Upcoming exhibitions

Jess Johnson & Jordan Marani

Switchback Gallery, Monash University, Gippsland campus
29 July - 5 September 2009
Curator: Dr Kyla McFarlane

Co-directors of Hell Gallery and occasional artistic collaborators Jess Johnson and Jordan Marani present a new exhibition following their artists’ residency at Monash University’s Gippsland Centre for Art and Design in April 2009. Dredging through the detritus of their own and others’ lives, Johnson and Marani draw on shared obsessions including comic books, doom metal, overdue bills and talkback radio. For Switchback Gallery, they will create a ‘hothouse environment … incorporating installation, sculpture, drawing, collage and a soundtrack too. A polyglottal simmering of words, images, shared memories, fantasies, associations and neuroses.’

Photographer Unknown

Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton campus
16 September - 28 November 2009
Curator: Dr Kyla McFarlane

Found or anonymous photographic images and film footage are a fascinating subject for many artists. The snapshot, the amateur photograph, the flea market find, the postcard and the work of the anonymous, jobbing photographer have all provided material fodder, or acted as conceptual springboards for making new work. Engaging with this material, artists enact a series of reversals, reprisals and re-workings – bringing the snapshot to the status of the fine art print, calling into question conventions of authorship, quality, the public and private, the nature of the archive and monumentality. Titled after Jacky Redgate’s photographer unknown series from 1980-3, this group exhibition charts a course through these encounters in the contemporary context, including works that draw upon flea market analogue prints, to those inspired by more recent forms, such as videos uploaded to youtube by a myriad of internet users. Artists include Susan Fereday, Marco Fusinato, Donna Ong, Patrick Pound, Jacky Redgate and Elvis Richardson, among others.

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