AD Space Exhibition Archive

2019

Shadow Shrine

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Shadow Shrine | Meng-Yu Yan 

Opening Tuesday, 12 February 6 - 8pm 

Exhibition continues 13 - 23 February

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Written by Virginia Rowlands Shadow Shrine is an experimental installation that has emerged from a photographic practice. In this exhibition the artist strips photography down to the bare bone elements of light, shadow and image. Inspired by Christian Boltanski's Theatre D'Ombres and traditional Chinese shadow play, this work imagines an offering and a theatre of demons and the dead. Experiencing grief for the first time, the artist found that ideas they sought to express could not be made with usual forms. Digital imagery gave way to manual labour. The artist used bamboo canes, twine and found cardboard, materials that are both solid but biodegradable. Learning bamboo lashing, a tying technique, and experimenting with shapes to form the required stability in the structures required assistance and rebuilding. In this way, the artist departed from the ultra refined quality of previous work, recalling the raw, naïve qualities of Art Brut and even Arte Povera. The materials are both of the earth and earthly, imperfect and unsteady, operating similarly to a performance work. Impermanence and the fragility of life are reflected in the weightlessness of the cardboard demons and cut-outs [and words]. Suggesting on one hand a kind of Plato's Cave, and on the other a playpen of projections; actual, psychological and counter-projection, the artist observes memories, ghosts and explores the unconscious. A cyclic narrative can be observed in the work rather than a lineal experience of time. It suggests endless movement and flux of realities, knowledge and experience. Chinese shadow play known emerged in the Han Dynasty, (206BC to 220 AD). It is said that following the death of a beloved concubine of Emperor Wu, experiencing the devastation of grief, ordered his court to return her back to life. Officers of the court created the shape of the concubine using separate pieces of leather, coloured cloths and shining an oil lamp on a screen recreated the concubine. Emperor Wu began to recover after seeing the shadow play. The work is a shrine to the lives of two people. The first passed away in 2017. Named Zhangrong Sifu, meaning 'evergreen', this person was a Buddhist teacher, nun and lifelong companion to the grandmother of the artist. The second person is Qiu Miaojin, a writer who passed away in Paris in 1995 from suicide, with whom the artist shares an age and growing affinity. The artist seeks to draw attention to the spiritual connectivity generated by the works and invites the possibility of musing upon how the sacred can be explored in the work. Psychoanalytic notions of light and shadow are explored in the shrine. According to Jung "The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow". The shadow can be also known as the alter ego, the unnameable 'it' or the id. The shadow, according to Jung contains all that one finds unacceptable or inferior to oneself. The artist seeks to suggest the inconclusiveness of death and grief by the nature of the shifting light and shadow, the ambiguity of opposites. The inclusion of lettering proposes the importance of inclusion of linguistic structures in this work. Both entirely surreal and symbolic, and entirely real, the Shadow Shrine is at once clear and obscure. The artist invites the visitors to the exhibition to experience the shadow and the light, to 'kill' the artist by means of observing La mort de l'auteur Roland Barthes 1967, (Death of the author/artist) and meet the shadow shrine.

Meng-Yu Yan (b. 1992, Sydney) is a photography-based cross-disciplinary artist. Their practice blends digital photographic methods with analogue manipulation, sculpture, and installation. The artist embodies a trickster of sorts who enjoys playing "photographic games" with their audience. Their practice amalgamates various forms and materials - employing the use of mirrors and reflections, light, lenses, glass and water to distort our perspective of reality. Characterised by spontaneity and experimentation, Meng's practice conveys strong conceptual engagement with self-reflection, alienation, and traversing the sublime. As a first generation Chinese-Australian queer artist, Meng's work consistently confronts the intersections between race, culture, sexuality and gender identity. Marked by fragmentation, multiplicity, and the unconscious their self-portraiture is reminiscent of Surrealist photographers such as Claude Cahun and Duane Michals. Meng's first solo exhibition 'occulere - vision & concealment' debuted at Dominik Mersch Gallery in 2017. Currently Meng is completing their Master of Fine Arts (Research) funded by the Australian Government RTP Scholarship at UNSW Art & Design. Their research explores queer spectrality and cultural haunting through experimental photography. Meng was recently awarded the Ross Steele Scholarship to fund their upcoming residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. www.mengyuyan.com

