Dec 6 - Dec 23

Painting becomes akin to staging, and the surface of the canvas, the set, in the work of Amber Koroluk-Stephenson. This November, at Anna Pappas Gallery, the Hobart-based painter brings bodies and buildings together in an indeterminate environment, an alternate world in which geographical distinctions of place are troubled, confounded, remade and rearticulated.

Painted by Koroluk-Stephenson during her recent 2017 residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, the artist reflects on Shadows on the Wall, stating: ‘These works attempt to reconnect with the magic and romanticism of encounter and discovery, teasing out connections between man and nature within fictionalised territories to fulfil the desire to connect with nature and make visible what is out of sight.’

Since graduating from the Tasmanian School of Art with a BFA (Honours) in 2010 Amber Koroluk-Stephenson has held numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally including Bett Gallery, Hobart, MOP Projects, Sydney, Sawtooth, Launceston, Archive Space, Sydney, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne and Firstdraft, Sydney.

She has has been selected for a number of Australian prizes including The Churchie National Emerging Artist Prize, Portia Geach Memorial Award, Ravenswood Art Prize, Tidal National Art Award, Redlands Art Award, Albany Art Prize, Glover Prize and Paddington Art Prize. Koroluk-Stephenson has received several grants and awards for her practice, including an Australia Council ArtStart Grant, a NAVA Australian Artists’ Grant, Arts Tasmania ArtsBridge National and International Grants and a Highly Commended Soya Visual Art Award. Koroluk-Stephenson has also received numerous studio residencies including Contemporary Art Tasmania, University of Tasmania, Arts Tasmania, Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.

OPENING NIGHT: Thursday August 3, 6PM - 8PM

Anna Pappas Gallery is thrilled to announce From Line to Form, an exhibition showcasing the fascinating sculptural work of Melbourne based artist Alex Lyne. From seductively abstract bronze to intricately carved wood alongside contemporary support structures, the very tradition of sculpture finds a new voice in the experiments of Alex Lyne.

Lyne’s practice exists comfortably in the collision between tradition and contemporaneity. His employment of timeless sculptural techniques is highly radicalised with contemporary injections of colour and remarkably detailed surface patterns. Lyne creates abstract and unknown forms out of bronze, wood, plaster and steel that are then treated with unconventional automotive paints and unusual plastic supports, reflecting the tradition of the ready-made. He engages in an extensive and highly physical process of casting, moulding and carving to transform his simple line drawings into exquisitely crafted three-dimensional forms. From Line to Form will exhibit his latest sculpture undertakings which have been manipulated to scale with the human form in mind.

Lyne returns his experiments to the body, describing his process as one that begins “internally and travels outward.” He finds inspiration for his work in the act of meditative line drawing, beginning by sketching out multiple forms on to the paper surface. After intuitively deciding upon which forms to realise sculpturally, he works via a process of addition, transforming his materials to varied scales and with unique hand marked detailing.

By working in this way, Lyne emphasises the ability of the artist and the human to carve into the physical world we inhabit and transform it by finding form in our true internal expression.

Alex Lyne is highly dedicated to the method of lost-wax bronze casting and has received extensive training in London with the Bronze Age Fine Art Foundry and in Melbourne with the Meridian Sculpture Foundry. Lyne further consolidated his sculptural practice by completing postgraduate studies in Art in the Public at RMIT in (2006).

Lyne’s sculptures have been included in the Lorne Sculpture Biennale, the Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition and the well-known Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney.

From Line to Form will be Lyne’s debut show with Anna Pappas Gallery.

Working with an earthly palette, Tim Bučković builds textural and gestural surfaces connected to a language of memory and information.
 
For Bučković, a painting is a repository of information, a reflection of a unique and personal visual language. Speaking about his painterly gestures, the artist states: ‘sometimes they are just lines and shapes and other times, a few centimeters below, they can repeat themselves like when we mispronounce something’.
 
The paintings present in 1536 can be experienced as an archive of both the artist’s personal visual language, but also as a reflection of the murky and unpredictable nature of decision making, with layers of reworking and structural change embedded within heavy coats of paint and glaze. In this way, Bučković's  slow and measured approach to painting presents as a conversation between the artist and the canvas, a conversation that the viewer is ideally positioned to overhear.
 
Bučković’s immense sensitivity to ideas, chance and coherence is evidenced by the exhibition’s title 1536, the year of publication for a Croatian text about mountains that had found itself reverberating in the artist’s mind during the painting process. 1536 marks a moment in time for the artist, where imagery, information and praxis align in the studio.
 
