Curated by Victoria Bennett and Clare Rae.
Jessie Angwin, Emilie Zoey Baker, Laura Castagnini, Brown Council, Madeleine Donovan, Rachel Fuller, Tamsin Green, Anna Greer, Mariam Haji, Kiera Brew Kurec, Jo Latham, Parachutes for Ladies, Hannah Raisin, Dunja Rmandic, Jessie Scott, Daine Singer, Nella Themelios
About the artist/s:
Victoria Bennett and Clare Rae first met at art school and haven’t stopped talking since. They’ve curated a number of shows together, most notably the Suffragette City program for This Is Not Art in 2009. As well as their ongoing curatorial collaboration, Vic and Clare make artworks that explore contemporary feminism. Clare works in photography and video to interrogate traditional notions of femininity, whilst Victoria uses any medium possible to make feminism fashionable.
Jessie Angwin is a visual artist and writer whose recent work in video, text, craft and performance is inspired by cataclysmic catalysts in her real life. Her work has been shown consistently in Melbourne over the past decade and has also been included in national and international exhibitions and private collections. In 2008 she undertook a residency in New Zealand and in 2009 enjoyed a two-night stay in the Plastics ward of the Alfred Hospital, which inspired the work for this project. Jessie is currently a studio Artist-In-Residence at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts.
Poet and spoken word performer Emilie Zoey Baker is the winner of the 2006 Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup and multi-slam champion. She just toured North America in 2009 following an invitation to perform at Montréal’s Festival Voix d’Amériques (The festival of American Voice.) She also performed and featured at New York’s regular Slam club, The Bowery, and featured at The Green Mill in Chicago with the father of Slam himself, Marc Smith.
Emilie also featured last year at the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Newcastle Young Writers Festival and at Melbourne’s famed La Mama Theatre as part of their exploration series. Emilie’s first collection of poetry, She wore the sky on her shoulders, was published in 2003 by Hit and Miss Press. Her poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, in journals such as Page Seventeen, Going Down Swinging, Cordite, Schriftstelle (Germany) and Short Fuse (US), and was featured on the US spoken word podcast Indefeed.
Laura Castagnini is a Melbourne based curator currently writing a thesis about contemporary feminist art. She recently curated a major exhibition entitled Re/Gendered at Platform Artist Group Inc. for 2010 Midsumma, following a year-long Curator-in-Residence position at Platform throughout 2009. In 2008 she co-initiated and managed the artist run space, O Projects, and was awarded a Quarterbred artist grant and residency in Sydney. Laura is also a practising artist; she holds a Bachelor of Visual Art (Painting) from Monash University and has exhibited in Australia, Italy and Japan. She is a recent recipient of an Australia Council Skills and Development Grant, which will fund an internship at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Centre at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2010.
Brown Council is a Sydney based video/performance art collaboration consisting of four artists: Fran Barrett, Kelly Doley, Kate Blackmore and Diana Smith. Their practice explores the intersections between visual culture, performance art and theatre. Their work reclaims, embodies and tears-apart images, sounds and actions from the screen, popular culture and theatre/art history to interrogate how it is that we should ‘perform’. Brown Council formed at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney in 2005 where each member was respectively studying. Selected solo exhibitions and performances include Big Show, Locksmith, Sydney (2009), Runaway, Chalk Horse, Sydney (2009), Milkshake, Kings ARI, Melbourne (2008). Selected group exhibitions include What I Think About When I Think About Dancing, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Campbelltown (2009) OK Video Comedy, International Video Festival, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia, (2009); The Death Project, Parramatta Artist Studios (2009), Athens Video Art Festival, Athens, Greece, (2008); Girl Parade, Australian Centre for Contemporary Photography, Sydney, (2007). Awards and residencies include: Bundanon Trust, Bundanon and Hot House Theatre, Albury (2010); Red Gate Gallery Studio Residency, Beijing, China (2009); Gunnery Studio Program, Artspace (2008); Best Theatre Production Award for Six Minute Soul Mate, Adelaide Fringe Festival; and finalists in the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship, Artspace, Sydney (2009).
