Bellowing Echoes is a creative exchange that involves both an exhibition and publication entited The 2012 Port Phillip Gazette. Read more about the artists in the publication on the GAZETTE page.
The exhibition, hosted by Gertrude Contemporary, features Jess Johnson, Anna Kristensen, Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, The Slow Art Collective, Marcin Wojcik.
JESS JOHNSON
Terror of the Deep from the series For Protection Against The Modern World, 2012
Born in 1979 in Tauranga, New Zealand, Jess currently lives in Melbourne where she is an artist, writer and founder of a gallery called Hell. Jess has a multi disciplinary art practice that sees her explore drawing, comics, installation art and temporal process orientated events.
For Bellowing Echoes, Jess Johnson’s new installation For Protection Against the Modern World creates a mise-en-scene of symbolic patterning for protection against a future built upon failure. This lurid portal pays homage to small historical disappointments, while portents and omens are secreted in the rooms patterning. The drawings feature disjointed fragments of text that speak of a privately cataclysmic event.
Select recent exhibitions include: (2011) Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire, Death Be Kind Gallery,(2010) Knowing You, Knowing Me: New Artist Show, Artspace, Auckland NZ ,No Soul For Sale; A Festival of Independents, Tate Modern, UK, Harrell Flectcher: The Sound We Make Together, NGV, Melbourne, Walk The Line: New Australian Drawing, MCA, Sydney, Hell Is Other People, Inflight Gallery, Tasmania, Home Is Where My Hell Is, Switchback Gallery,GCAD, Gippsland, Flippin Heck, Hell Gallery Melbourne,(2008) Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, Honk if you Love Contemporary Art, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, Who Cut The Cheese: Two Giants ofContemporary Art Talk Frankly Of Monumental Tasks, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, Hellraiser: The Director’s Cut, Hell Gallery, Melbourne.
Indian Chamber, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist
Born in 1983 in Sydney, Anna studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney and completed her Master of Fine Arts in Painting also at the College of Fine Arts in 2008. Anna is a painter whose work draws on the imaginative and transformative potential of the Australian landscape and the various mythologies surrounding it.
Anna Kristensen’s work for Bellowing Echoes, Indian Chamber is a 360-degree panoramic painting depicting one of the iconic Jenolan Caves. In the manner of a time capsule, stepping inside the cave is akin to entering the past. Here, the transformative potential of the Australian landscape is realised and captured within a single, silent moment in time.
Select recent exhibitions include: (2011) Mise en Abyme, Kalimanrawlins, Melbourne, Indian Chamber, Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria, and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW, and Gallery9, Sydney, Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship Exhibition, Artspace, Sydney, Just Imagine, Wollongong City Gallery, Illuminations and Bad Faith, Bondi Pavilion Gallery, (2010)Phenomenononon, Melbourne Art Fair, Uplands Gallery and Gallery 9, (2008) Supernatural Monuments, Locksmith Project Space, Vision Quest, Gallery 9 Sydney, (2007) Cave Painting, Galerie Elena Kolbasina, Berlin. Anna Kristensen is represented by Gallery 9 in Sydney and Kalimanrawlins in Melbourne.
TESSA ZETTEL & KARL KHOE (MAKESHIFT)
Landescapes, 2011, detail. Image courtesy of the artists
Born in 1980 in Sydney, Australia Tessa and Karl both live and work in various locations and are currently on residency at the IASKA Spaced program in Esperance, Western Australia. Tessa and Karl both hold a Bachelor Design with Honours from the College of Fine Arts.With a particular interest in social and environmental sustainability, architecture and urban design, Tessa and Karl embrace an improvisational process to create portable, participatory and site-specific works that explore people’s shifting relationship to place, history and the natural world.
In an attempt to create space (and time) for participants to rethink who and where we are, on the premise that to remake the city is to remake ourselves, Landescapes, featured in Bellowing Echoes, offers an intimate experience of a collective history remade. Furthering the reclaiming of miscellanea on city streets, the hybrid artifacts turned wearable masks offer an instrument of survival and ritual that can be associated with a new beginning.
Select recent exhibitions include: (2011) Primavera, MCA, Sydney, Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship Exhibition, Artspace, Sydney, Try this at Home, Object Gallery Sydney, My Own Private Neon Oasis, Museum of Brisbane, John Fries Memorial Prize, Blackfriars Off Broadway, Sydney, Sister City Biennial: Urbanition, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco/CarriageWorks, Sydney, The Right to the City, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney. (2010)Experiments of Plant Hybridization, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne, In the Balance: Art for a Changing World, MCA Sydney, Making Time, P4(pilot) Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Colony Collapse, Firstdraft, Sydney, Make-do Garden City, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney.
THE SLOW ART COLLECTIVE | TONY ADAMS, CHACO KATO, DYLAN MARTORELL
The Slow Art Collectiveis an artistic collective that focuses on creative practices and ethics relating to environmental sustainability, material ethics, DIY culture and collaboration intertwining art, architecture, music and environmentalism.
Welcoming the audience into a wanderlust of sights, sounds and smells, The Slow Art Collective have re-purposed reclaimed detritus in-situ at Gertrude Contemporary to create a site-responsive installation that entraps the senses. The collective engaged in foraging trips from the vicinity of the gallery to Chinatown. This process-based investigation is inspired by immigration patterns into Australia and utilises the practice of urban gleaning and using art as a form of social engagement.
Select recent exhibitions include: (2011) Try this at home, Object Gallery, Sydney,Shelter@McDonald’s Drivethrough – as a satellite project of MisDesign, The Brunswick Project, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, (2010) Watershed: Mapping the Yarra, Site Specific to the Yarra River, Melbourne (2009) TS2, Incinerator Arts Complex, Moonee Ponds
Born in 1988 in Melbourne, Marcin completed his Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2010.Underpinned by a continued exploration of identity, Marcin’s practice spans sculpture, installation, performance and video. His works employ theatrical devices such as role-play, accoutrements, scenes and backdrops to draw viewers into performative spaces that deconstruct the nature of mise-en-scène, painting the identities of both viewer and artist into these scenes.
Marcin Wojcik presents a new work for Bellowing Echoes that has taken on two forms. One that involved constructing and flying a glider and the other, an installation that recreates this. Mirroring the drive and ambition of the late George Arden, V-Glider (Fawkner Park) places both the artist and audience at the centre of an experience of attempted flight. Within the installation, the ‘prop’ alludes to the glider, the blue screen sets the ‘scene’ and the ‘costume’ alludes to both the viewer and artist.
Select recent exhibitions include: (2011)Scene: Crevasse, Bus Projects, Melbourne, Hidden Definition,Sutton Project Space, Melbourne, Cashmere if you can, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne,Sturt’s Boat, The Art Vault, Mildura (2010) Bus@Blindside: Play with your Food, Blindside, Melbourne.
Images : Unless stated, all images are taken by Tamaryn Goodyear from the Bellowing Echoes exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary.
