ENUMERATION

Mary Costello, Ron Pratt, Michelle Tinta

CON·TRA·VEN·TION

7 Recent Sydney Graduates

Elle Comino, Tim Duong, Phillipa Griffin, Elizabeth King, Susanna Obmann, Meeghan O'Shea, Christine Vox

INVISIBLE CITIES

PATRICK FAULKNER

SCORCH

KATH FRIES

3 MARCH  - 22 MARCH, 2012

Scorch is a exhibition of sculptural installations reflecting on our human efforts to render permanent that which is impermament.
Kath Fries explores materiality, spatiality and archetypical narratives in these works by marking a personal, immediate engagement with time, place and physicality.

Opening night - Friday 2 March 6pm
Drinks with the artist sponsored by the Lord Nelson Hotel

Art Month Sydney Event - Sunday 11 March 3pm
Kath Fries in conversation with Megan Robson from the Museum of Contemporary Art and Peter Cramer from galleryeight
Launch of Kath Fries' new art portfolio website www.kathfries.com
Followed by complimentary craft beer tasting courtesy of the Lord Nelson Hotel
RSVP This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

TARDY

KATE VASSALLO

IDENTIFICATION

CLARE COLLINS

DEMENTIA

TILLY LEAHY

NEW WORKS.

BECKY GIBSON

AFFINITY

AMANDA HUMPHRIES, AMY GARDNER, BECKY GIBSON, CELINE ROBERTS, DANIELLE TAM, ISABELLA ANDRONOS, JESSICA TSE, KATH FRIES, MANDY SCHONE-SALTER, MAZ DIXON, YVETTE MARIE TZALIAS

DAWN AND DUSK

MAZ DIXON

ALL I HAVE I HOPE TO KEEP

Thomas C. Chung & Amanda Humphries

TERRA AUSTRALIA

YVONNE RIBES ZANKI

After working as a physiotherapist for ten years, Yvonne recently took a year off to travel around Australia with her camera. The resulting works are an intriguing meditation on the relationship between physical and psychological and spaces.

"I love urban landscapes and the solitude in the big cities" says Yvonne, "but here in Australia I've been seduced by another kind of emptiness - the vast emptiness of land, the immensity of the sky".

Terra Australis explores the spaces we share, often unwittingly, with others. Yvonne has infused seemingly ordinary scenes with sense of quiet beauty.

SPECTATE

SUE MILLSON

Please join us for drinks with artist on Friday 5 August at 6pm.

UNCOVERED

JADE SANTO

PLACE AND TIME

TROY BEER AND JULIE EISENBERG

galleryeight is proud to present Place and Time, a debut exhibition of images by Troy Beer and Julie Eisenberg, as part of the 2011 HeadOn photography festival.

Please join us for opening drinks with the artists on Friday 3 June, 6-8pm.

What images of a place does memory hold? How does time affect what’s been seen?

Julie and Troy discovered they both had been observing and documenting landscapes shifting through and over time, and the idea for this joint show was born.

Julie’s images are intriguingly beautiful distortions taken through aged, sinking glass, freezing people and moments within the boundaries of grand European art museums. An inveterate traveler, she is drawn to the unusual and unexpected. Here, visiting institutions that are magnets for their internal treasures, she looks outwards, through the bubbles and bevels of their windows, creating dreamy, painterly landscapes.

“It’s interesting how the physical form of the building and its ageing can change the story it tells of what and who’s outside it”, she says. “These images from the Louvre in Paris and Hermitage in St Petersburg , though largely unretouched, are surreal and surprising.”

Troy’s works evolved from a project that captured an image each 15 minutes through a single day at Bondi. The repetition of form and changing details build a story about beauty missed in the hours unobserved. The compositions dissect the day, images merge or rise to the surface, exploring how we form our perceptions and memories of a place or time.

“Bondi has got to be one of Australia's most photographed, visited and looked at landscapes. Throughout a day there is noise and movement and spectacle but also places of quiet, natural

SURREALISM IN THE SUBURBS

PAUL TAYLOR

galleryeight is proud to present recent photographs by emerging Sydney artist Paul Taylor.

FABRICATION

MAZ DIXON,  SEBASTIAN GOLDSPINK,  DAVID HAYDEN,
BOOPSEDAISY,  ELKE REINHUBER,  SEBASTIAN PELZ
YVONNE RIBES ZANKI, CELINE ROBERTS, DAVID WILLIS
PETRA SVOBODA, YVETTE TZIALLAS, AMBER WALLACE

Hoax: deception: an act intended to trick people into believing something is real when it is not.

- something intended to deceive or defraud.

Galleryeight is proud to present Fabrication, an exhibition of twelve artists from multidisciplinary pra ctices, each exploring their perception of reality and what is real in our world. Australian culture is rife with deceptions and hoaxes, ranging from the Ern Malley afair to William Blundell’s “innuendos”. To coincide with April fools day Galleryeight invited artists to submit their response to the notion of ‘The Hoax’ or the idea of creative "frabrication".

