Kit Wise - Summertime @ ACCA
Kit Wise will create the ultimate relaxation destination in a series of new works for ACCA @ MIRKA.
Kit Wise creates large-scale digital landscapes where the ideal city meets with nature. “Utopia in arcadia,” he calls it.
The artist, a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University, borrows from western medieval narrative painting, the European tradition of the picturesque and science fiction cinema to make picture perfect, high-tech cities that sit against beautiful landscapes – usually with an uncanny twist.
For this series, which opens at ACCA @ Mirka on Friday 4th December, Wise looks towards the waterside paradise that is St Kilda as well as the world’s finest resort towns and leisure destinations, creating several screen-based works that explore the idea of the ‘ideal city’– in a disquieting but perfect digital reality.
Kit Wise was born in Portsmouth and graduated from Oxford University and the Royal College of Art. He received the Wingate Rome Scholarship in Fine Art in 1999, studying at the British School at Rome, and moved permanently to Australia in 2002 where he has continued to practice as an artist, writer and curator. Recent solo exhibitions in Melbourne include Natural Disaster at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (2008), Rhapsodia at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2007), Superhappiness at CONICAL (2006) and Soujourner, Westspace (2005).
Kit Wise – Summertime, opens at ACCA @ Mirka on December 4, 2009.
ACCA @ MIRKA is a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Mirka at Tolarno Hotel, presented by Sanpellegrino. ACCA will curate four projects by emerging Australian artists each year, continuing the tradition of bringing great contemporary art to this unique and historic restaurant space.
