Primavera 2012

Overview

Spring has sprung, and in the spirit of the season of youth, the romantically named Primavera 2012 ('Spring 2012') exhibition has opened at the MCA. The annual exhibition celebrates the creativity of Australia's young artists who are emerging bright-eyed and bleating into the art world.

Here, representations of the self are portrayed in place, machine, and increments of time. Time is significant on these intimate journeys. Teho Ropeyarn's work invites the viewer to share in his painstaking and patient cutting of vinyl to create the sharply graphic prints. With these prints, Ropeyarn tells stories which, having been passed down over generations, are buffed with time. Kate Mitchell's My Life in Nuts is indeed an exercise in patience, the piled-up peanuts representing each day she has been alive.

In Moving Out Justine Varga celebrates her final days in her cherished studio space. Here, we capture both the minutes and the minute: subtle changes are introduced in Justine's space, and the viewer can take the time to reflect on their own surroundings.

Output = Plotter sees a rabbit plotter scrawl with a biro, with which Benjamin Forster will have you questioning the meaning of drawing, and the needed knowledge in mark-making. Discourse is, too, an automated, print-based work; the luscious tangle of receipt-roll paper featuring an endless stream of philosophical dialogue. Todd McMillan's study of albatrosses is at once haunting and calming, the whirring sound of the 16mm camera's projection a pleasingly mechanical resonance of the sea's waves. The symbolism of the great seabird as the souls of those lost at sea is not lost.

If this spring exhibition is indeed a time-based journey of youth, Anastasia Klose is, perhaps, the wayward adolescent; the artist brilliantly re-enacts a period of unemployment in an attempt to recuperate ‘lost time’ and provoke new ideas. Delight in the disco ball, music and the irresistible charm of Klose, for all her spunk and, indeed, funk. Dion Beasley’s whimsical prints are personal, compelling and a reminder of, as the MCA writes on their website, the ‘comic absurdity of life.’

Margaret Atwood wrote that "in the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt." A day at the MCA is often an exercise in deep (and dirty) thought, though at Primavera 2012, the memories one takes of mindfulness, play and delightful absurdity should stick around longer than Atwood's under-fingernail grime.

Still from Kate Mitchell's Fall Stack.