Sunday Arts Magazine

In welcome news for Australian art and architecture lovers, RISING has announced that the season for A Miracle Constantly Repeated, leading visual artist Patricia Piccinini’s immersive takeover of the long-shuttered and mysterious ballroom and upper level of Flinders Street Station, will be extended to 16 January, 2022.

Presented in partnership with the State Government and City of Melbourne, the extension will give audiences more opportunities to glimpse inside the fabled spaces of Australia’s oldest and most recognisable train station as they explore Piccinini’s first hometown exhibition in more than two decades.

“In an era marked by cancellations, shortened seasons and sudden ends, we are so delighted by the degree to which audiences have embraced this stunning exhibition by one of Australia’s foremost artists,” says RISING co-artistic director Hannah Fox. “That we are able to extend the season for A Miracle Constantly Repeated, ensuring more people get to experience this incredible space, while continuing to draw visitors back to the CBD as the city continues to recover and rebuild, is all the more gratifying”.

Despite lockdown measures pausing operations, A Miracle Constantly Repeated has continued to see sell-out sessions, and since its opening with the launch of RISING in May, has been experienced by close to 20,000 visitors.

The once in a generation art event marks the first time Flinders Street Station’s famed ballroom and surrounding rooms have been open to the public in over 30 years. The 10 rooms on display were once home to dances, library books, night classes, a nursery, billiards room and offices, and have been transformed into an immersive world that celebrates and showcases the historic space. Responding to the station as an organic environment, which her creatures have fled to or sprung from, Piccinini has left the spaces within the upper level virtually untouched, allowing the peeling paint and left-behind filing cabinets to take on a symbiotic relationship with the works.

As visitors move through the space, they can access a personal tour from Patricia Piccinini herself — through an audio guide, direct from the artist’s mouth and accessible via QR codes throughout the exhibition.

A year after it was originally scheduled, Victorian Opera is finally set to present the Australian premiere of

five-time Tony Award-winning musical The Who’s Tommy.

Based on The Who’s legendary 1969 concept album Tommy, which sold over 20 million copies,

the rock musical is set to supercharge Melbourne’s Palais Theatre from 13 – 21 August.

In a role approved by The Who’s Pete Townshend himself, Victorian Opera welcomes back

rising star Mat Verevis (A Little Night Music, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Nine

Network’s The Voice) as Narrator / Tommy.

As Captain Walker, musical theatre icon Matt Hetherington (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Gypsy)

joins the cast and returns to the Australian stage after several years in the United States.

Hetherington stars alongside leading lady Amy Lehpamer (School of Rock, The Sound of Music)

as Mrs. Walker. The duo makes their Victorian Opera debut in the production.

Legendary performer Paul Capsis takes on the iconic role of The Gypsy (Acid Queen), with

Victorian Opera favourite Kanen Breen (Black Rider, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as Uncle

Ernie and Vincent Hooper (The Rocky Horror Show) as Cousin Kevin.

The ensemble cast includes Zoe Coppinger, Mark Doggett, Darcey Eagle, Joshua Gordon, Matt

Hamilton, David Hammond, Savannah Lind, Anna Mallows, Joe Meldrum, Nicole Melloy, Adam

Noviello, John O’Hara, Matthew Predny, Dean Schulz, Darren Tyler, Stephanie Wall, Jun

Woodfield, Gary Yong, and Rose Shannon Duhigg as Sally Simpson.

Hamilton Binnie Garcia and Sebastian Sero share the role of four-year-old Tommy, while Elijah

Slavinskis and Will Wiseman alternate as ten-year-old Tommy.

Boroondara Arts will be celebrating the 50-year career of local Boroondara sculptor Michael Meszaros with a commemorative exhibition at the Town Hall Gallery, from 3 August – 25 September. Meszaros has produced a number of well-known public works throughout Melbourne, Australia and internationally. Working primarily in bronze, fabricated copper and stainless steel, his work includes relief sculptures, exhibition sculptures, portraits, and his particular speciality, medals.

