May at Wellington St Projects

DIRTY DIGITal

Karen Kris

OPENING

Wednesday 10 May 6 – 8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

12 – 21 April

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 pm Fri – Sun

__________________________________________________

‘DIRTY DIGITal ’ is a series of new works around what the abject is now that CGI dominates popular culture. These resulting images are created utilising motion capture to drive bodily textures through a digital space.

Each image began as photographs detailing proximate bodily textures in order to interrogate the material field and affective (or abjective) power of the close-up. These photographs are then used as textures on 3d forms that twist and move through space, made with the movement of markers placed on a human body. The works have been printed as lingering lenticular imagery that shift and twist as the viewer walks around them, providing an immersive, interactive and tactile experience of a distorted abstract digital body.

By challenging and rejecting cinema’s use of CGI to depict the body as hyperreal, ‘DIRTY DIGITal ’ embraces the digital artefact, and re-inserts the abject body and trace into the digital realm. These exercises allow the potential for the abject body to move beyond mainstream CGI’s use of grotesque imagery towards ‘haptic visuality’, a tactile experience of images that is crucial to experiencing the abject.

“These are beautiful and compelling works, attesting to the workings of haptic visuality and the affective power of the image in which the extreme close-up is produced on a giant scale giving rise to enticing ambiguities… Twisted forms become topologies at once abstract and materials, suggesting a complex world enfolded in on itself and creating unknowable interiorities by virtue of that.”
Anna Gibbs (Professor, School of Humanities and Communication Arts at UWS)

“The art works themselves are compelling and beguiling. Resembling perverse representations of anatomical specimens, they move and mutate further in their three-dimensionality. In this they welcome a very active gaze of the viewer in the gallery who is complicit (unwittingly or otherwise) in the diminution of discernible ostensible anatomical facets (knee, shoulder, forearm) into unwieldy chimera… A pleasure to have experienced the work.”

Darren Tofts (Professor, Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne).

__________________________________________________

Image: Karen Kris, Thumb1, 2020, Lenticular print, 841mm x 2020mm

__________________________________________________

April at Wellington St Projects

Image : Clancy, 2020, acrylic, gouache, ink, painters tape on cotton drop cloth, 140cm x 170cm

March at Wellington St Projects

February at Wellington St Projects

Those Guys

Angus Gardner

OPENING

Wednesday 15 February 6 – 8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

16 – 26 February

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 pm Fri – Sun

___________________________________________________

As individuals it is apart of our basic human instinct to project a different façade in order to achieve certain things at different points in our lives. We have the ability to deceptively alter our appearance in hope that we avoid certain judgement and gain acceptance, respect and ultimately happiness. We all possess a public and private face and the link between the values either of these faces ultimately conveys how realistic ones façade is at conveying the inner workings of an individuals personality.

To many the thought of this behaviour may seem foreign and we would be quick to judge people who we think may display these altered traits. However, in the current social climate a great importance is placed upon our ability to create an ‘attractive’ façade through our use of social media and also our immediate appearance to those we encounter on a day to day basis. This image ultimately leads to judgement from others and an expectation about how something should be. Quite often this stereotype is a distortion of reality and as we begin to delve beyond the initial façade and discover other areas of ones existence, these representations become revised, hierarchies are broken down and distinct contrasts are discovered.

___________________________________________________

 December at Wellington St Projects

Fundraiser: Guess Who

November at Wellington St Projects

These Are The Measures Of Your World

curated by Jack Banduch

Athena Thebus / Cooper Michael / Finn Marchant
Katherine Rooke / Benjamin Chadbond

___________________________________________________

OPENING

Wednesday 16 November 6 – 8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

17 – 27 November

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 pm Fri – Sun

___________________________________________________

            “Ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars.”

                                                                       – Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Measurement is the abstract, characteristic assignment of an object or event. A process through which said object or event is, or can be compared to objects and events of sameness and difference to reach an outcome of understanding. As a poetic or critical process of elucidation, measurement and its applications can be seen as an avenue for social and political correction and or confusion, as well as the affirmation of ontological difference with the potential for revelation and or emancipation.

‘these are the measures of your world’ brings together a selection of artist forms and surfaces that individually, as well as a whole, engage with a desire or longing for revelation; for emancipation. The works present patterns of thought and production that exercise and challenge ideas of systemic oppression, authorship, exchange-value, spectatorship and that of ontological measurement.

__________________________________________________

Image: Katherine Rooke

Seen through in a second (Looking-glass)

20.3 x 25.4 cm

Inkjet print on photo rag

2020

October at Wellington St Projects

All of That Implicit Memory

Clare Thackway

___________________________________________________

OPENING

Wednesday 19 October 6 – 8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

21 – 30 October

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 pm Fri – Sun

___________________________________________________

Implicit memory doesn’t bring with it a sense of remembering when something is recalled but surfaces through emotions, impulses, behaviours, perceptions and bodily sensations. Saved from birth, implicit memories inform our mental processes in response to interpersonal experiences. How we make sense of our past, whether consciously or not, influences our present perceptions of ourselves and how we interact with others.