Bučković's work consists of paintings and drawings. He has studied painting at the Victorian College of the Arts and in the master class of Prof. K. Grosse at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Bučkovic has held various solo and group exhibitions in galleries in Australia and Germany, recently including; Radical Immanence, 2017, Anna Pappas Gallery; Rundgang, 2016, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; Pestilent Unground; Epidemic Openness, 2015, STATION and Grounds-, 2015, Bus Projects. 

Art Athina, Greece
25 – 28 May 2017

Announcing our participation in one of the oldest and most prestigious art fairs in Europe, Art Athina, in 2017, presenting works by Jayne Dyer, Michaela Gleave, Troy Innocent, George Raftopoulos, Karyn Taylor and Justin Williams.

Coinciding with the presence of documenta14 in Athens, Art Athina provides a unique opportunity for the exhibition of our artists on a global stage. 

http://www.art-athina.gr/

In Eden’s Hollow Dominic Kavanagh presents a site through which our contemporary relationship to urban decay can be explored. Using discarded industrial materials, alongside earth, weeds, water and light, Kavanagh constructs monuments to decay and regeneration within the gallery walls.

A focus on the architectural power of ruins informs Kavanagh’s engagement with the language of decomposition. With light mysteriously emanating from deep within Kavanagh’s installation of brick, steel, earth and rubble, and with water flowing from various crevices, Eden’s Hollow rejects passivity, and instead presents a growing, living, fluid testament to the ruins that emerge from sites of industrial abandonment.  

Solo exhibitions include The Beehive, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Relics of Utopia, Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy, 2013; Picnic at Phoenix Falls, Incinerator Art Gallery, Moonee Ponds, 2013, Requiem for Urban Ruin: The Lock-Up, The Lock-Up Cultural Centre, Newcastle, 2013; and Substituting Nature, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford, 2012.

In 2016 Kavanagh was curated into the group exhibition This Place. That Place. No Place by Irina Asriian/In Exile Projects, an exhibition at Neon Parlour, as well as Under Construction, at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, curated by Claire Watson, and Closing Exhibition, curated by Marie Schoenmaker, at Conduit Arts, Fitzroy. Other group exhibitions include Seven Trumpets, Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, 2014; The Gleaner’s Archive, D11, Docklands, 2014; and Noise Flash, curated by Todd Anderson-Kunert for the 2013 Liquid Architecture Festival, Melbourne.

Kavanagh has been shortlisted for numerous awards, and is represented in private collections.

For Justin Williams, Arcana represents an exploration of the self through painterly and sculptural engagements with mythology and folklore. Appearing in this new exhibition are recurrent figures from the artist’s oeuvre, including missing chef Willie Koeppen, and cult-leader Anne Hamilton Burns of the Family. These figures take on new meaning for the artist, as representations of an attempt to understand the self, through explorations of our folkloric pasts.
 
This exhibition sees Williams engage with large scale painting and ceramic forms, incorporating gold leaf and sand, alongside raw pigment and oil paint, to produce affect in his experimental, and textural works. Presenting like the fall of cards in a tarot deck, Arcana is an embodied attempt at understanding within the tumult of the contemporary, and allows the viewer a chance to divine possible futures for the artist, and themselves.
 
Williams has held numerous solo exhibitions, including the highly acclaimed Figures & Vessels at ART 3 in New York, in 2016. This exhibition, one of Forbes Magazine’s ‘Must-See’ exhibitions, garnered significant critical attention, with Williams described as ‘Australia’s latest Emerging Talent’. 2015 saw Williams present Stained Mountain at Anna Pappas Gallery, where the artist explored his relationship to place through the mythologies of various figures from local Victorian folklore. Other solo exhibitions include Viridian, 2014, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne; Mountain I Miss You, 2013, Mild Manner, Brisbane; A Touch of Norway, 2012, Lapis Lazuli Pop Up Factory Gallery, Melbourne.
 
His selected group exhibitions include the  touring exhibition Got It For Cheap, which travelled across Europe from David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen to Steinsland Berliner Gallery, Stockholm and Agnes B’d Gallerie du Jour, Paris, in 2016. Williams was curated into the Anna Pappas Gallery Booth at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2014; Project 14: Free Range, 2014, Anna Pappas Gallery; Trouble in Paradise, 2012, Paradise Hills Gallery, Melbourne; and Group Show, 2012, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne. He has been featured in Artist Profile, ARTSY, Australian Creative and New York Arts Magazine, and was featured as an artist garnering significant global attention in Australian Art Collector’s first issue of 2017.
 
