Emma Stuart’s paintings in After Arrernte are not the archetypal landscape vistas commonly associated with Central Australian landscape art. Intimately cropped, they instead explore the small clusters of trees off the beaten track, the silent beauty ‘hidden’ in Arrernte country’s tributaries and riverbed banks, in the Clay pans and Emily, Honeymoon and Simpsons Gaps.
These desert-scapes explore the transition between day and night, twilight and dawn, a time that reflects a shift in energy and consciousness. They aim to capture the liminal shift between light and shade, between focal points and distorted peripheries, between the revealed and the hidden.
In response to the announcement earlier this year that the Melbourne Art Fair will not take place in 2016 an alliance of leading Melbourne and Sydney galleries have initiated a new art event to be held during Melbourne Art Week this August titled 602.
With the support of the City of Melbourne, Art Month, Art Money & Work Club this alliance of galleries will be exhibiting in a former electricity substation at 602 Little Bourke Street from Thursday the 17th to Sunday the 21st of August.
The energy of 602 finds its roots in the rough and tumble Berlin style of creative collaboration, nine sophisticated art galleries exhibiting in the basement of a raw industrial space promises a fresh urban experience for collectors, curators and audiences interested in the visual arts in Australia.
Artists to be exhibited by Jacob Hoerner Galleries
Rius Carson
Joel Cornell
Mike Portley
Andrew Sibley
Jewels Stevens
Participating galleries include
Charles Nodrum Gallery (Melbourne)
Gallerysmith (Melbourne)
Jacob Hoerner Galleries (Melbourne)
Martin Browne Contemporary (Sydney)
M Contemporary (Sydney)
Michael Reid (Berlin + Sydney)
Olsen Irwin (Sydney)
Scott Livesey Galleries (Melbourne)
Watters Gallery (Sydney)
Viewing Times
Preview
12-6pm Wednesday August 17
12-6pm Thursday August 18
Vernissage
6-9pm Thursday August 18
Fair Hours
12-8pm Friday August 19
10-6pm Saturday August 20
10-5pm Sunday August 21
www.602melbourne.com.au
Retrospect is an exhibition of a selected works by Jewels Stevens, a combination of new and older works shown in a way that recontextualises the way these paintings have previously been viewed. Through this retrospective approach to the way these works are seen new associations are created. Individually they oscillate between works that are vivid, vivacious reflections of Stevens’ persona, while in other works we see cooler parts of her palette and approach to painting come to the fore. These visual manifestations are windows to her inner world and illuminate Stevens’ ability to capture transcendental light through her luxurious use of colour, shape and form.
Gillian Warden puts her love of paint at the centre of her practice. Over the past few years she has been exploring a ‘formless’ approach to paining. Textures are layered and scraped, folded and poured, and colours emerge from the painting itself. The works that she creates may be years in the making. They become a story of surface, transformed and in flux, exuding an energy that continues to change them long after her own work with them is finished. Qualities and forces of the natural world abound in Warden’s work, but there is no literality here. These are works that invite you to immerse in feeling states. States that are shifting, emergent, hidden and hinted. States that wildly, wonderfully, offer you everything. The quality of engagement that the works inspire is visceral and transformative. These are worlds we can enter into and be changed by.
