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Analogue art in a digital world
RMIT Gallery
7 December 2018 - 19 January 2019
How do artists find new content in digital media? How has technology altered the nature of analogue art practices? Analogue art in a digital world presents a survey of contemporary artists who use the analogue practices of painting and drawing to create artworks that engage with or are influenced by digital visual culture.
The exhibition will explore how artists are finding new content in digital media and how technology has altered the nature of analogue art practices.
Language shapes the way we think and the dominant visual medium influences the way we see the world. Many contemporary artists use digital technology in the process of creating artworks. Digital photography, Photoshop, and Google images are standard tools for painters. The sketch book has been replaced by a desktop folder.
In addition to practical uses of technology, digital aesthetics have crept into analogue painting. The invention of photography had a profound impact on painting in the nineteenth century and now digital technology has reinvigorated analogue traditions of art making, pushing representational painting and drawing in fascinating new directions.
Curators: Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd.
Artists: Monika Behrens, Natasha Bieniek, Chris Bond, Andrew Browne, Magda Cebokli, Simon Finn, Juan Ford, Stephen Haley, Michelle Hamer, Kate Just, Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Amanda Marburg, Viv Miller, Jan Nelson, Becc Ország, David Ralph, Datsun Tran, Darren Wardle, Alice Wormald.
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Why Listen to Plants? | Liquid Architecture X Design Hub
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
21 November - 7 December 2018
Why Listen to Plants? was a program of talks, workshops and performances presented by Liquid Architecture and Design Hub Gallery.
Plants know worlds, they contain worlds and they make worlds
Plants exist within plurality; they are part of, and themselves contain, many worlds. In the course of survival in its environment, a plant cultivates relationships with various non-human others with whom it shares the earth and air. Plants communicate through these interspecies proxies, passing messages through pollen, bacteria, and along underground filaments of vast mycelial networks. Less competitive than they are collaborative, these interspecies co-operations position plant partners as important co-creators of vegetal life - and suggest that mutual aid may be as much a condition of material existence as mutual struggle.
In this program of experimental plant-listening, we attempted to model the best features of these interspecies entanglements (reciprocity, mutualism, collective intelligence) while leaving behind the worst (co-dependency, parasitism). Through talks, screenings, workshops, performances, reading groups and residencies, we explored plants as sites of collective organisation, and their collaborators microbes, fungi and bees as social protagonists. With so much to say, these super-organisms suggest expanded definitions of both non-human subjectivity, and the listening – discursive, decentred, yet embodied – necessary to tune into them.
Artists:
Adrian Dyer & Scarlett Howard (RMIT), Aidyn Mouradov, Alicia Frankovich (NZ/DE), Amaara Raheem, Ann Lawrie (RMIT), Anthony Magen, Arini Byng, Jess Gall + Rebecca Jensen, Autumn Royal + Ela Stiles, Auntry Annette Xiberras, Ben Byrne, Benjamin Woods, Charlie Sofo, Danni Zuvela, Damien Nicholson, Debris Facility, Diego Bonetto, Djirri Djirri Dance Group, DJ Slime, Dylan Martorell, Floris Vanhoof (BE), Geoff Robinson, Gian Manik, Hannah Hallam Eames (NZ), Holly Childs (NZ/NL) + Gediminas Zygus (LI), Ivey Wawn (with Amaara Raheema, Arini Byng, Evan Loxton, Jimmy Nuttall, Lucien Alperstein, Megan Payne and Shota Matsumura), Jenna Sutela (FIN), Justin Clemens, Kalle Hamm (FIN), Katie West, Kelp D/J + Benjamin Hancock, Kirsten Bradley + Nick Ritar, Lz Dunn, Madeleine Mills, Magic Steven, Makiko Yamamoto (JP/AU), Maria Chavez (US/PE), Marjolijn Dijkman + Toril Johannessen (NED/NOR), Michael Marder (US), Monica Gagliano (IT/AU), Nathan Gray, Nic Dowse, Radha Labia, Scale Free Network (Briony Barr + Gregory Crocetti), Scott Mitchell (RMIT), Tarquin Manek + Ying-li Hooi, Tyson Campbell (NZ/AU), Walon Green (USA), Wet Kiss, Zheng Bo (HK)
Why Listen to Plants? was curated by Danni Zuvela, co-presented by Liquid Architecture and RMIT Design Hub Gallery.
Liquid Architecture: Danni Zuvela, Joel Stern, Georgia Hutchison, Debris Facility
RMIT Design Hub Gallery: Kate Rhodes, Nella Themelios, Erik North, Tim McLeod, Layla Cluer, Michaela Bear, Ari Sharp, Simon Maisch, Gavin Bell, Jessica Wood, Robert Jordan, Síofra Lyons, Ian Bunyi, Luke Pringapas
Liquid Architecture is supported by City of Melbourne, City of Yarra, Creative Victoria, and the Australia Council for the Arts.
