SAPCE 2: GROUP SHOW
'IN THE SPACE OF ELSEWHERE'
Exhibition dates. 7 - 18 Feb 2024
Opening Reception : Thursday 8 Feb 2024, 6:00 - 8.30pm.
Presenting a captivating exhibition, the Group Show of five features a diverse array of talented artists based in Melbourne, each renowned for their exquisite work in print making. Each artist has a unique style and technique developed from their own experiences. This diversity results in a wide range of techniques and styles, making the exhibition a rewarding endeavor that caters to varied preferences. Such an approach appeals to seasoned art enthusiasts and those who are just beginning to explore their artistic inclinations.
Artists
Marcus O’Donnell
Sophia Szilagyi
Angela Coombs Matthews
Sorcha Mackenzie
Silvi Glattauer
MARCUS O'DONNELL
Marcus O’Donnell is an artist, writer and academic working across traditional and digital print media. His abstract layered imagery explores pattern, chaos and complexity at the intersection of bodies, sexuality, and landscape. Marcus trained as an artist and exhibited in the 1990s and early 2000s but has only recently returned to public art-making after a time concentrating on his academic career. In 2022 he was awarded 2nd prize in the Jack Wilkins Experimental Photography Prize. He has been a finalist in the Milburn Prize (2023); the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (2023); the Olive Cotton Award (2023) and the Tacit Still Life Prize (2022). He is actively involved in the printmaking community and is a member of the Baldessin Press & Studio Committee of Management, a not-for-profit access, education and editioning studio.
A strange appearance – variations is part of his ongoing Dark Ecology series: abstracted variations on landscape and still life traditions investigating our troublesome representation of ‘nature’, all at once beautiful, monstrous and mysterious. The series uses layered imagery produced as pigment prints or photogravure etchings, or as is the case with the current work, a combination of the two processes.
SOPHIA SZILAGYI
Melbourne based practicing artist since the early 1990s, Sophia Szilagyi works predominantly in digital printmaking and more recently has explored photogravure. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, throughout Australia includingthe Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in NSW.
In 2005 she was commissioned by the Print Council of Australia to produce an edition for their annual print commissions. Sophia is also featured in the recently launched book “New Romantics” by curator and author Simon Gregg. Her work is held in major collections around Australia including Artbank, the State Library of Victoria, and the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum.
Through her work, Sophia Szilagyi, seeks to create a sense of fear, danger, and wonder that exists both in nature, and in the imagination. In capturing the beauty and grandeur found in the physical world, she also charts an internalised topography, giving form to unseen emotional and imaginative experience.
ANGELA COOMBS MATTHEWS
Angela’s practice involves creating imaginary and abstracted landscapes across the mediums of printing, painting, drawing and photography.
The elements in nature and the physical world that are absorbed at a particular time and place lead to embarking on a voyage of the imagination involving surface characteristics, tonal planes, mark making, linear and textural qualities, colour relationships, and being totally immersed in the creative process, allowing the work as it evolves to inform her.
SORCHA MACKENZIE
Sorcha Mackenzie is a Melbourne based Artist; working over a decade across Australia and Internationally as a printmaker. After completing a Masters of Contemporary Art degree in 2022, Sorcha’s practice has recently involved speculative architectonic assemblages ultimately realised through printmaking and sculpture. Sorcha transform these assemblages from their digital sketched state into analogue through historically traditional mediums of production. Sorcha’s practice extends into industrial design with the creative company, Full Form Studio, which she operates collaboratively alongside David Rockman and Will Mantesso.
In 2023 Sorcha undertook the Rick Amor Residency Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria through Baldessin Press, in which she began developing series of etchings and an artists book recounting the architectural history of Melbourne’s Princess Theatre, through the lens of the ghost of Frederick Federici. Sorcha’s work explores the sense of the sublime, where physical architectural space and the metaphysical converge; inviting viewers to contemplate the otherworldly aspects of built environments.
SILVI GLATTAUER
As a photo-media artist rooted in Naarm - Melbourne, Australia, I am Silvi Glattauer.
My artistic journey is a fusion of digital innovation and tactile craftsmanship, showcasing a particular expertise in the modern Photogravure technique. I navigate the intersection of digital and handmade methods.
My artistic exploration finds its muse in the world's driest regions and deserts, a fascination that led me to the vast landscapes of the Sahara Desert during a recent journey in Morocco. It was amidst the relentless gusts of wind that I created these works.
The scorching heat and gale-force winds of the Sahara become integral components of my creative process, influencing the transformation of shapes and patterns within my artworks. In this volatile environment, I manipulate elements to evoke a sense of things appearing and disappearing, mirroring the disorientating nature of the desert itself. Through a delicate dance between the digital and the handmade, my art invites viewers to experience the disconcerting beauty of these landscapes, where the boundaries between reality and illusion blur in the shifting sands of perception.