Nostalgia

Alan Chan

25 Jan - 4 Feb

Nostalgia is Alan Chan's first solo exhibition. As a graduating COFA sculpture student this exhibition will feature some of his recent most impressive sculptural and installation work. His work plays with space which is exciting and experimental. Chan's sculptures give a sense of melancholy and narrative.
Nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, an interest or remembrance of something from one's childhood. His installations of inflated and deflated balloons will project an essence of nostalgia and memory.

Brave New World

Amr Alfaleh, Kirsten Cunningham, Sophie Clague, Jessica Edwards, Julia Featherstone, Josh Harle, Laura Hill, Anne-Marie Hurtgen, James McDonald, Gail Reingold, Intan Tenacious, Miren Zarate and Freya Zinovieff

curated by Anne-Marie Hurtgen and Kirsten Cunningham

8 - 18 Feb


The exhibition Brave New Worlds investigates the impact of human intervention in the world, examining how it has shaped the present and imagining how it might shape the future.
With startling imagination, Brave New Worlds brings to life some of the terrifying and exhilarating possibilities long embraced by science fiction, reminding us, unflinchingly, that we are hurtling toward an uncertain future. In a collection of intertwining narratives, the works in Brave New Worlds offer a vision of our world to come that is politically charged without being pessimistic; it is a vision that ultimately celebrates the resilience and ingenuity of earth's inhabitants.

I Exist, I Insist

Alexander Poulet

22 Feb-3 Mar

As we pass through space and time, traces of our existence are left behind. What happens to emotions and passions, previously lived? Are they forgotten? Do we become a trace of the past? Or are these forgotten feelings rediscovered with each new generation? Just as I feel, somebody before me has felt.
I Exist, I Insist is an exhibition of reoccurring emotions and passions as inscribed in space and time upon the walls of the abandoned Queen Mary building of Sydney.

Site

Sophie Clague

6 March- 17 March

Exploring the schisms that open up when an idealised and finished notion of landscape imposed upon the (sur)reality of the eternally transient environment of urban development, of natural trauma, and of decay. As scale collapses and is rendered ambiguous, a third place existing at the point of friction between the ideal finished and the temporal unfinished is exposed, recorded and validated.

Because We Can

Tully Arnot, Alexandra Clapham, Lydia Dowman, Benjamin Holdstock, Bridie Moran, Stella Rosa McDonald, Zoe Robertson 

20 March -24 March

(KGMC 2011) 

My uncle once received an award from the City of Melbourne for the person who has most contributed to making Melbourne "a living city". He told an interviewer on radio that his father had gone down to Eastern Beach in Geelong every Sunday morning, regardless of the cold, to volunteer to teach the local kids to swim. When my uncle asked him why, he said: "because I can". My uncle said that since his father's passing a year ago, he had come to realise the importance of service to the community. My grandfather had actually died three years previous to the interview… When my mother asked my uncle why he had lied to the interviewer, he said: "because it made for a better story".

Mad Object

Claudia Bagnall, Rosanna Davies, Beth Dillon, Zachariah Fenn, Nick Fox, Sophie Harvey, Madeleine Lesjak-Atton, Joy Long, James McDonald, Kyle Morgan, Tamara Muzikants, Alex Ossington, Patrick Power, Spider Redgold, Harriet Robey, Samara Shehata, Jessica Stewart, Jacqueline Terrett, Lizzie Thomson, Olivia Tucker, and Miren Zarate 

27 March - 31 March

Is the object and art obsolete? Contemporary sculpture has morphed and extended, expanded, expended so far into interdisciplinary zones that the object could be said to be obsolete at worst, and an ironic quotation of empirical convention at best. This exhibition explores the object. Is all Art, deep down, and object?

Biographic Landscape

Annie Cohen

3 April- 14 April

Biographic Landscape explores the historical potential of objects and places to contain physical memory.

Environment & Spirituality: A Pilgrimage to the Kii Mountains of Japan

Aimee Sharpe, Cara Lopez, Edward Horne, Elizabeth Gervay, Gail Jackson, Jane Harris, Justin Ng, Nicola Wilson, Patrick Makey, Rachel Vosila, Samara Shehata, Tarek George

17 April- 21 April

A group exhibition featuring works created as a response to a Special Elective taught and organised by Louise Fowler-Smith. 

Generously supported by the Australian Government through a Short Term Mobility Grant. Also supported by Choya and Wakayama University

SS (2009-2011)

Tom Polo

24 April- 28 April

SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE
SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE SELF SABBO TAGE

An Island in Time: : Castellorizo in Photographs 1890 - 1948

Greek Festival of Sydney 2012

1 May- 12 May

Largely drawn from the recent publication An Island in Time by Nicholas Pappas and Nicholas Bogiatzis (Halstead Press, 2010), this exhibition documents a lost community through its people, its places and its politics. 

