FRONT GALLERY
Existence Resistance Consistence
John Billan

MIDDLE GALLERY
In pursuit of a state of uncertainty
Barbara Knezevic

SIDE GALLERY
Les Een, Australiese Gesegdes
Roberta Rich

John Billan

This work examines the concept of place and what lies beneath and behind the tangible and the visual. Examination via the image representation can be problematic, this work attempts to create links between structures of the internal and external and the connection of the elements that make up the fabric of the experience of place.

John Billans’ career in the visual arts spans more than twenty five years, during this time his primary concerns have been Photography Video and interest in experimenting with the performative potential of new technologies.

The main areas of his practice are printing and image making using traditional and alternative processes, this includes digital image production using ink jet technology and exploring the interface between the traditional and the new. He has worked closely and contributed to the migration from Analogue imaging to Digital photographic imaging practices. With a background in Media Arts he has worked mainly in the still image area often hybridizing the image to be used in a temporal form involving Video and Sound. He has worked in education and maintained an art practice over the past 25 years, and has many years experience facilitating and guiding students through a complex time adopting and embracing new technologies.

Barbara Knezevic

There is meaning in what seems not to have any meaning, something enigmatic in what seems self-evident, a spark of thought in what appears to be an anodyne detail.
(Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, 2001)

For this exhibition, Barbara Knezevic is presenting a series of sculptural studies. Posited as a means of working out, a probe with which to test the viability of ideas, these ‘studies’ encompass elements that veer from the handmade and unique to the mass produced and ubiquitous.

Central to the artists’ interests is the consideration of how value and meaning is constructed through objects; simultaneously through their complex inter-relationships with each other, the viewer and the environment.

Knezevic presents the viewer with a tableau, configured in a way that often produces a sense of unease. Thus the artist proposes objects as carriers of psychological meaning and points to the failures inherent in objecthood. Collectively, these works offer a consideration of transience; objects and meanings are presented as temporary, fragile, unstable, vulnerable and fundamentally contested.

Roberta Rich

Lesson One: Australian Phrases, is a two channel, simultaneous video projection, exploring the positions of race, gender and their divisions/intersections within contemporary society. Parental indoctrination takes place between a woman and an adolescent male. English is translated to Afrikaans, ‘Australian Phrases,’ are repeated back and forth.

‘Phrases’ were sourced by the artist, speaking to people living in Australia on how they felt about ethnic groups within Australia. Signifiers are intentionally removed, and replaced with, ‘they’ or ‘we’ for example. Viewers are left to draw upon their own experiences and preconceptions, (if any) as questions of validity arise.

Resonating are colloquial ideals, reminiscent of cliché expressions of ‘the other,’ proposing platforms of discussion about cultural myths still circumventing contemporary Australian culture. Lesson One… responds to social attitudes perpetuated by mainstream media that scrutinize and marginalise ‘the other.’ Those targeted by narrow presumptions are unduly feared within patriarchal society; those who don’t conform to mythological visions of a ‘white’ Australia. The remoteness of Afrikaans allows a distance for some, as well as referencing a Creole language with significant historical and cultural baggage.

Roberta Rich completed her Bachelor of Fine Art, at Monash University in 2009, during which she partook in the Prato Exchange Program in Italy. Roberta’s practice takes place within a feminist and post-colonial discourse. Roberta is now concluding Honours in Fine Arts at Monash University.