The Sticking Point

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The Sticking Point | Scarlett Steven

Opening Tue 26 Feb, 6-8pm
Continues 27 Feb - 9 Mar

Stickiness describes a material in transition. It is neither solid nor fluid, but exists at the viscous midpoint. It is fluidity in slow motion. It retains the flexibility and movement of a fluid, but is not as fleeting, as slippery, as forgetful. Stickiness has more elasticity. It has a tackiness that retains instead of dissolves. It forms an active archive which is in constant exchange with its surroundings. It may be human or non-human, organic or synthetic; it is a property, a material, and a process simultaneously.

'the sticking point' takes a gooey interest in the material properties of 'stickiness' and asks:

What is the political significance of goo? What would it mean for a queer politics to move slowly, to create moving archives, to stain, to stay behind? What would it mean to be flexible but to achieve moments of form before dissolving once again, for unmaking to be inextricably tied to the process of making? What would it mean to work through structures instead of against them? In a period where queerness is becoming increasingly enfolded into the mainstream, how might stickiness-with its memory, its elasticity, its ability to take temporary forms-help think through ways of retaining a queer specificity? Scarlett Steven is an artist and writer who works on Bidjigal and Gadigal land and is currently completing her MFA at UNSW Art and Design

Intertidal

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Intertidal | Carol Hudson

Opening Wednesday June 12th Exhibition Drinks Thursday June 13th 6–8pm Continues until June 15th

...

Intertidal is the final MFA exhibition of Carol Hudson. Using the visual language of the beach in combination with human artefacts, Hudson speaks to the ebb and flow, the connection and disconnection between humans and nature — interrogating the impact of Western hierarchical systems of thinking when imposed on nature. 

About Carol Hudson:

Carol Hudson is a Sydney based artist currently completing a Master of Fine Art at UNSW Art & Design. Hudson has exhibited at MContemporary, Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Bondi Pavillion Gallery, Stacks Projects and the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize.

Carol’s multi-disciplinary practice is concerned with exploring an interconnected way of thinking about the human place in the natural world as an alternative to the hierarchical systems in Western thinking. Her work questions the separation and categorisation of the natural world, that is required to enable hierarchical preferring of one thing over another, as the best way to relate to the natural world in our current environmental crisis.

Image: Carol Hudson, 'Intertidal Totems', 2018. Porcelain, steel, motor, plywood. 1950 x 1700 x 650mm

Erotic Engines

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Erotic Engines

Stella Palmer, Joan Shin, Sorcha Delahunty & Zoe Ingerson

Opening Tues 12 March 6 - 8pm Continues 12 - 23 March

... Erotic Engines looks at the unmentioned force of the adult industry in the development of innovative technologies. Through distinct material explorations, each individual artist translates their own unique conversation on the role of the adult industry and its provided exchanges between the real and the virtual. Erotic Engines invites users to interact with tangible and virtual elements, interchanging between an immersive VR landscape, AR app, collectable AI sex cards and digitally manipulated perspex prints. Playing on the gimmicky use of porn innovations, the VR and AR environments contrast real world elements with hypersexualised body images to exaggerate the desire for sexual indulgence. Existing within the 'real' space, both the AI sex cards and print work investigate the concept of sex tech through a focus on exploitive manipulation of the human body. The development of both works has led to different incarnations of pin up imagery, one through satirical commentary and the other via its process of creation.

Tactile Light

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Tactile Light | Rewa Wright

Tactile Light re-processes a suite of live performances enacted by a posthuman body given infrared vision, underscored sonically by the bio-electrical signals from living plants. Self-rendering algorithms tease iterative movements of light from this material flow, a liminal image stream emerges via the diffractive movements of post-processing software. And that’s when we might begin to consider the echoes of performance beyond the event, lured by the entangled intensities of gesture, data and signal. 

Rewa Wright likes to generate performances with software assemblages. She works with body area networks, infrared vision, mixed reality and experimental modes of live audio-visual performance. She has just submitted her PhD in Art, Design, & Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

Image: Rewa Wright, Tactile Sound re-processed, 2019, video still. 

