Exhibits,
Bryan Foong, Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son, Jessica Guo, Joseph Doggett-Williams, Melissa Nguyen, Naoise Halloran Mackay, Prudence Wilkinson the way a stranger looks
Opening: Wednesday April 9th, 6-8pm Dates: April 9th - May 3rd
As both an illustrative subject and an analytical gaze, the way a stranger looks reveals the notes we take as the keepers of things left behind—whether inherited or found. In its double meaning, the way a stranger looks can refer both to the physical and spiritual description of a stranger made by an audience, or the lens we take as an audience to something extrinsic—be it a person, place, belief, or moment. These are the little evidences of being alive that we hold onto and absorb within our sacred personal structures, as writer and academic Chelsea Watego asserts: “I tell these stories to enter into a conversation, one which others can be privy to; one that many of us have had at our kitchen tables.”
These artists are strangers to the stories they tell. In emulating them through their artistic practice, they do not attempt to distance themselves from their strangerhood, nor do they seek to fully understand it. With tender dedication, these artists peel back the layers of human experience, revisiting places and moments important to them, thus making them important to their audience. The way a stranger looks reveals the deepest and truest origins of art; storytelling, exploration, deeper histories, power dynamics, the nuanced politics of spirituality, uncovering personal experiences as reflected in fragments of past lives, rituals, and inherited practices.
The way a stranger looks is not merely a reflection of an outer appearance, but a window into the complexities of human existence. It is through the stories shared and the art created that we bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the foreign. The stranger’s gaze, in its layered meanings, invites us to examine not only the lives of others but our own - challenging us to rethink the boundaries of identity, connection, and history. Through this lens, art becomes a tool of both reflection and revelation, allowing the artists to navigate the intricacies of our collective and individual experiences.
I am because my little dog knows me. - Gertrude Stein
Curated by Tabitha Glanville.
Bus Projects is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts funding and advisory body.
Bryan Foong (he/they) is an artist of Chinese-Malaysian heritage working in Naarm/Melbourne. Their practice converges their background in clinical medicine with contemporary bio-politics, queer poetics and visual culture. Their work often takes the form of painting installations to provoke questions of power, pathology and subjectivity. They have exhibited work in a range of solo and curated group shows at CCAS (ACT), Drill Hall Gallery (ACT), Firstdraft (NSW), Laila Gallery (NSW), Blindside (VIC), WestSpace (VIC), QCA Galleries (QLD) and Alte Handelsschule (Leipzig, DE).
Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son occupies a complex cultural position as a contemporary cultural hybrid, having lived in Korea, Singapore, and Australia. She is interested in exploring transcultural identities, memories, and linguistic limitations. She uses scratching, sewing, drawing and texts to metaphorically inscribe, layer and erase diverse cultural memories and experiences that one may possess. Son has received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with Honours (First Class Honours, 2017) and a Master’s degree in Urban and Cultural Heritage (First Class Honours, 2022) from The University of Melbourne.
Jessica Guo is a Chinese-Australian multidisciplinary artist, based in Naarm. Her focus is on story-telling, making capsules based in phenomenology, evocations of personal memories, human connections and emotions. Through exploring the fragments of her lived experiences, and sharing those stories in her practice, Jessica aims to better understand herself and her positionality, her work becoming a constantly evolving ‘self-portrait’.
Joseph Doggett-Williams (b. 1999) is an artist, working in Naarm/Melbourne. His practice explores the interplay between desire, consumption, and nature. Through interdisciplinary methods combining painting and sculpture his forms grapple with the contemporary society’s coexistence with nature, and our desires as art audiences. A process of utilising abject materials currently underlies his improvisational and materially-led practice.
Melissa Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian artist living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation. Melissa has a painting-based practice interested in ideas of translation as creative methodology. The idea of artifice constitutes both her subject matter and process, lending itself to notions of translation, wherein every act in the painting process is relational, influenced and mediated by one’s perception of the subject.
Naoise Halloran-Mackay(b. 1997) lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. His paintings and sculptures navigate intersections of nature, the domestic and the mystical. Utilising a visual and material language that is at once familiar and elusive, he explores notions of looking. Through fragmented perspectives both remembered and imagined, Naoise combines form and imagery in these works to explore what it means to seek, to find or to give shelter
Prudence Wilkinson has been navigating the question of how to locate (and hold) the remains of a memory through the acts of painting, drawing and writing. By engaging with familial oral histories and tactile archives, she has tried to find a way to bring their dialogue into the present, rather than occupying a process of nostalgia. Seeking to both recognise and reckon with the unresolved present. She uses painting as a method of unpacking as opposed to understanding, acknowledging the impossibility of fully understanding someone else’s memory.