Mirror Brain, a new interactive installation by Elisabeth Weissensteiner explores the human inquiry into one’s own mind. A moving image sequence is projected from above as slowly superimposing pictures, text fragments and sounds are interpreted by the viewer. In a black space within the gallery, the audience clutches a vessel as they desperately try to catch a fleeting projection, trying to decipher meaning in complete derangement. As the artist explains “What each viewer sees strongly depends on their movements holding the vessel. By looking into the object held in their hands it raises the question of, can we understand how we think?” In addition, presented sculptures will depict the human head as the boundary between cognition and perception. They, too, will lead viewers into the mirror chamber of scientific inquiry as self-perception and perception of nature are like mirrors turned on each other.

Michael Carolan is the winner of the Anna Pappas Gallery RMIT Master of Fine Art Graduate Award 2012.

Hey you is one of an ongoing series of site-specific artworks that aim to question the hierarchies and conventions surrounding the signification of value – both commercially and artistically. The installation uses painting, text, video and sound to explore the varied, and sometimes confusing, signs and signifiers that both drive and undermine the relationships between communication, commerce and art. By investigating the function, role and value of products-in-art, it is also anticipated that this installation raise questions surrounding the function, role and value of art-as-product.

Vin Ryan’s new solo exhibition explores the urban environment of Melbourne suburbia. Intrigued by the dialogue which is created between nature and culture, Ryan highlights the mundane, minor details of everyday life. Following on from his Tree Game series in which nature is presented as a succession of discrete found objects, his new series moves along a similar juxtaposed vein, illuminating the habitual and common place around us. Arcadian Summer presents a series of small drawings of urban environments, street signs and common plants alluding to mock botanical studies. His deliberate use of red and blue ink on paper is a reference to the extent of which our environment is the result of administrative processes, declaring a victory over nature.

Kent Wilson’s new solo exhibition explores our connection to nature through the materiality of wood and its origin in plant growth. Wilson’s series of wooden skulls and intricate abstract drawings are extrapolations and interpretations of natural patterns, processes and behaviours. The skulls implicate human life in the materiality of the plywood, the contour lines reflecting the growth rings of seasonal time. His considered use of this manufactured natural product blurs the fragile distinction between the natural and the cultural.

Matt Coyle, Hot Mess, 2012, pen on paper, 68 x 89cm

Matt Coyle’s signature use of black pen on white paper has evolved over many years, allowing him to explore the possibilities of line and the dramatic effects of light and shadow. His works have an intense cinematic quality both fascinating and bewitching. In his new exhibition, Coyle explores the idea of beauty within the abject, in chaos and filth. This is evident in crudely assembled bodies of dirt, which speak of our need to find order, to find faces, meaning and connection, wherever we can.

Anna Pappas Gallery will be participating in the Melbourne Art Fair 2012. The gallery will present the work of Ewen Coates, Matt Coyle, Sue Dodd, Jayne Dyer, Sam Grigorian, Grant Nimmo and David Palliser.

Simon MacEwan, Watcher I, 2012, watercolour on paper, 56 x 76cm

Primal fear meets post-industrial anxiety in Simon MacEwan’s exhibition all that is solid melts into air. Drawing inspiration from the void of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, MacEwan seeks to reinstate clean dread into the dialogue of contemporary visual arts. Yet, in this exercise, the artist alludes to specific historical events and phenomena, rather than wholly abstracted concepts. The unfathomable capacity of nuclear power is referenced by MacEwan in his exquisite painting of the molten mixture of materials left behind after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

As this exhibition illustrates, specificity and intricate detail are amongst MacEwan’s calling cards, revealing his refined skills as both an analytical artist and a gifted craftsman. Meticulously rendered owls survey the viewer, their blank golden eyes resisting the viewer’s returned gaze. A map of the moon’s hidden face charts a land we will never see. A strange beguiling crystal grows under the ruined Chernobyl reactor. Exploring the way in which the uncanny intersects with the uncertainty of late-capitalism, these paintings and sculptures suggest that while we no longer believe in monsters, we may still be afraid of the dark.

