Art

Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation and promotion of south- east Australian Aboriginal art practices. Her continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revivification of traditional possum skin cloaks and her contemporary necklace designs using river reeds, kangaroo teeth and echidna quills.

Jose Dávila works in a range of media—including sculpture, installation, collage and photography—to explore both material and form, often appropriating and re-contextualising history and architecture. Davila's works are both odes and critiques to the artists and architects that came before him, such as Luis Barragán and Donald Judd.

Dávila’s work has been exhibited in the Sydney Biennale (2020), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo MUAC, Mexico City, Caixa Forum, Madrid, MoMA PS1, New York, Kunstwerke, Berlin, San Diego Museum of Art, Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, MAK, Vienna, Fundacion/Coleccion JUMEX, Mexico City, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Museu do Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, The Moore Space, Miami, NICC, Antwerp.

Jose Dávila works in a range of media—including sculpture, installation, collage and photography—to explore both material and form, often appropriating and re-contextualising history and architecture. Davila's works are both odes and critiques to the artists and architects that came before him, such as Luis Barragán and Donald Judd.

Dávila’s work has been exhibited in the Sydney Biennale (2020), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo MUAC, Mexico City, Caixa Forum, Madrid, MoMA PS1, New York, Kunstwerke, Berlin, San Diego Museum of Art, Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, MAK, Vienna, Fundacion/Coleccion JUMEX, Mexico City, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Museu do Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, The Moore Space, Miami, NICC, Antwerp.

Andrew Hazewinkel engages with archaeological material as a means to shed light on the contemporary legacies of ancient stories, objects, and archetypes. He combines traditional forms of scholarship with a strong poetic sensibility, which manifests as a broad material range that includes photographs, objects, video installations, and books.

His work has been presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, The Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, The Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and The British School at Rome. He has a history of active involvement in Australian artist-run initiatives, including. In 2015 he was the sole Australian representative at the 31st Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Art. His work is represented in national, institutional and private collections within Australia and further afield.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installations are investigations into sound and space. Formally trained as a composer and musician, he also practiced within the contemporary dance world for 10 years, before becoming a visual artist.  His work evokes his unique perspective into the relations that bind sound and objects, creating sound installations that he calls his corps sonore (sonic body), which immerse the viewer in a multi-faceted set of sensory experiences.

Boursier-Mougenot represented France at the recent 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. A related exhibition, titled acquaalta, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris shortly thereafter. In 2019, the Fondation François Schneider in Wattwiller, France, gave the artist free reign in a major exhibition of work, titled Liquide Liquide. In 2010 he was a Marcel Duchamp Prize finalist. Boursier-Mougenot has had one-person exhibitions in international museums and galleries including the Barbican Centre (London); Hangar Bicocca (Milan); La Maison Rouge (Paris); Pinacoteca do Estado (Sao Paulo); FRAC (Reims); Chagall Museum (Nice); and UMMA (Amherst). His work was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2012); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, (2011); the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2010); and the 3rd Moscow Biennale, Moscow (2009), among many others. His works can be found in important collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); The Marieluise Hessel Collec- tion (USA); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Collection agnès b., (France); The Museum of Old and New Art (Australia); The Israel Museum (Jerusalem); The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (USA); The Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France); various French national collections (FRACs); and the Caldic Collection (NL).

Seung Yul Oh practice combines elements of East Asian popular culture with ironic references to high Western art history. Incorporating painting, installation, sculpture, video, performance, and public art, Oh works seamlessly across media.

Oh has completed a number of public art works including Form in Formation (2018), commissioned by the Nelson Sculpture Trust, NZ, Conduct Cumulus (2017) commissioned by SCAPE Public Art, Upon a Pond and Drop a Loop (2017) commissioned by Auckland Council, NZ, Beat Connection (2012) commissioned by MESH Sculpture Hamilton, and Globgob (2010) commissioned by Newmarket Arts Trust and Auckland Council, NZ.

Seung Yul Oh was the second recipient of the Harriet Friedlander Residency which, with support from the New Zealand Arts Foundation, allowed him to undertake an artist residency in New York in 2011. Seung Yul moved to New Zealand to study at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts.

Marion Borgelt is one of Australia’s most evocative and enduring contemporary artists whose stellar career has spanned over 40 years. Her work draws inspiration from universal themes such as life cycles, cosmology, optics and phenomenology to create highly crafted, visually spectacular works. Through a journey between two and three-dimensional works she explores connections between man-made culture and nature, between the constructed and the organic world, the cosmic and the primordial, between microcosm and macrocosm and the ever-present duality of light and dark.

Borgelt manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work engaging a personal language that summons up deep-felt metaphysical qualities of time and transience, about the greater world outside our immediate everyday lives. Diverse as her practice is, there is a common thread in her work manifested through the interplay of polarities.

A lexicon of symbols and motifs, at once universal and personal, distinguishes the imagery of Borgelt’s work. Drawing on experience with a wide range of materials, including bees-wax, canvas, felt, glass, pigment, stainless steel, wood, stone and organic matter, she hones her ideas to the demands of a given site, mediating the creative intervention with originality and sensitivity.

In more recent years Borgelt has introduced motorised elements that add a kinetic, time-based dimension reinforcing her ideas about flux and impermanence.

Borgelt’s works are held in all major Australian museums and numerous regional, university and corporate collections throughout Australia and overseas.

Francis Carmody’s sculptural installations uncover connections between a diverse range of networks and natural structures. His process involves meticulous research, sculptural mind-mapping and persistence to establish a diagram that reveals the often-hidden logic of our lives.

