2017

water + wisdom Australia India

RMIT Gallery

1 December 2017 - 10 March 2018

This exhibition creatively explores contemporary issues surrounding water.

Drawing on extensive research by experts from India and Australia, water + wisdom Australia India presents a poetic dimension on ancient wisdom regarding water management in both continents, as seen through the work of visual artists and creative writers who have incorporated these issues into their work.

Curators: Suzanne Davies and Helen Rayment

Artists: Ravi Agarwal, Sandra Aitken, Clare Arni, Lado Bai, Badger Bates, Paddy Bedford, Atul Bhalla, Vicki Couzens, Hannah Donnelly, Vibha Galhotra, Bhavani G S., Connie Hart, Victoria Lautman, Rebecca Mayo, Djambawa Marawili, Wanyubi Marika, Jennifer Mullett, Lorna Fencer Napurrula, Glenda Nicholls, Mandy Nicholson, Justine Philip, Parthiv Shah, Jangarh Singh Shyam, Cop Shiva, K.R. Sunil, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Hanna Tuulikki, Judy Watson, Carmel Wallace, Asim Waqif, Liyawaday Wirrpanda.

Experimenta Make Sense

RMIT Gallery

2 October - 11 November 2017

Experimenta Make Sense investigates how artists ‘make sense’ of our world, inviting us to explore our understanding of the present.

Michele Barker and Anna Munster, pull (concept sketch), a 2017 Experimenta Commission, in partnership with ANAT © the artists

In a time of accelerating technological changes to our society and culture, Experimenta Make Sense investigates the ‘extreme present’1; a time where it feels impossible to maintain pace with the present, let alone the future.

The exhibition features commissioned and recent artworks by leading Australian and international artists, who employ, critique and experiment with media and technology. Audiences will experience interactive, playful and thoughtful works that draw inspiration from diverse creative fields such as digital media, science and technology, and design.

Experimenta is Australia’s leading media arts organisation, dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting and touring the world’s best contemporary media art.

Experimenta Make Sense is Experimenta’s 7th national touring show and first International Triennial of Media Art. It premieres in Melbourne on 2 October to 11 November 2017 at the RMIT Gallery, and will tour nationally until 2020. As the only international biennial/triennial to tour nationally, Experimenta prides itself on creating accessible exhibition experiences to cater for a broad range of audiences who can actively engage with artworks.

Curators: Jonathan Parsons and Lubi Thomas

David Thomas: Colouring Impermanence

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

27 July - 22 September 2017

David Thomas: Colouring Impermanence highlighted the value of painting and the process of empathetic observation to contemporary creative practice.

Implicit to David Thomas’ understanding of empathy is his sensitivity to touch: “Painting offers an opportunity to reflect on the complexity of our responses; emotional and conceptual; imaginative and tactile; via image and materiality in time. In the act of painting you feel; thought, touch and emotion are connected,” he explained.

Works drawn from over four decades were presented together for the first time at Design Hub Gallery. The exhibition was intended as an exploration of the core values inherent within Thomas’ practice including colour, duration and time.

The experience for visitors was one of time as a subject in itself. “The works enable the viewer to understand the movement of meaning over time and to contemplate the transitory, unstable nature of being and perceiving” Thomas stated.

The exhibition brought together two inter-connected yet distinctive spaces. Project Room 1 was a contemplative and experiential space with a series of works from Thomas’ archive as well as new works created directly in response to the Design Hub Gallery. Purpose-made, large-scale monochrome paintings operated as surfaces and offered illusionary depth; folding together real and pictorial space as well as time – the viewer saw themselves viewing.

Thomas uses colour in the form of the monochrome, placed in relation to other things to create an interval, a pause and a place of emptiness to stop and reflect. As he explained: “The monochrome is a tool for considering how we look, feel and construct our experience of the world.”