Through a kaleidoscopic lens, Bonnie Lane’s solo exhibition Make Believe will take the audience on a surreal journey through the mourning of the childhood being. Created during several artist residencies in America, the works explore notions of the fantasy and deception of life as both child and adult. Besieged by a bottomless black void, the haunting video installations explore human aloneness, the absurdity of adult existence, and the inability to reconnect with the innocence of childhood.

Lane’s video works become sculptural forms through the use of projections that run on continuous loop. There is no beginning, middle or end, rather what is created is an immersive environment to be stepped into, an amalgamation of experiences, memories, dreams, nightmares, fears and fantasies. Her artworks contain a persistent searching and longing, played out amid ideas of existentialism, absurdity and aloneness. The works juxtapose melancholia, nostalgia, comedy, memory, fear, tragedy, and beauty.

Armed with a medical scalpel and a keen eye, Lucy James harvests images from discarded and forgotten books and melds them into carefully composed hybrids of form and meaning. Often floating on vast spaces of empty white, her works evoke a sense of fantasy emerging from the vast expanse of our collective imagination.

Animals, plants and humans morph into and out of each other. Masses of collected and catalogued natural species burst and explode, and laser beams shoot rainbows out of the dead eyes of history. Touching on issues of inherited folklore, the commodification of pets and the exploitation of natural resources, her work appears playful and visually dynamic, while allowing for deeper interpretation.

after the end is a series of collages that explore notions of fantasy, hybridisation and the interaction of nature and objects. Her series of works conflates the boundaries between the manufactured objects of machinery and the manipulated elements of nature, exploring the historical consequences of our engagement with them.

In both his life and work, Matthew Bax confirms his reputation as a Renaissance man in the international urban arena.

In a studio in Munich, Bax has created his new series of pretty little stupid pictures. In these paintings, Bax employs the recognisably domestic motifs of flowers and shoes and, in so doing, engages the potential associations – good and bad – of the viewer with these domestic themes.   Holding a mirror up to the multisensory pressures and pleasures of domestication, Bax thus asks the viewer to choose one of two possible directions in their response to his work: are the motifs familiar and comforting or redolent and smothering?

Bax’s paintings of flowers challenge contemporary approaches to artistic practice, simultaneously demonstrating an exquisite patience and restrained handling in his representation of the theme. Through the title of the exhibition and the tone of his palette, Matthew Bax further explores the validity and authority of beauty in contemporary art.

Anna Pappas Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in Hong Kong International Art Fair (ART HK) in May 2012. We will exhibit Michaela Gleave’s new large scale sculpture entitled We Are Made of Stardust.

Winner of the 2011 International Street Photography Award, Jesse Marlow’s next solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery is the final instalment of his series, Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them which is based on his book featuring the whole series to be published in late 2012.The influence for this body of work includes architecture, painting and film with inspiration coming from the Australian Modernist painter Jeffrey Smart to French film director Jaques Tati. The series is a visual reaction of Marlow’s encounters in his daily travels; searching for the unusual in the ordinary. Set in the environment of the everyday, the photographs explore the banality of modern day existence through themes of abandonment, suburbia and daily rituals. Contrived photo shoots and intricately designed set-ups have never interested Jesse Marlow, rather it is the uncertainty of street photography that continues to stimulate him. What constantly drives and excites him is the idea that he can leave the house one morning and come home at the end of the day with a photo that will be with him forever. Over the last twelve years Jesse Marlow has exhibited extensively both locally and overseas. In 2010 he was one of 45 street photographers from around the world profiled in the book Street Photography Now (Thames & Hudson) and was featured in the 2011 documentary film Insight which premiered at the Tate Modern in London. As written by the artist, “For me it’s not about the location. It never has been. There are great photos to be taken wherever you are. The photos in my series Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them have been taken wherever I’ve been over the last few years – from Stockholm to Alice Springs.”