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Dynamics of Air
RMIT Gallery
14 September - 17 November 2018
How do designers, artists, scientists and researchers work with an intangible atmospheric medium such as air? Explore it, alter it, adjust it, feel it, smell it, walk through it, languish in it?
This highly innovative exhibition showcases design and creative practice research, capturing the beauty, dynamics and sensuality of air in our built environment and its critical role in designing for a zero carbon future.
Bringing together leading local and international practicing designers, artists, architects, researchers and students, Dynamics of Air explores radical innovations for creative sustainability in design and the built environment.
Through a stunning survey of commissioned and current projects, this exhibition will engage with the interface of air, lived space and architecture. Dynamics of Air will explore themes of aesthetics and representation, experiential environments and atmospheres, inflatable structures, architectural surface and microturbulence.
Guest curators: Dr Malte Wagenfeld, RMIT [with Prof Jane Burry, Swinburne Uni].
Artists – Transsolar: Thomas Auer (Germany); Breathe Earth Collective: Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König (Austria); Friedrich von Borries (Germany); CITA: Phil Ayres (England), Danica Pistekova (Slovakia), Maria Teudt (Denmark), Petras Vestartas (Lithuania); Chris Cottrell (New Zealand); Edith Kollath (Germany); Mikael Mikael (Germany); Philippe Rahm Architects (France / Switzerland); Enric Ruiz-Geli (Spain); Little Wonder: Gyungju Chyon (Korea), John Sadar (Canada); From Australia: Jane Burry, Helen Dilkes, Leslie Eastman, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Mehrnoush Latifi, Phred Petersen, Daniel Prohasky, Cameron Robbins, Malte Wagenfeld, Simon Watkins.
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NEW AGENCY: OWNING YOUR FUTURE
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
28 August - 21 September 2018
Hello. Welcome to New Agency: Owning Your Future, a research platform by Sibling Architecture that investigated the future of dwelling through the lens of Australia’s ageing population.
Who do you wish to grow old with? Will your house outlive you? What kind of ancestor do you want to be? What will your future housing look like?
Over four weeks, New Agency transformed Design Hub Gallery into a live research platform; gathering data, public conversations, design speculation and feedback about what constitutes home ownership during the later stages of life. As the retirement of Australians relies upon the asset of the family home (with superannuation), and as home ownership is becoming an impossibility for a huge swathe of younger Australians, how does this influence future models of living for the elderly, including financing aged care, retirement and intergenerational wealth? What can we learn from upwardly mobile grey nomads, multi-generational living or enclaves of like-minded people? A dataset of trends, interviews and a troika of interactive activity chambers – for reading, listening and talking – provoked thinking around these topical questions.
Curated and Designed by Sibling Architecture.
Research by Sibling Architecture for this exhibition was supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria’s Creators Fund.
WORKAROUND – Women Design Action
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
24 July - 10 August 2018
WORKAROUND engaged with a movement of women who are focused on advocacy and activism within an expanded field of architecture. Each of these practitioners works towards positive change in the built environment and its surrounding cultures. Motivated by the increasing urgency of the challenges we all now face – environmental, social and professional – these women work around existing conventions, systems and structures.
Such practitioners share some common characteristics. They demonstrate agency, strategic opportunism and values-based leadership. Also, they can be defined by what they are not – they are not conventional practitioners, and they are (generally) not producing objects or working within the traditional structure of the design office. These practitioners are agile and each has developed workarounds to critically negotiate and rethink systemic limitations; circumventing entrenched professional hierarchies; managing working life and family demands, and extending the bounds of architecture and design.
Within the diverse practices of these women, gender and feminist politics play varying roles: sometimes a direct and explicit driver, sometimes an implicit and understated context.
WORKAROUND was an online broadcast and a program of live events. Fourteen Australian practitioners each presented a critique, conversation, interview, workshop or performance that articulated their strategies and workarounds and reflected on their activist practice. Each of the episodes could be watched in real time as it occurred from the set at RMIT Design Hub Gallery, or viewed online via the Design Hub Gallery website.
For WORKAROUND, our curatorial intention was clear – it was to identify, assemble, create a platform for, and find new connections between a burgeoning movement of women focused on advocacy and activism within an expanded field of architecture. These fourteen broadcast episodes brought to light ways of working within, without and beside architecture as it has previously been conceived. WORKAROUND was our opportunity to learn how this extraordinary group of women articulate their particular workarounds – both personal and professional – that are necessary and urgent to effect change.
