Focusing on the moments when materials play the lead in artistic processes, entangling us in a web of connections and meanings and expanding on the notions of process, time and place, the Town Hall Gallery presents the group exhibition, Materiality.
The featured artists use materials and processes in different ways to imbue special meaning. Artists include John Brooks, Emma Peters, Nicholas Jones, Anna Farago and Vittoria Di Stefano.
Nicholas Jones works with books and paper to question the future of the written word, cutting and sculpting pages with a scalpel. His works are held in private and public collections in Australia and internationally, including in the State Library of Victoria.
Anna Farago explores her own connection with memory and place through her practice, which investigates the use of art-making traditions including embroidery, quilting and natural dyeing. “My stitched work, paintings and drawings are abstracted memories of place,” said Farago. “My use of traditional stitching continues the tradition of women artists reclaiming craft techniques for art, taking them out of the context of their functional domestic role.”
Vittoria Di Stefano is a Melbourne based artist who employs temporal, marginal and contingent processes to investigate a range of mutable materials as a means to explore the alchemical and transformational properties of the sculptural object.
Melbourne based John Brooks’ work looks at forms created by rubbish and detritus along the Merri Creek and questions the boundary between natural and artificial by merging various materials, particularly ‘real’ and ‘fake’ versions of the same thing.
“The accumulated rubbish flows downstream when the water rises and sticks to branches, forming a composite cloth dangling from the trees when the water levels lower again,” says Brooks. “Most of these materials came together to make something else and then broke apart, merging with materials from other things. They clumped together and caught my eye, making an impression, manipulating me to replicate the forms of the creek cloth.”
Spanning three gallery spaces, Town Hall Gallery features a diverse range of contemporary public programs, curated exhibitions and exhibitions drawn from the Gallery Collection, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the City of Boroondara.
Materiality
Town Hall Gallery, 360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn
Exhibition continues to 2 July 2017
Free admission
For more information, visit: www.boroondara.vic.gov.au for details.
Image: Selection of Nicholas Jones’ works – photo by Christian Capurro