GROUP SHOW : PASSAGE
Exhibition dates. 22 April - 4 May 2025
Opening Reception : Wed 23 April 2025, 6:00 - 8:30 pm
Passage: A Journey of Life
The upcoming Group Exhibition will showcase a diverse array of works from both emerging and mid-career artists who are based in the vibrant Melbourne/Naarm arts community. This carefully curated collection is designed to highlight their unique perspectives and creative expressions.
Artists
Amy Cooper , Ciara Turnbull , Diego Salas , Morgandy Walker, Santiago Mals , Vanessa Chen , Yoony Yoony
Curated by Orbit Art Space
Amy Cooper
Amy Cooper aims to express the inexpressible through tracing journeys at the intersection of internal and external processes of thought, sense perception and lived experience. After becoming visually impaired and undergoing major surgery on both eyes, Cooper has adapted her practice to prioritise art making as a tool of discovery, play and self-regulation through transitional life periods. Each layer is a fractured part of a potential whole, sitting in a mutable space of metamorphic discovery.
Cooper received the dean's award upon graduating Bachelor of Fine Art (2020) and graduated first class in Fine Art Honours (2021) at RMIT. She is currently completing her final year of a Master's in Art Therapy at La Trobe University.
Ciara Turnbull
This collection explores the pain and confusion felt in moments of uncertainty and decision making. We are always contemplating, deciding, and making choices which have the potential to change us the second we make them. These nebulous moments between choosing door A or door B, or no door at all, bring feelings of doubt, dread, excitement, possibility, disappointment and so on which clash cacophonously with our ideas of “self”. It is with these moments that the only constant we can be sure of is the inevitable passage of time. The concept of “identity” is always in flux and at any particular moment we are only one of many versions of ourselves. It is this identity that informs all decisions. One might feel compelled to choose something another wouldn’t. But how are we supposed to know which is the right decision for us, in this particular moment of time? For some of us, having a complicated sense of identity makes decision making impossible. The metaphorical fork in the road can be enough to make us freeze in terror, unsure of how to move forward. How does one choose between door A or B? How does one know which is best? It seems, as some say, that only time will tell.
Diego Salas
This body of work explores the transformative journey of migration and the emotional landscapes navigated by those who live, work, and create far from their homelands. Within the framework of Passage, these paintings reflect on transitions—not only as physical displacements, but as spiritual awakenings, cultural negotiations, and moments of profound inner change. Each composition blends overlapping images of human and natural forms, merging bodies with leaves, wings, and flowing landscapes. This visual layering becomes a metaphor for transformation, how the self is shaped and reshaped through experience, adaptation, and belonging. The paintings weave together symbols drawn from memory, belief, and nature. Birds take flight across borders as emblems of freedom and change. Flowers bloom as guardians of ancestral wisdom, carrying the resilience of tradition and care. Wild, untamed elements mirror the inner wilderness of identity and growth. At the heart of this visual narrative are powerful feminine figures, keepers of culture, emotion, and healing. The work becomes a meditation on coexistence, where diverse beliefs, stories, and life paths overlap and evolve, seeking harmony, meaning, and expression.
Morgandy Walker
My practice is an investigation of the archive and how it relates to the notion of the memorial. Delving into the importance of storytelling and connection in our lives, I had come to examine the rituals of memorials and have since determined that they are impossible tasks. We are all subject to a ‘second-death’ of archive anonymity. Using printmaking, film, and sculpture, I recast these archives and traces into new forms of remembrance. Exploring the burial archives of eastern Bunurong country, I revisit the roles of the living from a bodily perspective. I propose an alternative memorial through recording physical ephemera, highlighting spoken and performing language as intimately recognisable personhood. The video interviews, conversation frottages, and plaster hands within my practice are portraits of both the physical experience, and its transience as memory. I reform the bodily experience of remembrance as a eulogy. An embodied eulogy that is made to be felt, rather than catalogued and researched as the archive provides.
Vanessa Chen
In this collection, I explore the complexities of identity through a blend of abstract forms and subtle realism. Curving shapes and soft strokes reflect the fluid nature of memory and self, weaving a dreamlike narrative of transition and transformation. Rooted in my tri-cultural experience as a Chinese migrant to New Zealand now living in Melbourne, each layer symbolizes shifting cultural influences and an evolving sense of self. Winding Whispers speaks to the beauty and uncertainty of change, inviting viewers to see themselves as vessels of fragmented memories, cultures, and emotions—mirroring not only my journey, but their own.
Santiago Mals
In this series, Santiago explores the complexities of the inner journey he has experienced as a result of the transformations that came with living as a foreigner. The series is presented as a sequence of archetypal situations where Santiago portrays an internal, identity-based, and spiritual journey of self-discovery. These works aim to explore the fluid nature of our identity, presenting it as a constant and internal flow where everything changes in unexpected ways.
Yoony Yoony:
Yoony Yoony is a Melbourne-based artist who works with traditional Korean art materials such as Soonji paper, Peyonchae(watercolour), watercolour, and Meok (Korean black ink). She creates works that speak of hope for the socially disadvantaged, based on the difficult like of her late grandmother.
The Serenity series mainly depicts plants. Plants that grow from the earth are the most essential and fundamental elements for human life. They represent a warm hope like a mother’s embrace, and for some, they symbolise something that feels like a dream.
Through her work, Yoony Yoony hopes that many people in the blind spots of society can feel hope.