Madeleine Donovan (now based in NSW) studied in Photomedia at the Canberra School of Art, developed a healthy curiosity of the world of performance in the Melbourne Womens Circus, and continues to be inspired by hyper-real realities of art and film. Blending these interests, Madeleine’s work engages with the juxtaposition of femininity and physical strength of the strong woman, drawing on vaudeville photographs of the late 1800’s.
Rachel Fuller is a Sydney-based artist and writer. Her art practice primarily utilises video, photography and text to investigate mythologies surrounding gender and Australian identity.
Fuller graduated from the Sydney College of the Arts in 2007 with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours). Fuller has exhibited widely throughout Australia including group and solo exhibitions at The Australian Centre of Photography, Firstdraft, Chalk Horse, Kings ARI and mssr. As a writer, Fuller has been commissioned to write a number of catalogue essays and has also published various articles in art-based publications such as runway and Locksmith Project.
In 2007/08 Fuller was a recipient of the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Sculpture. During this time Fuller undertook an exchange at UdK in Berlin, Germany as part of her Honours degree and worked at Smack Mellon and The Gowanus Studio Space, two non-profit, contemporary art spaces in New York City, USA. In 2009, Fuller returned to New York to assist the artist Tracey Moffatt. Fuller is currently a co-director of Locksmith Project Space, an artist-run-initiative located in Redfern, Sydney. Fuller also co-curates the biannual artist publication, Locksmith Project.
Tamsin Green is a Melbourne based artist working primarily in film, video, and photography. She has recently completed her MFA at Monash University. Tamsin is a writer and occasional curator who is involved in Kings ARI and Light Projects.
Anna Greer is a journalist, researcher and online producer. She was the founding editor of online feminist magazine but now spends a lot of her time writing about political and social justice issues for various online publications. Her writing has also appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Yen Magazine, Peppermint, The Diplomat, The Good Weekend and others. She holds degrees in Journalism and International Studies from the University of Technology, Sydney and has a day job as a researcher for the Financial Times.
Mariam Haji was born and raised in Bahrain. She gained a Diploma in Art and Design at Dundee College, Scotland and later completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing) at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Since the completion of her degree, Mariam has been based in Melbourne where she has been sponsored to work as a Middle East Project Manager for Metasenta Projects with its affiliated universities, RMIT and the London School of Art, under Dr. Irene Barberis. She was also recently sponsored to work with Art Workers Alliance as a Project Officer for the Brisbane Arc Biennial 09.
Mariam is a fine artist who works with ideas of abjection, disability, anatomy and the female. The works produced vary from drawing, painting, sound, installation, public art, performance and video art. Aside from project management she regularly works as a duo with fine artist Meri Heitala, creating spontaneous workshops, performances and recycled art works. This collective is against a gallery context of art and many projects have been spontaneously exhibited in the streets of Melbourne, and later transferred to Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Helsinki, Finland. Their most recent work was a display of a frozen placenta from ‘Army of Mariam’ in the streets of Finland in January 2009.
Kiera Brew Kurec completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2007, after which she spent 6 months living and exhibiting in Berlin. She has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout Australia and overseas, including TCB art inc (Melbourne), Victoria Park Gallery (Melbourne), Seventh (Melbourne), K salon (Berlin), Takt Gallery and residency (Berlin) and Metro Arts (Brisbane) as part of Box Copy’s en suite program. She has also participated in group shows at various Melbourne galleries and ARIs as well as international film/video festivals. Brew Kurec is currently undertaking honours at the VCA.
Jo Latham reads and writes, collects dead flowers and doesn’t ever want to grow up.