Practitioners:
Simona Castricum; Esther Charlesworth; Pippa Dickson; Pia Ednie-Brown; Harriet Edquist; Mary Featherston; Guest, Riggs (Kate Riggs + Stephanie Guest); Amy Learmonth; Helen Norrie; OoPLA (Tania Davidge + Christine Phillips); Parlour; Sam Spurr; SueAnne Ware and XYX Lab, Monash University (led by Director Dr Nicole Kalms and the combined strengths of core members – Dr Gene Bawden, Dr Pamela Salen, Allison Edwards, Hannah Korsmeyer and Zoe Condliffe).
Curatorium:
Kate Rhodes and Fleur Watson (RMIT University), Naomi Stead (Monash University)
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My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid
RMIT Gallery
29 June - 18 August 2018
My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid explores our enduring fascination with the merging of the human and animal, and coincides with the 200th anniversary year of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Shelley’s seminal monster novel explores life and death and reanimating flesh. It is also the story of a hybrid outcast, for Frankenstein’s creature was made as a new species, from a combination of both human and animal parts.
Mythology and fiction have long entertained the fantasy of the animal and human fused into one being, and the metaphorical hybrid is embedded in mythology and folklore. The hybrids that appear in art can be whimsical, alluring, and confrontational. While hybrids shock and jolt with their appearance, they also offer an unsettling recognition of the disquieting unease we all feel about our place in the world.
Hybrids are the ultimate metaphor for the outsider. Their very existence is a political act, an affront. Like monsters of old, they are harbingers of a future we may not like, but are intent on creating through each twist and tweak of our species through biotechnology.
Our fear of hybrids stems from the historic view that such creatures are unnatural and monstrous and should not exist, and this revulsion extended to Frankenstein’s ‘hideous creature’ manufactured by science.
The desire to preserve distinct categories for animals and humans can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Humanity’s perceived uniqueness and dominance over the natural world was defined by its separation from the animal, and still lingers. Witness our current obsession with body hair removal.
The trouble with hybrids is that they disturb our moral compass, reminding us that we are animals, and animals are like us. This is the power of the hybrid creature. When we look into its human eyes, we see ourselves looking back from the animal body we deny we inhabit.
Curator: Evelyn Tsitas
Artists: Rose Agnew, Jane Alexander, Janet Beckhouse, Peter Booth, Jazmina Cininas, Kate Clark, Catherine Clover, Beth Croce, Julia deVille, Heri Dono, Peter Ellis, Moira Finucane & Shinjuku Thief, Rona Green, Ai Hasegawa, Rayner Hoff, Sam Jinks, Deborah Kelly, Bharti Kher, Deborah Klein, Oleg Kulik, Sam Leach, Norman Lindsay, Sidney Nolan, Eko Nugroho, Kira O’Reilly & Jennifer Willet, Patricia Piccinini, Geoffrey Ricardo, Lisa Roet, Mithu Sen, Maja Smrekar & Manuel Vason, Ronnie van Hout, (((20hz)))
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Chaos & Order – 120 years of collecting at RMIT
RMIT Gallery
13 April - 19 June 2018
Chaos & Order celebrates over 80 Australian and international artists in an ambitious survey of the RMIT Art Collection.
A riot of painting, sculpture, photography, sound and new media, the exhibition embraces the contradictions inherent in public art collections. How does one reconcile the academic style of Rupert Bunny with the minimalism of Robert Hunter, or the hyperrealism of Sam Jinks, without retreating to historical narrative?
Public collections can be paradoxical beasts. They strive to adhere to strict criteria (chronology, style or taxonomy; art history, theory and criticism) or be encyclopaedic in their holdings, but are as frequently defined by what they have failed to acquire. Just as often, the curiosities, outsiders and novelties that fall outside the stated ambit of a collection prove to be its great successes: serendipity uncovers many hidden treasures. Chaos underlies the myth of order.
Besides being a showcase for the work of alumni and staff, who rank among the most highly-regarded artists the country has produced, the intended purpose of the RMIT art collection is to tell the story of the university, its ideals and aspirations.
Chaos & Order takes this broad remit, and demonstrates the impossibility of a definitive narrative that accurately traces the evolution of artistic style, thought and technique across decades and generations. Instead, it suggests visual, poetic, thematic, and emotional relationships between works created over the past 100 years, and dispenses with the restrictive dictates of historical, technical or stylistic categories.
Chaos & Order is a collaboration between RMIT Gallery and the RMIT School of Art MA Arts Management program.
