c3 PRESENTS 3 NEW FUNDED PROJECTS
EXHIBITION NUMBER 17
GALLERY 1
OMFG!
ADAM CRUICKSHANK HIT & MISS ROB McLEISH DELL STEWART KOTOE ISHII
SIMON PERICICH EMILE ZILE
OMFG! is foremost an investigation into the subjective nature of offensiveness, combined with the sometime related aesthetic of doing it yourself. Various meanings, forms and incidences are offensive to some, but not to others. Why, where and what are these subjectivities and how can we possibly hope for everyone to be happy, all of the time? Offence is often related to the, for want of a better word, 'punk' sense of having the perceived arrogance to simply take things on ourselves. In a world where big culture costs trillions, is cynically target-marketed and controlled by bigger economics, the individual artist deciding she or he can brazenly contribute to culture on their own divisive terms is tantamount to revolution.
GALLERY 2
IN DEFENSE OF ONE OR MORE LOST CAUSE
NICKI WYNNYCHUK
Cinder blocks, bamboo, pieces of timber and plywood and other found objects, white paint and handmade ceramic bowls — these are the materials of Nicki Wynnychuk’s In Defence of one or more Lost Cause. This body of work is a motley and unlikely collection of political artworks — ‘unlikely’ because the political character of these assemblages is unapparent, but for the title of the work and its relationship with the balance of the artist’s oeuvre.
Two points of theoretical departure are unmistakable here. The first: Wynnychuk is professedly pursuing a “sustained investigation into the possibility of a sculptural translation of war theorist Herfried Münkler’s concept of a post-heroic society”. The second: Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, to which the title of the present body of work unambiguously refers. Common to both of these writers — and, I sense, to Wynnychuk too — is an unmistakable tenacity, an enduring belief in politics, an enduring belief in the importance of critique.

GALLERY 3
THE SAVIOURS
NAT THOMAS AND CONCETTINA INSERRA
Today, the Abbotsford Convent is a thriving Melbourne arts precinct, set in 6.8 hectares of garden and 11 historic buildings. Full of people everyday of the week, it was almost 289 apartments, a seven-storey tower and a putting green. The determined action of the community group Abbotsford Convent Coalition (ACC) saw the alternative option on the site become a wonderful reality.
“Eventually in 2005, the car parking went the way of the ACC too. They had won the lot. They were driving home the game show BMW, with keys provided by the smiling model.
Seven years of lobbying, gathering signatures, Tuesday meetings and pro bono work after work. Seven years”.
Nat Thomas and Concettina Inserra have met and photographed members of the ACC, to have faces to thank for saving a beautiful public space for all of us.
EXHIBITION NUMBER 16
GALLERY 1
Space A + Project room
It’s not the end of the world
Simon MacEwan
Everybody is living on the rooftops and the giant monkey robot doesn't
want to get up.
Post-apocalyptic urban planning and absurd disasters meet in a series
of drawings in which the personal is re-imagined on an epic scale.
it's ok.
It's not the end of the world.

Space B
Uncertain Futures
Jessica Hall
Masks are a potent symbol of identity, and of covered identity. Masks are as relevant now as they have been in the past, from images of bushrangers with face coverings, military and guerrilla masks, to CCTV images of masked robbers and surgical masks to guard against bacteria. Masks reference fear; of contagion, of the body being invaded or colonised, but they also represent a change in identity for the wearer. A mask can turn an individual into a pack animal, and it can enable that individual to do things they would not do unmasked. It represents a becoming, an in between space where the masked person is neither themselves nor something else. Some of the work uses army imagery and camouflage as a way of visually suggesting the impact of conflict on personal and national identity.

GALLERY 2
VENI VIDI VICI
Rohani Osman, Katie Jacobs and Brittany Veitch
These three artists use uniquely Australian native species to illustrate a traditional British dinner with a dark twist. Through research of historical representation of cultural practices within Australia, including poking fun at the British, the artists question the ideas of patriotism and environmentalism.
Bush foods lovingly made by the artists will be served at the opening night celebrations on the 28th of October, from 6-8pm.

