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