Curator: Jon Buckingham
Curatorial assistants [RMIT MA Arts Management]: Ellie Collins, Adelaide Gandrille, Marybel Schwartz, Valerie Sim, Sophie Weston
Artists:
Steve Stelios Adam, Tate Adams, Khadim Ali, Rick Amor, Howard Arkley, Ali Baba Awrang, George Baldessin, Ros Bandt, Stephen Benwell, Chris Bond, Natalie Bookchin, Peter Booth, Polly Borland, John Brack, Godwin Bradbeer, Philip Brophy, Rupert Bunny, Penny Byrne, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Peter Clarke, Jock Clutterbuck, Michael Cook, Timothy Cook, Noel Counihan, Len Crawford, Daniel Crooks, Augustine Dall’Ava, Craig Easton, Mark Edgoose, Lindsay Edward, Sarah Edwards, Henning Eichinger, Nina Ellis, Peter Ellis, Neil Emmerson, Emily Floyd, Juan Ford, Hayden Fowler, Nigel Frayne, Len French, Sally Gabori, Rosalie Gascoigne, Euan Gray, Nathan Gray, Robert Grieve, Helga Groves, Stephen Haley, Bill Henson, Petr Herel, Dale Hickey, Clare Humphries, Robert Hunter, Robert Jacks, Sam Jinks, George Johnson, Alan Johnston, Vincas Jomantas, Roger Kemp, Grahame King, Inge King, Robin Kingston, Juz Kitson, Andrew Last, Sam Leach, Grace Lillian Lee, Lindy Lee, Xiao Xian Liu, Jenny Loft, George Matoulas, Helen Maudsley, Clement Meadmore, Karen Mills, Hisaharu Motoda, Nick Mourtzakis, Albert Namatjira, Anne Newmarch, Trevor Nickolls, John Olsen, Jill Orr, Claude Pannka, Polixeni Papapetrou, Mike Parr, Susan Philipsz, Anthony Pryor, Douglas Quin, Clare Rae, Hugh Ramsay, Norma Redpath, Reko Rennie, Klaus Rinke, Kate Rohde, Gareth Sansom, Yhonnie Scarce, Marlene Scerri, Barry Schache, Greg Semu, Jan Senbergs, Wolfgang Sievers, Jeffrey Smart, Bruce Slatter, Studio of Domenico Brucciani, Wilma Tabacco, Antoni Tapies, David Thomas, Christian Thompson, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Darren Wardle, Chris Watson, Charles Wheeler, Fred Williams, Ah Xian, Yirawala
Experimental Jetset – Superstructure
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
15 March - 4 May 2018
Exclusively curated and designed for Australian audiences, Experimental Jetset – Superstructure was the first major retrospective of the work of globally renowned graphic design studio Experimental Jetset.
A free exhibition, Experimental Jetset – Superstructure was shown in association with the NGV and Melbourne Art Book Fair at RMIT Design Hub Gallery. Experimental Jetset was the keynote presenters at the Melbourne Art Book Fair, opening Melbourne Design Week.
For Superstructure, Experimental Jetset identified key sub-cultural movements that had inspired their practice. These moments in time would be layered with existing and newly-created works including film, collage, posters, prints and installations.
The exhibition was conceived as a journey through four quarters of an imaginary city representing four conditions: The Constructivist City, The Situationist City, The Provotarian City and the Post-Punk City.
The exhibition placed Experimental Jetset and their ideas-driven and socially-engaged practice within a historical continuum.
As they explained: ‘Invited by RMIT Design Hub Gallery and the NGV to put together a retrospective show on the topic of our own work, we decided to somewhat broaden the theme, and seize this opportunity to turn the exhibition into a personal research project – a chance to look deeper into some of the themes that we find relevant to our own practice’.
In addition, a sequence of newspapers would be published in collaboration with nine Melbourne-based graphic designers to connect the ideas within the show to the local context. The themes explored in the newspapers would also form the basis for a program of public events, giving visitors critical insight into graphic design discourse today. The nine practitioners were: Paul Marcus Fuog, Stuart Geddes, Jenny Grigg, Lisa Grocott, Hope Lumsden-Barry, Warren Taylor, Ziga Testen, Michaela Webb and Beaziyt Worcou.
Experimental Jetset is an Amsterdam-based graphic design studio founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen. Focusing on printed matter and site-specific installations, EJ has worked on projects for a wide variety of institutes, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Dutch Post Group, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Experimental Jetset taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) between 2000 and 2013, and are currently tutors at Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem).
In 2007, a substantial selection of work by Experimental Jetset was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Other institutes that have collected EJ material include Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), SFMOMA (San Francisco), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), Museum für Gestaltung (Zürich), Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris), and Cooper Hewitt (New York). In 2015, Roma Publications (Amsterdam) released a monograph titled 'Statement and Counter-Statement: Notes on Experimental Jetset'.
Experimental Jetset - Superstructure was conceived and designed by Experimental Jetset, Netherlands.
Presented by RMIT Design Hub Gallery in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria.
Curatorium: Megan Patty (National Gallery of Victoria); Brad Haylock, Kate Rhodes, Fleur Watson (RMIT University).