GALLERY 3
2009 Convent Studio Artists Salon
Ralf Kempken, Micheline Lee, Carol Batchelor, Phoebe Porter, Marte Newcombe,
Kathryne Leopoldseeder, Charlie Sublet, Jon Butt, Rick Matear, Deborah Cole, Rebecca Wetzler
Wendy Golden, Marita Lillie, Jason Maling, Phillip Stokes Studio Glass, Louise Richards-Green
Serving as the mother-house of the Sister’s of the Good Shepherd in Australasia for 112 years, the Abbotsford Convent now houses artists, arts workers and creative organisations.
The pantries which once stored the food and produce needs for the 1200 women and girls who lived on site now function as the c3 contemporary art space, while the ground floor spaces of the Convent now host regular special events, conferences and arts, craft & design markets.
The first and second floors of the Convent where the Nuns were housed in dormitories and cells are now the creative base for painters, illustrators, poets, writers, weavers, designers, jewelers, performers, musicians, singers and more.
This exhibition is representative of the work of these artists. The Convent Salon Show exemplifies the diversity of creative practice based at the Abbotsford Convent today.

EXHIBITION NUMBER 15
Gallery 1
Space A
Mona Frank meets S.P Jamestowne
(The family project, life in progress part 1)
Mona Frank
The Family Project is the first part in a series of art works to emerge from artists Mona Frank and S.P.Jamestowne.
Strangers become family: this is what brings these two artists together in all their alter ego madness, their new family orientated life, streaming from every angle of their living beings to create a hopscotch of ideas, dreams and realities.

Space B
After the Goldrush
Kate Robertson
Snaking its way more than 200 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges across Melbourne’s open plains into Port Phillip Bay, the Yarra River is many things to many people. Having survived and supported European settlement, the Victorian gold rush, industrialisation, tourism and more, its history is as rich and diverse as the landscape it travels across.
In her first solo exhibition After the Goldrush, Melbourne based artist Kate Robertson documents the Yarra River with photographs, large-scale posters and ceramic sculptures. Moreover, she uses ‘the river’ as a motif to explore the course of contemporary life and photography.
From an image of a ship docked at port, a young girl catching raindrops on her tongue, to gutting a fish, After the Goldrushexplores the malleability of photography and the fragmentation of our image and information saturated world. Ceramic sculptures serve as a souvenir and reference to photography’s ‘golden moment’.
After the Goldrush embraces a more subjective approach in contrast to conventional documentary photography, blending fiction and non-fiction, utilising collaboration and performance, and blurring the line between subject and photographer.

Gallery 1 project room
THE DYLAN DRAWINGS
Mary Good
“The universe resembles a brain, not a machine. Life is a story being told now. The first reality is story. This is what being a mechanic has taught me.” John Berger in A-X
My step grandson Dylan inspired these drawings. He was leaning over the table drawing with a contraption like a pantograph made from Lego. His drawing was alive. I am interested in the idea of domestic or mechanical events being the compost for imagination and I wanted to try to marry Dylan’s contraption with the Homers’ Odyssey.
These marks, tracings, maps, recordings move from place to place sometimes serenely, sometimes frantically., sometimes moving forward as if to a destination at other times turning in on themselves. Though mundane and ordinary they are also a mystery .. a form of poetry….perhaps an epic.

Gallery 2 and 3
Lingua Natura
Curated By Kent Wilson
Elizabeth Romanin, Sian Edwards, Kynan Sutherland, Mali Moir, Joanne Mott, Lucy James, Sophia Mundi Collaboration, Sandra Cumbari, Alanna Lorenzon, Lilly Dusting, Jon Butt ,
Max Milne, Matthew Coller, Sandra Drummond, Riki-Metisse Marlow, Gabriel Carazo, Stephanie Smart, James Juricevich, Clare Brakebrough
An ensemble cast of practitioners explore various ways in which we understand nature.
With jewellery, sound recordings, sculpture, botanic illustration, land art, paper collage, digital imagery; and work from the fields of education, architecture, and environmental science this exhibition allows for a variety of voices to speak collectively. Stemming (like a plant) from the idea that maybe nature has created us as its own voice, its way of expressing itself, to itself, ‘lingua natura’ is searching for the language of nature. If we are the mouthpiece of nature then it might be evident, in some way, in a semi-random collection of expressive forms, drawn from a semi-random collection of people.
More information on the show is available on the digital archive at linguanatura.blogspot.com

