Life in the NEW world
NEW09 – PRESENTED BY THE BALNAVES FOUNDATION
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ACCA’s annual NEW exhibition series continues in 2009 with seven new commissions from eight great contemporary Australian artists.
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Always a popular event on the ACCA calendar, the NEW series seeks to extend the practice and profile of selected artists, giving them the means and support to create their dream work and have it shown in ACCA’s exhibition hall.
Since it was first established in 2002, the NEW series has helped over 50 Australian artists make and show new works. Many of those artists have gone on to launch solo exhibitions, win prizes or achieve commercial representation.
2009 is also the inaugural year of a new partnership with the Sydney-based Balnaves Foundation, which will support the NEW series with a most generous endowment of $300,000 over three years. This is the first time the Balnaves Foundation has invested in a metro-Melbourne arts project.
And the NEW09 crop of artists promises to surprise and stimulate the imagination with works that reach a new level of ambition for each of the participants. NEW is this year curated by Charlotte Day, who recently curated the TarraWarra Biennial 2008 and Martin Boyce’s Shipwrecked at RMIT University. Day has also worked on projects at the last two Venice Biennales, including Ricky Swallow’s This Time Another Year and Callum Morton’s Valhalla.
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The NEW09 artists are:
• Justine Khamara, who works with photography and portraiture, cutting up the photographic print and recomposing it as three dimensional form, will create two large headshots which project out into the gallery space.
• Brodie Ellis has travelled to Burketown to film the famous ‘morning glory’ cloud formations for NEW. Ellis works with film and installation to make works that draw on the documentary tradition relating to environmental and social issues.
• Marco Fusinato works between visual arts, performance and music and recently produced the program You Dont Have to Call it Music: Music by Visual Artists. For NEW he will create a sculpture that draws on the aesthetics and spectacular effects of the concert stage.
• Simon Yates makes life sized animated robots out of balsa wood and thin paper. For NEW he is making two new robots that will move freely through ACCA’s galleries.
• Matthew Griffin treads a thin line between black-humour, slapstick comedy and pathos with his low-fi assemblages, videos and photography. Griffin is conducting a number of interviews with celebrities and the celebrated for his NEW project.
• Benjamin Armstrong will make new glass and wax sculptures as an extension of his ongoing sculptural and drawing based project that inhabits the world of the eye –
the works will make material the act of looking, searching or gazing.
• And Jen Berean and Pat Foster – whose practice aims to reveal different ways of connecting artists, audiences and ideas – will make an architectural intervention that brings unassuming urban surfaces into the ACCA gallery.
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NEW09: 17 March - 17 May 2009
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Weekends 11am–6pm. Mondays by appointment.
Tel: 03 9697 9999. Admission: Free. www.accaonline.org.au
For further media information: Katrina Hall on 03 9697 9999,
mobile 0421 153 046 or email kathall@ozemail.com.au
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*The Balnaves Foundation supports eligible organisations that aim to create a better Australia through education, medicine and the arts with a focus on young people, the disadvantaged, and Indigenous communities.
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