The Social Contract

Samuel Kirby, Sonia Tanner, Bill Hope, Jason Farrow and Liam Kane

15 May- 26 May

The Social Contract is an exhibition that focuses on the ways that "contracts" shape the world we live in, and our attitudes towards their manifestations. We investigate the position of The Social Contract in our contemporary society, and the current times of crisis in a globalised world. 

Acting Auditory

Lizzy Thomson, Samara Shehata, Beth Dillon, Nick Fox, Jessica Stewart, Tom Hetherington, Samuel James, Madeline Love, Josephine Skinner, Lena Obergfell, Emily Logan, Kristian Fuhrer, Zac Fenn, Kate Harris, Elizabeth Lester, Olivia Louella, Kieran Bryant and Ludwig El Haddad

Curated by James McDonald 

29 May- 2 June

Acting Auditory explores the links between performance and audio both of which have a definition outside of pure art in acting and music, the question is how deep does their relationship run. Music can and has been severed from the performer through the processes of recording or computer generation, however there remains a human aspect in the manipulation of sound. Does this act of manipulation retain and uphold ideas of performance? Performance, essentially movement, generates its own sounds. It reveals weight, speed, and materiality through contact with the world. If the two are severed what is the result and together how do they relate? Will one dominate the other or are they in harmonious relation working at different levels to create a whole experience. 

Surge

Lucy Knox

5 June- 16 June

Surge explores the emergence of early adulthood and the impending arrival of awareness and sexuality. Examining race and gender roles, Surge investigates Western culture's impact upon the notion of love between men and women and same sex relationships, blurring aggression and tender sexuality and the confrontation of the male gaze. 

meaning/ matter

David Greenhalgh and Lisa Sammut 

June 19- 30 June

Understood as a purely human concern, this enquiry into innate tendencies towards lived experience explores the illogical leap between the nature of matter and the act of attributing meaning to it. A product of countless close discussions undertaken during a 6 month stay in Berlin in 2011, meaning/matter will harness an open interaction between discipline and point of view. 

Glossolalia 

Skye Wagner and Wally McGregor 

3 July- 7 July

Blessed be the infinite form that illuminates the will of understanding.
Let us systemise our threads of meaning,
so that we might understand that each of us is a point in space;
a branch on the tree of binary space partitioning.
Let us be guided to a set of intersecting points
and seek orbital momentum in all aspects of being.
May computational geometry and linear algebra bless our perception.
May we come together and know we are together.
May we sufficiently compact mass
to form a super conductor,
making new light in another dimension.
Field of gravity give us your fundamental power,
illuminating time with relativity.
Lets us maintain the entanglement of our particles
and harmonise our entities interaction.
Know that to be a cosmological constant
one must oscillate with dynamic instability. 

Flotsam and Flux

Jack Condon and Rebecca Karageorgos

10 July- 21 July

Somewhere between light and dark is the truth of who and what we are. There is no sense in showing darkness without beauty or gorging ourselves on the beatific without the pain that is part of everyday reality. We're caught in a sphere of great familiarity and at the same time, a great distance. A sphere where the past and present have been removed and all that remains is a cutout pretending to be something more than the stillness of the moment. 

Science Fictional

Andrew Frost

24 July- 4 August

Science Fictional is an expanded short story incorporating telemetry from a 3.5 year deep-culture research mission. Six screens of image and four channels of sound were sorted and edited according to strict apophenic principals, eschewing strict temporal alignment while maximising emotional and cognitive response, here presented for your viewing pleasure. 

Oh, For the Love of Prints!

Prints Charming Collective: 

Rebecca Geddes, Helen Daley, Angela Butler, Anna Russell, Helen Wardle, Jess Bradford, Jessica Hoddkinson, Max Gosling, David Quoy, Kate Landau, Verity Wells and more!

7 August- 11 August

There is an established tradition in the history of art where artists form collectives and new ideas are born. In this spirit, the Prints Charming (PC) Collective has been set up to allow an environment for printmakers to experiment, collaborate and produce new art. The Collective is based in the backyard of a Newtown residence, where members have access to a printing press, lithography stones and silkscreen equipment. As a grassroots initiative, we endeavour to support an environment that produces high quality art in a studio that brings together the general community, students and professional artists.

"Oh, for the love of prints!" is a celebration of the diversity of printmaking and the collaborative environments that printmakers work in. Our first public show allows others to get involved and an opportunity to showcase a few of the styles mediums and approaches to print from the members of The Prints Charming Collective.

Half a Desk

14 August- 18 August

Half a Desk supported by the SRC @ COFA in response to reduced studio space for students throughout the COFA Building Project .

Satellite Garden

Dylan Quirk

21 August- 25 August

Satellite Garden explores fictitious elements of a modernist wasteland. While the aggregation of interrelated earth objects give meaning to the physical parameters of form, speculative elements are realised when filtered through narrative, as a celebration of our current spacetime coordinates.

