power of the photographic medium lies precisely in this complex relationship with time in her photographic meditation on her mother’s life. In Camera Lucida, itself written as a eulogy to his late mother, Roland Barthes wrote of the power of the camera not only to refer to the past, but to bridge the past with the present4. For Green, following Barthes, a photographic representation of a thing can ‘cross time barriers’. While the fan (as effigy for her mother) may no longer exist, its representation exists indefinitely, arrested in time. Lachlan Petras, Charlie Tweed and Hannah Tai take this meditation further to consider time as both subject and object of their enquiries.
Hanna Tai’s Something Happened was created in response to a conversation the artist had with a group of astrophysicists about the origins of the universe. The work deals with the artist’s own difficulties in attaining and retaining this kind of ‘big picture’ knowledge but speaks more broadly of an inability for the human mind to ever fully comprehend questions of such sheer magnitude. Attesting to the limits of what can be communicated, Something Happened becomes an acutely condensed cosmology that captures the boggling of the mind at the point at which scientific thought verges on abstraction; like a kind of empirical transcendence – but with a lightness of touch that diffuses the heavy self-seriousness that often attends such ponderings. In this fourth instalment of The Substation’s annual survey exhibition, SUB 12 has reimagined the exhibition format to include six invited artists who each, in turn, invited an artist of their choosing. Like the idiosyncratic network of spaces that make up The Substation’s sprawling exhibition rooms, the final selection of twelve artists range in their ideas and approaches as to what it means to be making art today. In some instances, this inclusive, invitational approach resulted in interesting correlations of reflection and exchange between artists, creating fertile grounds for new meanings to open up and different readings to occur. This is indeed the case for Lachlan Petras and his ‘guest’ Charlie Tweed whose video Archimeters forms an elegant backdrop to Petras’ kinetic sculpture Astrolabe.
The slowly orbiting wooden frame of Petras’ video sculpture triggers myriad associations with gyroscopes and satellites. Found footage from The Singapore Aeromedical Centre shows astronauts in training, undergoing simulation centrifuge testing designed to speed test the thresholds of the human body. Like the footage, Petras’ work is also a simulation – an artist playing astronaut or painter-cum-lab-technician: To the Power of Zero, a series of ten small watercolours depicting the microscopic workings of a particle accelerator accompanies the video sculpture. Moving past Petras’ Astrolabe to descend into one of The Substation’s atmospheric cellar spaces we encounter Tweed’s video work Archimeters as a kind of futuristic civics experiment. Tweed proposes a ‘fully integrated, auto-poetic mechanism’ for the city of Ordos, a failed public-works venture in Inner Mongolia. Tweed’s proposition updates Louis Borges’ 1:1 map for a digitally mechanised era. In On Exactitude in Science, Borges describes a civilisation in which the cartographic sciences have become so advanced that only an exceedingly cumbersome map on the same scale as the terrain it charts is sufficient to describe the empire5. Archimeters’ plan for the technological self-government of Ordos hints ominously at a future of far-reaching technological control.
III. Bodies Politic Esther Stewart offers a far more humancentric investigation of public space. Her formal concerns with architectural and industrial design here resonate in sitespecific paintings that adopt the vernacular of their built surroundings. Stewart’s characteristically colourful geometric abstractions activate social spaces to impact upon the way we perceive and experience public environments. Toby Pola and Amy May Stewart similarly investigate the individual in the public realm with both considering quiet, grass-roots forms of expression as markers of individuality in otherwise largely undifferentiated social bodies. Pola concentrates on subcultural symbols; here the mullet hairstyle and it’s changing signification over time, while Amy May Stewart catalogues the seemingly mundane and homogenous in hand-written cash register signs: ‘Cash Only’ or ‘Minimum Eftpos’ that betray a surprising wealth of personality.
Taking participation in public life to its natural conclusion, Fergus Binns’ sitespecific installation for SUB 12 negotiates the volatile terrain of topical Australian political debates. Provocatively conflating far-flung critiques of staid and retrograde art (specifically mindless rehashings of modernism to appeal to popular tastes) with questions of the limits of surveillance and mandatory detention, Binns offers a wry and damning diagnosis of the current political and cultural landscape. Foucault’s thinking on bio-politics provides a foothold into this work as the means by which governments regulate their populations through the exercise of political power over all aspects of human life. Returning fullcircle then, to the use of the artist’s body in contemporary art, Binns seems to suggest that not even the artist is immune to this kind of all-pervasive exercise of power. Brooke Babington 2013 Brooke is a participant of the Gertrude Contemporary Emerging Writers Program
1 Daniel Buren in Dorothea von Hantelmann, How to Do Things with Art, the meaning of art’s performativity, JRP|Ringier and Les presses du réel, Zurich, 2010, 72. 2 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, Grove Press, New York, 2011, 43. 3 Laurie Anderson “From The Air”, Big Science, Warner Bros. Records. 1982. 4 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. (trans. Richard Howard). Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, 80-82. 5 Jorge Luis Borges, On exactitude in science, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley) Penguin Books, 1998, 325.