2017 will also see Anna Pappas Gallery present works by Williams on the global stage at Art Athina Art Fair, Athens, taking place alongside documenta14, which will see a concentrated international art world focus on Athens.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 24 March 6pm-8pm

Exhibition to be introduced by Aaron Martin (Five Walls Projects)

Digital Abstract catalogue essay by Giles Fielke

In Pattern Recognition, Troy Innocent interrogates the hidden potential of geometric abstraction, through the visual language of code. For this exhibition, Innocent places agency in the hands of the viewer, challenging the static nature of sculptural forms. Through the use of an augmented reality application, the viewer reveals layers of animation, information and music, coded within the geometric language of Innocent’s works.   

From digital maps for wayfinding, to visualisations of climate change, or the predication of election results, pattern recognition is central to this worldview, as it is coded into the abstractions through which we understand the contemporary world. In this exhibition, Innocent applies strategies of pattern recognition to psychogeographic abstractions – spatial maps of cities he has walked, folded in time and space.

As Innocent states: ‘code mediates and creates the world simultaneously, giving rise to a rich multiplicity of meaning as it traverses the virtual and the actual.’

In the 1990s, Innocent represented the vanguard of Australian new media arts as the co-founder of the digital arts collective Cyber Dada. With Cyber Dada, Innocent heralded the cyber world as an ‘enveloping phenomenon, a techno-determinist vision of change’ and presented pioneering collaborative and collective digital works, including the language-oriented, interactive CD-ROM artwork Idea-ON! (1992).

Recent solo exhibitions see Innocent combine digital innovation, specifically coding, with sculptural forms and geometric abstraction. These exhibitions include Double Abstraction (2016), Five Walls Projects, Melbourne and New Abstraction (2015), Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne.

For Asemic Writing 1 (2013), Hugo Michell Gallery, Innocent mediated the visual language of graffiti through screen-based digital works. Nine Signs for Ogaki (2012) Hugo Michell Gallery, stemmed from Innocent’s 2010 residency at IAMAS – an Art & Science research institute in Ogaki, Japan – where the artist surveyed the landscape around him, creating visual codes and dispersing them throughout the town. Innocent’s work in Japan informed the exhibition Tokyo Pop // Ludean Play, at Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne (2011), which documented the artist’s engagements with play and mapping across Tokyo. Other solo exhibitions exploring language, cityscapes and digital media include Scenes from Ludea, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney (2006) and Ludea, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2005).
 
Digital engagements with urban cityscapes inform Innocent’s strong public art presence, and includes works such as Zydnei (2013), an interactive street game exploring the lasting effects of colonisation, a work coinciding with the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Sydney. Innocent presented an interactive sculpture garden entitled Colony (2008) in the Melbourne Docklands, and an alternate reality game reinventing the history of Melbourne, Urban Codemakers (2010), Docklands, as well as x-milieu, Federation Square Melbourne (2008) and Field of Play, Melbourne Docklands (2007).
  
Group exhibitions have taken place at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Performance Space, Sydney and the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Innocent is represented in numerous collections, including the V&A Museum, London, ACMI, Artbank, the Lyon Collection, and other private collections.
 
Innocent holds a PhD in Animation and Interactive Media from RMIT University, Melbourne.

Exhibition Opening: Friday 24 March 6pm-8pm

Exhibition to be introduced by Dr Terri Bird (Monash University)

Andrea Eckersley in Conversation with Meredith Turnbull

Andrea Eckersley works with an expanded understanding of painting, where the surface of the artwork becomes more than the application of pigment to canvas and instead manifests itself as a site of material investigation. Through recasting relationships with painting practice, Partial coherence presents a space within which the canvas, the wall, lighting and the body are implicated in the realisation and experience of an artwork. Alongside painterly works, Eckersley utilises light installations, bronze sculptures, constructed shelving and garment making, in order to position surfaces, affect and material as uniquely interrelated concepts.
 
Eckersley is a lecturer in Fashion Design, at RMIT University and received a PhD in Fine Arts (Painting) from Monash University in 2016. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work investigates the material aspects of painting with a particular focus on surfaces. She has recently contributed a chapter for the upcoming book Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press). Eckersley is the art editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and contributes to national and international conferences.
 
Previous solo exhibitions include Shed by the sun in eclipse in 2016 at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, in which the artist explored painterly surfaces as events, felt as differences in intensity. Eckersley’s exhibition Surface Activations, 2015, Monash University School of Art, Design and Architecture Graduate Gallery, Melbourne, considered relationships between painting and the surface, through materials including light and sculpture, as well as painting. The exhibition was the culmination of the artist’s PhD research project. In 2014, Eckersley was curated into Depthless Flatness by artists Bryan Spier and Steven Rendall, as part of ‘Incidents Above a Bar’, a series of exhibitions interrogating contemporary painting theory and practice.

