CATHY DREW & JENNIE HOLTSBAUM

TRACES OF NATURE

September 3 - September 23, 2010

Galleryeight is proud to present TRACES OF NATURE, a joint show by Cathy Drew and Jennie Holtsbaum.

Please join is for drinks with the artists on Tuesday September 7 from 6pm.

We tend to think of decorating our homes as a frivolous act without much meaning beyond our personal tastes. But for these artists, the act of using Australian motifs in the context of interior decoration is an act loaded with meaning. It can be an instrume...nt of preservation – or an act of subjugation.

Jennie Holtsbaum sees pattern as a way of preserving Australian flora and fauna. Using the idiosyncratic shape of local plants and animals, Holtsbaum creates new forms that combine local shapes with European decorative forms. Her work asks if these plants and animals are going to last. With changes in our environment, will the only evidence of the existence of these plants and animals be a ‘trace’ in the form of a fossilised outline, or a decorative pattern?

Cathy Drew also looks at Australian nature through the filter of decorative arts, but for her the act of rendering Nature as decoration is an act of control, stemming from the naivety of early European settlers. Decoration is associated with the comfort and status of a good home. By combining Australian nature with Western decorative forms the Northern and Southern Hemispheres collide, making bizarre and unfamiliar animals seem harmless and distant to newly settled European Australians.

EDEN DIEBEL

AGAINST NATURE

August 13 - September 2, 2010

Galleryeight is proud to present a new exhibition of recent photographs by Eden Diebel.

Please join us for drinks with the artists on Friday August 13 from 6.30pm.

AGAINST NATURE starts with a memory.

As a very young kid we took a family trip to the coast of Spain. It was there that I experienced the violent bashing of an octopus by a gang of teenagers.  At the time it seemed incomprehensible that anybody could be so cruel to one of gods creatures. It was many years later that I realised the kids were tenderising the beast by pounding it against the rocks, creating a delicacy for the dinner table.

It makes sense now, a custom that was so normal to people who still knew what a real animal looked like looked, appeared to be brutal torture to a kid who saw animals as either pets or anonymous bits floating around in mums ‘cowboy stew’.

On the same trip I fell in love with a crabs’ claw, this huge vivid red one that found it’s way onto our dinner table. I wanted to keep it and take it back to my room. I was seduced by it’s rich colour, moulded shape and shiny black edges. When I woke in the middle of the night it was there by the bed, and it terrified me. It was no longer food, but some grotesque angry shape that reminded me of the nose of Mr Punch from the vividly violent Punch and Judy show. The claw had to go.

AGAINST NATURE is about animals (apart from one picture of an onion), not the animals in nature, but the ones found in the supermarket and fish market, the ones we’ve packaged, frozen, caged and netted. To that extent I suppose there’s an ecological theme but not a polemic.

I see all these creatures outside their natural habitat and they look strange to me, equal parts compelling and repellent…and I suppose the pictures in this show may be the same, both compelling and repellent.

JOSEY KIDD-CROWE

SUCCESSIVE

June 25 - July 8, 2010

Galleryeight is proud to present a new exhibition of recent paintings by Josey Kidd-Crowe.

Please join us for drinks with the artists on Friday June 25 from 6pm.

Josey Kidd-Crowe begins his paintings with a loosely painted landscape, often simplified in design to a ground and a sky. The motifs seem to be built out of or grown from these indefinite spaces in which they are placed.

Each painting is like an idea that comes at a certain moment and then leaves. It is usually only the first impressions of an idea that we see. This gives the paintings an alluring and mysterious quality.

Kidd-Crowe does not revisit his paintings, he does not re-vision the image for reworking or clarification. When the painting has enough suggestive quality it is put aside and the next painting is started. The exhibitions title refers to this sequential working method, where each painting (image) succeeds and breaks away from the last.

