Engages,

Nina Sanadze, Bus TV Living Room

Dates: Every Wednesday, 6pm

‘I want to do more than just exist.’
—Eva Hesse

What is behind this ordinary apartment door?
Who is that woman that cleans your office or serves you coffee?

‘Living Room’ is a series of short films by visual artist Nina Sanadze. Each film presents a portrait of a Melbourne artist captured in their home studio and sometimes at their job too. Shot on the mobile phone during the time of Covid lockdowns, the films blend domestic and political, private and public creating personal, insightful biographies of artists and life conditions of our time.

The slow panning camera creates a witness view where people and objects are still, presenting a slice of time and timelessness, reminiscent of a theatrical tableau. A moving picture that doesn’t move, a film evoking a monument. The narrative is told through domestic objects, trinkets, books, textures, tools and artworks, producing a synaesthesia of sound and image. The home becomes a rare still life, uncovering ephemerality, beauty and the unique and rich world of its inhabitants. House and objects become epic, revealing stories and history through the micro and macro dimensions.

WEEK 1: WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY AT 6.30pm: Mia Salsjö

We are listening to a structural composition of an architect’s drawing for the internal framework of the inner atrium of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center. The sound is constructed based on a system of numbers created from an overdrawing of music notation onto the architect’s structural plan drawing.

Artist and composer Mia Salsjö orchestrates multi-disciplinary art projects, encompassing drawing, music composition, text, performance, video, and textile-based works. Her practice is grounded in complex code-based systems. The systems are devised by Salsjö as a means of linking diverse media to an underlying linguistic system. It is through this process that Salsjö reflects on the elusive nature of communication – its potentialities, triumphs, failures, past, present and future. Her work has been performed and presented in many exhibitions, most recently Moving Pictures at LaTrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Modes of Translation at the 13th Biennale de la Habana, Cuba 2019 and The Score at Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne in 2017. Mia is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne.

https://www.miasalsjo.com
https://www.instagram.com/miacerasalsjo/

WEEK 2: WEDNESDAY, 22 JULY AT 6.30pm: Gonzalo Ceballos

Gonzalo Ceballos is an multi-disciplinary artist based in Melbourne. Exploring the tender forces that draw people together and the bleakness that accompanies the dissolution of idyllic moments arising from love and friendship, Gonzalo captures his subjects in everyday scenes, emphasising the deceptively unremarkable settings of these happenings. Eating dinner with Matisse, drinking wine with Frida Kahlo, or simply documenting the subtle intimacies of friendship by drawing a friend lying in the grass; through these works Gonzalo extends his fixation with human connections to a yearning for a different reality, and the possibility of living and breathing with those he reveres. Gonzalo is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, where he studied painting from 2009-2011.

http://www.gonzaloceballos.com
https://www.instagram.com/dirty_sprite_pouring/

WEEK 3: WEDNESDAY 29 JULY, 6pm: Christine Fontana

For Chris Fontana, medieval aesthetics offer a compelling and explicit vehicle for story telling, allowing her to present a contemporary worldview through a historical lens. While precariously fragile and tactile, her work often takes on a monumental scale, adopting the principle of the medieval map and incorporating graphic narrative illustration within portraiture to address broad political and social concerns. Combining both art and writing practices, she currently works across mediums and genres to develop alternative methods for the delivery of story.

http://www.chrisfontana.com.au
http://www.instagram.com/theotherchrisfontana

Week 4: Wednesday 5 August, 6pm: Linda Gibbs

Linda Gibbs is a landscape painter who has spent the past decade surveying Wilson’s Promontory, the most southern tip of the Australian mainland. Her practice begins in the field, franticly recording wild weather, subtle colour shifts and the ever changing atmospheres of Bass Strait. The field studies reveal vast panoramas of complex abstraction and inform large scale, pared back oil paintings produced in her country studio. Simon Gregg best describes her as painting “with the soul of a poet and the eyes of a realist.”

Following studies at the National Art School, Linda worked in Melbourne as a gallery director, curator, major festival events producer and adult art tutor. Her main focus is always her own studio practice. She is included in private and public collections and has been selected for many prestigious art prizes.

https://www.lindagibbs.com.au/

Week 5: Wednesday 12 August, 6pm: Jaime Powell & Cheralyn Lim

Jaime Powell explores printmaking in a spatial practice, using prints to investigate scale, pattern and tessellation. In installations consisting of multiple prints, organic imagery is created by aligning simple geometries or patterns. The mark making is influenced by the various languages around her while growing up in India. She has trained at Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Tamarind Institute of Lithography, New Mexico and is a recent recipient of the APW James Northfield Trust Lithography scholarship. She was awarded Highly Commended at the Fremantle Print Awards 2018, and is a finalist in 2019.