Eckersley has exhibited at Platform Public Contemporary Art Spaces, Nellie Castan Gallery, Craft Victoria, c3 and West Space in Melbourne. In 2016 she was the inaugural winner of the Royal Como Art Prize in 2016. Eckersley is represented in various Australian private collections, as well as the Justin Art Foundation.

Antonia Sellbach | Ben Jones | Franky Howell | Isabelle de Kleine | Max Lawrence White | Melanie Irwin | Nanou Dupuis | Paul Williams | Renee Cosgrave | Tai Snaith | Teelah George | Tim Bučković

Curated by Chantelle Mitchell

Exhibition Opening: Friday 10 February 6-8pm

Guest Speaker: Helen Hughes (Research Curator, Monash University Museum of Art)

What could it mean to engage with material in sincere terms? 
To what extent is this a radical, contemporary act?

The annual APG Project Series, a keystone within the Melbourne arts program, provides a significant platform through which contemporary currents and key concerns can be interrogated and explored. 

A curated group exhibition, Radical Immanence brings together the work of twelve Australian contemporary artists to explore concepts of sincerity and materiality as located within an expanded field of painterly practice. 

Within the whorling maelstrom of contemporary culture, the exhibition invites sincere contemplation and engagement with materiality and form, an acute sensitivity to the vibrations which ‘underlie the solidity of things’. Within this context, the exhibition asks: what could it mean to engage with material in sincere terms? To what extent is this a radical, contemporary act?

Oscillating between highly gestural mark making, embodied practice, geometric investigations and colour theory, each artist is united by unique reverence and conviction in their explorations of material potentials, and individual concerns. Eschewing self-consciousness in favour of a sensitivity to material and form, this exhibition encourages a return to looking inward, to sensitivity, in order to better orient ourselves within uncertain and tumultuous times. 

Although the exhibition looks toward the experimental potential of both representational and non-representational painterly practices, it also seeks to break down traditional material boundaries, emphasising possibilities as occurring within and outside the formal limitations of medium and concept.

Review by David Wlazlo for Memo Review

Selected Works

Opening drinks: Friday 11 November, 6pm

Click here for more information on Yuria Okamura

OPENING DRINKS: FRIDAY 11 NOVEMBER, 6PM

Opening Event: Saturday 22 October, 2-4pm, featuring an Artist Talk from Justin Williams
Exhibition: Saturday 22 October – Saturday 10 December 2016

Anna Pappas Gallery will be featuring the work of artists including Justin Williams, Joanna Logue, Jarek Wojcik, Marc Standing and Simon McEwan at the Bendigo Inaugural Group Show, an exhibition in partnership with Gallery 369 in Bendigo.

Gallery 369 is located at 369 Hargreaves Street, Bendigo, Victoria

Opening Hours:  Monday to Friday 10 -17.30, Saturday 10-4.

OPENING NIGHT: FRIDAY 7 OCTOBER
EXHIBITION: 7 OCTOBER – 5 NOVEMBER 2016

Romantic Strangeness Flourishes in the Paintings of Michael Vale

As the English poet Alice Oswald writes, Mercury is ‘a violently magic little place…’ and Michael Vale’s paintings act as portals into an esoteric realm, unlocked thirteen times each century by the transit of this quicksilver planet around the sun.

Deeply engaged in the exploration of the mysterious worlds between our inner and outer experiences, Vale paints melancholic landscapes inhabited by absurdist figures. Informed by the works of visionary writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and Lewis Carroll, and engaging with lyrical surrealism, Vale succeeds in transporting the viewer to an atmospheric plane of netherworldy experience.

It is within these netherworlds that Vale explores what he describes as ‘the mercurial moments of possibility in human affairs’, as enacted by his gloomy and irrational forms. Although engaging with the esoteric and the unearthly, Vale is driven to represent the complexity of human experience through his paintings. Themes of confusion, uncertainty and romantic strangeness abound in works that explore a sunset of the conscious mind.