Josey Kidd-Crowe is emerging artist who graduated from La Trobe University, Bendigo in 2009 majoring in painting. He has also studied in Lismore and Mildura. Kidd-Crowe has participated in Group shows in Regional Victoria and Melbourne. This will be his first Sydney exhibition.

MATCH BOX PROJECTS

ENCOUNTER.........New York

June 12 - JUNE 24, 2010

Please join us for the opening night preview with the artists on Friday 11th of June, from 6pm.

At galleryeight Match Box Projects invite you on a visual journey through New York City. They will present a body of work incorporating photographs, mixed media and video - a result of their performative project  "Time Capsule" carried out on the streets and subways of New York in 2009.

Match Box Projects (twin sisters Leanne Shedlezki and Naomi Shedlezki) are a Sydney based conceptual artist duo who work across disciplines including performance, installation, digital-media and collaborative exchange. Since 2006 Match Box Projects have been creating long-term, socially engaged interdisciplinary projects/interventions exploring notions of identity, place and the archive. Using public space as a site of enquiry and research, their projects initiate conversation, negotiation and exchange with individual strangers and impromptu audiences around the globe. Match Box Project’s audiences are simultaneously the subjects and collaborators of their work.

Match Box Projects have presented their work in Australia, Japan and the United States and have been awarded various grants for their practice including from Arts NSW, City of Sydney, Japan Foundation,and NAVA.

matchboxprojects.com

sydneyariguide.com

CATHERINE CONNOLLY & SALLY TAPE

RECENT PAINTING AND INSTALLATION

MAY 28 - JUNE 10, 2010

Opening on May 28 is a new exhibition from Catherine Connolly & Sally Tape.

Drawing on elements of film and architecture, Connolly and Tape re-present them in the form of painting, installation, objects and video works.

Connolly's video installation work examines representation in and the hyperbolic language of popular culture, particularly in cinema and music, and the ways in which this enforces, subverts or complicates ideas of gender, performativity and space.

Working with ideas of contemporary painting Sally Tape’s work delves beyond a surface seemingly implicit to a formalist vernacular. She is interested in the psychological effect an object can produce. Accordingly, she works to layer specific objects within her paintings and installations to reshape and reformat a viewer’s mental space. She achieves this with a keen sense for exhibition design, consideration for the mechanics of vision (perception) and imagery that has been considered simultaneously organic and industrial.

Please join us for drinks with the artists on Friday May 28 from 6pm.

JULIA SCHAUENBURG

COUPLES

MAY 14 - MAY 27, 2010

"Through my photographic practice, I am exploring the boundaries of gesture and romance, I am interested in humans and in life as it happens."
Julia Schauenburg

‘Couples’ is a series of photographs taken in 2009 and 2010 of friends of mine who were recently engaged or married. In times of individuality and self-realisation, marriage seems to be the most profound thing to give, the biggest sacrifice to make. Julia Schauenburg is a German artist and photographer who is based in Sydney, Australia.

juliaschauenburg.com

STROBED Posting on the Couples Exhibition:

http://www.strobed.com.au/2010/05/julia-schauenburg-galleryeight

VALENTINA SCHULTE

PHANTOM DETECTION

APRIL 30 - MAY 13, 2010

Phantom Detection is a new photographic collection by emerging Sydney based artist Valentina Schulte and is part of the Head On Festival for 2010.

This new work celebrates the idea of the Shinto belief that there is a Kami or spirit in all things relating to the natural world. From the smallest creature to the largest fixture in the landscape some include water, rock, tree and mountain, there are hundreds if not thousands of natural elements that have a kami. This work is inspired by the spirits of natural elements represented in the Miyazaki animated film Spirited Away. Within the setting of a traditional Japanese bathhouse radish, wind and river spirits are given personality and physical form and can go to relax after a hard days work. It centres around the idea that the kami can be watched in their natural environment similar to a nature documentary. We watch them in acts of their everyday happenings but are unaware of our presence.

Schulte's work has been collected in Hong Kong, Norway and Denmark as well as around Australia.

valentinaschulte.com