Exhibits,
Emeline Robinson-Shaw, Visaya Hoffie, Mythra Schwartz, Loretta Riach, Isabella Darcy, Grace Culley Cost Benefit
Opening: wednesday 30 september, 6-8pm Dates: 30 september - 24 october
Cost Benefit brings together five painters who configure the “value” of their work in very different ways. It also brings into view the economic conditions which organise our collective ability to produce and exhibit art. Each of these artists have been commissioned for the nominal price of $237.96 and tasked with a corresponding brief: to paint $237.96 dollars of their time. Accompanied by a silent auction, the exhibition invites visitors to bid on the commissioned paintings, with each work’s reserve price being the cost of commission, and the sale proceeds used to pay Bus Projects’ volunteers.
The rather specific sum of $237.96 represents a fifth of what volunteers would receive to invigilate the exhibition if they were paid the minimum wage of a casual employee. If all works sell at their reserve price of $237.96, volunteers get paid for the exhibition’s four-week run – meaning the value of the exhibition’s production realises the value of its “reproduction” within opening hours. For any works which exceed their reserve, artists will pocket the surplus, thereby turning a profit greater than the “value” of their artistic labour.
Curator Emeline Robinson-Shaw’s full exhibition essay is available here.
Emeline Robinson-Shaw is an art historian, curator, and arts worker based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her
research focuses on the relationship between art, labour, and finance. She currently works as the Gallery
Coordinator at Blindside, and tutors in Art History and Theory at Monash University.
Loretta Riach is an artist and writer from Aotearoa, based in Naarm. Their practice explores socio-ecological relationships, and possibilities beyond a work/life balance. In 2023, they were a studio artist and facilitator at play_station artist run space (Wellington), where their solo show Urban Green Space was presented.
Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Grace Culley is an artist working in drawing, painting and sculpture. Her practice investigates the various roles that repetition plays in trying to understand oneself and one’s environment. Underpinned by Culley’s experience of repetitive behaviours resulting from Tourette’s Syndrome, her works are made through labour-intensive processes, emphasising how repetition intensifies sensations like pleasure, escapism, discipline, and damnation.
Mythra Schwartz (b. 1996, Canada) is a Naarm/Melbourne-based painter whose practice explores the fleeting edges of perception, memory, and desire. Growing up between Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Bali, her transnational upbringing informs a sensitivity to transience and displacement. Schwartz completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University in 2022 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2024. She is represented by ISM Art Space (China) and FUTURES (Melbourne). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Huxley Parlour (London) and FUTURES (Melbourne) alongside inclusions at West Bund Art Fair, Shanghai, and So~Shenzhen Art Fair, Shenzhen (China). Other recent group exhibitions include Arc One Gallery, George Paton Gallery, TCB Gallery, Blindside ARI and Lennox St Gallery.
Isabella Darcy (b. 1995) is an early career cross-media artist based in Naarm. Her practice explores the systems and flux of value within consumable objects and design, reconsidering the ways value is constructed and aligned with contemporary culture, material culture, and human consumption. Through the use of colour, material, and tactile processes, Darcy examines how objects communicate meaning, desire, and cultural significance, drawing attention to the shifting relationships between aesthetics, consumption, and value.
Visaya Hoffie’s practice extends through ‘expanded painting’ into sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, design, animation, leatherwork, haberdashery and a range of craft media that she often brings together in immersive installations that locate the viewer as an essential and performative element in the work. The artist brings a broad range of historical and cultural experiences and references to bear on her slightly wry, amused and often revealing responses to our contemporary cultural landscape. Her work often suggests new paradigms for world-making where hybridised boot-legged characters transcend hierarchies of taste and toy with the limitations of aesthetic boundaries.