EXHIBITION NUMBER 14
Gallery 1
I saw and heard of none like me
Rona Green (curator)
Jazmina Cininas
Gregory Harrison
Deborah Klein
Rebecca Mayo
Dean Patterson
I saw and heard of none like me comprises work by six artists exploring ideas about identity and uniqueness through drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture. Topics of interest include contemplation of individuality, archetypes and alter egos, family relationships, feminism, persona and role-playing. Each of the artists encourages the viewer to enter a dialogue with the work and to consider thoughts and feelings about their own identity.


Gallery 2
Plutonic section: a drawing of the earth to scale.
Anna Ephraim and Cameron Robbins
Cameron Robbins and Anna Ephraim propose to produce a scale drawing of the diameter of the earth. Using a scale of 1: 1 million, where one millimetre equals one kilometre, the drawing will be approximately 13 metres by 2 metres. When the Earth is drawn at a large scale, the relationship between the earth’s thin crust and vast interior can be appreciated. In contrast to the large size of the whole image, the details are surprisingly small: Mt Bogong is 2mm high, the deepest ocean is 7.5mm and the deepest hole ever dug is 12mm.
This project was sponsored by the Janet Holmes à Court Artists’ Grant Scheme, supported through a donation by Mrs Janet Holmes à Court, financial assistance from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and administered through NAVA, the National Association for the Visual Arts.



Gallery 3
Dreamcase
Caroline love
Dreamcase is an installation of pillowcases sewn together by the artist to form architectural tent like structures.
Each pillowcase has a dream described on it by a community of people. The dreams take the forms of writing, drawing, poetry or collage and all incorporate some kind of embroidery.
This work encourages open dialogue & the communication of private thoughts within the public realm, where the boundaries between visitor/audience are blurred with the traditional artist/maker.
Dreamcase celebrates the hand-made; textile; communal exhibition of individual expression and a desire to make the invisible visible.
Hurrah for dreams in colour, cloth and the thread to combine it all together.


EXHIBITION NUMBER 13
Gallery 1 and 2
The black show is a project initiated by the Angela Thirlwell and the c3 curatorial board.
Darren Sylvester
Rob McHaffie
Tara Gilbee
Nevada Duffy
Rob McLeish
Brigid Healy
Angela Thirlwell
Lisa Benson
Hayley West
Roslisham Ismail aka Ise.
Greg Spiller
Tim Sterling
Riki Metisse Marlow
Jon Butt
Eleanor Butt
Pip Davey
Kent Wilson
The White Trash of Asia
Rozalind Drummond
Gabriel Carazo
Mila Faranov
What is this Black?
When we think of black, it is often in relation to product, which will help us to appreciate it somewhat more clearly for what it can be or what we most obviously have come to know it to be. In the realm of product it denotes the classic, the uncluttered, the monastic, free of fuss, full of luring sophistication. It protests its seriousness and abhorrence of frivolity of colour. Its power is direct and strong.
Removing the focus from product it can be many other possibilities that sit outside of materiality.
The lack of colour leaves us with no reminder of the natural world as blacks’ primary affection comes from the enveloping night, the consuming nullification of sleep or either the blur of “black” thoughts or the quiet of the meditative mind. In all cases it holds a position beyond the activity of the day to day. It’s void defies it’s origin as the absorber of all light and colour to become a presence and simultaneously an absence. It is ‘without’ and yet contradicts itself with the force of presence through its lack. Within the absence arises the pulse of potentiality, the unknown, swimming within the viscous density, the secrecy that hides within the fold.
For the artists participating we ask them to look at black from the centre of their own practice. The possibility exists to explore black as an emotive language or in its literal tone or perhaps re-configuring it in a philosophical sense. All of these possibilities are encouraged.














squashed and merged between layers of clear plastic resemble collector
cards, a meeting of informality, portraiture and experimental
expression. The process brings simple characterisation to the striking
figures, composed fluidly with the improvisational touches of the
artists apparent, bringing life throughout the works.