Positioned between the Project Rooms was the ‘mobile monochrome’ series Taking A Line For A Walk. The work brought together Thomas’ playful sense of humour together with a deep contemplation of mortality, transience and our passage through the what he described as the “wonder of the everyday world.”

Project Room 2 was conceived as a studio-like environment where works – from early figurative drawings through to contemporary paintings – were presented with works by peers alongside collaborative projects such as those with international collective Concrete Post.

A series of drawings in folios invited interaction and close observation. Collected within a loose chronology from the 1970s to the present day, the folios brought together drawings from Thomas’ transition period between figuration and abstraction – ‘the blur’ as he referred to it – as well as early explorations into colour, time and duration through photo paintings and composites. Interacting intimately with these works by turning each page of the folios and even handling works directly, provided a rich insight into Thomas’ processes for making and thinking through his art, for teaching his students and for working collaboratively with others.

The exhibition culminated with a large-scale and immersive installation entitled Impermanences – works made on thin paper with opaque media. The emphasis on touch and its duration created an unstable surface that was subject to the conditions of change, challenging ‘value’ in painting. We saw the moment of the brush meeting the surface and a slow awareness of the duration of contact.

During the exhibition the Design Hub Gallery hosted a ‘micro-course’ examining the importance of teaching to Thomas’ practice. Through eight lessons participants experimented with drawing, painting and photography, participated in tutorials and attended group discussions with Thomas and his peers and collaborators. Each lesson unpacked the ideas explored in Thomas’ work and his approach to helping students develop their own creative practices.

Thomas explores ideas that are deeply human. Implicit in his understanding of empathy is his sensitivity to touch and ‘the felt’. While poetics underpins the language, Thomas’ argument for ‘attentive looking’ has renewed currency in the face of our increasingly pressured, augmented and shared contemporary lives.  Colouring Impermanence challenged us to pause, and reconsider the world around us with empathy.

Curation and Design: Fleur Watson, Stuart Geddes and David Thomas

Fast Fashion: The dark side of fashion

RMIT Gallery

21 July - 9 September 2017

Taking a critical look behind the scenes of the fashion industry with an exhibition that undresses the social, economic and environmental impacts of cheap fashion.

The world of fashion is dominated by globally active corporations that operate according to the principles of ‘fast fashion’.

They cater to the constant desire for the newest and latest by rolling out new collections at an ever faster rate. Their price policies enable customers to purchase new clothing more often than necessary.

Fast Fashion unveils a dark side of the industry that lurks behind the wardrobes fuelled by mass consumerism.

In response, the Slow Fashion Lab by the RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles explores new fashion practices and experiences to bring about positive change.

Fast Fashion provides a comprehensive and discerning examination of the clothing industry system and its socio-economic and ecological consequences.

How are clothes made so cheaply, by whom and under what conditions? What does this say about the quality of fashion and the value consumers place on it?  What impact do the fast changing fashion trends have on the environment?

Behind cheap throwaway fashion lies a myriad of contradictions explored in the exhibition: fashion & victims; poverty & affluence; global & local effects; wages & profits; garments & chemicals; clothes & clothing & ecological balance.

The term ‘fast fashion’ stands for a specific production and distribution system of mass-produced fashion wear that is frequently copied from high-end designs and sold worldwide at low prices. It also makes reference to acceleration in production and trade, where the time span between the product’s design and its rollout can be as short as two weeks.

Fast fashion has attained the status of an economic success model which earns its profits at the expense of ecological and social systems, and it is among the sectors responsible for disastrous working conditions and below-subsistence-level wages.

In the price calculation for a piece of clothing, a maximum of one to two per cent is accounted for by the wages of textile workers, 90% of whom are in low-wage countries, mainly in Asia.

In contrast, the slow fashion movement is presently gaining significance as a counter-model to fast fashion. It calls on producers and consumers to take more responsibility and show more respect towards human beings, the environment and products.