http://www.jaimepowell.com.au
https://www.instagram.com/jaime.jaime/

Week 6: Wednesday 19 August, 6pm: Tracey Lamb

Tracey Lamb is a sculptor who works mainly with welded steel from her home studio in Melbourne. She has created a range of large to medium sized, modular, site specific, welded installations that reference geometry found in architecture and design and often refers to the stories and works of woman who have been erased from these related histories. She is also currently working on a series of smaller welded sculptures made from steel sheet. The works are finished in clear coated polished steel to reveal the gestural marks of their construction or alternatively painted over in a variety of colours. These smaller abstract works generally acquire their form from fragments domestic or interior design. Tracey completed a Master of Fine Arts at Monash University in 2018 and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts (2013) as well as qualifications in Interior Design and Decoration. Her work has been shown throughout Australia and internationally.

https://tracey-lamb.com
https://www.instagram.com/tracey_d_l/

Week 7: Wednesday 26 August, 6pm: Alison Kennedy

For Alison Kennedy, the art road twists and turns. She is interested in ways of poetic being as disclosed by technology and interprets this through handmade media – combining digital with digital.

Her work so far includes print making, computer modelling and painting and is informed by thinkers including Heidegger and Stiegler.

Untroubled by nihilism – more with the contemporary excess of meaning – Alison considers that it is in this amorphous unpredictable surplus of activity where art is particularly powerful. She is on the lookout for slippage, error and the overlooked because we are at once closest to and furthest away from ourselves.

She has recently completed her MFA at VCA, has exhibited in Australia and overseas, with work held in private collections.

Books are a constant shining presence in her life.

http://www.alisonkennedy.website/
https://www.instagram.com/champagne_sweetie/

Week 8: Wednesday 2 September, 6pm: Shane Nicholas

Shane Nicholas uses systems of art making to explore the mechanisms inherent in current smart
technologies to investigate how the human subject could be viewed by systems of online surveillance
and subsequently represented. The systems of artmaking Nicholas employs reproduce the human form based on the mishandling of data. The resulting forms echo the fundamental contradictions inherent in systems of online
surveillance.

The artwork produced through this process draws from limitations common to neural networks that process collected data. By decontextualizing, filtering, fragmenting and reconstructing data to create distorted versions of the original, the resulting sculptures present a vision of how systems alter subject matter when rendering a model from reality.

Sculptures were produced using an iterative method of 3d scanning, 3d printing, rescanning and reprinting. The distortions in form were directly caused through errors that occurred when translating the subject into digital data, and then back into a real-world object.

Shane Nicholas was the recent winner of the Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture in 2020 and has exhibited his work nationally at Kings ARI, C3, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Linden New Art, Incinerator Gallery, Trocadero Art Space, Five Walls and Latrobe Regional Gallery. Nicholas won the Peter Redlich Memorial Prize in 2017 for his Masters exhibition at Victorian College of the Arts and has previously been a finalist for a number of other awards. Most recently, Nicholas was a finalist for the Incinerator Art for Social Change Award, 2018 and the Linden Art Prize, 2019.

http://www.shanenicholas.com/index.htm
https://www.instagram.com/shanelnicholas/

Week 9: Wednesday 9 September, 6pm: Seth Searle

Seth Searle’s work investigates the relationship between painting and performativity. Through working with the imagery of cropped limbs, vessels, food, patterns and hanging backdrops, she is playing with the symbology of the empty container, cropped and measured foregrounds and distortions through glass. The paintings aim to articulate a feeling of theatrical uncertainty in regards to the performance of self and ask the question: what parts of this performance are visible?

https://sethsearle.com
https://www.instagram.com/sethsearle/

Week 10: Wednesday 16 September, 6pm: Azza Zein

Azza Zein is an installation artist and writer who lives and works in Narrm/Melbourne. Born to a Syrian mother and a Lebanese father, Zein grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. Her practice-led research examines concepts of value in art through the materiality of domestic space and personal experience as a migrant. Through a process of rematerialisation, conceptualised as care for  ‘migrant  materials’, her recent works comment on the dematerialisation of the economy and offer a revaluation of invisible labour. Her artistic research draws on her heritage and her background in economics to explore how artistic processes can be alternative modes of revaluation.

Zein recently completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of Arts, the University of Melbourne. She has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions held in artist-run spaces in Australia. She has participated in art residencies in Argentina, India and remotely the Santa Fe Art Institute Labour residency. Zein was recently a finalist in the Incinerator Gallery Art for Social Change Award (2020), Australian Muslim Artist Award (2019) and the Athenaeum Club award (2020). Zein won the Fiona Myer Art+Australia Internship award for 2020. She published her writing in Art + Australia, in Kohl Journal for Body and Gender Research, Un projects review and recently Kings Artist-run Live from the field. She also performed in the CARE: transforming values through art, ethics and feminism, at George
Paton Gallery in 2019.

http://www.azzazein.com/
https://www.instagram.com/3azzazein/