This exhibition is a contemplation of what is passed down from generation to generation. Be it mannerisms, traits, or patterns in behaviour, our inheritance is stored in genetics and memory.

Following a maternal lineage, the ten subjects of these paintings span four generations, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, aunt, daughter, niece, sister and cousin. Each subject was asked to position their hands in the same repeated interlocked gestures. Left hand touches right alluding to connectedness, things hidden and things shared, alluding to a personal and implied symbolism. This body of work speaks to both the specificity and universality of intergenerational ties and the complexities of attachment relationships.

___________________________________________________

Image: Interlace 2020, oil and acrylic on aluminium, 28.5cm x 50cm

September at Wellington St Projects

WHAT IS ERROR

Iain Dean

___________________________________________________

OPENING

21 September 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

22nd September – 2nd October 

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM FRI – SUN

___________________________________________________

“I am not Iain Dean” said the Artist, “He met me serendipitously when a package I had ordered online was mistakenly delivered to his house, rather than my own, which is located directly across the road. The fact that we look similar is purely coincidental. Iain asked me to come here today to answer your questions about his work. Apparently he thinks I have a unique perspective.” He paused, frowning, “I am not so sure, I can only guess at Iain’s process, because I’m not him, but I would imagine it has something to with circles, triangles and squares.” He drew a circle, triangle and square on the napkin in front of him, then passed his palm over the napkin, as though divining something from the shapes. “Basically everything can be constructed from circles, triangles and squares. Even something really complex, like an automobile or a painting, can be broken down into these basic shapes. Your body could also be deconstructed like this, or your mind. If you look inside an atom, circles, triangles and squares. The Cubists understood this, as did Kandinsky and, later, Warhol, then Michael Bay. The Transformers films are the greatest contemporary example of formal abstraction. When I look at those robots I understand nothing.”

Kieron Broadhurst, 2020

___________________________________________________

August at Wellington St Projects

SEASON FRAY

CHRIS CASALI

___________________________________________________

OPENING

24 August 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

25 August – 4 September 

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM FRI – SUN

___________________________________________________

Theories behind the Super-Market Society describe contemporary culture as a system of ‘Human Barcoding’. Theorists Henk van Houtum and Bas Spierings believe we are enslaved and controlled by systems of consumerism where “everybody is required to be somebody, to have a marketable identity, to be a unique product.” 蜉 They ask us to consider … Who is controlling who?

As artists, are we allowing neoliberal systems to dictate our practices? Are we conforming via the CVs we produce, the websites we design and the artist statements we carefully compose? Does contemporary art dive into political and social matters to appear intellectual and secure funding? Academic and art critic Karel Vanhaesebrouck proposes that contemporary artists are injecting ‘subversive’ subject matter into their art for personal gain. He believes there is an ‘‘over-inflation of the notion of commitment, to such a degree that the concept is threatening to become a fashionable, meaningless category that is incorporated with amazing ease into the … creative society.” 蜉

Season Fray is Chris Casali’s attempt to strip back external influences on her identity and practice as an artist. The backdrop for this work is a turbulent and disillusioning time for arts education and funding in Australia, but for Casali, the process of making is one of reduction and withdrawal: an active removal of oneself from the external to the internal world. This is both a coping mechanism and an attempt to recapture that which gets lost when art becomes a mere yardstick for cultural capital.

These works are about material and process: the density and texture of paper and aluminium, the way it supports or incorporates graphite; how graphite is dull here and glossy there, and it has been rubbed or washed or scratched into the substrate. Relational concerns are reduced to the interactions of graphite, water, aluminium and paper; the only politicking occurs within hierarchies and ordering of subconscious imagery; resource management is simply a matter of maximising the effect of a wash whilst minimising the retraction of the surface beneath. This refusal of content is a quietly defiant act, driven by a desire for simplification and integrity. Sometimes going back to basics is the best way forward, and Season Fray is an extended meditation on the fundamental artistic tenets of process and materiality.

http://www.chriscasali.com

July at Wellington St Projects

Memorial

Anke Klevjer | Lachlan Herd | Alexandra Mitchell

__________________________________________________

OPENING

20 July 6pm

CONTINUES

22nd – 31st July

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM FRI – SUN

__________________________________________________

Memorial

by Genevieve Felix Reynolds

Memorial focuses on the residues left from various meetings of the human and natural. Employing alternative media to create traditional art objects, each artist strives to convey the ambiguity of absence through material investigation. By contrasting and limiting the organic with mathematical / human systems of control, the artists investigate the relationships between art and the physical world in relation to the past and future.