50 Years as a Sculptor by Michael Meszaros features a collection of Meszaros’ commissioned medals created for prizes, awards, centenaries, and unveilings, as well as more personal works and portraits created for both private and institutional clients.

Meszaros began making portrait medals, working with his father, in the last 1950s. In 1967 he completed a Bachelor of Architecture and went on to work as an architect. Since 1970 to now he has been practising as a full-time sculptor, producing 39 major works, many reliefs, plaques, memorials, trophies, exhibition and garden works, as well as over 600 medals.

 

Meszaros’ medals have won a number of international awards and are held in national collections in England, Europe and the USA. He has received a range of local prizes for his sculptural works. In 2012 he received an Order of Australia Medal – for contributions to the Visual Arts as a sculptor. In 2014 he won Inaugural American medal of the Year, and in 2019 he won the Equal People’s Choice award, Deakin Small Sculpture Prize.

Meszaros explains: “The origin of the modern art medal can be traced back to the coins of ancient Greece, with portraits and symbolic designs representing rulers and cities. Today, medal art has become much broader, often breaking out of the traditional circle and using a variety of materials, techniques and subject matter.”

The Town Hall Gallery exhibition will include newly commissioned works, exhibition medals and a video of major public works to commemorate five decades of Meszaros’ work.

 

“I am excited to present an exhibition that represents over 50 years of my career as a full time sculptor. I have lived or worked in Boroondara all my life and am thrilled to have a solo show at my local gallery after all these years” says Meszaros.

The multi-awarded gothic glamazon, environmental scientist and burlesque genre-smasher Moira Finucane is emerging from the ashes of a pandemic year gone by and rising into the flames of a winter season of theatrical and performance wildness.

From the tail end of July and throughout the month of August, Finucane & Smith and their band of exquisites return to the stage with five synesthetically exhilarating shows that will capture the hearts of those who have missed them so dearly.

“Four lockdowns, a bin fire of a year, and the unique joy of cancelling a year and a half’s work in one day over a cup of whisky. What could we do but Phoenix-pivot?! But the day I recycled gold shoes off the footpath I knew it was a sign; we’d rise from the ashes, taller, brighter and undimmed. And we are striding back; in fact we cannot be stopped. Live, digital, virtual, visceral – tune in, turn up, I’ve missed you all like the fires miss the air, like the whales miss the water and like the penguins miss their krill,” Finucane said.

Rapture: Bathtub Edition – 22 & 29 July and 5 August

Fresh from being beamed live to the Copenhagen International Stage Festival and streamed live from the depths of her bathtub comes Rapture: Bathtub Edition. For three showings only on 22 & 29 July and 5 August, this lockdown-created work is an intimate, epic, surreal fever dream of Art vs Extinction. With genius composer Rachel Lewindon on piano and Theremin, audiences will submerge in a stunning scape of penguins, demons, angels, hope, extinction, propaganda and ice.

Commissioned by Mesto Žensk (Slovenia), Climakaze Miami and Take Over! (Arts Centre Melbourne/Melbourne Fringe), written in Paris museums and on Antarctic icebergs, with seasons from China to Prague, and winner of the Climakaze Award for Outstanding Work on Climate Justice, this visceral performance is the next r/evolution in Finucane’s globally acclaimed Art vs Extinction suite.

As part of the Art vs Extinction suite, from 22 August – 5 September Finucane is also co-curating Denmark’s first Women in Climate art residency at BIRCA Bækkelund International Residency Center for Artists with 12 artists from around the world (Greenland, Australia, USA, Norway, Mexico, Sweden, Korea, Vietnam). This residency is an exploration into some of the most urgent issues of our time where art, climate, hope, despair, poetry and beauty collide.

“Be careful what you name an artwork. Rapture means emotional, physical and spiritual transportation, and so far I have done this work in a museum box in Prague, a silent movie theatre in Berlin where Nosferatu premiered, a glacier in Antarctica, a forest in Denmark, a power station in Slovenia, an antique wood carving hall in Wuzhen and a bathtub in Melbourne. You can’t make this shit up! And every single time the audience is transported with me. So much crying, laughing, dancing and singing. The Rapture is a wild, wild beast; get into the tub with her. You won’t regret it,” Finucane said.

Glory Box – 19 & 20 August

Finucane & Smith’s most globally awarded provocative variety show

 

The Victorian Pride Centre is thrilled to stage identity, adornment, transformation as the inaugural exhibition for the Pride Gallery, the only purpose-built gallery in Australia celebrating LGBTIQ+ culture and artists.

The Victorian Pride Centre is Australia’s first purpose-built LGBTIQ+ Centre. Located

at 79 – 81 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, the Pride Centre will house major LGBTIQ+

organisations and provide a social and cultural venue for the LGBTIQ+ and wider

communities.Curator Mish Eisen brings Indigenous LGBTIQ+ artists Jenna Lee, Clint Lingard,

Paul McCann, Dylan Mooney and Peter Waples-Crowe together to create identity,

adornment, transformation. The exhibition explores notions around discovery of

identity, resonance of adornment and bearings of transformation from a LGBTIQ+Indigenous contemporary lens.

Stephen is back talking to the Sunday Arts Magazine team…..

The Naomi Milgrom Foundation yesterday released the design for MPavilion 2021, the seventh MPavilion in an ongoing series, by MAP studio (Venice) architects Francesco Magnani & Traudy Pelzel. The geometric, kaleidoscopic design—‘The LightCatcher’— has been envisioned as an urban lighthouse, set to illuminate MPavilion’s diverse program of free cultural events over the summer.

MAP studio—an architecture, urbanism and design practice based in Venice, Italy—is renowned for responding to existing sites in a sensitive and celebratory way. This approach has been especially poignant as MPavilion 2021 returns to its original home in the Queen Victoria Gardens.

A project more than two years in the making, the MPavilion by MAP studio was originally slated for construction in 2020, with progress postponed as the world responded to the COVID-19 crisis. The Naomi Milgrom Foundation is delighted that MAP studio’s MPavilion can now come to fruition.

Commenting on their MPavilion design, Traudy Pelzel said: “The structure we imagine is a shimmering device that qualifies itself as an urban lighthouse that hosts and enlightens the cultural activities planned for the 2021 summer season in Melbourne….A kaleidoscopic structure that reflects and amplifies activities, people and colours. For this reason, we call it ‘The Lightcatcher.’”

The MPavilion design comprises a reticular steel structure in galvanized and painted tubular profiles that support a set of panels in a mirror-finish aluminium coating, reflecting light, colours, activities and people who will use the space. These surfaces will also function as shading elements. The MPavilion 2021 structure appears to float above the ground level on a coloured, organic-shaped surface.

MAP studio’s design has inspired MPavilion’s program themes for its 2021/22 season of free events and will open in the Queen Victoria Gardens, Southbank Arts Precinct, on 11 November 2021 until 20 March 2022.

Taking on a second life, at the end of each season the MPavilion is then gifted by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation to the public. Becoming a legacy of esteemed architect-designed pavilions for the state of Victoria, the series enables design awareness to continue in new communities for years to come.

About MAP studio (Venice)

Located at Palazzo Foscarini in the historic centre of Venice, MAP studio is a young and exciting practice that considers architecture to be a process of constant dialogue, between client and creative, past and present, environment and inhabitant. Founded in 2010, MAP studio (Venice) is renowned for its considerate, deeply site-responsive work—a quality that will be especially significant as MPavilion 2021 takes shape at its original home on Boon Wurrung land in the Queen Victoria Gardens.

