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.

Click here for more information on Michaela Gleave.

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