Michael Vale is a visual artist, writer, curator and academic. In addition to exhibiting paintings, installations, photographs and video works he has also worked as a TV writer, scenery painter, interior designer, and art administrator. His scenic work can be seen in the Ghost Train at Luna Park, in St Kilda. In 2006 he completed his PhD at Monash University with a multi-media “art fiction” project entitled Le Chien qui Fume – A Smokey Life. In 2006 he was awarded Best Film on Art at the prestigious Asolo Artfilm Festival in northern Italy for a video work entitled The Long Walk. He has also been a finalist in the Archibald Prize on two occasions, with portraits of rock’n’roll musicians Dave Graney & Clare Moore in 2012, and Warren Ellis in 2013. He has held 21 solo exhibitions since 1986, as well as curating and participating in numerous group exhibitions and short film festivals. For the last twenty years has been teaching in art schools including Monash University, RMIT, and the Hong Kong Art School. He is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (MADA) at Monash University. His artworks are held in several public collections in Australia, as well as private collections in Australia and overseas.

Click here for more information on Michael Vale

OPENING NIGHT: FRIDAY 7 OCTOBER, 6-8PM
EXHIBITION: 7 OCTOBER – 5 NOVEMBER 2016

Hyperreal Illustrations Explore the Earthly and the Uncanny

With an almost draughtsman-like meticulousness, artist Matt Coyle produces hyperreal drawings that excavate the boundaries of the dream-state and the real.

Presenting astonishingly detailed investigations of the suburban and the everyday, Coyle infuses his works with elements of the uncanny. Exploring the symbolic potential of soil and earth, Coyle suggests something ominous about what can be revealed by digging through the surface.

Citing stillness and contemplation as central to his creative process Coyle states: ‘Looking out of the kitchen window every day, imagining miniature worlds in the foliage and beneath the rock walls, ideas for making artworks slowly emerge. There is time to contemplate… A pumpkin slowly rots and collapses around a garden gnome. Lemons ripen above a pile of splintered timber. I’m keeping an eye on these glacial transformations.’

Marking the artist’s return to exploring the full expanse of the page, the works in Coyle’s new show at Anna Pappas Gallery imbue the everyday with eerie, symbolic power. The presence of colour in Coyle’s new works emphasise characters, dwellings, and growth; central representations of Coyle’s focus on personal, domestic and ultimately human experience.

Matt Coyle was born in 1971, and grew up in Canberra. After a short stint at art school in Sydney, Coyle turned his attention to drawing and has been working within this medium ever since. Exhibiting regularly in Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney, Coyle has appeared in group shows internationally including the Hong Kong Art Fair and the Korean International Art Fair. He has work in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Gallery of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery and has had numerous commissions including a suite of drawings for Art and Australia. Coyle has two published graphic novels “Worry Doll”, Dover Publications, 2016 and “Registry of Death”, Kitchen Sink Press 1996. He lives and works in Hobart, Tasmania.

Click here for more information on Matt Coyle

Opening Night: Friday, Sep 2, 6-8pm

Standing’s latest series The Oracles represents a departure from his more introspective search for identity in order to position himself within humankind’s age-old search for enlightenment. Each painting depicts a mythical world inhabited by transcendental beings and sacred artefacts yet grounded in the familiar patterns of nature. Hoodled figures rise up from the luscious undergrowth of the island while disembodied faces appear within a patchwork of pastel geometries and rocky outcrops. Through this complex layering of other-worldly textures and images Standing creates an isle of solitude and contemplation. Like the Oracles, Standing is motivated to create art as a means of revealing a “hidden knowledge” that inspires a more ethical and harmonious way of life.

Marc Standing holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors) from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His works have been shown extensively throughout Australia and have also been included in prominent Australian art prizes, as well as a commission work for The Groucho Club in London, a nominee for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and acquired by Artbank in Australia. His work has also been exhibited in New York, London, Holland, Hong Kong, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Standing has recently returned to Australia after several years living and working in Hong Kong.

View artist’s page

Opening Night: Friday, Sep 2, 6-8pm

In the world of NASCAR, the American auto racing empire, there is no such thing as an easy race and the Darlington Raceway is no exception. The “Darlington Stripe”, a phrase well-known amongst NASCAR circles, refers to the black mark or dented sheet metal that ensues from an encounter with the outside wall of the toughest track. For drivers is to be worn like a badge of honour. On the racetrack these spectacular machines become objects of considerable speed and strength, it is here that Papoutsidis’ affinity for materiality and motion is borne.

Interested in the sculptural and post-painterly contexts of formalist abstraction, Papoutsidis utilises the form and texture of automotive materials – from powder-coated steel to PVC and enamel – to create bold minimalist constructions that embody a sense of movement. Fractured steel lines, powder coated in primary colours; geometric forms adorned with automotive offcuts; PVC pipes lodged at obtrusive angles, these structures act as ‘vehicles’ repurposing classic automotive principals to reflect upon new methods of construction. While seemingly arbitrary in composition, each work is meticulously designed, and built according to a specific hierarchical structure, a Darlington Stripe for the beauty of honest construction.

Graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2014, Basil Papoutsidis has held several solo shows, including Camber at C3 Art Space, Melbourne (2016), Livery at Nicholas Projects, Melbourne (2016), Sunday Ride at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2016) and Auto Salon at Kings Artist-run, Melbourne (2015). He has also exhibited at the International Mokuhanga Conference – Geidai in Tokyo, Japan (2014) and his work is represented in a number of private and public collections, including the Epworth Hospital, Melbourne.

Opening night: Friday, July 29, 6-8 pm

Sharpness continues Jayne Dyer’s investigation of imminent states of collapse through a series of small-scale candy coloured objects. Corporeal tensions are implicit in these abject forms. Behaving like bodily matter – clinging to shelves, spilling onto the gallery floor –they appear delicate and beautiful and at the same time familiar and visibly uncomfortable. Are these fleshy malformed objects prototypes of our future DNA?

About Jayne Dyer
Currently based in Lisboa, Portugal, Jayne Dyer is recognized world-wide for her diverse and socially engaged projects, having been invited to participate in Conceiving Space, for the 2016 Colombo Art Biennale, Sri Lanka. Dyer has also received the inaugural Individual Artist Award from the Australian Federal Government for arts achievements in Asia (2013) for her expansive work The Butterfly Effect, the centerpiece of the Four Seasons Beijing.

Dyer’s interdisciplinary practice spans Australia and Asia, and increasingly east and west Europe. Recent exhibitions include Ger to Ger, Mongolia National Art Gallery, Ulaanbaatar; The protest that never ends, ARTISTERIUM 5, Tbilisi; The Butterfy Effect, ARTBosphorus, Istanbul; URS27, a Taipei City Urban Redevelopment initiative; postEDEN, Today Art Museum, Beijing; and Spill, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. Dyer has also collaborated with British artist Wayne Warren on a major installation Last Things, at the Bury Art Museum, England (2016) and It’s closing time for gardens of the west, at the 56th Venice Biennale for Personal Structures-Crossing Borders, Palazzo Mora, Venice (2015).

View artist’s page

Opening Night: Friday, Jul 29, 6-8pm

Having recently relocated from country New South Wales to inner-city Melbourne, Joanna Logue experienced a deep nostalgia for the land surrounding her former home. Logue’s landscape is warm and comforting, a moment of solace, set apart from the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne. Referencing her own visceral memories and personal histories, Logue explores how memory might inform the spirit of the painting. Paring down the landscape to a deeper level of abstraction, the work escapes its painterly surface to reflect the culmination of all the landscapes the artist has visited over her lifetime and a vision of the ones yet to be experienced – paintings imagined out of a dream or reverie.

About Joanna Logue
Through a languorous yet lively application of paint, Joanna Logue reimagines the Australian landscape for today. It is this new romanticism that has seen her be included in Country and Western, a national showcase of Australian Landscape painters from the bi-centennial year to present day. Having opened in May at Townsville Regional Gallery, the show will tour nationally throughout 2016. Her paintings have also been shown as part of New Romantics at the Gippsland Regional Gallery (2011) and The Feminine Optic – Perspectives on Landscape, curated by Andrew Frost at the Tamworth Regional Art Gallery (2013).

Born in 1964 in Scone, NSW, Logue received her BA in Visual Arts from the City Art Institute, Sydney. In 2006, she was awarded the Country Energy Prize and in 2009 she received the Central West Regional Artist Award. Logue’s works are represented in numerous collections including Barclays Bank, Bathurst Regional Gallery, Cornell University, Macquarie Bank, University of NSW, Pat Corrigan Collection and Qantas.

View artist’s page

Rod Moss has lived in the Aboriginal community, Whitegate on the eastern fringes of Alice Springs, for almost three decades, forging close ties with the community. Breaking the barriers of what Moss considers “a politically correct, insulating silence” within the Australian art scene, Origin of the New Poetics depicts the people of Whitegate in extraordinarily personal, vulnerable and private moments.

Moss’ narrative paintings show resolute scenes in which the impact of alcohol and violence are unflinchingly depicted, contrasted with tender moments showing cultural milestones and family rituals. Appropriating compositions from the Old Masters and religious paintings, his artworks are familiar yet foreign, romantic yet confronting.