About the Naomi Milgrom Foundation

Since 2014, the Naomi Milgrom Foundation has enriched Australian cultural life by engaging new audiences with exceptional art, design and architecture. Led by Naomi Milgrom AC, the Foundation has become a model for public-private collaboration by enabling new projects with a focus on public engagement, industry stimulation, and education.

About MPavilion

MPavilion is Australia’s leading architectural commission and design event, conceived and created by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. A philanthropic success story that brings government, business and private sectors together to collaborate in significant and lasting ways season after season,

 

Craft Victoria is pleased to announce the appointment of experienced First Nations artist Jenna Lee to the Board as a Craft Industry Professional non-Executive Director.

Ms Lee is a Larrakia, Wardaman and Karajarri woman who also has Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry.  Her interdisciplinary art practice works across painting, projection, found object and sculpture, with a reoccurring use of paper, the book, language, and text.

Craft Victoria Chair, Katrina Raymond, said Ms Lee brings a unique industry professional maker perspective which will be invaluable in supporting strategic planning and in helping the organisation to assist our Members in building professional and sustainable craft careers.

“Jenna’s career achievements to date have been inspirational.  Her early commissioned design work for major organisations have helped in preserving, exploring and expressing Aboriginal cultural practices.

“In recent years she has been the recipient of numerous important national Awards with work that explores the transformation of the printed word through the ritualistic acts of destruction and reconstruction, seeking to translate the page into a new tangible language.

“We look forward to the role Jenna will play in securing Craft Victoria’s future success,” Ms Raymond said.

Craft Victoria’s core mission is to support and promote professional craft makers in their endeavours to build professional and sustainable careers.  The two Craft Industry Professionals on the Craft Board have a unique role in representing the interests of Craft’s diverse maker membership and ensuring they have a voice.

 

Future U explores what it means to be human in the 21st century and beyond. Bringing together Australian and international artists, the exhibition examines the increasingly urgent questions of what makes humans unique, and our place in the world during a time of technological acceleration.Future U opens at RMIT Gallery on Friday 23 July until Saturday 23 October 2021.Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and biotechnology are challenging deeply heldbeliefs and notions of what it is to be human.Future U brings together a broad range artists, designers and researchers and includes:  Bettina von Arnim, Holly Block, Karen Casey, Duckworth Hullick Duo, Peter Ellis, Jake Elwes, Alexi Freeman, Libby Heaney, Leah Heiss, Amy Karle, Mario Klingemann, Pia Interlandi, Zhuying Li, Christian Mio Loclair, Maina-Miriam Munsky, Patricia Piccinini,  Stelarc, Deborah Wargon. Curated by Assoc. Prof.Jonathan Duckworth and Dr.Evelyn Tsitas. The exhibition presents creative responses to the potential implications of rapid technological change. It is both speculative and poetic, wonderous and grotesque, with dark humour and provocation in many of the works.The potential of artificial intelligence to replicate and replace human creativity and desire is explored in works including Jake Elwes’ Machine Learning Porn, a video work that records the pornographic fantasies of an AI. Christian Mio Loclair’s Blackberry Winter uses custom machine learning to reproduce human movement digitally.Uncanny Valley’s Beautiful the World won the inaugural AI song contest.The ability of technology to enhance and extend human life is investigated in Amy Karle’s video Amy Karle: Bringing Bones to Life that depicts scientific research and cutting-edge technologies used to transform stem cells into bone. Karen Casey’s video Transplanted interrogates the moral and ethical dilemmas of using medical technology for organ transplantation. Stelarc’s installation StickMan/ mini Stick Maninvolves Stelarc’s body being controlled, augmented and manipulated by a machine.Rapid technological change presents exciting possibilities and potential risks.Alexi Freeman’s BioTextiles uses the power of science to transform micro organisms into sustainable textiles. Bettina von Arnim’s prints from the 1970s examine the dehumanising effects of rapidly advancing technology.‘In curating this exhibition, we did not seek out artists with a shared vision of the future. We found ourselves drawn to diverse artists whose work grappled with key questions about human endeavour, transformation, and relationships. We sought works that opened debate rather than offered answers,’ says co-curators Associate Professor Jonathan Duckworth and Dr. Evelyn Tsitas. The works inFuture U first posit that rapid advances in AI, machines, robotics, and biotechnologies have disrupted the definition of what it means to be human. The exhibition’s second premise explores the impact of technologies on our relations with our environments, and with each other.The third idea Future U considers is the extent that humans can augment and manipulate their bodies with technologies until we are no longer human.