Alexandra Mitchell uses repetitive pattern to coerce dead organic matter into domestic neatness on the floorboards. Describing the inevitable transience of home and the loss of childhood, camelia flowers are reimagined as symbols of the ever-changing, alienating urban environment of Sydney. The transparency of Mitchell’s work is a commonality throughout the exhibition. Each artist acknowledges a separate aspect of the rooms architecture and so links itself to location – floorboards, air, and walls.

Anke Klevjer’s wild hand gestures are constrained by the geometry of the canvas. Ghost-like silk allows glimpses of the painting’s construction – an authoritarian reminder of geometry and the hidden language of ratios that mysteriously govern organic form and beauty. Klevjer’s acknowledgment of painting’s construction and her truthful mark-making both nod to the myth of Modernism and its quest for the ideal. In a post-postmodern art context, this is an act of respect for the dead and of gleeful, rebellious resurrection – the ambiguity of minimalist formalism has simultaneously nothing, and everything to give.

Like Klevjer, Lachlan Herd contrasts the ambiguity of natural form against the boundaries of geometry. Herd frames formlessness by conforming water (and its residing biological matter) into man-made cubes. Herd’s autonomous objects are synecdoches for the larger world: ever-evolving, persistent and volatile. As successful micro-environments, they can be read as optimistic prophecies – so far, the algae, at least, survives – but in the face of global warming, they double as warnings, or precursory memorials to the much heralded environmental apocalypse.

__________________________________________________

Image: Lachlan Herd

July at Wellington St Projects

Mountain Pony Face

Anthea Kemp

___________________________________________________

OPENING

29 June 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

1 – 10 July

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM FRI – SUN

___________________________________________________

Paintings of Ponies in idyllic landscape scenes; yellow hills, grey skies, oceanic formations and ponies riding through wave mountains, are to relieve the artist’s anguish to still connect with the significant animal that is the Pony.

Anthea Kemp’s work consists of an exploration of a familiar environment. She works with geological motifs, the terrain of hills and lowlands, organic form and colour. ‘Mountain Pony Face’ extends this exploration to a familiar figure, initiating her work to another level of playfulness.

___________________________________________________

June 2020 at Wellington St Projects

so fresh

Dan Hollier | Paul Williams | Alexandra Standen

Emma Finneran | Will Cooke | Greg Hodge | Sally Anderson

Belem Lett | Genevieve Felix Reynolds

OPENING

1 June 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

3 – 12 June

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM FRI – SUN

___________________________________________________

Join us for the opening of So Fresh, featuring nine young artists trying to make it in the big smoke. This exhibition is an expansion of the group show Present Tense which opened March 2020 at Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane.

So Fresh is an exhibition of artists from Sydney working across ceramics, sculpture and painting. Heterogenous practices compliment one another, contrasting obsessive hard-edged perfection with truth-telling brush and hand marks. As each artist deals with their unique materiality, formalism remains a primary concern. A commonality is found in each artist’s examination of the relationship between object making and abstraction. Holes, windows, and other negative spaces crop up in a variety of guises. Despite their differences, all artists seem to agree that material will not be denied – both the flatness of canvas and the innate squishiness of clay demand recognition.

___________________________________________________

May 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Lying In Wait

Tane Andrews

___________________________________________________

OPENING

4 May 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

5 – 15 May

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM THURS – SUN

___________________________________________________

Tané Andrews’ practice aims to be a poetic and considered exploration, one that seeks to understand the inherent instinctual relationships within nature and how these reflect human activity.

Andrews’ work often involves ritual, repetition, process and a demand for contemplation. Displaying a beauty and fragility that marks the progression and deterioration of life into death.

___________________________________________________

Image: Transition One, 2020, white marble, 25 x 10 x 8 cm

Image credits: Anna Pogossova

April 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Chonda Za

Simon Gardam

___________________________________________________

OPENING

6 April 6-8pm

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

7 – 17 APRIL

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM THURS – SUN

___________________________________________________

Built upon a vast collection of gestures and subsequent erasures, the paintings in Simon Gardam’s Chonda Za act as residual images or artefacts of corporeal motifs. This methodology allows the work to arrive at a place of reduced wholeness in which materiality, surface, and mark making fight against pictorial definition and spatial complexities. In adopting these strategies it is hoped that the paintings find themselves in a state of flux between the abstract and actuality.

___________________________________________________

Image: CZ#1 (untitled), 42 x 30 cm, oil on wood panel, 2020

___________________________________________________

March 2020 Book Launch at Wellington St Projects

BOOK LAUNCH +EXHIBITION

ATLANTIS

By Pedro Ramos

ATLANTIS marks the first published release from Try Hard Editions, the in-house publishing imprint of Try Hard Magazine. We’d love it if you would help us celebrate – drop in, grab a copy and down a beer with us on Thursday the 24th of March.