The chief aims of slow fashion are deceleration, the environmentally friendly production and selection of raw materials, fair trade, sustainable clothing production and high-quality processing, and the use of chemicals is avoided to the greatest extent possible.

The exhibition celebrates this movement with the ‘Slow Fashion Lab’, where local designers show alternative approaches to the fashion dilemma. This platform for ethical fashion labels and new approaches to design aspects such as recycling or upcycling reveals what tomorrow’s ethically defensible wardrobe could look like.

Curator: Dr. Erika Nostrom, Professor Ostrud exerci tatioer adipis (Cologne)

Mmmm...

RMIT Gallery

21 July - 9 September 2017

Madrid-based mmmm…, a collective of four Spanish artists, has been producing art in the public space across the globe since 1998.

Interact, communicate and interfere – these intentions have been at the forefront of Spanish collaborative mmmm…’s performative projects since they burst onto the European public art scene 18 years ago.

Projects included an intriguing public art ‘action’ in 2013, in which 50 people wearing large cardboard bull’s heads walked upright and proudly through the streets of central Madrid, then scattered and dispersed into the corners of the city. With the figure of the bull representing the resistance, courage and character of the Spanish people, the event was aimed at bringing optimism into a city heavily affected by the global financial crisis.

A public art installation of urban furnishing called the Meeting Bowls in Times Square, New York City, gave the public another vision of what the most crowded street in New York City could look like with just a simple design.

The public art sculpture BUS in 2014 presented the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore with a 14-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide three-letter bus stop that typography spelt out the word BUS.

In 2002, the Spanish artist collective manufactured a moment of mass with Kiss Invasion, where 100 couples placed in crowds around the city centre kissed simultaneously.

These are just some examples of more than 50 creative projects in public spaces that artists Alberto Alarcón, Emilio Alarcón, Ciro Márquez and Eva Salmerón have produced since mmmm… was founded.

This retrospective exhibition presents a survey of the Madrid-based collective’s playful and thought-provoking projects from 2000-2016, exploring the common ground among their seemingly disparate ventures.

Sponsors: Embassy of Spain in Australia

Curators: mmmm… collective

Artists: Alberto Alarcón, Emilio Alarcón, Ciro Márquez and Eva Salmerón

Number of the Machine

RMIT Gallery

19 May - 10 June 2017

Audiences are invited to watch this kinetic sculpture as two human bodies become components, disassembling and laboriously transporting a timber dwelling from one synthetic island to the other.

Performed over several hours each day, Number of the Machine carries layers of meaning that respond to a number of philosophical ruminations, such as the synthesis of technology and biology, human primacy, perceptions of sentient machines, and the problematic belief in progress.

Two performers engage with a machine that reflects human intellect and biological physicality. The machines exhibit a sentient quality that rivals the human body’s rank in the space. Central to the work are two 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) motion simulators which activate the bodies.

The collision of primitive and current technology in the work is symbolic of our entangled relationship with the constructed environment over countless millennia. It also explores notions of shared ascendance between primitive and current technology, challenging popular views of technological and ethical progress.

It is a powerful and menacing image, and it continues to pervade our collective view of where we are now, and where we might be headed.

The work operates as a poetic treatise on our binding connection to the unwieldy and dominating force that is technology. Perhaps it moves alongside us and not necessarily with us, or for our benefit. Ritualistic clothing, totemic shapes and seemingly purposeful movement of the machines all serve to challenge the proposal that the biological bodies and their mechanised environment are entirely bound by social determinism.

Artistic Director: Antony Hamilton

Programming, System Design and Sound: (((20hz)))

Timber structure: Justin Green Performers Melanie Lane and Amber McCartney

Sponsors: Created with the support of Darrin Verhagen, AkE Lab, City of Melbourne and Arts Victoria.

Ocean Imaginaries

RMIT Gallery

5 May - 1 July 2017

Ocean Imaginaries focuses on some of the contradictions and conflicted feelings raised by how the ocean is imagined in an age of environmental risk.

