SPACE 2
GROUP SHOW: VISCERA
Exhibition dates. 3 Sep - 15 Sep, 2024
Opening Reception : Thursday 5 Aug 2024, 6:00 - 8:30 pm.
VISCERA : Guts, embodiment, ritual and unrest.
Viscera finds common ground between four artists through ritual and catharsis in their explorations of subjectivity, communication and embodiment. With roots in expressionist and history painting, Bonnie, Paula, Ned and Sean both explore and reconcile with different states of being through their use of intuitive and experimental sculptural and painting practices.
As we position ourselves in a violent shifting political and ecological landscape, the brutality of Viscera aims to contribute to the normalisation of addressing discomfort, and in turn, the collective truth-telling that is crucial for our transition into a contemporary cultural landscape.
Sean is a Bachelor student at LCI Melbourne, Bonnie-Jean Whitlock and Paula Maggs are 2023 Master of Fine Art Graduates from RMIT, where Ned is a current student in the same program.
Support by Yarra City Arts
BONNIE-JEAN WHITLOCK
Bonnie-Jean Whitlock is a contemporary painter originally from rural Southeast Gippsland, she currently lives and works in Melbourne/Naarm. Her art delves into feeling at home in internal and external environments, self, and relationships. It features partner portraits, queer themes, inner landscapes, and psychedelic elements. She layers images onto fabric like recycled bedsheets, showcasing materiality in installations with wooden brackets or frames. Bonnie is a recent Master of Fine Art graduate from RMIT University (2023) and a recipient of the Evan Lowenstein Arts Management Prize.
Catalogue
NED BROOK
My work comes from the back, or the underneath. The back is filled with turmoil, and energy. The back sits atop a gentle valley, eucalypts on either side and a lake down the bottom. This is where the back exists and moves. I sit below the back, further down in the valley, in the centre. The underneath is a quietly whirring machine, a mist. The underneath expresses itself in all it’s machinic beauty. Coming up with suggestions and solving problems, creating beauty. The underneath is walking amongst the mist until something comes up ahead, something barely able to be seen that then gains clarity, the closer you get. Either way you want what’s there to come forward, out to the front paddock, and express itself through your hands, through making. This is what it means for something to come from the back, or the underneath, and out into the world.
Catalogue
PAULA MAGGS
Paula Maggs's work emerges from an explorative painting process that wilfully embraces uncertainty. Inspiration ferments from a brew of memory. imagination and the zeitgeist. These notions are allowed lines of flight, the outcome unfolding from the process. As much about the materiality of the paint as the underlying concept, her work often begins on the floor where she flings, drips and spatters paint, embracing uncontrolled mark making and happy accidents in whole body gestures. The final works act as psychic maps - a physical manifestation of her unconscious, allowing Maggs to gain insight into the entangled mix of her inner and outer worlds.
Catalogue
SEAN BRADING
Sean Brading works in an Expressionist vein. His work explores topics such as limit experience, sexuality, drug use, systems of control and the weight of history on the individual. Working frequently with improvised and recycled surfaces, his paintings are dominated by bold use of colour, interjections of language and text and a type of tortured, distorted figuration. There is a certain occult resonance in many of his pieces, as if to recall arts original use as a median of ritual and magic, but it is anchored by an urban and technological perspective.