Art

Barerarerungar recognises the longest-living culture in the world and it is my hope that this work provides an immersive and reflective space for people to slow down and connect with Country in the city. Barerarerungar displays four chapters including footage from Brisbane Ranges, Timbertop, Cape Schanck and Sherbrooke Forest.

José is interested in making people feel present and aware of their surroundings. This totem-like composition consists of travertine marble volumes, raw volcanic rocks and a mirror-finished metal sphere balanced vertically. The sphere and cube as platonic volumes illustrate how forces are exchanged, weight is distributed and gravity is confronted.“It’s human nature to organise things”, says José. “There’s no complex narrative, I want it to be easy for people to feel an emotional connection.” José’s sculptures respond to the pure mass, gravitas and columns of 101 Collins, working with the overall language of 101 Collins yet strong in their own presence. 

 “We need to humanise our built environment as much as possible. Where we work, where we live. My sculptures are there for all different people, it doesn’t matter where you come from, the works are there for people to enjoy. It’s like a universal understanding. The more people who get to see them and experience the materials, the happier I am.”

This totem-like composition consists of travertine marble volumes, raw volcanic rocks and a mirror-finished metal sphere balanced horizontally. The sphere and cube as platonic volumes illustrate how forces are exchanged, weight is distributed and gravity is confronted. “One could say that humans have tipped the world out of balance and a constant effort is needed to retain the fragile balance of our society”, says José. “So, these works are simple, easily recognisable and yet also have a narrative that gives them a gravitas both in their materiality and as reminders of how society should function.”

First modelled as 25cm high clay figures, these part caryatid, part reassembled column-like figures were scanned in three-dimensions at extremely high resolution using a gem scanner, enabling them to be scaled up to almost two metres high without losing any of their exquisite detail. After digitally reassembling the figures, they reentered the world by being machine-cut and hand-finished, becoming the ‘positives’ from which the moulds were made enabling the bronze casting processes to begin. The casting and ‘reassembly’ processes culminated with two completed human-scaled bronze figures being finished with a whiteish patina of bismuth nitrate, leaving each of the figures with one highly polished, mirror-like section which reflects each of The Sisters’ surroundings and the viewer that moves around them. 

“101 Collins has a temple-like scale and dimension and you don’t often get an opportunity as an artist to engage with that kind of environment. When this project came along with Emily’s curatorial perspective, it was so perfectly tailored to my practice, it seemed the perfect fit.”

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, duplex (2021), porcelain bowls, pump, glass ring: glass panels, steel armature, film projection.

duplex (2021) is composed as an immersive sensory artwork and is designed to generate a synesthetic response in the body of the viewer. 

Installed in the gold reflecting pools at 101 Collin’s entrance, duplex (2021) features a collection of porcelain bowls that float on the water’s surface gently clinking into one another, creating a tinkling percussive sound. Simultaneously, projected on the opposite pool’s wall is a film depicting white circles of varying sizes that echo the movement of the bowls. As the large white dots collide and slide across the wall, they are reflected in the pool below, extending the synesthetic experience of this immersive installation. Boursier-Mougenot describes the projection work as a “retinal afterglow” that is “like a silent echo of the crystalline sounds of its companion piece.”

The grand entrance spaces of 101 Collins are rich in the reverberant materials of water, hard stone and marble, which ensures that sound is carried in complex ways.  In this context the chiming bell-like sounds are experienced differently by each viewer, depending on where they stand, or in what direction they look. Boursier-Mougenot refers to this embodied viewing experience as corps sonore (sonic body), whereby the viewer is immersed in a multi-faceted set of sensory experiences. For the artist architectural spaces can become akin to instruments that are played by the body, as a viewer moves through them. Duplex is composed in two halves and is incomplete until it has been experienced as a whole, with the viewer’s body and senses generating the work’s entirety.

Orbit consists of a pair of 6.5m high mirror-polish bronze infinity symbols, which cantilever over the Collins Street entrance of the 101 Collins lobby. These two large-scale sculptures articulate the central ceiling space, highlighting its grand vastness, while embracing the viewer in a nurturing but also comic and slightly unnerving way. Coated in lush liquid mirror polish, Orbit captures and mimics the movement of people in the space, at once reflecting the bodies of the viewers while they simultaneously dematerialise and become part of it. 

Candescent Moon suggests universal themes of sequences, celestial orders and lunar rhythms. These ideas are particularly pertinent to the modern, corporate lifestyle, where life is a delicate balance within daily cycles of time and the forces of nature’s flux and unpredictability.

Candescent Moon is an artwork that encourages interactivity with the viewer. That is, as the viewer moves around the work its appearance and nature change from light to dark and from one texture to another. This sequential change can represent a change in time such as the passing from day into night. It could equally stand for changes in temperature, from warm to cold. Furthermore, it encompasses major celestial events such as a lunar eclipse, when the earth obscures the sun’s light from illuminating the moon.

The work evokes a timeless quality, bridging the gap between the everyday and our greater universe, reminding us that our lives are governed by the forces of nature and transience.

