News
Julia Robinson is exhibiting in ‘From the other side’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) that launches this weekend.
Curated by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark, ‘From the other side’ brings together Australian and international artists to unsettle the tropes of the horror genre and its relationship to vulnerability, anxiety, rage, and revenge.
‘From the other side’ draws upon horror’s shared cultural imaginary and its ability to transgress and destabilise institutions of power, conjuring counternarratives and alternative mythologies that challenge the assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
Horror often speaks to the collective anxieties and fears of our times, from sexual liberation to new technologies, racial tension to gender subversion. This fear proliferates across shared cultural imaginaries to lay bare our innermost desires, tendencies for self-destruction and the conflicting impulses to confront and exorcise our darkest fantasies. Horror provides a language with which to be scared and to respond to challenges that might be beyond our control.
From the other side brings together nineteen Australian and international artists, integrating historical and contemporary works, alongside key new commissions that draw upon horror’s capacity to transgress and destabilise forms of power and subjugation. The exhibition summons the impulse for rage and revenge, while embracing feelings of vulnerability and unease. Rather than speculating on the field of horror as a whole, the exhibition embeds and casts a lens upon feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.
Centring the fear of the monstrous-feminine, the exhibition raises questions about the often-harmful representation of female monsters — the witch, the hag, the monstrous mother, the shapeshifter, the possessed woman — and how she has been reclaimed by female storytellers in recent years. The monstrous-feminine resists the prototypical role of women in horror, as either victims or final girls; instead she performs the dual roles of temptress and castrator — alluring yet repulsive, contaminating yet pure.
The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side challenges the traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
This exhibition will be open to the public from 9 December 2023 to 31 March 2024.
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is a cornucopia of folk horror and art played out through a ritualistic meeting of made and modified materials, textures, colours, tools, bodies and nightmares. Julia Robinson and Don Driver's assemblages and sculptures form an elaborate ceremonial procession in the gallery space—an eerie pageantry of the Antipodean Gothic.
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is curated by Aaron Lister and Dr Chelsea Nichols as part of their project Curator of Screams which explores connections between contemporary art and horror films.
‘Eerie Pageantry’ is on display at City Gallery Wellington (Te Whare Toi), New Zealand, from 28 October to 18 February 2024.
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‘Z munu A Titutjara’ features new works by Zaachariaha Fielding and Alfred Lowe. Both artists combine traditional influences from their respective cultures with contemporary artistic practices. While the journey the two have taken to become practising artists is different, they are now travelling on the same path to recognition and reconciliation. This exhibition celebrates their journeys so far, as well as looking towards the future.
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Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions!
Hugo Michell Gallery are excited to return to Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, located at Booth F14 from 7th -10th September, 2023.
Presenting:
Richard Lewer
Trent Parke
Justine Varga
Sera Waters
Tony Garifalakis [Installation Contemporary]
Our booth presentation this year creates four distinctive spaces, with an immersive grotto of embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures by Sera Waters that dwell within the gaps of Australian histories to examine settler-colonial home-making patterns and practices. Richard Lewer’s take on the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ - pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth - is loaded with historical reference and surface lustre. Trent Parke’s photographic series ‘Monument’ revisits over 25 years of his most iconic street photography, presenting a single filmic narrative capturing the last moments on earth. Justine Varga’s intimate analogue photographs will seduce with deep colours and gestural marks that writhe across the surface. Tony Garifalakis' 'Scum Suite' engages with the ways in which the meaning of images, signs and symbols might be ascribed, conveyed or transformed in contemporary culture, and how conventional notions of hierarchy and status might be undermined.
Sydney Contemporary, Australasia’s international art fair presents the country’s largest and most diverse gathering of local and international galleries.
Sera Waters, Justine Varga, Richard Lewer, Trent Parke for Hugo Michell Gallery at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, 2023. Photo by Document Photography.
Register your interest to receive additional information regarding this presentation by emailing mail@hugomichellgallery.com
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Georgia Spain
No one tells you how to weather a storm
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Kate Kurucz
Eventual Horizon
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event. Please join us in celebrating the launch of these two exhibitions!
Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages.
The monolithic publication is painstakingly hand-bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language.
When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions.
At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyor belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species.
“At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.” - Trent Parke
First edition copies of Trent Parke's 'Monument' is now available to purchase through the Hugo Michell Gallery Online Shop.
Exhibition dates: 27 July to 26 August
Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
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OLGA CIRONIS, KARLA DICKENS, LEAH EMERY, MICHELLE HAMER, NATALYA HUGHES, KATE JUST, HIROMI TANGO, PAUL YORE
Many Threads
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Hugo Michell Gallery acknowledges the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region, and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people today.
Karla Dickens is courtesy of STATION
Natalya Hughes and Hiromi Tango are courtesy of Sullivan + Strumpf
Clara Adolphs has been featured in the most recent issue of Artist Profile magazine.
About Adolphs' painting practice, Susan Horsburgh writes: “Like old photos, Adolphs’ paints allude to a constancy, suggesting that our experiences aren’t so different from those of our grandparents. “The wider world and society might change but the human condition doesn’t.”.
Clara Adolphs’ exhibition ‘Silent Reply’ is showing at Hugo Michell Gallery until 20th May.
Enquiries to mail@hugomichellgallery.com
Pictured: Qantas ‘Travel Insider’ Magazine, May 2023; Cover to pp 131-135.
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