Media Release - NEW IDEAS: Palaces, Pop, Mazes - Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

NEW IDEAS: Palaces, Pop, Mazes and Memories

NEW06, ACCA’S annual showcase of the best young Australian artists returns in 2006, with five new commissions by Melbourne artists and two from New South Wales.

ACCA’s NEW series is now in its fourth year and is one of the most anticipated events in Melbourne’s contemporary exhibitions calendar, revealing ‘who’s hot’ in Australian contemporary art.

NEW06 promises to deliver yet more remarkable and ambitious works from the freshest crop of young Australian artists, including Sydney’s Makeshift Collective and Giles Ryder, together with Melbourne artists Helen Johnson, Darren Sylvester, Shaun Wilson, Natasha Johns-Messenger and Laresa Kosloff.

This year curated by ACCA’s Artistic Director Juliana Engberg and part of Festival Melbourne2006, the cultural festival of the Commonwealth Games, NEW06 will be a sensory experience, one of palaces, pop, mazes and mirrors, childhood memories and merchandise. It will feature installations, sculptures, sound works, photography, video and painting, showcasing the diversity and verve of Australia’s young talent.

• Darren Sylvester, known for his high resolution photographic work, becomes 70s pop idols, Kate Bush and David Bowie, and an IKEA freebie distributor, to create a fascinating hyper-narrative about the objects of popular culture and how they enhance our lives.

• Video artist, Laresa Kosloff, creates a new choreographed video work that playfully explores issues relating to sculpture, painting and performance, a kind of Bauhaus A-Go-Go.

• Shaun Wilson makes a memory palace, where film footage found in his family archive will become animated and painterly, creating a heart-tugging and nostalgic place of intense observation.

• Helen Johnson makes a magical landscape wall painting, reflecting a renewed appreciation of the natural, and an examination of how our representations of ‘landscape’ interact within the sphere of ‘culture’.

• Natasha Johns-Messenger builds a sculptural mirrored palace, one full of trickery and deceits. Natasha, who recently won the 2005 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, will invite the viewer to step inside her sculptural construction and become an active performer within her process.

• Giles Ryder produces a series of neons and wall panels, extending his practice and investigation of the reduction of form, space, line and material and the effects of colour.

• And Makeshift Collective, a Sydney based ‘art tribe’, will construct an intricate yet volatile cardboard castle that is part mood maze, part adventure playground, and dream space.

Curator, Juliana Engberg says; “Ultimately there is a sense of wonder and invention in each of the projects which are being made by the artists I have selected for NEW06. Optical plays, enacted geometrics, animated memories, labyrinthine encounters, wondrous, weird nature and post-pop art all make their presence felt in this clutch of commissions that activate ACCA’s ever changing, challenging spaces.”

NEW06 is this year part of Festival Melbourne2006, the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. In addition, as a special focus event for the Commonwealth Games, ACCA will add to NEW06 with +Plus Factors, taking the best of cutting-edge contemporary performance and art to the street.

Festival Melbourne2006 celebrates the breadth and depth of culture and art from across the Commonwealth. It is proudly supported by the Victorian and Australian Governments and is an integral part of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

NEW06 March 14 – May 14 and +Plus Factors March 13 – March 26. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm. Mondays by appointment. Tel: 03 9697 9999. Admission: FREE. www.accaonline.org.au

For further media information about NEW06 and +Plus Factors, contact Katrina Hall on 0421 153 046 or email kathall@ozemail.com.