Compositive

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Compositive |Harry Copas

Compositive investigates the potential in harvesting wasted time, utilising this dormant energy to produce new outcomes. A collaborative exercise with several thousand worms and some of my unknown fellow painting students, Compositive used discarded paintings from bins on campus and from my own personal archive to imagine a future without failure – or at least where success can be salvaged. Combined with my own household green waste, my gang of Eisenia Fetida (red wrigglers) worked tirelessly on this project, breaking down the matter to create new, marketable commodities. 

Harry Copas is currently studying Fine Arts (Honours) at UNSW Art and Design in Sydney. They also hold a Bachelor of Teaching (High School)/Bachelor of Visual Arts from ACU. Their work has been exhibited at AD Space in Sydney, The Grand at Broken Hill Art Exchange courtesy of an AGL Cross Cultural Scholarship, The Writing On The Wall following a residency at Watch This Space in Alice Springs and The Voice of a River at Arts Mildura. Copas’ work often uses humour or irony as tool to investigate and critique the complacent acceptance and consumption of dominant culture, and the pitfalls of collective memory.

Image: Harry Copas, Compositive, 2018, red wrigglers, pvc plastic, discarded paintings, organic matter, dimensions variable, ongoing.

Playing on Synthetic Grass

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Playing on Synthetic Grass

Katherine Bourne, Amy Bruce, Holly Dixon, Michael Nguyen-Huynh, Jack Poppert and Sivaan Walker

Opening Tues 16 April 6-8pm, Continues until 27 April 

When Playing on Synthetic Grass, we are in our element, in the playground, the artificial space that looks nothing like the real world, but is designed to be safe. A space for experimentation, learning and growth. We don’t work, we play, and we don’t make works, we make games.  

Playing on Synthetic Grass brings us back to our childhood, the playgrounds, the playpens and the various play things. The world around us is forgotten as we reimagine our inconsequential childhood through the bizarre fantasy of this hyperreal synthetic material.


HOLLY DIXON - Holly Dixon is a Sydney sculpture, installation and performance artist whose work explores a range of themes including gender, social norms, the everyday, labour and ritual, and human relationships to environment. Her current works consider the relationships between labour and value in our society, focusing on the repetitive, mundane and everyday tasks associated with maintenance (of life, health, body, home etc). Dixon employs time and movement in kinetic sculptures as well as both live and documented performance.

SIVAAN WALKER - Sivaan Lansdowne Walker’s artistic practice considers intergenerational power relationships within society, and specifically, the paradoxical political and resurgent ideologies used to shape younger generations. Using found objects and textiles, she creates sculptures which are satirical, thoughtful, and engage with topics that delve deeply into internalised emotional responses to environmental contexts. 

MICHEAL NYGUEN – is an emerging artist and writer whose works examine the strange dynamics between bodies, time, space, and the mind. With an output that spans multiple disciplines, Michael has used the moving image, the spoken word, as well as installations of varying scale to explore what it means to exist amongst others, and inversely, the many forms that displacement takes. As a second generation Australian born to immigrants, notions of duality come into play, as he reasons with his roles as both a successor of family history, as well as one of the many faces in an ever-changing landscape. He is particularly interested in the minutiae of the post-post-modern landscape. With the relationship between the ironic and sincere continuing to evolve over time, Michael continues to search for small pockets of the absurd and surreal; capturing them as they rapidly form and disappear in the blink of an eye. 

KATHERINE BOURNE – Katherine Bourne is a Fine Arts student at UNSWAD. Her focuses are Sculpture and Installation art, and contemporary Jewellery. Her practice has explored large scale installation, sculptural objects, video and sound mediums. Often Bourne investigates social issues while inducing shock, where the audience is drawn in only to be repulsed. Bourne’s work emphasises making and a hands-on approach which is also shown through her contemporary jewellery making. In this show Bourne has explored new mediums of collage and video installation as well as small sculptural objects. 

