SPACE 2 : GROUP SHOW SOLASTALGIA
Exhibition dates. 10 May - 21 May 2023
Opening Reception : Thursday 11 May 2023, 6:00 - 8.30pm
“The former four Elements (Earth, air, water, fire) have mutated into geo-hy-dro-solar-biotech-politics”
- Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, ‘Post Human Glossary,’ 2018.
This proposed group exhibition will examine the environmental effects of climate destruction and how that has effected society’s technological, cultural and structural systems. Collating our expertise within printmaking, we will adopt a unique perspective, utilising specialised mediums and processes. Each artist will be displaying work that has been produced in response to the previously stated quote, following four unique ideas.
Inherently, printmaking utilises raw materials from the earth that is then transformed into a mode of visualisation. Applying this manner of thinking to the medium of printmaking, the work in this show proposes a deeper conceptual breakdown of the environmental reality. The re-production of print informed artworks dictates the manner in which each artist explore Post-Human concepts and elemental mutations. Such re-usable modes of thinking centres this exhibition around the interconnectedness between human and non-human organisms.
Through the traversing of ‘Deep Time’ and the existential notion of ‘Atomic reality’, this exhibition will investigate our understanding of environmental systems and how they may transform under the stress and anxiety of the foredooming Anthropocene. This epoch, will analyse systems within environmental life and its platooning ramifications on our current human behavioural structures.
MARIA FLORES
Through her lithographic practice Flores swims through primordial soups and bygone worlds. As she unearths these ancient landscapes buried in stone, they become a kind of language with which to understand her diasporic identity as a displaced Latin American woman settled in Australia.
However, as the modern world around us continues to undergo rapid transformation due to anthropogenic change, Flores lingers in these ancient spaces to reflect on the growing tension between place and the body in our shifting contemporary landscapes.
In response, Flores’ maps the unique and surreal landscapes formed through our individual experiences of place that can only exist within ourselves but are as real as the view outside your window. These places become are fuge, to reconcile with the love, longing and grief for the fading world around us.
VIVIENNE ADENEY
Vivienne Adeney is an emerging artist from Naarm/Melbourne who just graduated RMIT with a fine arts degree focusing on printmaking. Last year she has begun focusing on reusing studio waste and rethinking the printing matrix for a more sustainable practice. In her current work she uses a bioplastic matrix developed by the artist as a fully reusable alternative to the lino block. Using this bioplastic block along with cut paper she discusses how places in nature are becoming ambiguous versions of what they once were. Places are becoming shadows of what they used to be as the world is changing before our eyes. This body of work aims to capture that change but also show regrowth and renewal in hope that these places are slowly being rebuilt and becoming diverse once again.
CATALOGUE
MYA COOK
Mya Cook is an emerging Australian artist living and working on the Mornington Peninsula. Working in a print based practice, she has most recently been engaging with techniques of linocut and collage.
Throughout this body of work, Cook explores the opportunistic characteristic that the flora of the the living world possesses. In a world which defines so strictly spaces as being for either only humans or only flora, Cook considers a hypothetical of the dissolving of this rigidness; contemplating the capacity for nature to overcome. Exploring processes of transformation, Cook delves into the intersection of the spaces occupied by both flora and human beings. In diminishing the separation between the two, she alludes to a future point of harmony and homeostasis between these two worlds.
MICHAEL LYE
Michael Lye is an Asian-Australian artist based in Nar- rm / Melbourne, Australia. Working in both the digital and traditional printmaking fields, his work discusses race, philosophical and scientific explorations through the use of playfully abstract and minimalistic formations. Either blissfully colourful or grotesquely visceral, Lye builds upon his own position as a multi-race artist to dis- cuss the background stereotypes of society towards mi- norities. His sometimes stark and baron concepts drive his work towards the realm of existentialism, embodying sides of the social and political whilst more specifically the environmental impacts of climate change. These di- rectives follow through Lye’s own practical discussion of the virtual and analog, emotional and scientific as a dual dialogue to the fabric of our reality. In this body of work, Lye dissects the dialogue between natural and physical, partaking in how spaces are held by human and natural beings. This is focused through a discussion of Post-Hu- man discussions combined with the ongoing effects of Cli- mate change on the current and future states of human life.