EDEN DIEBEL

RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS

MARCH 11 - MARCH 31, 2011

"As a very young kid we took a family trip to the coast of Spain. During this 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.

This show is partly about animals, 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."

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

MIKE WATT, FERNANDA PORTO, KATRINA HILL, JUSTIN SCIVETTI,

STEPHANIE GALLAGHER, CECILIA HEI JIN, YEN,

LILY SUN, NANCY LIANG, YVONNE LI, DORA CHEUNG,

JEREMY BONDOC, NADIA LEE, ANASTAZJA KRUSZEWSKA.

FEBRUARY 18 - MARCH 10, 2011

In an environment where we are constantly bombarded with information and trends how can we find the real us, you or me? Who Do You Think You Are? is a collection of contemporary works from a new generation of Sydney based artists. Identity, sexuality, individuality, time and loss are explored through the variety of illustrated and painted works featuring in this show.

JOANNA MARSHALL, TANIJA PARKER & RODNEY YE

SHOOT THE FREAK

January 28 - February 17, 2011

Joanna Marshall
As adults we are delighted by childhood memories of fantasy, innocence and excitement. Humans experience matures our perception of the world around us, a transition from the hyper real to the brutal truth. My practice explores my human experience of this transition. The photographs are a series of compelling film-like stills, reminiscent of childhood bad dreams.

Tanija Parker
Part of becoming an adult, seems to i...nclude letting go of your childhood or ‘childish’ habits, yet our childhood makes us who we are as adults. My work takes a playful look at the role of the child within, the sentimentality attached to childhood objects and how we as adults engage with the world.

Rodney Ye
In a world where we chase endlessly at the conventional standards of beauty, where celebrities rule the way we see and feel, magazines inform us of what to wear and what to love, we seem to have lost the ability to see beauty in the imperfections. My work is a personal, as well as social exploration on the notion of beauty in our day and age.

KATE FARQUHARSON

BLOODLINE

JANUARY 7 - JANUARY 27, 2011

'Bloodline' is an attempt to resolve a split identity which confronts the confusion and dislocation of one caught between cultures and families, and separated by migration and death. In dealing with a mixed heritage of English, Scottish and Sri Lankan Burgher descent, objects of nostalgia within the context of the personal archive, and the family album are transformed into something more sinister. The original moment in time is obscured, and these memories become a means of dissecting past narratives and personal histories. Bloodline is the rumination of the obsessive collector, encapsulating the desire to inevitably grasp knowledge of the past.

LUKE STAMBOULIAH

PERSONS OF INTEREST

December 17, 2010 - January 6, 2011

Inspired by the Justice & Police Museum’s City of Shadows exhibition in 2006, Stambouliah has created a world in which celebrities from the 21st century pose as 1920’s criminals. These gritty tableaux form a striking contrast to the polished paparazzi shots associated with celebrity.

Stambouliah’s project has attracted the cream of Australian stage and screen. Each actor happily submitted themselves to the interrogations of Stambouliah’s lens. “With this work I’m asking if there’s a correlation between the famous actor and the infamous criminal who seeks fame,” explains Stambouliah. “When you see celebrities being photographed within an inch of their lives, it’s hard to escape the idea that they’re experiencing a form of imprisonment”.

Stambouliah is a graduate of the UNSW College of Fine Arts (COFA), with an impressive body of work he imbues photographic artistry with a cinematic sensibility. Persons of Interest is his debut solo exhibition.

JAMES MCMAHON DALE

DARK HARBOUR

November 26 - December 16, 2010

Welcome to Dark Harbour, a fictional series of works based on Sydney’s waterways.

Purposely void of human activity these works focus on prominent or not so prominent buildings, structures and scenes that maybe found within Sydney’s waterways.

Through the use of repetition, distance and space James McMahon Dale has created backdrops for these objects to sit within that enable each works subject matter to take on it’s own personality.

These works play on the relationships and attachments that people develop over time with local landmarks and familiar surroundings and the personalities that these landmarks and places in turn adopt.

JACK CONDON, ISOBEL PARKER PHILIP, IRIT POLLAK AND DARYL PRONDOSO

SLIP

November 12 - November 25, 2010

An exhibition of photography and sculpture by Jack Condon, Isobel Parker Philip, Irit Pollak and Daryl Prondoso that plays with the edge and collapses the periphery. A ‘slip’ is a fleeting event, occurring in the briefest of instants. We are not aware of the slip as it happens. It is too fast. It is only afterwards, once we are back on our feet, that we realize what has happened. Distilling the instantaneous, the artists in this... exhibition attempt to catch the slip – the metaphorical slip – as it occurs.

Where Condon collides the real with the surreal, Pollak grafts three-dimensional forms from two-dimensional images, slipping between the tangible and the intangible. While Prondoso’s attention slides into the voided abyss, Philip uncovers the narratives that lie dormant in the space between images, teasing association out of disassociation. These works lead the viewer through paradoxical and uneven ground over which they must tread carefully, lest they themselves slip and fall.