Leeches and Beaches

Sophie Harvey, Kyle Morgan, James McDonald, Kyle Christie, Maddie Lesjak-Atton, Miren Zirante, Tamara Muzikants, Harriet Robey, Pops Bagnall, Patrick Power, Olivia Louella, Lizzie Thomson, Joy Long, Jackie Terrett, Kieran Bryant, Lachlan Herd, Zach Fenn, Phillip Roberts, Rosanna Davies, Olivia Rosebery, Cecilia White, Liz Lester 

28 August- 1 September

During the first week of May, 2nd and 3rd year Sculpture Performance and Installation majors travelled to UNSW's Smith's Lake Research station for a week of intensive art practice. The exhibition will explore a rich relationship between each artists existing practices and the inspiration of the surrounding natural and varied environment of Smith's Lake.

Showcasing artworks that include a non-premeditated range of mediums that were experimented with during the weeks long experience. In particular found organic and man made objects, natural flora and fauna and the landscape which the surrounds the site. 

Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship for Emerging Artists 

4 September- 15 September

Tim Olsen Drawing Prize 2012

18 September- 22 September

The Tim Olsen Drawing Prize is a collaborative initiative between the Tim Olsen Gallery and the Department of Drawing and Painting at COFA. With the intention of encouraging excellence in drawing the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, now in its twelfth year, and the accompanying exhibition are important events in the College and School of Art calendar. The prize will be announced on opening night. 

This Land of No Horizon

Adam Gibson

25 September- 29 September

Australia is so big, the horizon could almost be said to be "never ending"; as if it is only the limits of our own vision that creates an ending, whereas in reality, the land stretches on (seemingly) forever. There is mystery in that endlessness. 

Play

Squiggle Collective

2 October- 6 October

A world of endless possibilities are within arms reach and as we all know, it's more fun with friends. So let's come together and celebrate the marvellous world of collaboration with the Squiggle Collective. 

networked://

Justin Balmain

9 October- 13 October

My examination of the interrelationships between physical and virtual social models have resulted in sculptural works that move between concrete and virtual form, sometimes blurring the lines between the two. Engaging in online social networks and offline subcultures, I create works that rely both on physical outcomes, and others that remain within digital space. 

Kudos Emerging Artist & Designer Award 2012

16 October- 20 October

Now in its 11th year, the Kudos Award seeks to recognise, nurture and support innovation and excellence across all disciplines at the UNSW College of Fine Arts. The Annual Award is judged by an external panel, this year made up of Ron and George Adams (MOP and Pom Pom Gallery Directors), Lucy Simpson (Indigenous Designer, Creator of Gaawaa Miyay), and Nick Garner (Director and Producer of Dasplatforms). 

The major prize is $1,500 from Arc @ COFA and runner up prizes for Highly Commended works include donations from Matisse Derivan, Artist Profile, Art Almanac, Performance Space, MCA, Eckersley's, dasSuperpaper and Arc@COFA 

Exile's Lament

Siân McIntyre 

23 October- 3 November

Signs and songs of a homeland lost but not yet forgotten will invade the white walled Kudos Gallery space, with 138.6 square meters of turf laying the foundation for an enquiry into site, place, history and value. 

Artifact Cartoons

Samuel James

6 November- 10 November

Artifact Cartoons is a collection of research-animation videos which explore hybrid mechanisms of perception. Through a combination of morphic resonance and accidental encounters, video composition transfers new, animistic phenomena. As we occupy the world it is seen through our interference. Video as a re-animator of the inanimate and simultaneously a displacement of seeing.

Palimpsest 

Donna Eddie, Mollie Rice, Christine Wiltshier, Isabelle White, Alex Moore, Nicola Finlay-Jones, Katie Cave, Hannah Carroll Harris, Bec Culican, Angela Tao, Teresa Yang, Michelle Lo 

13 November- 17 November

Applying a palimpsest of notions and interpretations, the loose thread collective reveal art works which express unique dialogues between the artist and their medium. 

Landscape Projections

Anna Russell, Angela Hayson, Brooke Thompson, Rebecca Geddes, Yana Myronenko, Viruch Pikhuntod

20 November- 23 November

A collection of works by six artists where the landscape has acted as the muse. Ranging from closely observed localities and sensations of place through to interior landscapes relating to memory and culture. 

Transformation and Renewal

Elizabeth Gervay

27 November- 1 December

One Thing You Lack

Aaron Moore

4 December- 8 December

What if the sale of any one of the items on this card could save a child's life? Are we obligated to sell it?
34-year-old artist and international aid worker, Aaron Moore's latest exhibition aims to put the teachings of Jesus Christ and moral philosopher and atheist, Peter Singer, to the test, by literally selling every item he owns and giving it to the poor. Come along and perhaps you might make a purchase that could quite literally save a life.