This is Moss’ fourth solo exhibition with Anna Pappas Gallery. Moss was awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction in 2011 for his first memoir The Hard Light of Day. Moss’s second memoir, One Thousand Cuts: Life and Art in Central Australia was launched in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery in 2013

Click here for more information on Rod Moss

Click here to view catalogue

Jack Rowland’s third solo exhibition Alternative Territories, is inspired by the artist’s recent journey through outback Australia. For Rowland, exploring unfamiliar territories fostered a deeper engagement with the land and created new ways of interpreting the physical and inner reality.

Visualising the notion of altered perception through his psychedelic aesthetic, Rowland transforms the familiar earthly environment into an otherworldly landscape, inviting us to see the world around in a Utopian light. Through the vibrancy of his palette, Rowland celebrates the beauty of the natural world, and by extension, enriches our perception of reality.

Click here for more information on Jack Rowland

In Claire Anna Watson’s work, Endocardium, the cabbage, a mundane and uninteresting vegetable, holds the artist’s fascination as a sculptural object. Unveiling its gnarled and freakish core, through a systematic unwrapping, Watson exposes this most banal of vegetables to know it more intimately.

Multidisciplinary in approach, Watson’s practice explores aspects of contemporary culture and its relationship to foodstuffs and the impact of scientific interventions on the natural world. Ephemeral matter is the medium for manipulation and experimentation, recontextualised to invite the viewer into a state of reflection on the natural, or not so natural, world. With each procedure, Watson increases her understanding of the world through discovering both the exhilarating and inane.

Claire Anna Watson is a Melbourne based artist, curator, and arts writer. She creates installations, photography and video-based artwork, and has devised public art projects for the shores of the Black Sea in Turkey, a forest in Finland, the rural plains of Portugal and the snowfields of Australia.

Michael Prior works across several disciplines to create works that are tactile, immersive and playful, allowing chance elements to emerge within fixed structures. Slow Air, is an installation of ephemeral and responsive works. For this exhibition, Prior’s sculptural devices focus on unseen forces at play, composing them into layers of sounds and gestures with actions and reactions, causes and consequences. The work in Slow Air consists of mechanical sculptures, multiple sound sources and video. Applying playful spontaneity to the material, objects are activated to create a network of rhythm, gestures and relationships.

Prior’s works activate materials in unexpected ways to create self-generating compositions of motion and sound. Elements emerge from a process of play, improvising with materials to explore their innate properties. Prior investigates the behaviour of the object rather the object itself, uncovering universal patterns.

Curated by Kent Wilson

OPENING DRINKS: FRIDAY 19 FEBRUARY, 6PM
EXHIBITION: 19 FEBRUARY – 26 MARCH, 2015

Held in February each year, the Project exhibition series at Anna Pappas Gallery has become a stand out event of the Melbourne art scene. Project 16: The Agency of Things will bring together artists Sarah Contos, Chris Dolman, Betra Fraval, Michaela Gleave, Justin Hinder, Zoe Kirkwood, Sam Leach, Melanie Upton and Mark Whalen, under the curatorship of Kent Wilson, Assistant Curator at the Town Hall Gallery.

Featuring a selection of artists working across a variety of mediums, The Agency of Things is at once a rallying cry for the life of objects and a celebration of the networked nature of our reality. Artists based in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Los Angeles have been drawn together for the next instalment of the Anna Pappas Gallery Project series. All chosen for their capacity to carefully marry conceptual rigour with material acuity, the exhibition promises to provide a sweeping insight into the ideas driving Australian contemporary art.

Proponents of art have faith in the idea that the things we call art propel themselves into the world with something akin to a life of their own. That objects, materials and evidence of process have agency to affect their immediate environment and influence the world of which they are a part. The Agency of Things is an exhibition that takes this notion as its premise, an exploration into the idea that the non-human elements of the universe may well have the sort of agency we normally only attribute to the conscious choices made by humans.

Originally from Perth, Sydney-based artist Sarah Contos completed a Masters of Art at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney in 2010. She has held several solo exhibitions as well as being included in group shows – including Future Primitive, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2013–2014) – building a name for her sensual forays into soft sculpture, embroidered images and quilted works that broach multiple pop-cultural, personal and art-historical strains and references. Merging the totemic with the kinky and the historical with science-fiction, Contos works with her materials to draw out emotional and psychological resonances from deep within.

Chris Dolman’s practice uses the formalist Modernist tropes with an irreverent and self-deprecating humour. Moving across painting, printmaking, ceramics and video, and drawing on the histories of geometric abstraction, Pop, and Surrealism, Dolman employs non-traditional self-portraiture to explore absurd notions of identity and themes of loss and failure.