For one night only 

Thursday March 24th 6-8pm

For more information email: [email protected]

www.tryhardeditions.com

www.tryhardmagazine.com

www.pedroramos.org

___________________________________________________

ATLANTIS, Pedro Ramos

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system will tend to increase over time, is used in physics to explain why we experience time as moving forward; why eggs once broken don’t un-break or buildings once demolished don’t spring miraculously back from the rubble and dust. It’s what is known as the arrow of time.

Atlantis by Pedro Ramos is an exercise in dismantling this simply linear notion of time. It takes as its subject the implosion of the Atlantis hotel on the island of Madeira, Ramos’ birthplace. Originally built in 2020 to capitalise on the burgeoning tourism industry, the Atlantis hotel was demolished in 2020 to make way for the expanding airport, ironically bringing in the very tourists the hotel was built to accommodate. The implosion was barely a footnote in history, however, in Atlantis, Ramos uses it as a means to explore how the same event can take on multiple meanings depending on the perspective – the personal or the historical.

The images in Atlantis are taken from original news footage of the implosion found online, they are degraded and blurred, showing their own signs of entropy. By fracturing and re-sequencing the footage Ramos is able to summon the building back from the debris in order to watch it come crashing down again, allowing him to enliven and re-imagine his own faded memories of the event. Technology has allowed us to restructure our memories.

On an historical timescale Atlantis can be read as an allegory for the experience of modernity, a world of perpetual destruction and renewal where the same forces which bring things into being are just as quickly their undoing, as Marx would say a world in which “all that is solid melts into air.”

Published in an edition of 300. Designed by Rob Milne, Essay by Adam Jasper.

ISBN: 978-0-646-94395-4

___________________________________________________

March 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Horse Boy

David Collins

___________________________________________________

OPENING

2 MARCH 6PM

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

3 – 16 MARCH

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM THURS – SUN

___________________________________________________

David Collins explores how ritual and role-play are shaped by the cathartic desires of our society. Using the horse as a personal motif and metaphor for the sublime, Collins engages in various performance exercises with horses, inhabiting the precarious space between control and surrender. These human-animal collaborations are analogous to experiential extremes, psychological struggles and power relationships, through which Collins proposes catharsis as a crucial human compulsion.

___________________________________________________

February 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Group Sex

DOMINIC KAVANAGH | JOSEPH FLORIO | LISA McCLEARY

 ___________________________________________________

OPENING

6 – 8pm 10 February

CONTINUES

11th – 21st February

OPENING HOURS

11-5 pm, Thursday – Sunday

___________________________________________________

 Group Sex is an exhibition focusing on intimacy, anxiety and physical exploration. Three recent art graduates from Sydney reflect on the contemporary experience of romance and social relations: fraught with abstractions from the physical and insulated by layers of technology from both social risk and direct connection.

Each artist elaborates on the position and presentation of the self in its relation to others. Joseph Florio’s wall sculpture uses suggestive materials and kinetic repetition to create an atmosphere of slow-building tension and innuendo. Lisa McCleary’s paintings are far more explicit: collages of truncated text and eroticised bodies dissect the politics of sexting. Kavanagh’s life-size photographs proclaim their own insecurity through their extroversion, highlighting the tension between the managed, public persona and the private personality.

These varied studies of our atavistic, compulsive desire for sexual intimacy overlap another contemporary trend. As narcissism becomes not merely acceptable but expected, we are at risk of foregoing the vulnerability beneficial for mutual understanding.

 Curated by Genevieve Felix Reynolds

 ___________________________________________________

Image: Lisa McCleary

January 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Between

AMY MILLS | BAILEE LOBB | MITCH THOMAS

ELLE VAN UDEN | DAN PERVUHIN | NAT DUNCAN

CURATED BY GEORGIE PAYNE-LOY + ELLE VAN UDEN

___________________________________________________

OPENING

6 pm Wednesday 13 January

CONTINUES

14 – 24 January

 OPENING HOURS

11 – 5 pm, Thursday – Sunday

___________________________________________________

EXHIBITION RATIONALE

 The intention of ‘Between’ is to facilitate the process of collaboration as a means for making work. Artists have been invited and designated a partner to compliment and challenge their existing ideas and practices. The result of these collaborations occupies a space that belongs to neither artist alone. This concept was ignited by Martin Buber in 2020 as he compared the two ways a person can experience the world. The first being ‘I-It’ suggests that our comprehension of an object is “monological”, that our understanding of an object is only informed by our experiences and therefore an inward relationship. ‘I-Thou’ suggests that two people in any sort of relationship is “dialogical” and creates a new entity within the space between them.

Collaboration in art sees physical manifestation of this space. The artists are encouraged to look at each other’s practice, discuss what they are interested in exploring and engage in dialogue. The final product may be two takes on the same idea, one work produced together or a series of iterations.