CLARE RAE Lives and works MELBOURNE Untitled Movements (with respect to YR), 2013, 39 photographs mounted to dibond, dimensions variable courtesy of Beam Contemporary
Clare Rae engages photography, stop motion animation and performance to navigate and defy the limitations of the everyday environments she inhabits. Her works explore tension, portraying situations that offer alternative spatial and psychological interactions between the artist and the possibilities that are held in her surrounds. Untitled Movements continues Rae’s interest in the performative body within art practice. The work seeks to address the dichotomies inherent in photography; between the stasis of capture and the subjectivity of representation. A central interest within this work is the exploration of performance documentation, specifically how the camera can act as a collaborator, rather than mute witness, to the performer. This work was performed and captured in the dance studio at The Substation between April and May, 2013.
Biography Clare Rae graduated from the BA Fine Art program at RMIT with Honours in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include VIDEOS at Beam Contemporary (2012) and Climbing the Walls and Other Actions (2009) at the Centre for Contemporary Photography. In 2011 Rae was awarded a New Work Grant by the Australia Council for the Arts, and in 2009 she was the recipient of the CCP/ Colour Factory Award. In 2012 she was a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Prize at the Monash Gallery of Art, and The Substation Contemporary Art Prize. Clare is a current research candidate in the Master of Fine Art program at Monash University, and is represented by Beam Contemporary.
HANNA TAI Lives and works MELBOURNE SOMETHING HAPPENED, 2013, LED lighting, chipboard, aluminium, electrical wires
Hanna Tai’s practice is an inquiry into the cyclical and messy relationships between what is known and what is experienced. Her practice is multidisciplinary and uses photography, installation, object-making, kinetics and electronics, writing, video, drawing and performance. Knowledge becomes vague; parts of it are forgotten, or were never understood in the first place. Something happened. This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.
Biography Hanna Tai completed a Bachelor of Design Studies (Arch) at the University of Adelaide in 1998, a Masters in Image and Communications (Photography) at Goldsmiths College, London in 2003, and a Masters in Fine Arts at RMIT University in 2007. Solo exhibitions include Pictures, Rae & Bennett Fine Art Gallery + Printers, 2013; Vertigo, or no return, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, 2012; Looking for Nothing, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, 2011; and
Trees in Space: The Reorder of Things, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2010. Group exhibitions include WITHIN, Greenwood St Projects, 2013; Reason and Rhyme, Gertrude Contemporary and St Paul St Gallery, Auckland 2011; Holding on, looking down, Light Projects, Melbourne 2011; and Octopus 8: The softness in the rock: hope in disappointing times, Gertrude Contemporary, 2008. She is currently a Gertrude Contemporary studio artist. Her work is held in the RMIT University collection and various private collections.
KIRON ROBINSON Lives and works MELBOURNE No no no, 2013, inkjet print, sound, canvas, ink courtesy of Sarah Scout, Melbourne
Kiron Robinson uses a range of mediums including neon, video, photography and installation to investigate the idea of doubt and failure as constructive devises. Continually chasing ways of articulating that, which by its own definition, is beyond articulation, leads to a paradoxical reasoning in Robinson’s work, which unravels as it constructs. Materials are chosen and placed with great care. No, no, no through the use of sound, image and text continues this exploration. Each element within the work bears on the other giving meaning and context all the while serving to undercut the very same. No, no, no creates a platform of surety through instability and anxiety.
Biography Kiron Robinson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2004 and is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University. Since 2003 Robinson has exhibited his work widely. Recent exhibitions include The Big East, Melbourne, 2013; Immanent Landscape, Kurumuya Museum, Japan, 2011; Here’s the tender coming (Whoopee) We’re all going to die, Pallas Project, Dublin, 2011;, Encounters with the Uncanny, Gippsland Regional Art Gallery, 2011;
Hevy, Conical, Melbourne; If I take the time will I get it back, Sarah Scout, Melbourne, 2010; Unseen Forces, Institute of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2010; And the Difference Is, NUS, Singapor, 2008; Octopus 8, Softness in the Rock, Hope in Disappointing Times, Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, 2008; Manila Bites, Green Papaya Art Space, Manila 2008. In 2012 Robinson partook in a the inbound residency program through Apexart, New York, and from 2005 – 2007 Robinson was a Gertrude Contemporary Studio resident.
JANINA GREEN Lives and works MELBOURNE My Mother’s Fan, 2013, Acrylic wallpaper with a hand tinted silver gelatin print Courtesy of M.33, Melbourne
This work is a meditation on a photograph I took of my mother’s electric fan: an object of luxury to her. I‘d been thinking about her working in factories in Germany as a forced labourer, making parachutes. The work continues my interest in old photographs, particularly as they are transposed through old printing processes.
Biography Janina Green has been studying and teaching photography with a passion. Fascinated with all aspects of making photographs, she has explored several genres including traditional forms such as landscape, hand colouring, still life and the nude - but also venturing into more experimental ‘post–photographic’ territory utilising digital processes and rephotographing. Janina had her first solo photographic exhibition, Rephotography, in 1986 at Artists Space gallery in Melbourne. This work was shown at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, acquired five of the works from that exhibition. Recent solo exhibitions include Ikea at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, 2012; Be Home Before Dark, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale; Colour Factory Gallery, Melbourne, 2012; and Vacuum, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA, Melbourne 2011. Janina’s work is held in a number of collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, Latrobe Regional Gallery and the Rotterdam Art Foundation, Netherlands. In 2010 M.33 published, “Blush” a monograph of Janina’s work.