JACK POPPERT - Jack Poppert is an emerging artist and writer, whose practice explores key notions of and reactions to the modern period, broadly conceived. A range of materials and processes are deployed for these explorations, with written work often a key component. Poppert has been in two exhibitions; the Gaffa Ten Year Anniversary Show at Gaffa Gallery, and Second to None at AD space, with written work publish in Unsweetened Literary Journal 2016, and Kindling III. Jack Poppert is the founder and editor of the Lyre Literary Journal; the inaugural issue of which is forthcoming.  

L.K.R.M.A. BRUCE - L.K.R.M.A. Bruce is an emerging artist based between Sydney and the Central Coast of NSW. Currently undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art & Design, Bruce’s practice is informed by the dichotomies between the urban and coastal landscapes surrounding her as well as her lived experience with mental illness and BLIPS (brief limited intermittent psychotic symptoms) which have become central to the ethos of her work. Bruce’s practice often explores questions surrounding social identities, and making as a form of therapy. A fundamental aim for Bruce is to create a practice that facilitates time for healing and preservation. 

2019 Jenny Birt Award

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2019 Jenny Birt Award

Opening: Tuesday 18 June 2019, 6pm – 8pm Exhibition: 19 – 29 June 2019, Wed – Fri 11am – 6pm, Sat 11am – 4pm

Interested in seeing how emerging artists are exploring new possibilities in contemporary painting? Join us for the 2019 Jenny Birt Award exhibition opening and announcement.

The Jenny Birt Award was initiated in 1995 by the ‘U Committee’ and is the longest running and most prestigious award for Painting within the UNSW Art & Design academic calendar. Candidates are nominated by academic staff and then selected for inclusion in the exhibition and consideration for the $3,000 Jenny Birt Award.

The evening will celebrate the finalists, whose work will be displayed on campus at AD Space, and announce the 2019 recipient.

The 2019 finalists: Hugh Black, Amy Bruce, Monika Cvitanovic Zaper, Bartholomew Daniels, Jennifer Friedland, Tyson Frigo and Aaron Kennedy, Nani Graddon, Aaron Kennedy, Nicola Mason, Rumpa Paweenpongpat, Katerina Patrikeos, Emma Pinsent, Alexander Ryrie, Shannon Simm and Sophia Thalis.

Crossword

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Crossword

Jennifer Brady, Jorden Cooper, Lauren Grabara, Rosalie Hopkins, Millie Mitchell

Crossword, is a cross-disciplinary investigation into the potential of language; toying with syntax and semantics to demonstrate how words can be utilised to express a meaning. 

Language is a medium: something that may be performed, written, spoken, as a means of articulating a deeper meaning. Crossword examines language in the form of ‘words’ (written and spoken) using the English language. Words can be humorous, instructive, intrusive, weighty and powerful. This exhibition acknowledges however, that language, although significant and critical, is limited and limiting. But, we can use these confinements as an advantage.  

In acknowledging it’s restrictions the artists in this exhibition edit, manipulate, and override linguistic structures to make language anew.  


Jennifer Brady: 

Jennifer Brady is a Sydney based emerging artist who recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the University of New South Wales - Art & Design. Primarily engaging with language and ‘word art’, she has been actively involved in group shows since mid 2016 in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. 2018 saw Brady execute her first solo exhibition Betwixt and Between at Gaffa Gallery, Sydney; and both exhibit and perform at Brunswick Street Gallery, Airspace Projects, Bedrock Collective’s Long Weekend, and Women In Music Empowerment Day among others. Her practice has recently extended into curatorial realms, co-curating the outdoor exhibition Piece of Mind (2018) at Gallery Lane Cove + Creative Studios with Yanchen Li for Mental Health Month, and curating the group show d.i.why? (2019) at Kudos Gallery, Paddington. Brady was a finalist for the Lethbridge 10,000 Small Scale Art Award (2017), Jenny Birt Award (2018), and the Kudos Emerging Artist and Designer Award (2018). In 2019 Brady exhibited her second solo exhibition, ‘This is a Conversation Piece’ at 107 Projects collaboratively with curator Sarah Rose. Brady is also a cofounder of More Than Reproduction, a printmaking collective seeking to foster a platform for emerging female identifying printmakers.  

www.j-brady.com

Jorden Cooper: 

Jorden is an interdisciplinary media artist primarily focused within photography and its expanded fields. She finds herself drawn to themes of trauma as she examines the relationship it has with photography, and its ability to portray repressed thoughts. The concepts behind her practice evolved from her struggle to verbally communicate, along with being questioned ‘why do you have to be like this?’ Instead of seeing this as a weakness, Jorden has used her experiences to drive her creativity.[Text Wrapping Break] 

She has completed a BMA (Honours) and has previous training with the Production Art Department, Sydney. 