Jessica Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the Parachutes for Ladies (PfL) make work that sits at the nexus of art, dance and performance. Utilising the freedom of an interdisciplinary practice Jessica Olivieri and Hayley Forward with the PfL investigate modes of territorialisation within a broader exploration into vulnerability, recently pre-occupied with the By-stander effect and other complex crowd phenomena. Recent projects have been shown at the Optica Festival in Spain, France and Germany, Inflight in Tasmania and Artspace in Sydney as part of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship. With support from Australia Council for the Arts Theatre Board, NAVA and Next Wave’s Kickstart program upcoming projects will be shown at the 2010 Next Wave Festival, Tiny Stadiums and GRANTPIRRIE. 2010 residencies include Future Local Association Group at Bundanon, Fraser Studios, TAPR Space in Melbourne, and at the Artspace Gunnery studios.
Since completing a BA in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts Hannah Raisin has exhibited in a number of group and solo shows throughout Australia, including: RAISIN+WELLS, Gippsland Regional Gallery, Sale (2009); Grievous Charm, Rear View Gallery, Collingwood (2009); The More You Ignore Me the Closer I Get, UQ Museum of Art, Brisbane (2009); Suffragette City, This Is Not Art Festival, Newcastle (2009); Useful Tips for Anxious Gardeners, Library Space, North Fitzroy (2009); Post, Place Gallery Richmond (2009); Luscious Grass, Library Space, North Fitzroy (2009); Sugar Mummaz Pt2 Platform, Melbourne (Midsumma Festival 2009); Eat My Spider ,TCB art inc., Melbourne (2008); Do It, Hans Ulrich Obrist Collaboration, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2007); Wallara, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2007); Somewhere to Run, Loop Bar, Melbourne (2007); Do You Like me? Kings ARI, Melbourne (2007); Provisional Investigations, George Patton Gallery, Melbourne (2007); The Miraculous Mandarin, Bella Bartoc Animation, Melbourne Town Hall (2005). Recent publications include ‘Torture the Women’ by Phip Murray in Photofile, Edition 88, 2009.
Raisin was a 2009 Next Wave Kickstart Participant, Wallara Travelling Scholarship Finalist, received the VCA Proud 2nd Year Art Award and is a board member of Rear View Gallery.
Dunja Rmandic, a Melbourne-based curator and writer, graduated with a Masters of Curatorship at the University of Melbourne in 2007. She has worked in a number of public and private galleries, produced an arts program for SYN FM, and is currently a committee member of KINGS ARI.
Jessie Scott has been making videos since she walked into the wrong installation class in early 2003 and decided not to correct her error. Hesitant to show work in actual galleries as a general rule, she nonetheless manages to inveigle herself into curated feminist art shows on a semi-regular basis. As such, her work centres on the most banal but persistent problems of womanhood in a liberal, materialist culture: makeup, clothing, lipstick, body and hair (managing to utterly spoil any enjoyment she previously derived from said pursuits in the process). Vacillating between empathy and scorn, comedy and tragedy, Scott’s work demonstrates the difficulty of living by your principles when you are a social animal programmed to run with the pack. Beyond wondering what happened to feminism, Jessie is a founding member of Tape Projects, with who she has been producing and collaborating on events and publications since 2007. She completed an Australia Council funded internship with Wholphin in San Francisco in 2009 and hopes one day to really make a go of it.
Daine Singer is an independent curator and Associate Curator at Experimenta where she is part of the curatorium for the 2010 media arts biennial, Experimenta Utopia Now (2010). Recent projects include curating Draw the Line: the Architecture of Lab (NGV 2009) and Dream Weavers (Cast Gallery 2010). Previously Daine was Gallery Manager at Anna Schwartz Gallery and prior to that she was Curator of Melbourne’s Chinese Museum.
Nella Themelios is a writer and curator and currently holds the position of Coordinating Curator at Craft Victoria. She has written a number of catalogue essays and has contributed to various non-refereed arts publications including Object Magazine, Un Magazine and Eyeline. Recent curatorial projects include Shoe Show (2009); Chicks on Speed: Viva La Craft! (2009) and Give/Take (2009). She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Cultural Studies) and a Graduate Certificate (Art History) from the University of Melbourne. She is currently completing a Masters in Curatorship at the same institution.