EXHIBITION NUMBER 12
Gallery 1
Space A
Carmel Seymour
SUB ROSA
The unknown is a disappearing entity in today’s scientific truth seeking society. Sub Rosa attempts to allow the unknown back into our lives. It is an investigation into magic, mystery and Para-psychology. It stems from a constant diet of science fiction, mystery and horror, films, books and television shows from Daphne Du Maurier to the Twilight Zone. In the watercolours, everyday objects become omens of the supernatural and the domestic is given a curiously, sinister overtone.





Space B
Greg Spiller
EVEN THE ABYSS HAS A SILVER LINING
Within the abyss of the modern, as passersby, our lives are lived through the consumerism of experience. Like life tourists viewing the world as a game show without meaning, passively looking on, we fail to grapple with the sublime essentialness of life as primary existence. We wait for the car crash of mortality to make it stop.
Greg Spiller’s large-scale, submersive photographic works are visually sophisticated and deeply emotional. This exhibition continues his investigation towards subtle perfection within abstraction and narrative based installations.






Project Room
Maara Serwylo
ALL DAY I DREAM OF DRAWING GROVER YEAH
Maara Serwylo's work explores the notion of offerings to the unseen presences of childlike dreams.
Shrines dedicated to the lovable furry puppet from Sesame Street made from found objects combine with strange shamanistic displays.







Gallery 2
Pippa Makgill and Anna Rees
This collaboration began with two happy little paper hats from greasy brown paper bags at a standard burger haunt. Pippa and Anna have a tendency towards tranforming unsustainably cheap local or imported materials. In this debut collaboration they work responsively with materials to build a dialogue between environmental anxiety and cultural ambivalence.






Gallery 3
Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett
INSIDE THE REALM OF INVISIBLE SPHERES
These works explore the shifts of perception that occur when our awareness of reality through observation is deconstructed, exposing a rupture in the natural order. Spheres and bubbles with their infinite and sensitive boundaries mark out fragile positive and negative spaces.
EXHIBITION NUMBER 11
c3 contemporary art space opens its new show on:
Wednesday, May 27th from 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition runs:
May 27th - June 14th
Space A
Convent Studio Artist Program
Jonathan West
Heavy Metal Haven
At the beginning of 2008 the National news reported on a small isolated Aboriginal community in a Northern Territory town called Wadeye, formerly known as the catholic mission Port Keats. Violent riots had erupted between the town gangs and it looked like the Australian Armed Forces were going to have to be brought in to settle the fighting. The publicity brought to light the unusual names of these Indigenous gangs. They were all named after Heavy Metal Bands, with the dominating gangs being the Slayer Mob and the Judas Priest Boys.
Photographer Jonathan West ventured the three thousand kilometres from Melbourne to Wadeye mid last year for Vice Magazine.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he found.


Space B
Convent Studio Artist Program
Sal Cooper
The Second Circle
(per me si va tra la perduta gente)
The second circle refers directly to a particular area within Dante’s design of hell; the circle of the lussuriosi or carnal, and by extension refers also to the notion of romantic love as illustrated by the notorious characters of Paolo and Francesca who are situated there. This couple are famous for having had an affair, being discovered and then both murdered by Francesca’s husband. They are found in Dante’s hell, eternally bound together and blown about in the stormy darkness.
Sal has create a visual metaphor for the condition of perceived helplessness and desire as described by Dante.
Project room
Todd Anderson Kunert
I like what you’ve done with the lights
Todd’s work is a reflex of him, trying to get his body to comprehend the uncontrollable environment that surrounds it. This is an ongoing project that manifests itself in different shapes and forms.
Todd is completing a Masters in Fine Art through RMIT.
Gallery 2
Rocio Roman
Transmutación
This project was initiated after my grandfathers death on the 7th of November 2008. A few days after his passing I received some registered mail, and a box addressed to me. As I began tearing the wrapping off the box I realised it was a shoe box. When I opened the box, my grandfathers shoes that he had worn for 28 years were carefully placed inside. As a child I would ask my grandfather ‘Why don’t you buy new shoes?’ and his response was ‘ I have hands to fix them.’ When I returned to Chile 15 years ago, I glanced at his feet and he wore the same shoes I had seen before. I drove down to the main town to buy him new shoes. When I returned and gave him the new shoes, ever so softly he whispered ‘thank you, but you shouldn’t have.’ He never wore them, instead he placed them next to his found book collection in a shelf in his bedroom.
As of the 17th of November 2008, up until the 12th May 2009, I began picking up shoes off the streets of Melbourne. All sorts of shoes, men’s, women’s and children’s. Each shoe photographed in it’s found state and each shoe’s address archived in a little black book. In total 4137 shoes were found in 6 months.