Image: Nat Duncan

December 2020 at Wellington St Projects

How To Live Together

Anna McMahon

OPENING

6pm Wednesday 9th December

EXHIBITION CONTINUES

December 10 – 20th

GALLERY HOURS

11 – 5 PM THURS – SUN

How to live together is the title of a series of seminars delivered by Roland Barthes in the years preceding his death. In this work Barthes focuses on the concept of ‘idiorrhythmy’, a productive form of living together in which one recognizes and respects the individual rhythms of the other. This exhibition aims to poetically present floral sculptural arrangements based on the ideas presented in this text about closeness and separation, longing and closure, as well as comfort and failure.

Anna McMahon is an artist and curator. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD) in 2020, a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Sydney in 2020 and a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD) in 2020. She is a 2020/2020 Co-Director at Firstdraft Gallery Sydney, and a resident artist at Parramatta Artist Studios in 2020. McMahon also collaborates with fellow artist Kate Beckingham as OK YEAH COOL GREAT. She has shown nationally and internationally in solo, group and curatorial projects in various galleries including, MOP Projects (upcoming 2020) (NSW), Open Source Gallery (NY), Raygun (QLD), Gaffa (NSW), Metro Arts (QLD) and Verge Gallery (NSW). As OK YEAH COOL GREAT, she was part of the 2020 SafARI Live program.

November 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Intrigue

Michael Bennett

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday November 18th

Exhibition continues
November 19th –  29th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

_______________________________________________

Intrigue is Bennett’s first exhibition in Australia for two years after relocating to Berlin, Germany. For this show, he has returned to Sydney with a collection of new paintings and sculptures investigating the concept of intrigue from the perspectives of both viewer and creator.

Through themes of transcendence and escapism, Bennett investigates the artistic process and how the development of intrigue contributes to the  viewer’s overall experience and engagement. These new works invite contemplation and immersion by continuing Bennett’s previous explorations of the personal and ‘inner world’.

Deep layering, a pared back colour palette and textural subtleties alongside found materials combine with the introduction of confident and bold mark-making, ensuring that this is Bennett’s most raw and honest body of work to date.

“I’m interested in what draws people into artworks particularly in the realm of painting – what people gravitate towards, what they are compelled by and why. Not only for the audience, but also from the perspective of the artist. What is it that unites all three parties?”  

– Michael Bennett

_______________________________________________

October 2020 at Wellington St Projects

House Hold Me

Sally Anderson

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday October 14th

Exhibition continues
October 15th –  25th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

_______________________________________________

There are many ways we remember, occupy space and anticipate situations. House Hold Me uses dualities (foreground/background, floating/falling, verity/mendacity, interior/exterior, remembering/forgetting) to reinterpret understandings of familiar spaces and situations.

These painterly works use intuitive colour-play and suggestive architectural motifs within abstracted landscapes to destabilise rational delineation of space, perspective, emotion and association. Deliberate metaphoric reference to still-life and landscape, both experienced and anticipated, are suggestive of language and thought, presence and absence.

_______________________________________________

September 2020 at  Wellington St Projects

Sealed Earth

Harriet Body

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday September 16th

Exhibition continues
September 17th –  27th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

_______________________________________________

Beginning On 1 July, 2020 and finishing on 30 June, 2020 I underwent a daily task of repeatedly grasping clay within my hand. The resulting ceramic installation titledSealed Earth consists of 2020 individual ‘grasps’ and behaves as a catalogued index of the movement of my creative body through a time period of one financial year.

Creating Sealed Earth was never intended as an imposition. It was not meant as a test of endurance, nor to enslave me to my own creative process. Rather, the task became a gentle accompaniment to my every day routine – a log book was kept and days missed were acknowledged and recorded.

My art practice often involves me imposing sets of rules and parameters upon my creative process. The parameter of one financial year for Sealed Earth allowed me to examine how my art-work, being concept-based, can exist in a “real-life” economy and thus the resulting ceramic installation also becomes a survey of my productivity as an artist.   

I will also be exhibiting two new paintings, Sticks and Stones One and Two, made from hand-made pigment from porcelanite rocks on washi paper, also hand-made during a recent masterclass at the Awagami Papermaking Factory in Tokushima, Japan.

There will be an essay written by Chloé Wolifson available at the exhibition opening.