Responding to a recent turn to the ocean in the environmental humanities, this international exhibition considers how reflections on the ocean are aesthetically reconfigured when viewed from a contemporary urban perspective.

Though artists have always responded to the nonhuman world, it is really only in the past three decades that environmental critique has become a major theme of contemporary art.

Most environmental art of the late 20^th century focused on more terrestrial ecologies while the ‘oceanic turn’ in the arts and humanities occurred more recently with the acknowledgment of the ocean as our ‘evolutionary home’ and the ancient site where biological life first emerged.

From the early modern era of global maritime expansion in the late 16^th century, the ocean has been valued as a conduit for colonial expansion and trade in raw materials and consumer goods, most of which continue to be shipped across the world today.

During this period the ocean was also used for its apparent capacity to absorb waste: from the industrialised waste of heavy metals to radioactive material and plastics.

Effectively, the most insidious forms of oceanic pollution remain invisible to the human eye, while the serious effects of ocean acidification, mercury poisoning or pollution by micro-plastics, along with the gradual effects of ocean warming, are slowly, but surely, afflicting every ocean on earth.

The sea has long appealed to the romantic imagination as a compelling metaphor for the sacred mysteries of nature, yet given the escalation of global modernity this romantic view now incorporates a countervailing imagery in which the slow violence of ocean pollution not only represents a risk to human interests but also to a diverse range of marine creatures threatened with extinction.

While the wild, pristine imagery of the ocean still persists in contemporary culture it is now conflicted by an imagery of pollution, destruction and loss. Increasingly, the oceans represent a channel for greater engagement in the urgent need to protect environmental resilience and biodiversity.

These divergent views suggest powerful imaginative contradictions that Ocean Imaginaries explores through artworks evincing responses to global oceans in our era.

Ocean Imaginaries is an exhibition that addresses research undertaken by the AEGIS Research Network led by Associate Professor Williams in the School of Art. She remarked that the high level of professionalism at the RMIT Gallery means that it is an ideal partner for bringing international research collaborations in the field of art and ecology into the cultural life of Melbourne.

Part of CLIMARTE’s ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 – a festival of exhibitions and events harnessing the creative power of the Arts to inform, engage and inspire action on climate change.

Curator: Linda Williams

Artists: Anne Bevan, Emma Critchley and John Roach, Alejandro Durán, Simon Finn, Stephen Haley, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Chris Jordan, Sam Leach, Janet Laurence, Mariele Neudecker, Joel Rea, Dominic Redfern, Debbie Symons, Jason deCaires Taylor, teamLAB, Guido van der Werve, Chris Wainwright, Lynette Wallworth and Josh Wodak.

Behind the Lens: 130 years of RMIT Photography

RMIT Gallery

10 March - 13 April 2017

RMIT University’s photography students and staff have captured and contributed to the shifting cultural and political climate in Australia over the last 130 years.

Photography 130 offers an expanded view of the role and contribution of RMIT University to the photographic imaging of Melbourne and Australia, presenting a fresh perspective through the lens of the University’s photographic history, legacy and culture.

From the University’s beginning in 1887 as the Working Men’s College, RMIT students took to photography with great enthusiasm, making important connections and contributions to the growth of Melbourne as a city as part of the world’s longest running photographic school.

Featuring over 100 photographs created by RMIT staff and alumni between 1887 and 2017 sourced from RMIT Archives, the National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, and private collections, the exhibition showcases work by photographers and artists whose images have reflected the changing social landscape of Melbourne in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, commerce, science and discovery.

While Australian photography has an established history that is well represented in major State museum, library and gallery collections, Photography 130 places the focus on the role of the teaching institution. RMIT University has provided skills and nurtured students who have gone on to contribute to the artistic, commercial and scientific culture of Australia.

Photography 130 seeks to respond to core questions about how the culture of RMIT as an institution has influenced the development of photographers in Melbourne and Australia.