Paul Yore’s solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery presents a series of paintings without paint. Plasticine has been worked into thousands of fine layers of colour in order to build up the sculptural impasto presented. Drawing from the ancient proverb by Heraclitus of Ephesus that ‘everything flows’, the works depict a lurid multiverse in fluxus; a shifting, unstable physical or intellectual division. Panta Rei presents a series of fluid, apocalyptic mindscapes that swirl within the confines of the framed picture plane. Within the locus of these seemingly LSD soaked ‘ant-farms’, the mind is free to wander, couched within the contours of a catatonic cartography. Furthermore, the use of modelling-clay provides an association with the pre-linguistic visualities of children. Paul Yore is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice involves installations, painting, sculpture, sound, drawing and tapestry. Playful, imaginative and fantastical, his work investigates constructions of culture, place and identity. Yore’s imaginary worlds and mystical interventions employ absurdity and joy as beneficial responses to being confronted with meaninglessness, hopelessness and apathy.

Billy Gruner is not living in any moment in idleness. He is currently finishing an article for a new magazine on Australian architecture and panel discussion for the AIA (NSW), preparing a catalogue funded by the Australia Council on Australian Avant-Garde circles in particular, working as a curator at a not-for-profit gallery in Sydney and preparing the New Wave: Experimental Painting exhibition for Anna Pappas Gallery in collaboration with his partner, artist Sarah Keighery. In addition, they both own and run the Pink Flamingo, a re-design store in the Blue Mountains and produce a small clothing line called Butterflies are Free. Arts NSW has long funded the SNO (Sydney Non-Objective) the project co-founded by Billy producing a wide array of critical shows on Australian Non-Objective Art. In March 2012, he will be travelling to USA again to organise a show of international artists, another ongoing project he has been co-curating in Europe since 2005 with curator and artists’ friends, Tilman and Jan Van der Ploeg.

Gruner and Keighery have been radical advocates of purist styles of work since 1995, and what that implies is a kind of ‘seccessional approach’ to contemporary art and regional conventions. In particular, Billy was distrustful of contemporary art speak and the constant blame many contemporary art makers may place on a prior history of radical developments. He felt problems inherent in more radical modernist approaches were more interesting, challenging and difficult to work through than say works made under an ‘anything goes’ or citational postmodern system for instance. They draw on their influence from the experimental painting movement of the 80s, which brought a savage return to reductive practices around the world. They collaboratively create works which extend on the themes explored in concrete art, colour field, geometric and other forms of early radical abstract art. Their practice questions the need for art to be precious in order to be valuable whilst taking a new approach to concerns of the time when Avant Garde rebelled against the restrictions of traditional art practices, a reductive and punk aesthetic in fact.

I am always expanding my technique to bring me closer to painting. Through many layers and intuitive mark making, I hope all the under-painting transcends its awkward journey to a decisive version of all that went before.

Bursting through active layers, gestural mark-making, illusions of sculptural forms, David Palliser’s second solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery continues his exploration of contemporary abstract painting. Working on the traditional principles of painting, he creates vividly rich works with ecstatic inventions and exasperated analysis.

At the heart of Palliser’s practice is the ongoing journey of abstract expression; the creation of exhilarating visual experiences. Through the dynamic combination of different brushwork, from flat, bold fields and simple patterns of pure colour, to washes, splatters and fine lines, Palliser creates spaces that twist and turn, bend in upon themselves, and bring disparate elements into harmony.

Hovering between the figurative and abstract, his paintings challenge the viewer’s perception; falling in and out of the canvas between the push and pull of its spatial parameters. Palliser works intuitively to create rich, colourful paintings which flow with conscious expression.

We are pleased to announce our participation in Art Stage Singapore in January 2012. Anna Pappas Gallery will present an extraordinary installation by Cyrus Tang entitled The Fleeting Now and Eternity.