Lauren Grabara: 

Lauren Grabara is an emerging interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video, performance, and sculpture. She explores the realm of institutional critique within her practice through modes of parody and persona. Lauren has exhibited in Sydney at 541 Art Space, GAFFA Gallery, and ADSpace. Lauren is an educator at Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewer's Bequest, and teaches as a Sculpture and Performance tutor at Nepean Creative and Performing Arts High School. 

Rosalie Hopkins: 

Sydney based multidisciplinary artist, Rosalie Hopkins, has built a body of work embedded with a wide range of subtle social commentary. Exploring and expressing her own personal journey of self discovery has led to a dynamic practice exploring mediums including installations, performance, photography, and videography. Hopkins’ practice aims to critique heteronormative desire in mass culture through a feminist framework. Her work employs humour as a critical strategy for destabilizing constructs of the male gaze. Hopkins’ is interested in exploring the powers of parody when navigating the her own fears and anxieties that exist within popular culture. 

 Millie Mitchell: 

Millie Mitchell is an emerging Sydney-based artist. She recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at UNSW Art & Design. Her creative practice uses the mediums of drawing and printmaking, notably lithography, to explore themes surrounding the dichotomy of appearance and reality. She is particularly concerned with ideas of femininity, strength, beauty and notoriety. Last year, Mitchell was finalist in the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, Kudos Emerging Artist + Designer Award and Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize in 2018. She was also invited to exhibit in the Print Council of Australia’s group exhibition, plate_tone (2018), and .M Contemporary’s inaugural Heroine: Celebration and Protest in Women’s Art exhibition (2019). 

www.milliemitchell.com

Soft Monument

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Soft Monument | Linda Sok

At present in Cambodia, the remains of those who were killed during the Khmer Rouge Regime are stacked in tall and rigid structures called Stupas. However, in the Buddhist faith, the practice of cremation is required for people to pass on to the afterlife.  

The artwork Soft Monument (2019) refers to the Cambodian government’s reluctance to acquiesce to Cambodia’s predominately Buddhist society’s requests for the bodies to be cremated. The work engages with the materiality of Joss paper, a hand-made piece of paper with a piece of gold or silver leaf, traditionally burnt and used in a Chinese-Cambodian ritual during a ceremony that remembers and pay respects to those who have passed.  

The practice of burning Joss paper is the same required of the bones in order to peacefully pass on. The use of gold leaf throughout the work harks back to the materiality of Joss paper and acts as a symbolic gesture to highlight the absence of the proper treatment of the bodies and as a reminder of the ongoing trauma caused by the genocide.  

In addition to this, the rigid monumental Stupas are contrasted by the soft textures of the mosquito nets used throughout the installation. The mosquito net is a common everyday item that works to subvert the notion of “the monument”. The work speaks to the Khmer Rouge Regime without depictions of violence and promotes a softer way of communicating the occurrence of the violent acts perpetrated during this time and its ongoing effects. The installation offers a space for surviving generations to properly memorialise the dead.


Linda Sok is an Australian-Cambodian artist whose practice predominantly focuses on the materiality of objects and their potentials in relation to her culture. Her experience as a member of the Khmer diaspora informs her investigation of her family’s experience of the Khmer Rouge and their genealogical effects. Stories from her familial and cultural heritage significantly influence how she chooses to represent confrontational notions of trauma and genocide. Linda has exhibited in institutions such as Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Firstdraft, and Wellington St Projects. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from UNSW Art & Design with First Class Honours and the University Medal in Fine Arts. Linda is currently a studio resident at the 4A Creative Studio Program.  