Gallery 3
Convent Studio Artist Program
Rick Matear
Merge
Rick Matear is renowned for his compelling photo-real depictions of the picturesque coastal area of the Mornington Peninsula. However for the past three years, Matear has been experimenting with the way that diverse cultures influence and enrich one another.
The exhibition involves a series of large-scale expressionistic dot paintings reflective of his love of the Mornington Peninsula, where he has spent every summer holiday he can remember.
EXHIBITION NUMBER 10
Gallery 1
Space A
Nanna Cares What Britney Wears 2
Ashley Mariani
Nanna cares, oh nanna cares, please tell me that your nanna cares!! If nanna expressed her thoughts on young women in the media and their effectiveness as role models, how would she go about it? Would she stage a protest against overly skinny starlets outside her newsagent, claiming they were the dirty pushers of the size o utopia? Or perhaps write a letter to the local newspaper about Lindsey’s bad driving?
I think maybe nanna would get nice and comfy in her favourite chair, throw rug adorning her frail knees, pull a square of aida cloth from her craft bag and masterfully stitch us a soliloque on the subject.


Space B
Folded Spaces
Andrea Eckersly
This work follows representations of the fold, such as those found in origami, and develops a process about working through notions of abstraction in an attempt to identify a new space. Something between 2D and 3D and ending up somewhere in the 4thD. The figurative elements hide amongst geometric abstractions and appearances, deliberately distorted by choosing either a disparate colour or extending a shape beyond its logical bounds. These maladjustments create a sense of unease; just when you think you have figured out the composition and how it fits together rationally, the image flattens itself out and becomes two dimensional again.
Project Room
This filthy…
Riki-Metisse marlow
The use of noise to remove meaning opens up possibilities to allow for a space where new meaning is generated. Noise as the point of creation.

Gallery 2
Funny Ruptures
Amelie Scalercio
We vomit, volcanoes erupt, pimples get popped. Ruptures are always emerging in one place or another.
Amelie Scalercio's practice stems from investigations into order, disorder and the anomalies embedded within such systems. Using symmetry and repetition of form attempts are made to maintain order in a system. There is a continuous attempt to preserve the ordered system but the presence of deviations is always evident. An interest in how and where anomalies occur within order/disorder is explored in the rupture drawings. Such deviations demonstrate the failing of an implied order. They expose the constant presence of the potential for failure within systems. It suggests that these departures have not yet been defined as ordered or disordered.
Gallery 3
Convent studio artist program
Give your God fifty dollars for me
Micheline Yoke Yean Lee
Lee re-assesses facets of family history and her Chinese Malaysian heritage and migration to Australia in a quest to make sense of the “self”. She explores the psychic and mythological terrain of the events depicted in her works. Conjured up are ancient curses causing disability in her family, confrontations with ghosts, remembered renderings of the Penang home and the conversion to fundamentalist Christianity on arriving in Australia. The works reflect a fusion of eastern and western influences- traditional Chinese brush painting presented on ceremonial banners are combined with digital imaging, and childlike storytelling is infused with contemporary Western interrogation and black humour.
EXHIBITION NUMBER 9
c3 opens its new show on: Wednesday, April 1st from 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition runs: April 1st - 19th
Read Robert Nelson's review:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/sardonic-images-that-confront-and-unsettle/2009/04/14/1239474872036.html
















