Art gallery Cool Change Contemporary is displaying the work of four intriguing artists in August.
The gallery will present work from Ben Bannan, Mossy Jade Johnson, Fiona Gavino and Linda Loh. Each artist has distinctively different work that covers a wide variety of themes and influences.
For Bannon, who previously presented work inspired by gay beats and glory holes, is a new piece called Demarcations.
“Demarcations brings together two discrete bodies of work made within the last year. The exhibition is influenced by the relations and projections that we build between ourselves and the Other.” Bannan describes the work, “The pictorial grounds within the exhibition have a perpetually disturbed rapport with their figures. These landscapes shift around perspectival axes that chart disoriented viewpoints, boundaries, and proximities.”
“Untitled (Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata) is a video installation that disassembles Giotto Di Bondone’s painting of the same name (1295-1300), and restages the composition into a fiction. The figures of Christ and Saint Francis have been removed from the landscape, negotiating a separation between figure and ground. The perspective circles the projection of stigmata, articulated as abstracted lines of transference, demarcating the tension between two absent bodies.
“A new drawing from the series Demarcations details a simplified architectural blueprint that overlaps and contaminates each previous rendition of the motif every time it is redrawn. The work occupies a threshold between constructed and improvised, using the rigid structure of the grid to speak plainly to a complex, weave-like network of interactions.”
Linda Loh’s contribution Beyond Agog is a video derived from the recent virtual reality project Agog.
Agog is an exploratory experience in a sublime space with luminous and colour-saturated structures towering above and around, with various perceptual phenomena and sound to explore and encounter.
While this video is no substitute for the VR experience itself, it takes on a life of its own by embodying the transitional experiences of wonder from that speculative, non-ordinary
“world”.
Linda Loh is a visual artist working between New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Her multimedia works navigate the elusive form and materiality of digital space with transformed sources of light.
In 2012 she received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Expanded Studio Practice) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University. She has since exhibited around Australia and in the USA, as well as undertaken artist residencies around the world, including NARS in New York City, in 2018.
In 2021 she completed a Master of Fine Art in Computer Arts, at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Multi-disciplinary artist working in performance, painting, sculpture and tattoo, Mossy Jade Johnson, brings forth her exhibition Girl Next Door to Cool Change Contemporary.
The painting, sculptural and text-based exhibition explores the love, lust, ignorance and shame that co exist in the memoirs of a trans girl.
Through abstraction Mossy depicts the flying colours felt in romance and release, passionate and pastel in colour they reference the body and feminine sensuality. The text explores intimate story telling, unpacking the fraught complexities of the cisgendered rendering of trans women highlighting how love, lust, ignorance and shame can co-exist. Sculptural works speak to the objectification of trans women whilst being relatable to the body in space further humanising their beauty and calling for acceptance.
Mossy 333 (Mossy Jade Johnson) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in performance, painting, sculpture and tattoo. Across these mediums she adopts abstraction as a tool to navigate her body in biology and spirit, and explore public and private spaces as a trans woman.
Her work seeks to bring trans people and their narratives into conversation through representation in hopes to combat the ongoing violence of transphobia. Mossy has performed and shared work at Arts Centre Melbourne, ACCA, M Pavillion, RMIT Design hub and PICA.
Not Shouting Asking is intercultural artist Fiona Gavino’s body of works on paper that are a loose intersection between traditional broadsheet headlines, idioms and improvised protest banners of the streets. The objective of the artist is to seek beauty in truth, a truth that challenges and reimagines the current dominant societal narrative.
The prints are made by first harvesting the plant fibre, curing the long strappy leaves, followed by weaving a suite of handwoven letters. Arranged into words and phrases this unique analogue font the artist calls Bad Ass Caña, are inked up and ran through the press.
Gallery goers are invited to challenge and reimagine the current dominant social narrative, to create their own words and phrases with the woven letters installed in the exhibition space to take a photo and upload it to their own social media accounts with the hashtag #BadAssCaña.
The Bad Ass Caña hashtag can then be searched up by anyone resulting in the cultivation of new community networks with the aim to build solidarity and facilitate a stronger community of artivists.
With Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage Fiona Gavino has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. Born in Brisbane (QLD) and growing into adulthood in the NT, where she was adopted into a Yolgnu family, this artist has a unique decolonised lens in which to examine socio-cultural and political Australia.
Graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Charles Darwin University in 2006 she now lives and works in Fremantle.
The exhibitions will have their official opening on Friday 6th August at 6pm, with exhibitions continuing 7 – 28 August. During this period, the galley will be open Wednesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm, and Sunday by appointment only.
Visit the Cool Change Contemporary website.
Source: Media Release
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