_______________________________________________

August 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Laminate

James Leiutenant

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday August 19th

Exhibition continues
August 20th – August 30th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

_______________________________________________

The exhibition Laminate is a product of collecting, archiving and translating. This new series of paintings and screen prints by James Lieutenant grew from the process of collecting litter. Tiny pieces of indiscernible debris become large, highly detailed images that sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration. Scale becomes disorientating and distorted, offering no solid reference to place these objects in reality. The surface and texture of these highly detailed works becomes the focus, with specks of dust and dirt enlarged to an unearthly size.
_______________________________________________
Image:
Found Black Rubber with Dirt Pattern, 2020
Acrylic on Canvas
80x80cm

July 2020 at Wellington St Projects

UGLY ANGRY

Rafaela Pandolfini

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday July 22nd 6-8pm

Exhibition continues
July 23rd – August 2nd

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

_______________________________________________

Ugly Angry is the second part of a three-part series. Through photographic, video and sound installation the work focuses on latent anger that lies beneath the surface. Because of my complex relationship to anger I look at Jo Spence and Rosy Martins’ ideas of phototherapy and reconstruction when defining my methodology in Ugly Angry. I continue to look to the approach of reconstruction through an examination of Mike Kelley’s work, in particular through his large–scale piece Day is Done (2020/05) and his reimagining of events via sound and video installations. I also refer to Jean Luc Godard’s editing techniques to explore ideas of audience interactivity. I employ stereotypical representations of femininity to depict women and anger, and compare this technique to Monika Tichacek and her work Lineage of the Divine (2020). Ugly Angry sees a very different style of movement used to convey emotion, which is inspired by Yvonne Rainer and her seminal piece Trio A. While I am physically present in this work, I still use the camera, costume and a subject to create distance and remove myself from focus.
_______________________________________________
Image info – Ugly Angry #9, 2020/14, 26.5 x 40cm, semi gloss photo paper, ed of 3 + AP

June 2020 at Wellington St Projects

The View

Eleanor Louise Butt
Ellen Dahl
Lydia Dowman
David Manley
Scott Morrison
Naomi Riddle
Talia Smith

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday June 24th 6-8pm

Exhibition continues
June 25th – July 5th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm
_______________________________________________

Curated by Talia Smith

“The landscape functions as a mirror and a lens: in it we see the space we occupy and ourselves as we occupy it.”
Joachim Koester

The View brings together seven emerging artists whose practices examine the often-tenuous relationship between man and the land we inhabit. Belonging, comfort, home, a resource – the landscape and our relationship to it can be interpreted in many ways, with the passing of time it has come to bear these physical and psychological marks. The marks of what has come before and what will come after.

From explorations of the unexplored neighbourhood to modern day ruins to the tension within the landscape, this exhibition aims to present seven different ‘views’ of the landscape that each of these artists experience.
_______________________________________________
Image details: Lydia Dowman, 34° South, Pigment print on photo rag paper, 2020

May 2020 at Wellington St Projects

BIG DAMN TRAGEDIAN

JONATHAN MCBURNIE

Exhibition Opening
Wednesday May 27th 6-8pm

Exhibition continues
May 28th – June 7th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm
_______________________________________________

Statement

In McBurnie’s latest works, the melodramas unfolding appear to be imitating the melodramas of life. Or are these apparent parallels merely coincidence?  The art gallery is transformed from a site of cultural significance and veneration into an arena of heaving, steroidal masculine bravado and genetically-modified, cosmetically-enhanced vulgarity of the commodified feminine, all clashing for the top spot in the next art ‘event’. Here, the art event closes in on the narrative absurdity of the comic book event, which tends to feature a more robust, end-of-the world crossover appeal than its more cultured, but depraved uncle, the fine arts. Big Damn Tragedian is narrative voyeurism for a vacuous, doomed generation.
_______________________________________________

Image details: Flex Low, Sweet Charriot (get ze Chopair)2020, Ink, watercolour and gauche on paper, 575 x 440 mm

April 2020 at Wellington St Projects

UNIFICATION

Bruce Reynolds

Exhibition Opening

Wednesday April 29th 6-8pm

Exhibition continues

April 30th – May 10th

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

Exhibition Statement

March 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Some Rocky Socket

Deb Mansfield

Exhibition Opening

Wednesday March 4th 6-8pm

Exhibition continues

March 5th – 19th

Special event

March 19th

Artmonth 2020 Chippendale precinct artbar hosted by Wellington St Projects

Gallery hours
Thursday to Sunday 11-5 pm

Exhibition Statement
Some Rocky Socket is a project that brings to light the artist’s and her family’s sea-faring history. Mansfield, who worked as a sailor between 2020-2020, has created with Some Rocky Socket a body of work about her Grandfather, who was a Captain in the British Navy dismantling ocean mines post-WWII, and in later years, designing sea craft.
Using photographs from the family archive, Mansfield has crafted three hand-woven photo-tapestries, replicating an ocean-mine being destroyed/detonated at sea, a portrait of her Grandfather (who bears a striking resemblance to the artist herself), and a design for a submarine launched MiG-25 Foxbat – a fantastical idea that did not get realised until well after the Captain’s death.
Some Rocky Socket continues Mansfield’s research into island and ocean geographies – as a way of investigating the nature of boundaries and exploratory travel.