LACHLAN ANTHONY

WHAT CAN YOU ASK OF ME BUT FOR THAT TO WHICH YOU DON'T ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER?

October 29 - November 11, 2010

What does contentment mean? More than emptiness? Can I use rationality to find happiness? Maybe I don’t care, I’m not sad and this is not necessarily autobiographical. I do get scared but it’s always an itch I can scratch. The television flickers, my biceps ripple. Is there such thing? I doubt it. That’s where it all crumbles really isn’t it… doubting? I should stop smoking, take up yoga, maybe buy a dog or something, Italian greyhounds are hip. uhhh, non-smokers die every day too, pff i'm confused… about Friday, has it ended or begun? I thought it was Monday, I can’t really tell because the lamp is fading in and out. Ah the old in-out, real savage, bit shallow, Rick roll, dirty mole. I’m better than them, much better. The sea sung and the birds hum, never before coffee should a man be hung. Espresso… maybe martini? It might be more fitting, like the pants I’m not wearing, the life I love living. I’ve only been awake for ten minutes but already this day seems like forever again, the clock is a liar but it’s not a bad thing.
10 000 frowns make a wrinkle, put on a smile, are you afraid of dying? Pan said it would be an adventure. Stop whinging, bench-press 150, pop a Xanax and ride kaleidoscopes of caramel light through eternity.

x  x  l o k i

After an adventurous installation exhibited at First Draft in March exploring the capacity for fluorescent lighting to modulate behaviour in the workplace, Lachlan backs up with his 2nd major show of 2010 at galleryeight.  Maintaining a fascination with programmatic living and behaviour, he brings an experimental body of sculpture and performance that looks beyond the office, into to the franchise gym and back to the homogenised bedroom via the mall. Lifestyle, consumption and mortality are carefully intersected with both the cosmetic and utilitarian in a series of dark object remixes that take contemporary corpo-reality into liminal space. This new range of work is informed in part by 6 months of covert, interactive research into mainstream gym culture as member of Fitness First.    http://fitnessfisting.blogspot.com/

Be at the gallery by 6:30 to see a live performance by Lachlan, his father and grandfather.

Gin & Tonic + delectable orderves till 8pm

Lachlan’s practice interrogates mainstream lifestyle programs and environments through a vernacular sculpture that is best understood as form of physical remixing. The form and functionality of common utilitarian objects and systems are sampled, hijacked and transfigured to a state of deliberate liminality. Contextually these objects and systems are products as they are purchased brand new. Here, Lachlan’s role as an artist is consciously mashed with the presumed role of a retail consumer. Purchasing consumer products with deliberate intention to liberate their prescribed, functional meaning is a subversive process that explores the politics of sculptural action.

Lachlan graduated from COFA in 2008 with First Class Honors, he now lives and works in wonderful Melbourne.

ELKE REINHUBER

I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING!

October 15 - Octoberr 28, 2010

On our path through life, we have – at turning points, again and again – to decide, which path to take. But the difficulty to reach a decision can hardly be expressed in terms; much less visualised....As soon as different possibilities are offered to us, our dilemma begins. Which is best way to reach our targets?

The panoramic landscapes follow the tradition of veduta. But here they turn into illustrations of different species of decisions; nature so becomes a sculptor of the ideal path. Sometimes the paths are almost similar; in other cases there is the narrow and the wide, the left and the right, the easy and the steep path to see - which we already know from the myth of Hercules, who had to choose between virtue and vice.

A series of drawings shows different categories, into which forking paths could be classified. Supported by maps and aerial
views, I investigated intersections at places which I was visiting and took photographs on-site. My imagination often differed from what I found on the spot; due to bad weather conditions in winter, some bifurcations were hardly visible or sometimes blocked by construction sites. Therefore, new temporary paths appeared, visible as footprints in the snow. The drawings are presented together with satellite images and on location photographs.

KEVIN BAVA, JULIE BURKE

& YVETTE TZIALLAS

EMBODIMENT

September 24 - Octoberr 24, 2010

Galleryeight is proud to present EMBODIEMNT, a group show by Kevin Bava, Julie Burke & Yvette Tziallas. 

A body tells a thousand stories. Every line, gesture or movement communicates not only the internal but culture and time. From primitive art and ancient myths, the body continues to define and reflect the human spectrum of emotions and imagination.

Kevin Bava’s work is inspired by ancient Greek and European myths, and encapsulates the universalism of human emotion. States of being, as true now as they have been from the dawn of... human thought and feeling, are expressed through the media of sculpture. The scenarios and characters chosen provide a window to the past, attempting to evoke a recognition of the ties that bind us.

Julie Burke works predominantly with the process-driven, traditional and tactile medium of drawing, She often combines large-scale drawing with video and installation. Her work often punctuates the notion that journeys- geographical and temporal, become circular reconstructions through memory.

Yvette Tziallas draws from her imagination to create detailed decorative portraits with distinct and varying personalities. Her work has a tribal edge and appropriates symbols, patterns and themes that reflect the abundance of cross cultural influences in Australia today.

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.


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.


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.


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

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.

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