EXHIBITION NUMBER 8
c3 opens its new show on: Wednesday, March 4th from 6 - 8 pm
Exhibition runs: March 4th - 22nd
Artist talks on Saturday 7th March at 2pm.
Gallery 1
Order/Disorder
Hamish Carr - Kat Clarke - Wanda Gillespie - Jess Hall - Lucy Irvine - Kotoe Ishii
Helen Johnson - Dong Woo Kang - Andrew Liversidge - Greg Penn - Thea Rechner
Anthony Sawrey - Michelle Tran
Order/Disorder is an experimental exploration into a common thread of a disparate group of artists.
Each artist was asked to write three words to describe their practice.
From this process we identified recurring themes, the most common being order and disorder.
Oddly enough, our process itself for finding a unifying theme as a group, re-stated the predominant theme
order/disorder in its execution.
Responding in a range of media, each artist explores shifting states of reality and thought provoking
subject matter to challenge the viewer in a time of chaos and new world orders.
All artists are currently undertaking Masters of Fine Art by Research at VCA.









Gallery 2
Rhythm Code
Kent Wilson
Rhythm Code is an installation that explores the relationship between nature and culture.
Taking a more participatory approach to art making, the work assembles a collective garden of pot plants, each donated by a volunteer, together with a symphonic ensemble of vocal humming, consisting of a tonal note sampled from each volunteer participant.
The collective nature of the work is designed to hint at the networked pattern of both the natural environment, as ecosystem, and the cultural environment, as society.
Mediated by a technological composition Rhythm Code asks whether our cultural forms can serve to illuminate a new understanding of nature and whether our engagements with nature can inform our understanding of our current cultural constructions.

Gallery 3
GROW UP
Sylvia Jeffriess and Rosie Kavanavoch
Sylvia Jeffriess and Rosie Kavanavoch present GROW UP, a two-man show focussing on the vacuous nature of the cliche.
Jeffriess comic style grotesquesness bound together with visual and textual inuendos steam up alongside Rosie's rocket-fuelled collages, and signature visual backdrops that seem forever submerged in their own autobiography!
Arm in arm they come together to what...?
To generate activity, to elaborate on the concept of individual power and their collective force of art, its alluring benefits, temptations and somewhat rocky marriage.




EXHIBITION NUMBER 7
Gallery 1 – Space B
Colour Accord – Contemporary Jewellery
Banana Bowery – Jill Hermans – Deidre Hoban
Phillipa Knack – Felicity Large – Julian Loxton – Regina Middleton
Carole Moffat – Nicole Oostwoud – Lauren Raso – Jasmine Targett
Group show of jewellery and small scale sculpture that brings together a diverse group of
artists connected by their use of colour. Seemingly different styles and sensibilities come
together to demonstrate the binding influence of colour.

Gallery 1 Project Room
Wanderlust
Rachel Feery and Alanna Lorenzon
Rachel and Alanna probe the outer limits of the known universe with their
pseudo science installation piece, Wanderlust. Stickers, diagrams, text, glitter, glue and fabric
come together in a cosmological explosion of childish exuberance.

Gallery 1 Space A
The Grandfather Paradox
Georgina Campbell
Campbell’s work has always been concerned with the strange and unusual.
Weird science, mind powers, antique medical procedures and a fascination with the
dark and sinister have appeared like recurring characters throughout much of her work.

Gallery 2
Odalisque
Bernadette Keys
At least one third of our lives is spent in bed.
It is the site for birth, death, sex, dreams, rest, insomnia, nightmares, thought,
conversation, infirmary, intimacy and peace.
Bernadette Keys video installation is both an ironic take on the tradition of the reclining nude (Odalisque) in art
and a commentary on the impact of screen technology in the 21st century.
Gallery 3
Silent Past
Micheal Carver
Silent Past is a glimpse into the history of the unnoccupied buildings at the Abbotsford Convent.
The images were all shot on a large format camera to preserve the attention to detail that went into the site when it was in operation. After admiring the architecture and marvelling at the historical significance, most of the spaces only seem to evoke thoughts of what the occupants where there for and if choice was something they had.








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