Simone Slee's sculptural works continue her ongoing investigation into sculpture's conceptual conditions and problems. Slee constructs and composes her assemblages, casting her objects into conundrums and juxtapositions that highlight the material agency and activity within her chosen media.

In these works exhibited at 101 Collins Street as part of Art in Focus, glass and stone are presented as two versions of the same matter with their material properties inverted. Slee enlists her materials as both the subject and the activity, positioning her rocks and blown glass so that they perform an action that is opposite to that which one would expect. In these works, blown glass holds and boulder’s prop, so that the materials become accomplices in her questioning how things might be held up (and conversely held down). Whilst, the materiality of these works implies stability and permanency, it is the suggestion of pushing and propping (and the immanent potential of failing and falling) that suggests these sculptures are actually the protagonists in some kind of durational performance.

All of the rocks included in these artworks have been sourced from operational licenced quarries or have been gifted by current landowners from where the rocks were found. As such, Simone Slee acknowledges all rocks have their provenance from the unceded lands of First Nations peoples and pays her respect to the work they have done and continue to do, caring for country for thousands of generations.

Art works courtesy of Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne and the artist. Simone Slee acknowledges and thanks the VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne where she is the Head of VCA Art. She would also like to thank: The JamFactory, Adelaide, including the fabulous glass blowing team of Kristel Britcher, Drew Spanenberg, Alex Valero and Alex Hirst; Webb Welding for the beautiful plinth production. And, as ever, thanks to Coco and David Harley and the Slee family.

Francis Carmody’s artistic practice serves as a useful alibi to reach out to people across disciplines and technical capabilities to share stories and complete projects. Through tracing networks and natural structures, he would like to get a glimpse of where we have been and where we are going. This process of enquiry draws on meticulous research, cold calling, persistence, and frequent rejection. Creating an ever-expanding list of Project Partners and friends throughout the process. Including Psychics, DNA scientists, Neuroscientists, Day-Time Television Sales Specialists, Media Managers, Border Force Agents, Computational Designers, Patent Lawyers, Cartoonists, Graphic Designers, Architects, Automotive painters, Blacksmiths, Rope splicers, Stage designers, Architects, Engineers and Lighting Designers.

Carmody completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2019), with a year studying Fine Arts (Hons) at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019). Recent exhibitions include Signal Detection, Mejia Curated by Tamsen Hopkinson (2024), A Relic Remains, Gertrude (2023), Laschamp Cycles, ReadingRoom (2023), Exposure Site, Gertrude Glasshouse (2022), And Shuffling, Conners Conners, Melbourne (2022).

Dane Mitchell (1976) is one of Aotearoa’s leading artists and was Aotearoa New Zealand’s representative at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. He now lives in Melbourne. He has presented solo exhibitions at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Institut D’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France; Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Govett-Brewster, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia; SAM Sound Art Museum, Beijing, China; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; RaebervonStenglin, Zurich, Switzerland; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, United States; Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Galerie West, Den Haag, The Netherlands amongst many others.

He has participated in a number of biennales, including Venice Biennale; Biennale of Sydney; Liverpool Biennial; Bangkok Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; Singapore Biennale; Thailand Biennale; Ljubljana Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennale; Busan Biennale, Klontal Triennale (CH) and Tarra Warra Biennial and presented solo exhibitions at Art Basel Basel, Art Basel Miami and Art Basel Hong Kong twice. Dane has also been in many group exhibitions including Ludwig Museum; Tai Kwun Contemporary; University of Queensland Museum of Art.

Nina Sanadze is a Soviet-born (Georgia), Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist who works with monuments, archives and political action. Her practice is dedicated to peace-building. Nina’s work has been described as “conceptual art dressed in classical form”, often manifesting itself as sizeable installations and social practice.  Sanadze presents narratives built upon personal stories from within the experience of conflict; a wall of remembering that acts as a fortification against repeating histories. She believes in the power of art and beauty to bring people together and that peace-building is achieved through proactive work, determination, negotiation, and the forging of narratives designed to unite competing ideologies. 

Presenting appropriated original artefacts, blunt replicas, or documentary films as witnesses and evidence, Sanadze seeks to re-examine grand political narratives from a diametric personal position. Deploying any appropriate medium, her work responds to the most immediate socio-economic and political global developments with urgency. Humour and beauty allow her to address often disturbing concerns, reflecting the complex paradigm of our existence, which is simultaneously sublime and horrific.

Noriko Nakamura completed a Fine Art Foundation Diploma at Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London, before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012. Nakamura experiments with the transformational potential of materials in order to explore the relationship that exists between humans and the material world. She has presented solo exhibitions at West Space, Melbourne and TCB Art Inc., Melbourne. Her work has been exhibited at XYZ Collective, Tokyo; RM Gallery, Auckland; Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch; Murray White Room, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria Studio, Melbourne and Sutton Projects, Melbourne. She received an Australia Council ArtStart grant in 2012.