Dolman graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2010. He was the recipient of the Wallara Travelling Scholarship, as well as New Work (early career) and ArtStart grants from the Australia Council for the Arts. He has undertaken residencies at Hill End, Bundanon Trust, BigCi NSW, Ceramic Design Studio (Sydney Institute), and St George Institute of TAFE. He has exhibited nationally including shows at Alaska projects, Firstdraft, West Space, Seventh, FELTspace, Wellington St projects, MOP projects and [MARS]. Dolman runs the project gallery TWENTY THIRTYSEVEN, and is currently a research candidate at Sydney College of Arts, with an Australian Post Graduate Award from Sydney University.

Justin Hinder is an emerging artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne. His practice investigates human movement and the decision making process. Hinder’s interest lies in combining daily normalities with ideals of pre-determined destiny and storytelling. He explores ideas of satisfaction of self by focusing on the everyday – acknowledging the cause and effect of idiosyncratic thoughts, decisions and actions.

Zoe Kirkwood works in an ever-expanding painting practice. Generally taking the form of large-scale installations, her work traverses a range of media to create visually engulfing worlds. At the center of her practice is an interest in the spatial qualities of painting and a relentless desire to investigate new ways in which painting can move into the physical space of the viewer.

Kirkwood is an emerging artist based in Adelaide, South Australia. She graduated with first class Honours in Visual Arts in 2013 from the UniSA. She has been involved in numerous exhibitions locally and interstate and in 2015 travelled to New York to exhibit with CHASM Gallery. She is the recipient of a number of prizes including the prestigious Doctor Harold Schenberg Art Prize, 2014; The Helpmann Academy and Hill Smith Travelling Art Prize, 2014 and The Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Prize, 2013. Her work has been shown at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, MARS Gallery, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, FELT Space, Hugo Michel Gallery and the Contemporary Art Centre of SA.

Sam Leach’s virtuosic oil paintings are thematically and stylistically informed by the traditions of 17th century Dutch painting. His mimetic works conflate the poles of the metaphorical and the empirical, the analogous and the objective, in an ongoing investigation of the relationship between humans and animals. While the delicate interplay between formalist figuration and modernist abstraction in his paintings operates on one level to distance the viewer – to encourage them to look objectively at the subjects – on another level each animal depicted has a symbolic currency that resonates with the audience on a personal level. The paintings extend their focus on animal life to the spectrum of all life itself, encouraging the viewer to contemplate their role as living creatures on this shared earth.

2015 will see Sam Leach feature in ‘Time Space Existence’ as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, and a major monograph with essays by Andrew Frost and esteemed fiction writer Tim Winton. In 2010 Leach won both Wynne and Archibald Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and he was a finalist for the Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Artist Award in 2009. His work has been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Sam Leach, Future Perfect, Singapore, 2013; The Ecstasy of Infrastructure, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2012 and Cosmists, 24HR ART, Northern Territory of Contemporary Art, Darwin, 2010. Leach was recently included in the group shows Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013; SkyLab, La Trobe Regional Gallery, Victoria, 2013; Haunts and Follies, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2012 and First Life Residency in Landscape at Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2011.

Melanie Upton is an artist working across sculpture, installation and 2 dimensional media. Exploring the intersection between the natural and built environment, Melanie’s work is invested in an investigation of material. She finds inspiration in the urban and natural spaces around us, the evolving process of decay and renewal, spatial evolution, and the inherent power of things.

Upton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the VCA in 2006 and has shown in group and solo exhibitions throughout Melbourne and Brisbane. In 2015 Upton ‘s sculptures were featured as part of a collaboration with Australian accessories label Mimco, she undertook research in New York and was also published in Scottish online journal ‘Unthunk’. She is a recipient of local and federal government grants and has been awarded the Dr Rosenthal Award for Sculpture, the National Gallery Women’s Association Encouragement Award and the George Tallis Foundation prize.

In Mark Whalen’s work science, geometry, illustrated perspective and construction are depicted in outer space environments, as if an alternate universe is starting from scratch. Since 2006, Whalen’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Italy and Australia. He was included in 2009’s Apocalypse Wow! exhibition at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and more recently SPACE INVADERS at the National Gallery of Australia. Whalen has appeared in numerous publications such as Juxtapoz, Modart Europe, Arkitip, Nylon, Artist Profile, Australian Art Collector and Monster Children. His work was recently animated for Autolux’s film clip of their single ‘The Science of Imaginary Solutions’. His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, Art Bank and Mainland Art collections.

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Project 16: The Agency of Things is presented courtesy of Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney; Galerie pompom, Sydney; Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and blackartprojects, Melbourne.