Its also Wellington St Projects 2nd Birthday! come and celebrate with us!

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale, 2020

November 2020 at Wellington St Projects

RETRIEVAL

Jack Banduch and Nichola Palazzi.

Exhibition Opening
6 – 8 pm Wednesday November 12th

Exhibition continues
14th – 16th October

Gallery hours
Fri 12-6pm
Sat 12-6pm
Sun 12- 6pm

RETRIEVAL seeks to navigate the imposed line of division situated between subjectivity and objectivity. An exploration of the relative, interconnected nature of condition and consequence, what it is to seek, perceive and retrieve form and value through experience and the photographic image.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale, 2020

October 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Save As

GENEVIEVE REYNOLDS

Exhibition Opening
6 – 8 pm Wednesday October 15th

Exhibition continues
17th – 19th October

Gallery hours
Fri 12-6pm
Sat 12-6pm
Sun 12- 6pm

Overlapping layers of translucent paint obscure and reveal earlier compositions, forming tunnels leading into the work’s history. The resulting forms protrude and recede, oscillating between reading as positive objects and holes. Each work is based on a preliminary photoshop drawing, software that mimics the process of layering paint. Translating the compositions from intangible, infinitely reproducible, virtual jpegs into physical, handmade objects is an attempt to reclaim visual experience for the material and three dimensional.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale, 2020

September 2020  at Wellington St Projects

Chinese Checking

MATT BROMHEAD

Exhibition Opening
6 – 8 pm Wednesday September 17th

Exhibition continues
19th – 28th September

Gallery hours
Fri 12-6pm
Sat 12-6pm
Sun 12- 6pm

You are invited to attend Matt Bromhead’s solo show ‘Chinese Checking’. An exhibition of new painting and sculptural works at Wellington St Projects.

Chinese Checking is built on the premise of positive tension; it aims to achieve a certain posture through inherently opposing forces and materials. It chronicles a relationship between attraction and repulsion, distance and sameness, and follows the dance of two entities that swirl around each other in order to achieve victory in the game.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale, 2020

August 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Empty Vessels, Awkward Advances

CHRIS DOLMAN

Opening night
6-8pm Thursday 28th August

Exhibition continues
29th – 31st August

Gallery hours
Friday 12-6pm
Saturday 12-6pm
Sunday 12-6pm

A durry butted out in a perfectly cooked egg. A black and white stripped pot with a name of Beetlejuice. A painting of a geometric void with a garden hose nose. Enter the world of Chris Dolman.

Wellington St Projects is pleased to present Empty Vessels, Awkward Advances, an exhibition of new works by the Artist formerly known as Christopher.

The opening night will double as a launch for Dolman’s new website, www.chrisdolman.com with a small visual publication on the Artists recent practice, and accompanying essay by Chloe Wolifson.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale, 2020

July 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Uncanny Residues

TULLY ARNOT

Exhibition opens
WEDNESDAY July 23rd
6-8pm

Exhibition continues
July 25th – 27th

Gallery Hours
Friday – Sunday
12-6pm

Through subtle alchemical shifts, Tully Arnot produces works which reinterpret existing understandings of everyday objects, their functions and our relationships with them.

By disturbing the familiar, he creates what he calls an Uncanny Residue. This manipulation of the quotidian, of objects that are known to the audience, disrupts our perception of everyday forms, vaguely but permanently altering how we see them.

The exhibition presents a number of sculptural experiments investigating the creation of an Uncanny Residue.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale

May 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Fixed Object

PAUL ADAIR
KATE BECKINGHAM
DANICA CHAPPELL
KATE ROBERTSON

Exhibition opens
WEDNESDAY MAY 28th
6-8pm

Exhibition continues
May 30th – June 1st

Gallery Hours
Friday – Sunday
12-6pm

In ‘Fixed Object’ Paul Adair, Kate Beckingham, Danica Chappell and Kate Robertson explore contemporary iterations surrounding the ‘photographic’.

Following on from their exhibition This Has Been at c3 Contemporary in Melbourne last year, the group further investigates the logic of photography, through their independent practices, which span sculpture and photography.

Wellington St Projects
studio 8, 19-25 Wellington St
Chippendale

March 2020 at Wellington St Projects

SafARI 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Wellington St Projects are proud to present the work of:

James Carey

Penelope Benton & Alex Clapham

OK YEAH COOL GREAT

Opening Friday March 14th

Exhibition continues 15 March – 4 April

Gallery hours

Wed- Sunday 12-6pm

Curated by Liz Nowell and Christiane Keys-Statham, SafARI exists as the fringe event for
the Biennale of Sydney, presenting new work by emerging artists across 7 diverse spaces.