Curator: Shane Hulbert

Artists and photographers: Pauline Anastasiou, Chris Barry, John Billan, Earl Carter, Peta Clancy, Lynton Crabb, Stuart Crossett, Heather Dinas, Greg Elms, Samantha Everton, Daniela Federici, Susan Fereday, Sue Ford, Jerry Galea, Mark Galer, Silvi Glattauer, John Gollings, Janina Green, Frank Guy, Ludovico Hart, Alan Hill & Kelly Hussey-Smith, Shane Hulbert, Richard Kendall, Bronek Kozka, Ian Lobb, Murray McKeich,Garry Moore, Steven Morton, Rebecca Najdowski, Harry Nankin, Phuong Ngo, John Noone, Bernie O’Regan, Jill Orr, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Polixeni Papapetrou, Hugh Peachey, Phred Petersen, Louis Petruccelli, Clare Rae, Kate Robertson,  Linnea Rundgren, Lisa Saad, Rod Schaffer, Sam Shmith, Matthew Sleeth, Glenn Sloggett, Gale Spring, John Story, Darren Sylvester, Alex Syndikas, Henry Talbot, Christian Thompson, Heidi Victoria, Jens Waldenmaier, Lyndal Walker, Les Walkling, Michael Wennrich, Ellie Young, Joel Zika.

Ectoplasm

RMIT Gallery

18 - 19 February 2017

Audiovisual artist MindBuffer (who illuminated Storey Hall in 2016) team up with world renowned digital artist Andy Thomas to flood the building’s façade with a mind bending audio reactive display.

Ectoplasm features the visceral aesthetic of MindBuffer alongside Thomas’ synthetic infusion of organic systems. It is a supernatural viscous substance exuding from the clear outer layer of the cytoplasm in amoeboid cells leading to the manifestation of spirits. 

High Risk Dressing / Critical Fashion

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

16 February - 12 April 2017

High Risk Dressing / Critical Fashion looked at the ideas and community coalescing within contemporary fashion practice today through the lens of the Fashion Design Council (FDC). The FDC (1983–1993) was a membership-based organisation established to support, promote and provoke avant-garde Australian fashion, founded by Robert Buckingham, Kate Durham and Robert Pearce.

By using the FDC materials housed within the RMIT Design Archives as a leaping off point, the exhibition opened up and queried ideas promoted by the FDC while looking at the relevance of the Council to contemporary practice today.

Rather than looking back with nostalgia at this rich period of fashion practice, Design Hub Gallery was transformed into a ‘set’ for a month-long program of fashion provocations, cross-disciplinary exchange and contemporary venturous practice.

A new ‘collective’ of contemporary fashion practitioners activated the space through a program of fashion presentations, performances, films, publications and residencies.

Three local architecture practices - Sibling Architecture, Studiobird and WOWOWA - were commissioned to produce scenography that referenced the creative, social and promotional spaces central to FDC activities - the Office, the Bar and the Shop. Each studio was asked to design a set that captured the shift outlined in our title: from an emerging, provocative, collaborative creative culture to today’s world of internationally-networked, conceptually-driven contemporary fashion practice.

The FDC collection - including printed matter, video footage and photographs - was unpacked, discussed and catalogued in a new archive space designed by Ziga Testen. In this zone, we drew on critical reflections from original members of the FDC, as well as other designers, musicians and writers associated with the organisation.

Curatorium: Professor Robyn Healy, Dr Fleur Watson, Kate Rhodes, Nella Themelios

Research assistant: Laura Gardner

Fashion Practitioners: Adele Varcoe, Alexandra Deam, Annie Wu, Chorus, D&K, Laura Gardner, Martha Poggioli, Matthew Linde, PAGEANT, S!X, Winnie Ha Mitford

Scenography designers: Sibling Architecture, Studiobird and Caitlyn Parry, WOWOWA and Andre Bonnice