Arts Project Australia is excited to bring a multi-dimensional experience to its Collingwood Yards gallery space from Saturday 10 July to Sunday 22 August titled Material World.

Referencing personal worlds created in response to physical surrounding, the exhibition features APA artists Mark Smith, Adrian Lazzaro, Bronwyn Hack, Rosie O’Brien, Chris O’Brien, Fulli Andrinopoulos, Anne Lynch, Dorothy Berry, Matthew Gove and Terry Williams.

The featured artistic practices and works testify to the movement between – and stark transition from – idea and concept to visceral threads and textiles.

Co-curated by Peter Douglas and Jodie Kipps, audiences can expect a tactile multi-dimensional display that represents corporal curiosity, sexual politics, the home, possessions, consumerism and the imaginary world.

Douglas and Kipps consider the mood of the works to represent two distinct personalities: one of a grandma and one of a punk, with hopes that audiences vividly experience a duplexity between the pieces.

“From controversial ‘hot’ topics to the everyday – Material World is a tangible textile conversation that invites others to experience and be a part of the artists very own world. We want to show the marker and the artist, to unravel for the viewer; part of the mystery behind these artist’s work and their distinct processes,” explains co- curators Douglas and Kipps.

Material World is the third exhibition to be presented within Arts Project Australia’s inaugural program at Collingwood Yards, and the only exhibition in 2021 curated by APA’s staff artists, who work closely with each represented artist in the Northcote studio. As part of APA’s commitment to accessibility, the exhibition will also be presented as a virtual show during the same dates.

Mark Smith is a figurative multi-disciplinary artist who has been with Arts Project since 2007. Smith explores how the body relates to human nature and the human condition, using emotion as a starting point.

Adrian Lazzaro is known for his sinister yet humorous imagery. His character-based works primarily feature wrestlers, zombies and lovers that are depicted in a saturated comic strip colour scheme.

Bronwyn Hack is a multi-faceted artist whose works vary from sculpture to painting, printmaking and ceramics and often showcases her interest in animals, particularly dogs, as well as the body and bones.

Rosie O’Brien is an emerging artist whose vibrant use of pattern and placement of soft vessel-like flowers demonstrates her observant style, the soft palette reminiscent of spring.

Chris O’Brien is a multi-disciplinary artist who represents domestic dwellings through his painting, prints, sculptures, videos and artist zines. O’Brien has been an APA artist since 2002.

Fulli Andrinopoulos is an established artist known for her signature floating circular forms. Her works reminisce on the nature’s organic processes such as birds’ nests and spider webs.

Anne Lynch is also an established artist known for her use of pastel colours to exude a sense of nostalgia and memoir. Lynch has sustained her art practice with Arts Projects since 1995.

Dorothy Berry incorporates her interest in animals into her vivid and vibrant images. Symbols and signs in Berry’s works often reflect her personal experience, events, beliefs or opinions.

Matthew Gove is an emerging artist working across a variety of mediums, Gove’s artworks portray a quirky yet humorous matter through playful narratives that often involve animals in a ridiculous ‘humanistic’ way.

Terry Williams is an established artist well known for his soft sculptures. In creating his works, Williams adopts an immersive and idiosyncratic process that manifests his ideas into multi-faceted creations.

A creative social enterprise providing support for individuals with intellectual disabilities, Arts Project Australia is a not-for-profit organisation promoting ar...