NEW07 - Contemporary Art Exhibition
NEW, the brainchild of ACCA Artistic Director Juliana Engberg, has quickly proved itself a prodigy. Firmly established as one of the most anticipated events in the visual arts calendar, NEW is now also perceived as an important springboard for upcoming artists.
NEW07 promises the look of love, the disappearance of things, masculine mythologies, the aesthetic of the pathetic, fractured identities and a skating incident!… and much, much more…
For the fifth year running, ACCA continues its ground-breaking series of commissions from some of Australia’s brightest and best contemporary artists:
Anastasia Klose - draws upon her life’s own painful or humorous moments to make videos about subjects like love, sex, not being married, and being dumped by a socialist. Her interest in personal failure and humiliation drives her to place herself in awkward situations and film the results.
Christian Capurro - is interested in the idea of ‘un-making’ in a culture obsessed with visibility as a criteria for value. For ACCA, Capurro will contribute a new series of ‘compresses’, whereby an image has been pressed from one magazine page onto the next and then ‘whited-out’ with correction fluid, creating delicate and haunting ‘anti-images’.
Brendan Lee – uses photography and the moving image to explore the hairy underbelly of Australian male culture as represented in film. At ACCA, “Wake in Fright” meets “Chopper” in a showdown of booze and blokes while the last great Aussie muscle car attempts a ‘break-out’ from Pentridge.
Nick Devlin – whose low-tech stacked TVs project back to the viewer a jigsaw of their own body parts. Referencing the American artists of the Beat generation, the “grandaddy of video art” Bruce Nauman, and Japanese/American video artist Nam June Paik, Devlin’s manipulation of CCTV, film and live feed is a kind of ‘visual sampling’.
Damiano Bertoli – takes us “back to the future” as he re-examines the utopian worlds of the late 1960s. Using collage, sculpture and painting, Bertoli proposes a Yesteryear of political and social conundrums in which the Lunar landscape might be traversed by the Manson Family.
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro - are known for bundling and stacking household items and reconfigured vehicles in a way that is both sculptural and curiously animated. For ACCA they will be presenting a kind of forensic dissection of a caravan as both a middle class getaway and counter-cultural home.
Curator, Juliana Engberg says;
“ We are currently in the throes of a shift in artistic practice: NEW06 showcased a highpoint in the referencing of early 60s minimalism, whilst NEW07 predicts a return to the low-tech aesthetic of recycling found objects and a reinterpretation of materialism”.
NEW07
March 17 – May 20
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art,
111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10am-6pm. Mondays by appointment.
Tel: 03 9697 9999.
Admission: Free. www.accaonline.org.au
