Five Fierce February Exhibitions You Really Shouldn't Miss
Get lost in the surreal, the hallucinogenic and the reimagined this month.
Five Fierce February Exhibitions You Really Shouldn't Miss
Get lost in the surreal, the hallucinogenic and the reimagined this month.
Was one of your New Year's Resolutions to 'see more art'? Well, there's no time like the present to get started. It's already February, after all. Melbourne's galleries — from the NGV to the small Swanston Street space CAVES — are getting down to business this month, with the surreal, the hallucinogenic and the reimagined. From naked forms floating in extreme slow motion against clouds to an exhibition that exists solely in the digital realm, these five shows are accessible, free (!!) and ready for you to get lost in.
Top image: Richard Mosse
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The tiny, non-profit gallery aptly named CAVES on Swanston street is hosting an exhibition of the work of Annika Koops, kicking off on February 5 and running until February 27. Koops, just FYI, is prolific homegrown artist whose work has been exhibited across Australia and who manages to combine the enviable attributes of being technically brilliant and precise with an ideologically broad and abstract practice.
Koops has grown a name for herself through her hyperreal still-life painting and portraiture. Bump Function promises to continue Koops’ manifesto while looking at the interaction of man and machine — albeit with a slight twist. It explores the digital realm and the tools and patterns used to navigate and describe it as a starting point, but they are then reimagined as analogue in her native medium of oil painting. The result is a slick combo of the ironic internet art that’s so popular nowadays with the classic precision of oil painting. The pieces will be accompanied by an essay by Liang Luscombe and we can’t wait to see what they’ve got.
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Richard Mosse’s The Enclave was on display in 2014 at COFA in Sydney, and now it’s visiting the National Gallery of Victoria. The video installation explores the invisible war in the Democratic Republic of Congo which has claimed the lives of 5.4 million people since it begun in 1998. Mosse and his team spent years filming the rebel militants with 16mm infrared film, a process which turns the Congo’s green jungles into a surreal, startling pink bubblegum landscape. The hallucinogenic installation spans six screens and was initially inspired by Joseph Conrad’s melancholic literary work Heart of Darkness. It aims to shine a light on the conflict that receives so little media attention.
The installation was commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Bienniale in 2013, and wraps up at the NGV on February 28 — so get in quick before it’s gone. And best of all, you can catch the exhibition for free.
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Rachael Archibald’s current exhibition Carnate (in-pinking) on show at Paper-Thin is a tactile, textured, surreal wonderland — after all, that’s kind of her thing. But the most intriguing point of difference is that Paper-Thin is a gallery that exists solely online. It’s a unique new exhibition platform for digital artists who work on the threshold between material and virtual. You’ll have to install a few plugins to enter the gallery, but when you do, it’ll feel like the new-age art version of the Windows ’98 3D maze screensaver.
You can check out Archibald’s work from the comfort of your couch (or sneakily from work when your boss is distracted) as well as the work of fellow digital artists Alan Resnick, Hunter Jonakin, Daniel Baird and Haseeb Ahmed and Hugo Arcier. At this virtual gallery, you can stroll through the surreal white gallery space (using the forward and back arrows) and interact with the displays in a way they would never allow at the NGV.
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This February, Abbotsford’s c3 contemporary art space is showing a massive multi-disciplinary show spanning photography, painting and sculpture. Housed within Abbotsford Convent, the arts space is a special hybrid gallery that combines the works of large-scale, publicly funded galleries and the ethics and structure of smaller, artist-run initiatives.
Spanning three galleries, the February show is diverse and large. In gallery one you’ll find a photography exhibition by James Voller, which examines the suburban housing facades of North Melbourne, as well as Ruby Brown’s works exploring race, sexuality and mythology in her exhibition, enigmatically named Multi-Purpose Gap Filler. In gallery two is Oracular Vernacular, a group exhibition composed of the work of over ten artists and curated by Jake Adam Treacy. To make things interactive, the viewer can engage with the exhibition using their smartphone.
Travers Nash takes over gallery three, manipulating objects found on the side of the road to question art and its value. And that’s just the start of it. So wear comfy shoes — and while you’re there, the grounds at the Covent are the perfect spot for a post-art day picnic too.
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From February 5 to March 5, Gertrude Contemporary is hosting a solo exhibition of artist and filmmaker Amy Amos Gebhardt. The exhibition, named There Are No Others, is being displayed on multiple screens and explores the lives of people who live outside the confines of traditional gender binaries. The portraits show naked forms in extreme slow motion floating against clouds to represent the fluid, free-form nature of gender. Gebhardt collaborated with a team of musicians and cinematographers to pull together the ambient film series, which has recently been shown at Mona in Hobart.
Showing alongside There Are No Others are two exhibitions also work a looky-loo: Jamie O’Connell’s More day than Beyonce, and Urska Mindre’s Slide.
