Abbotsford Convent

Gallery 1
Every 1's a Winger 
Steven Rhall

'Never could explain just what was happening to me,
Just one touch of you and I'm a flame.
Baby, it's amazing just how wonderful it is
That the things we like to do are just the same.

Everyone's a winger, baby, that's the truth.

Some guy something Aboriginal Art something some-some thing
Linear something post-decolonial
Text pre colonial something does art act act act
Enact something culture identity

Everyone's a winger, baby, that's no lie.
It never fails, to satisfy.'

Gallery 2
Keen
Ben Sexton

There is a place in the Gulf of Alaska where people believe two oceans meet. In 'Keen', photographs show one body of water (light), and another body of water (dark), touching each other but not dissolving into each other. Are they not simply one body of water? After all, they are both wet and blue. The DVD symbol glides across the black screen, bouncing off the walls in a continuous, steady pace. Every now and then the stars align and the symbol is wedged perfectly into the corner. This moment is a byproduct of the programmed movement of the DVD symbol, whose noble task is to save our screens from imprints left by an image sat on pause for too long. More often than not, the DVD symbol isn't bouncing off the corners, nor is the line between two bodies of water clearly defined, but I'd like to be there when it happens. 

'Keen' is a new series of photographic work from Ben Sexton.

This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Gallery 3
New Shapes
Liesl Pfeffer

'New Shapes' is an exhibition of staged still-life photographs. Pfeffer assembles temporary arrangements of sculpted objects, which she photographs and then dismantles. By pursuing this laborious way of making images, Pfeffer aims to address the material concerns of photography in an era of digitalisation. Photography used to promise a view of the world on a piece of paper, but today it is disposable and mostly screen-based. At a time when the photograph is increasingly dematerialised, this project attempts to rebuild photography as a physical medium and to encourage the contemplation of our experience of photographs as objects. In a kind of doubling, like the mimetic nature of photography itself, these fictional worlds mimic the virtual worlds of computer generated images and 3D rendering. 'New Shapes' is a world of constructed stages, of frames within frames, microcosms that invite us to reflect on the act of viewing.

Gallery 4
The Camouflage Act
Torika Bolatagici

In Barbadian law, 'The Camouflage Act' forbids civilians wearing any camouflage clothing. The law, which is enforced by the police, reflects broader notions of the visibility and invisibility of power in Barbados. Considered to be the first British plantation experiment, Barbados’ rich and complex history is a mix of colonialism, African slavery, Anglo indentured servitude and the myth of an ‘absent’ indigenous population. In Barbados, the flora and fauna are predominantly explanted, with only one gully on the island containing indigenous plant life. 'The Camouflage Act' explores the politics of space, displacement, identity and belonging in Barbados where the traces of empire are palpable.

Gallery 5
Forms of Agency
Madeleine Kelly

In these paintings, signs of creativity, sustenance and fertility, unfold within a rectilinear dream world. Smooth surfaces and seamless paint depict forms that evolve within geometric patterns or architechtonic forms. Abstracted human bodies suggest an interior life where domestic connotations ride on bodily ones. Their effects are founded on contagion and give rise to metaphor and association. The resulting figures fuse with grounds in careful balance so that the life of the image presents as a force that offers new forms of agency to question a world that is flourishing unsustainably.

Gallery 6
Concrete Commodity
Garth Howells, Isabel Buck, Isabella Darcy, Lina Buck

'Concrete Commodity' is a collaborative show between artists Garth Howells, Isabella Darcy and Isabel and Lina Buck. The exhibition explores limitations and confinements imposed by the project’s location, materials, accessibility, and availability to both produce work and extend an understanding of materiality through art making processes: not form over function, but rather function derived from form. The works make references to the 'process' of labour, both in respect to time and the artist as a producer of a singular task. 'Concrete Commodity' indicates the parallels and diversity of soft and hard materials. The works demonstrate the possibilities of four emerging artists’ practices coming together through a primary focus on raw materials and art-making processes. The exhibition challenges the preconceived notions of 'valued' materials by being presented in an environment that dictates attention, making evident that there is an interaction between the material world and the artists’ construction of a re-valuing through both the process and presentation of work.

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