News

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

I am now based in my new tumbled down, damp studio which sometimes turns into a river. I need a builder. Here is a photo of the space before I moved in.. still full of the old tenants stuff, will repost an image once i make it my own. The river thing hinders the process a little.

I have two works (above) in the Chalk Horse Xmas Show – Chalk Reindeer.
Come along if you are in Sydney.

17th December – 21st December
CHALK REINDEER
Thursday
Opening – 17 December 6-9pm

GALLERY HOURS
Wed – Sat
12 – 6 PM

ADDRESS
94 Cooper Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010