www.linda-sok.com

Modern Baseball

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Modern Baseball | Timothy Pauszek

Modern Baseball is a series of paintings that references Ellsworth Kelly’s Red, Yellow, Blue III (1966) and the artist’s father Raymond Pauszek II’s commercial sign paintings for the Dunkirk, New York, Little League Baseball Field. The new work by Tim Pauszek zooms in to his father’s since destroyed signs to become closer to Kelly’s colour field work (or do they zoom out of Kelly’s work to become closer to Ray II’s signs? I can never remember). The series addresses the traditional hierarchy between craftsman and artist, labourer and academic, and the hand and the head. The artist selectively borrows from Raymond Pauszek’s signs to create abstract colour field paintings and then places them in a formal gallery setting. By doing so he questions if it is the content of a painting or the context in which it is viewed that generates its value.

Tim Pauszek is a Western New York native, born and raised a stone’s throw away from Great Lake Erie in the Rust Belt town of Dunkirk, NY. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Alfred University in chemistry and interdisciplinary art and was employed there as the 2D technician in Drawing, Painting, Photography and Printmaking. He is currently undertaking a masters by research in fine art with a focus on printmaking at UNSW, where he is a part of the collaborative print workshop Cicada Press. He roots for the Boston Red Socks, and understands why that’s funny in Australia. 

www.bluepikepress.com

Forecast Impact: Textiles Design

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Forecast Impact: Textiles Design

Opening: Tuesday 13 August 2019, 6-8pm
Continues: 13 - 24 August 2019


Forecast Impact: Textiles Design exhibition presents contemporary designs by emerging designers creatively responding to two industry level briefs for trending textiles designs. In T1 2019, 3rd­ year textiles students at UNSW Art & Design completed either the ‘Rug ­Up 2019’ Designer Rugs project or the ‘Karolina York Commercial Print’ design project. Both projects challenged students to research and explore forecast trends to understand the impact trends have on the design process. From this, students developed an innovative range to a technical standard accepted by each company.


Thanks to Designer Rugs and Karolina York for supporting this innovative project and giving students an insight into designing for industry standard briefs.

Image: Amelia Breen, Block 'Touch', 2019, digital print

AD Space x Tributary Projects

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The Fig Tree | AD Space x Tributary Projects Gallery Swap

Opening: Tuesday 3 September, 6-8pm
Continues: 3 - 14 September

“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked ...I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Machines cannot make choices: they can only make decisions. Choices are something that, for now, is in the realm of the human. How do we choose the future we want to create and what choices do we need to create it? The line between utopia and dystopia is dangerously thin.

The Fig Tree explores the everyday choices and uncertain visions produced by fragile beings (humans) operating in systems of materiality and information overload. As we are more connected through ethernet cables, wires and technology, there is a pervasive disconnection from the natural world and ourselves. An ‘othering’ is taking place in the everyday and producing the ‘post-capitalist alien’.

Works in this show contemplate the idea of transhuman futures being set in an accelerated, deteriorating anthropocene. At once it is where we are heading and where we already are. The artists are met with a difficult conundrum about how to envision their life on a planet filled with so much potential yet such diminishing resources. In such critical times, how will we choose?

The Fig Tree is one part of AD Space x Tributary Projects interstate gallery swap. Exhibiting two iterative exhibitions across two cities with artists from UNSW Art & Design and Canberra. The Fig Tree at AD Space features work by Grace Blake, Jacqueline Bradley, Kieran Browne, John Carolan, Sean Minhui Tashi Chua, Felix Idle, Joanne Leong, Dierdre Pearce, Rebecca Selleck, Jess Selmer, Amardeep Shergill. Curated by Lucy Chetcuti.

This project is supported by the ANU PARSA Student Extracurricular Enrichment Fund and UNSW Art & Design Student Council.

Image: Kieran Browne, The Other Side 2018, Seance; prayer beads, wood, candles. Performance video still.

AD Space x Tributary Projects

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Becoming with | AD Space x Tributary Projects Gallery Swap

Opening: Wednesday 4 September 2019, 6-8pm
Continues: 4 - 15 September 2019

Ursula K. Le Guin has stated that “the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next”. We stand in our present moment, paralysed. Looking into the mirage of an unimaginable future, swirling with abstract dystopian visions and fleeting utopian hopes. This moment is an existential juncture — an extended journey along the edge of extinction into a time unrecognisable from what we know.

How do we love with the end in sight?

Becoming with explores relations in the face of uncertainty. Artists in this exhibition meddle with the stitches that hold us together, speculating how might we understand connections between bodies, beings, technologies and environments in this time of rapid shifts. Becoming with centres care as the tool to work beyond and with this crisis. Embodying it as a strategy that places us at stake in the world.

Becoming with is one part of AD Space x Tributary Projects interstate gallery swap. Exhibiting two iterative exhibitions across two cities with artists from UNSW Art & Design and Canberra. Becoming with at Tributary projects features work by Ella Bryne, Joan Shin, Stella Palmer, Jesse Rye, Megan Hanson, Mackenzie Benato, Jack De Lacy, Collaboration between Eleanor Zurowski, Bryan Martin, Max Whelan-Young and Sunny Lei, Two Leaves, Meng-Yu Yan and Ondine Manfrin. Curated by Anna May Kirk.

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land, the Ngunnawal, Ngambri, and Ngunawal peoples and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

This project is kindly supported by The ANU PARSA Student Extracurricular Enrichment Fund & UNSW Art & Design Student Council.

Hero image:
Megan Hanson, Given we don't know each other, I think we should meet beforehand to discuss safety, consent and preferences..., detail, 2019. Image by Jonno Revanche.

Drawing Nature

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Drawing Nature | Eva Nolan

Opening: Tuesday 24 September 2019, 4-6pm at AD Space and the EPI Centre
Exhibition: 17 - 28 September 2019

Drawing Nature features the culmination of Eva Nolan's Master of Fine Arts Research. Her body of work explores the abiding relevance of Linnaean taxonomy on our awareness of human/nature relationships. Referencing drawing's role as a tool to understand and document natural phenomena, Nolan's creative approach is both empirical and speculative as she reimagines systems of biological classification. Her research critiques Linnaean binary logic as inherently exploitative and anthropocentric by exploring a network of creative authorship that entwines and transcends dyadic themes and processes. Oscillating between analogue and digital, micro and macroscopic, Nolan's body of work investigates how expanded drawing can collapse boundaries between corporeal and virtual, spectator and artwork, human and environment.

Image: Eva Nolan, The Pinned Moth Cannot Fly (video still), 2019, 4k digital animation, 15 min 11 sec

2001 | Aidan Maloney

26 March - 6 April


We are constantly bombarded with Americanised, romanticised, faux nostalgic and fetishised depictions of adolescence, especially in film and television. These visions of youth are beautiful and yet, mostly unattainable. By drawing on the cinematic aesthetics of the slasher horror genre and coming-of-age films, artist Aidan Maloney explores and deconstructs the specifically Australian adolescent experience. As a series of large-scale, soft, fabric flags adorned with idealised photographs, 2001 questions how these seductive portrayals of growing up warp and corrupt our own experiences and memories of our formative years.


About Aidan Maloney:
Aidan Maloney is a Central Coast-based emerging artist, working primarily on Darkinjung and Awabakal land. He is currently pursuing a creative education at Sydney's UNSW Art & Design. His practice encompasses mediums including analogue and digital photography, screen printing and design. His work primarily engages with the experience of growing up in Australian suburbia along with explorations of Sydney's underground music scene and Australian cinema.
...
Image: courtesy the artist

Speaking Space

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(A) Mild Inconvenience

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Objects of Influence

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AD Space x Tributary Projects: The Fig Tree

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2019 Tim Olsen Drawing Prize

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Arc Creative

P:(02) 9065 0981

E:creative@arc.unsw.edu.au

H:10am to 5pm

A:Ground Floor D Block, Greens Rd, Paddington

AD Space

Rory Moy

P:(02) 9065 0981

E:r.moy@arc.unsw.edu.au

H:Gallery Hours: Mon - Fri 11am - 5pm.

A:EG01, Ground Floor E Block, Greens Rd, Paddington NSW 2021, UNSW Art & Design.