FERGUS BINNS Lives and works MELBOURNE CCTV camera and Fly on the wall (to stop people stealin me ideeeeeas), 2013CCTV camera and fly on wall, 16 x 8 x 27cm, Image courtesy the artist and Utopian Slumps
Winter time get togethers just because it’s cold outside, That doesn’t mean your social calendar shouldn’t be jam packed Greet your inner child, in winter Get playful with these ideas, for turning your home into An indoor play paradise for your young-uns Light up rooms, who needs long daylight hours? You can set the light, to how you like it Simply by getting creative With lamps Enjoy weeks of perfect temperatures, Be your own weather person by setting your living environment To the perfect warmth Then maybe you can skip the heavy PJ’s.
Biography Fergus Binns completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002. He is currently a Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces studio artist. Recent solo exhibitions include Ali Baba Squinting and The Watership Windband, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2012; Toy Paintings, Uplands Gallery, 2011; Toy Paintings, Chalkhorse Gallery, Sydney, 2010; In a Heart Beat (Minnie Expressions of a Distant Airshow), Inflight, Hobart, 2009; Missing Bushwalkers on Found Landscapes, Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, 2008; Work From Garage, Chalkhorse, Sydney, 2008. Recent group exhibitions include DECLINE, curated by Harriet Morgan, Top Shelf Gallery, Melbourne, 2013; Like Mike, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, St Kilda, 2013; Guirguis New Art Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat, 2013; On the Y Axis: Considering Vertical Perspective, curated by Venita Poblocki, First Draft, Sydney, 2012; Thank you for the days: my teenage years, curated by Djon Mundine, Lismore Regional Gallery, 2011; Impossible Objects 1, organised by Melissa Loughnan and Helen Hughes, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2011; Home, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore, 2008; MAN: Depicting Contemporary Masculinity, Penrith Regional Gallery, Penrith, 2008; Primavera 2006, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006; Big In Japan, Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, Japan.
RICHARD GRIGG Lives and works MELBOURNE Untitled, 2013
Richard Grigg’s recent work investigates how developing faults of the body can manifest in artworks. His new work relates directly to the dimensions of his own figure and attempts to demonstrate abnormalities in function exemplified in the floating apple and the malleable hand-print in wood. The artist collects the stone, rock and pebble cast offs that have cracked and rolled from mountains into lakes, rivers and oceans. These are reassembled in a manner suggesting a body unmade and then remade highlighting a being assembled from nameable parts. This process is remarkably similar to the relics of an ancient city broken apart and distributed along the pathways of human traffic and reassembled as an ensemble of event-worn signifiers.The technical processes of mould making and casting in clay, plaster, concrete and builders bog of objects are carried out to create mirrored but disjointed symbols of nature with a personal effect. These duplicating methods also plainly demonstrate a labour that impacts physically and neurologically upon the maker. The artist’s work illustrates how gradually, as the body and its capacities alter, so do the physical appearances of the artworks. The artists present concerns are no more evident than in the making of terrazzo- the gathering of marble chips, granite and glass which are poured and contained in concrete and then worn down through great physical effort slowly and eventually becoming a container of distinct, broken parts.
Biography Richard Grigg completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1995 and is currently a Masters candidate at Monash University. In 2012 Grigg was awarded the Australian Postgraduate Award. Notable solo exhibitions include Building Ghosts, Block Projects, 2011; They Stand Outside, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2010; New work, Block Projects, 2009; love you love me, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, 2007; Life after life, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2006. Recent exhibitions include Rock, Vapour, Fissures, Utopian Slumps, 2013.
Floor plan
4
Fergus Binns
Hanna Tai
MEZZANINE 3
Charlie Tweed
BASEMENT 3
Amy May Stuart
MEZZANINE 2
Toby Pola
BASEMENT 2
2
Upper & Lower Levels
Kiron Robinson
6
Clare Rae
Veronica Cust
3
1
Upper & Lower Levels
Lachlan Petras
Janina Green 5
Esther Stewart
7
FOYER
Richard Grigg
Lift
Entrance
SUB TOPIC; a social space for dialogue & critique Sunday 21 July, 1pm–5pm As part of the public program associated with SUB12 each of the artists in the exhibition presented their practice to the public.
SUB12 Proudly Supported by
The Substation Proudly Supported by
Exhibition installation photography by Catherine Evans
The Substation’s Education & Public Programs Pilot is supported by Education Partner:
Will Foster
SUB12 Installation team
Gallery Volunteers
Visual Arts Committee
Selection
Corey Mahar Katie Broadbent
Alice Clanachan Carmel Kozlop Ara Dolatian
Kate Daw Ruth Bain Tully Moore
Curator
Jessica Bridgfoot
1 Market Street, Newport VIC 3015 Telephone: (03) 9391 1110  www.thesubstation.org.au