The Chippendale art precinct will come alive on Friday 14 March, with combined openings at DNA Projects, The Corner Co-operative and Wellington St Projects
For full details and performance times visit the SafARI 2020 website

Please see the opening night program below

Introducing the Artists’

Wellington St Projects are proud to introduce our SafARI 2020 Artists’ Penelope Benton and Alexandra Clapham, James Carey and Ok Yeah Cool Great.

Join us in Chippendale for the opening night of SafARI 2020 on March 14th from 6-9pm at Wellington St Projects, DNA Projects and The Corner.

December 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Gallery Hours 
Wednesday 6-8pm
Friday 12 – 6pm
Saturday 12 – 6pm
Sunday 1 – 6pm

Greedy Hen is a multi-disciplinary art collective, housing the collaborative works of Katherine Brickman and Kate Mitchell. They create imagery eluding to a playful black humour, unwritten fables, and subtle off-kilter sinister elements lurking amongst a kinder-esq beauty.

November 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Passing Through has been curated by Gallery Co-Director Katherine Brickman.

Passing Through

Gallery Hours 
Thursday 6 – 8pm
Friday 12 – 6pm
Saturday 12 – 6pm
Sunday 1 – 6pm

Like the feeling of deja-vu some artworks have a hint of pre-knowing without knowing them at all. There is something simultaneously familiar and disconcerting, a sense of wanting to discover the greater story when only being presented with the tip of the iceberg. Crucial elements of the narrative are left undisclosed. The open gaps leave a space for the viewer to fill in details and come to their own conclusions, hint at action as having taken or about to take place, a questioning of what has or is about to pass. This implication of stilled time allows for a contemplation of the transient nature of the image itself.

September 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Curated by Katherine Brickman and Belem Lett.

‘Face Off’

Matthew Hopkins

Emily Hunt

Kate Mitchell

Tom Polo

Vivian Cooper Smith

Opening night 

6-8pm September 12th

Exhibition Continues

September 13th – 15th

Gallery Hours 
Thursday 6 – 8pm
Friday 12 – 6pm
Saturday 12 – 6pm
Sunday 12 – 6pm

Contemporary portraiture engages with not simply a likeness of physical being but rather the potential of the psychological to be personified in various material forms.  Face Off revels in the awkward portraits created when the concern for a likeness of a specific individual is removed. The portrait then can assume the position of being an experimental representation rather than a literal one, which questions our assumptions of what it means to create or to be a portrait. The abstract, disguised or masked subject can reveal often hidden human characteristics. In stripping back the portrait subject, whether real or invented, these artists playfully reveal the unhinged, sinister oddities of our relationship towards the face and the psychology it contains.

July 2020 at Wellington St Projects

The next exhibition at Wellington St has been curated by Co-Director Belem Lett

Space is the place

Alex Clapham
Mike Hewson
Deb Mansfield

Opening
6-8pm Thursday July 11th

Exhibition continues
12th – 14th July

Gallery Hours 
Thursday 6 – 8pm
Friday 12 – 6pm
Saturday 12 – 6pm
Sunday 12 – 6pm

Exploring site specific intervention and spatial interaction as modes of artistic production ‘Space is the place’ brings together the work of Alexandra Clapham, Mike Hewson and Deb Mansfield. These artists explore their individual practices through the adoption and interaction with the gallery space. Through mediated documentation, architectural intervention and structural illusion these artists reflect upon the exhibition space as being inherently present within the work rather than a space into which their work is placed.

May 2020 at Wellington St Projects

The next exhibition at Wellington St Projects, curated by the Directors Belem Lett and Katherine Brickman is:

Oi!

Sarah Contos
Will French
William Mackinnon
Julian Meagher
Joan Ross

Opening
6-8pm Thursday May 9th

Exhibition Continues
10th – 12th May

Gallery Hours
Thursday      6-8pm
Friday         12-6pm
Saturday     12-6pm
Sunday       12-6pm

‘Oi!’ explores a pop colonial landscape in Australia today. Each artist has been selected due to their multidisciplinary approach to engaging with depictions of “Australianess”. ‘Oi!’ playfully balances imagery delving into post-colonial critic, nostalgia and isolation with a prevailing sense of wry optimism and humour.

March 2020 at Wellington St Projects

Wellington St Projects launches it’s program with the exhibition:

Rumble

Greedy Hen
Gregory Hodge
Kirra Jamison
Belem Lett
Dane Lovett
Tara Marynowsky

Opening
6-8pm Friday 15th March

Exhibition Continues
15th – 17th March

Gallery Hours
Fri 6-8pm
Sat 12-6pm
Sun 12-6pm

Rumble explores the cross over between representation and abstraction within contemporary artistic practice. The artworks within this exhibition bring together six artists based in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

Wellington St Projects initiates it’s founding principle to foster creative exchange between a local, national and
international audience. We aim to build upon and sustain a vibrant and supportive artistic community.