For 101 Collins, Carmody exhibits a series of sculptures that explore terminology more commonly associated with free market economics and financial services.

The works on show are sculptural representations of concepts such as ‘Hawkish and Dovish’ and ‘Black Swan Event’. The Black Swan submerges its head in a nest of horsehair – hoping to avoid the fiscal disaster of the unexpected event. Whereas the graceful arch of ‘Hawk-ish’ emulates the steady ascent of interest rates typical in a hawkish market.

He has also brought to sculptural form the idea of an oath - more specifically the oath, “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. In this work the sound waves of this spoken oath are transformed into a scrawl of sculptural waves dipped in Indian ink and tar. 

Carmody’s works are rendered in a variety of media including plaster, polyurethane foam, aluminium, crushed quartz, silica, horse hair and ram’s wool. Together they allude to the visualisation of data common among financial markets, showing how data can be visualised and represented in aesthetic or sculptural forms.

Modern Fossils by Dane Mitchell presents a sketch of absences. The work features mounts for the bodies of extinct native Australian birds, which are arranged airborne above a platform of acoustic panelling. The acoustic panelling is symbolic of an absence also, as it absorbs sound and displays its absence, just as the armatures highlight the absence of the extinct bird.

Modern Fossils is a portrait of what is not there. As a scattered monument of mounts, this work draws attention to our desire to protect, present and contain objects from the past, and in doing so highlights their absence. Each of the mounts in Modern Fossils is made to scale to grasp extinct Australian bird species - holotype, fossil and full skeletal remains alike. The acoustic panelling imagines that we might safeguard the song of a lost bird or uttered words from the past, and hold them encased in its absorbent surface.

Modern Fossils presents itself to us in a state of absent-hood and reminds us that all things are in constant movement, and are migratory and transitory, leaving nothing left to grasp.

The species on display include: 

Pygmy cassowary / Casuarius lydekkeri

Progura gallinacean / Giant malleefowl

Dromaius novaehollandiae baudinianus / Kangaroo Island Emu

Aplonis fusca fusca / Tasman Starling

Hypotaenidia philippensis macquariensis / Macquarie Island Rail

Microcarbo serventyorum/ Serventy's cormorant

Psephotellus pulcherrimus / Paradise Parrot

Drymodes superciliaris colcloughi / Roper River scrub Robin

Dromaius novaehollandiae diemenensis / Tasmanian emu

Lewinia pectoralis clelandi / Western Lewin's Rail

Dasyornis broadbenti litoralis / Western Rufous Bristlebird

Dromaius novaehollandiae minor / King Island emu

Cyanoramphus erythrotis / Macquarie Parakeet

Find out which bird each of the armatures correspond to here.

This work is the second exhibition in 101’s ongoing partnership with Gertrude Contemporary entitled Art on View, with new sculptures by leading local artists presented every six months in the West Pools of 101’s ground floor.

This new series of installations by Nina Sanadze, a Georgian-Australian artist are an evolution on her recent series entitled  Call to Peace (March 2022 – ongoing).

For this series Sanadze presents multiple variations of her replicas of an existing WWII Soviet bronze monument also entitled Call to Peace. Sanadze reconfigures this sculpture, playing with scale and form, so that the work becomes emblematic of the passage of history, and sculpture’s mutable role within it. 

At 101 Collin’s West Pool cast replicas of this sculpture are presented as relics, poised in the process of deconstruction, partially reconstructed into new forms. Reminiscent of the 2nd Century Hellenic winged goddess of victory, Nike of Samothrace, the winged female form seemingly emerges from rubble, defiant yet graffitied and broken, or she stands supersized and white, cloaked in rich gold or vibrant, optimistic blue. 

Within 101 Collin’s opulent interior spaces the ruins of the Call to Peace sculptures take on an entirely new meaning. Created from cheap, scrap materials these Soviet relics are lent new significance through being sited within a corporate context. The grandiosity of these sculptures is undermined by their prop-like qualities, which echo the theatricality of 101 Collin’s luxurious stage-like post-modern interiors. 

Sanadze’s work invites viewers to engage with history and culture in poignant ways. Her careful combinations of site and sculpture generates new ways of thinking about the relationship between materials and place. She draws attention to our own individual agency, reminding us of our ability to generate peace, and ensuring that her artworks become powerful tools for social change. 

To view more of Nina's work visit ninasanade.com.

We don’t speak about birth, especially not caesarean birth, Norkio tells me. Silvia Federici has done important work in tracing how women became estranged and alienated from birth. Specifically, the Marxist feminist scholar has focused on how the social violence of early capitalism denied women control over their own bodies, severing them from traditional knowledge systems pertaining to reproductive health. As a result, in our contemporary moment of late capitalism, the experience of birth is paradoxically both singular and universal, shared and solitarily, and sometimes shameful.

During the tea ceremony held last Saturday, a small audience of adults and toddlers gathered. The tea ceremony was important to Noriko as an offering for the audience, encapsulating how she thinks of motherhood as a gesture for offering. (“All welcome” the invitation insisted.) The ceremony was performed by Yuka Mikayama with ritualised precision. It took place amongst the sculptures, which became supports for the various implements involved in the making of the tea, the matcha whisk nestled inside of Milking my heart (2019), the tea canister disappearing inside of The child (2019). Water pooled underneath the sculptural vessel that collected the remnants of matcha tea and hot water. The permeability of the stone acted as a reminder of how the boundaries of the body are let down during birth and post partum. Blood flows, fluids leak, colostrum and milk drip out.