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Media Release - NEW continues to set the agenda - Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) NEW continues to set the agenda
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ACCA’s annual NEW exhibition, a showcase for the very best and latest in contemporary Australian art, returns in 2005 with six major new commissions from a selection of outstanding young Australian artists.
Since its launch two years ago, NEW has rapidly established itself as one of the stellar events on the contemporary exhibitions calendar, revealing ‘who’s hot’ in Australian contemporary art.
This year, guest curator Max Delany, known for his work at the seminal Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, and now as Artistic Director at Monash University Museum of Art, together with ACCA’s Artistic Director Juliana Engberg, have selected an exceptional group of artists including Mutlu Çerkez, Destiny Deacon, Mira Gojak, James Lynch, Kathy Temin and Stuart Ringholt.
As with previous NEW exhibitions, artists are encouraged to develop new work of sophistication, ambition and scale, pitched to extend the scope and opportunity for their work.
Mutlu Çerkez will create a series of intense, hyper-real self-portrait paintings. Modest in scale, and painstaking in technique, these serial portraits command our attention, confusing time and appearances, whilst also underlining, whilst standing defiantly against, the monumental architecture at ACCA.
Destiny Deacon, one of Australia’s leading indigenous artists, as well as filmmaker, performer and broadcaster, will devise an energetic new video and photographic installation, with the artist’s trademark black humour, empathy and political punch.
Mira Gojak’s surreal, sculptural assemblages are created by literally cutting up, dissecting and reconfiguring familiar domestic furniture and objects (chairs, cupboards, mirrors, light-globes and mirrors). Resembling structures such as ‘lattice’, ‘tunnels’ and ‘mounds’, Gojak’s organic sculptures are infused with air, and dispersed through time and space, conjuring strange memories, like dreams, and freeze-frame photography.
Focusing on real dreams, James Lynch’s videos are based on a continuing collection of other-people’s dreams in which the artist appears. These are then animated in films and paintings, and projected larger-than-life, in a new installation resembling a nostalgic, mobile home-made cinema.
Kathy Temin will create a new sculptural work in the form of a scale-model of the artist’s house. Obsessively detailed, and rendered between architectural model and doll’s house, Temin’s new sculpture will contain a catalogue of works by the artist in miniature, continuing Temin’s exploration of connection between art, architecture and interior design, and their relation to memory and identity, psychology and behaviour.
Stuart Ringholt’s vast compendium of sculptural objects, staged images, home-made books and other curious documents draw upon the vocabulary of the social sciences with humour and psychological insight. Interested in finding out whether art might have practical value beyond immediate visual or sensory experience, the artist asks: ‘Can art literally improve my life on an inter-personal level?'
Whilst the exhibition brings together six artists of diverse and divergent positions, Delany suggests that each are united by an engagement with personal history and memory which then animates larger consideration of social history, community and contemporary experience:
‘Woven through the exhibition are images and objects of psychological intensity and projection. It is not surprising that artists respond with emotion and empathy, and sometimes even absurdity, in the development of new images to account for the strange days in which we live’. NEW05 continues ACCA’s commitment to developing and encouraging artistic growth for younger Australian artists. Works from previous NEW exhibitions have been exhibited extensively interstate and internationally, following their ACCA showing.
“Both NEW03 and NEW04 have been phenomenal successes on a number of levels,” says Juliana Engberg. “We have seen audiences avidly engaged in discovering the newest crop of up and coming artists, which has widened the reception for local contemporary art.
“But we’ve also been delighted by the fact that many of the projects have had longer lives in other exhibitions here and overseas, and have then gone on to be purchased by major collections. The NEW concept has taken hold in ways we hoped, but it has gone even further than we might have imagined,” she said. “The opportunities keep coming for all the NEW artists and it is clear that in helping them make a work of ambition they have a project that sustains interest over a number of years,” she said.
NEW05
March 15 – May 15, 2005
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Gallery hours:
Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm
Mondays by appointment 10am-5pm
ACCA is open on public holidays with the exception of Christmas Day and Good Friday
Admission: Free
For further media information:
Katrina Hall on 03 9697 9999, mobile 0421 153 046 or email khall@accaonline.org.au
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