News

Worm Mountain
Amber Wallis, Andy Hutson, Dane Lovett, Jordan Wood, Linda Tegg, Lucy Griggs and Nicola Page.

OPENING 6 – 8pm Wed 23rd June

Worm Mountain is a curated exhibition of new work by emerging artists with a focus on natural history and interactions with nature as explored through seven contemporary arts practices.

Worm Mountain brings together a group of emerging artists who are inspired by various aspects of the natural world to generate work that is highly evolved and visually engaging.

Works are presented across a range of art forms featuring, video, photography, wall drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media, we have approached the topic of Natural History with unique perspectives and inventive approaches to both subject and media.

Presenting a range of artists who list interaction with nature and the sublime as concerns in their work, manifesting in various forms as, decorative, historical, scientific, sociological and spiritual. The exhibition aims to represent the full spectrum of these concerns as a reflection of Contemporary Art and Natural History.

Wednesday June 23 6:00pm till 8 pm
Sunday July 11, 2010 close
C3 Contemporary Art Space @ the Abbotsford Convent
Abbotsford Convent Foundation
1 St Heliers Street
Abbotsford VIC 3067
Tel: (03) 9415 3600

I am about to have some work in this great project, which showcases Melbourne artists, designers, musicians and products in a hotel room for three months, you can of course purchase what is in the room. Its called the Lost and Found Hotel Room and is part of a one room hotel concept in association with Tourism Victoria. If you subscribe to Lost and Found you can stay there for free! Check it out.

I received an Artstart grant from The Australia Council for the Arts. YAY.

The studio is now fixed, walled, roofed, beamed, painted and kind of dry and I have started working again!

TERRITORIAL PISSINGS
Friday April 16 – Saturday May 8 2010
OPENING THURSDAY APRIL 15, 6 – 8PM
SEAN BAILEY
DAN BELL
NATHAN GRAY
MICHELLE HANLIN
MATTHEW HOPKINS
SASKIA LEEK
ROB McHAFFIE
TOBY POLA
TOM POLO
TIM PRICE
MARK RODDA
GEMMA SMITH
MASATO TAKASAKA
JAKE WALKER
AMBER WALLIS

UTOPIAN SLUMPS
Ground Floor, 33 Guildford Lane Melbourne
Hours: Wed – Sat 12 – 6pm
Other times by appointment: +61 403 009 291

Utopian Slumps is pleased to announce the re-launch of the gallery and opening at its new premises in Melbourne’s CBD on Thursday 15 April 2010 with a group exhibition, Territorial Pissings.

Territorial Pissings will bring together fifteen Australian artists to explore the notion of mark-making: with all the glib inferences of the Nirvana song. Surveying territorial pissing as an abject methodology — how the encrustation and infestation of things relates to ownership of space — the exhibition aims to address ironic incarnations of ownership and assertions of ‘property’ in contemporary art. The exhibition will acknowledge both the intense cynicism underpinning this notion, as well as the more complex and indefinable motivations behind mark-making more universally.

Michelle Hanlin’s work explores mark-making as branding, through the iconography of heraldry and grotesque decorative forms; Sean Bailey’s experiments with alternative symbolism similarly question ideas of ownership, though using a much more abstract language; whilst Tom Polo’s practice addresses the visual or objective measures of success and failure in art (and in life, more broadly) by analysing and mocking modern society’s inherent desire to one-up itself.

Accompanying these are Dan Bell’s pseudo-decorative installations of objects and jewelled adornments, which will give a new take on the temporal ownership of space; while Masato Takasaka continues to explore his own interest in the re-framing of existing images to investigate notions of pop-cultural ownership and rock history through the medium of the readymade and his trademark ‘alreadymade’.

The artists brought together in Territorial Pissings will, through their individual practices, make their mark on the new Utopian Slumps premises.

Territorial Pissings will take place at Utopian Slumps, Ground Floor, 33 Guildford Lane Melbourne, from 15 April to 8 May 2010. For further information please contact Melissa Loughnan on +61 403 009 291 or melissa@utopianslumps.com.

Saskia Leek and Rob McHaffie courtesy of Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Gemma Smith courtesy of Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney