JUl - DEC 2023 - In Progress

‘RECOLLECTION’ PROGRAM & EXHIBITION FOR WUNDER GYM X MELBOURNE FRINGE FESTIVAL

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WYNDHAM CITY COUNCIL X Hobson's Bay City Council

Details LAUNCHING WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE! Watch this space…

Program representing Western Region Artists features:

  • Mentor Elvis Richardson

  • Q&A at Ian Potter Gallery, Community Hall as part of Melbourne Now

  • Multi site exhibition outcomes at The Annex, next to the Wyndham Cultural Centre, Woods Street Arts Space billboards and projection window and Altona Civic Centre.

about the program theme - ‘recollection: Western region environment as creative playground’

Using your local environment and community as your playground, start with a pre-existing object/image/recording and use this as a prompt or the raw materials to unpack, reveal, recover, represent, archive. Build upon the object’s personal and cultural meanings through a process of addition, subtraction and change or transform the viewers understanding of that object in some way. Create a more inclusive, optimistic and empathetic world response to your environment.

This prompts invites artists to be collectors, editors and curators using their local environment’s objects, recordings, sounds, images as their raw material and inspiration for an artwork. Exploring how their art practice changes the function of the chosen object. How does the viewers personal experience and perspective inform new readings and assessments of the chosen object as art. As the participating artist, how much or little do you change the object. Artists can approach this prompt by curating or editing pre-existing materials through; collage, re-mixing, editing, rearranging, recreating, juxtaposing, uniting, hybridising, categorising, found materials, archiving, appropriation, raising awareness of their chosen objects existence or function.

In the Swing - Is the 2023 Melbourne Fringe Festival will give us a birds’ eye view of Melbourne’s changing culture, as we seek to see the world from new perspectives. As our ideas take flight, we will imagine a world of radical optimism. We all promised we would build back better, and now the time has come for us to urgently plan then create a more inclusive, optimistic and empathetic world. To start, let’s take the chance to simply play – following the expertise of children – to free ourselves from our existing viewpoints, embracing our city as a giant adventure playground where anything goes and everyone is welcome. As we reverse our roles and invert power structures, we will see cultures differently, uncover new art and new art forms, and ultimately make extraordinary new discoveries about ourselves.

ABOUt our program mentor - Elvis Richardson

Elvis Richardson is an artist who frequently collects and curates the objects and imagery of everyday life, gathering raw material from public sources and reconstructing them to comment on taste, class and the realities of being a working artist. Through various media, Richardson’s work employs formalism and satire to expose the inherent contradictions of modern-day, ultra-commodified life on Earth.

In an expansion of the artist’s broader, ongoing investigation into the domestic sphere as a site for understanding the human condition, Settlement and the gatekeepers, 2022, a major new commission by the NGV, is a set of recognisable domestic gates that the artist has modified. Each gate has been reworked to feature the most frequently used synonyms of the word ‘settlement’, a common word with many usages and meanings. Meanwhile, the same English-language thesauruses seldom list the word ‘treaty’ as a synonym for the word ‘settlement’, but the inverse is regularly true. Settlement and the gatekeepers brings attention to this omission and invites the viewer to think about how access is socially constructed through meaning. With each gate powder-coated and rendered functional in the gallery space, visitors are able to interact with the structures and the questions they elicit.

Richardson’s works are held in the collections of the NGV, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artbank, City of Fremantle, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Merri-bek City Council and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia. She has been the director of several artist-run initiatives, including First Draft (1996–97), Elastic (1999–2000), Ocular Lab (2008–10), DEATH BE KIND (2010–12) and True Estate (2017–18).

Richardson is the founding editor of CoUNTess,(www.countesses.blogspot.com) a blog publishing data on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector. The Countess Report 2016 (www.thecountessreport.com.au) was released in 2016 a sector wide bench marking data collection project, and which re-launched as The Countess Report (www.countess.report) in 2017 in collaboration with Amy Prcevich and Miranda Samuels and producing the updated 2019 Countess Report. Elvis Richardson is represented by Hugo Michell in Adelaide and galerie pompom in Sydney http://www.elvisrichardson.com