(above) Work by NotFair 2023 participating artist, Dominic Kavanagh. Image: Courtesy of the artist and NotFair Art Foundation.

The artist-led NotFair art fair will welcome its 11th iteration with co-curators Darren Tanny Tan and Linsey Gosper under the title, ‘Alchemy’.

Alternative art fairs have gained their fair share of popularity in the past decade or so. Often housed in unconventional settings that diverge from the standard booth model, these fairs aim to platform underrepresented artists with a strong curatorial focus, while giving art lovers the opportunity to financially support bold, experimental work.

The SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York is one example, while in Melbourne, the biennial NotFair returns this December for its 11th iteration. This year, NotFair founders Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd and Ash Crawford have handed the reins to artists and NotFair alumni, Darren Tanny Tan and Linsey Gosper.

Celina Lei

Read on artshub.com.au

Sydney-based artist Mark Maurangi Carrol has been awarded the 25th annual Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. Announced today at a ceremony at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, the prestigious annual painting award sees one artist aged between 20 and 30 receive a three-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Carrol also receives $50,000 in funding – an increase from $40,000 in previous years – to further his art education while in Europe.

Five additional Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship recipients were today also awarded $10,000 and a two-week residency at Shark Island Kangaroo Valley, NSW. In 2023, the five recipients of Shark Island residencies are Angus White (VIC), Joseph Christie Evans (NSW), Lauren O’Connor (NSW), Oliver Scherer (NSW) and Sis Cowie (VIC).

Guest judge and Archibald Prize winning artist Guido Maestri selected 12 finalists and six scholarship recipients from 181 entries.

Read the full article on argallery.nsw.gov.au

NotFair curators Darren Tanny Tan and Linsey Gosper will be live on 3RRR's SmartArts program with presenter Richard Watts. Tune in on Thursday 16th November at 11:30am as they discuss their curatorial vision and what one might expect from the most ambitious iteration of NotFair to date.

Listen to SmartArts – 16 November 2023

Committed to constant evolution, NotFair, the Melbourne art fair that is determinedly different, is back this year with new curators, new venues, a host of exciting new artists and a new major sponsor.

In its 11th iteration, the biennial NotFair will be curated by Darren Tanny Tan and Linsey Gosper, with the original founders Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd and Ash Crawford stepping aside in favour of “fresh blood”.

“It has always been NotFair’s intention to allow new opportunities, new talent and new ideas. That applies to the curatorial sensibilities alongside the art and artists. We’re delighted to have Darren and Linsey take over from us!”, said the founding curators.

Darren Tanny Tan is a Singapore-born artist living and working in Melbourne/Naarm.
Linsey Gosper is an artist, witch, and arts worker living on Bundjalung country, northern NSW.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the basic NotFair curatorial premise, with artists selected on NotFair’s commitment to diversity, supporting, unearthing and empowering artists.
Exhibited artists can be emerging, mid-career or well-established artists who might be totally unknown or already quite successful. The key criterion is that the curators believe that more people should know about these artists’ works.

The main NotFair 2023 show, titled Alchemy, 8-13 December 2023, will be held at 333 Malvern Road South Yarra, which was previously Joels Auction Rooms, and originally the Hawksburn Primary School built in the grand Gothic style in 1874.

True to its record of finding interesting and quirky locations, NotFair will be the last major event held in the heritage-listed building before being imagined into global headquarters by new owner Scanlan Theodore.

NotFair 2023 will also stage a companion exhibition, Das Kapital, featuring video and new media curated by Victorian College of the Arts staff, Brie Trenerry, Amanda Morgan and Kieran Boland held at a former bank building 236 Chapel Street, Prahran.

Fashion house Scanlan Theodore will be the major venue sponsor for NotFair 2023, with further support from Bendigo Bank and the City of Stonnington.

Darren Tanny Tan

Linsey Gosper

The Lennox
208 Lennox Street, Richmond
Feb 16-26, 2022

As part of the highly successful NotFair Art Fair 2021, NotFair board-member Helen Bogdan offered her own salon-style gallery space, The Lennox, to an artist of her choice to hold an expenses-free exhibition, COVID permitting, in 2022.

But she openly admitted to being totally flummoxed at choosing a single artist. “There was just so much burgeoning talent exhibiting,” she says. After some consultation with the NotFair curators, Sam Leach, Ashley Crawford and Tony Lloyd, Bogdan finally settled on two highly disparate but clearly vibrant and emerging artists for the space: Liss Fenwick and Ash Coates.

Timed to coincide with the 2022 Melbourne Art air, the result is a multi-media, phantasmagoric explosion of painting, photography and video-projection that touches upon the environment, science, history and mythology by two of Australia’s most exciting emerging artists.

Liss Fenwick

Liss Fenwick is a visual artist from Larrakia country in the Northern Territory currently living in Naarm/Melbourne. Fenwick will be exhibiting a selection of photographs from Back Out, a body of work that won the prestigious Fineman Award in December 2021. This series of photographs subverts the nationalistic, romantic and colonial role depictions of landscape, instead drawing on Fenwick’s upbringing in rural NT to present a bleak, yet tender view of the contested northern ‘frontier’. This builds on the notfair award winning work, Meat Tray, a series of photographs depicting flesh-eating ants (Iridomyrmex sanguineus) consuming feral buffalo meat on decaying colonial era trays, forming an absurd commentary on the vainglorious historical narratives of white settlement in rural northern Australia. Recent solo exhibitions include: Natural History of Destruction, Stockroom, Kyneton, Grim Purpose, DVA Gallery, Darwin, and Wrought, Testing Grounds, Melbourne. Notable group exhibitions include: Satan’s Tears, curated by Mikala Dwyer, Mejia Gallery and Animal Nation, curated by Simon Pericich, Stockroom Kyneton. Fenwick was awarded the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2018, and is currently working on a PhD at RMIT University and working on a book with New Zealand publisher Bad News Books titled Humpty Doom.

Ash Coates

Ash Coates is a multi-disciplinary artist. His practice involves, but is not limited to, painting, animation/video, installation and digital art. Across these mediums the artist conjures environmental and scientific narratives, while gleaning reference materials from the landscape, personal events, mythology and science fiction\horror films. Often using tropes and metaphors from a broad range of sources, Coates work has a tendency to explore weird biological and social phenomena. Coates has completed a bachelor’s degree with Honours in visual art and has exhibited widely. His animations have been screened at various galleries and festivals, including the Adelaide Festival Centre, Kofu City International Art Festival (Japan), University of Mary Washington (USA), Willoughby Art Biennale, Gertrude Projection Festival and more. In 2019, he was selected for the Rio Tinto’s, Martin Hansen Memorial Art Prize and was the recipient of both the Crow Street Creative Award and the People’s Choice Award. In 2018 he won the Eureka Art Prize and in 2017 he was selected for the Rio Tinto’s, Martin Hansen Memorial Art Prize and won the CQ University Award. He also received the Ballarat Arts Foundation’s Project Assistants Grant, the People’s Choice Award at the ANL Maritime Art Awards and residencies with WASPS studios in Edinburgh and Fife, Scotland and also with AIRY Kofu in Kofu City, Japan.

View The Lennox Award Exhibition 2021