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We hosted a series of exhibitions in the lead up to our fair at South Side House, James Street, Windsor.

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January 29 – March 7
Space 2: Sonia Payes / Doble & Strong / Simon Strong

February 19 – March 7
Space 1: Belinda Wiltshire

January 23 – February 14
Space 1: Saffron Newey / Marion Abraham

March 11 – 28
Space 2: Naomi Bishop / Irene Wellm

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Space 2: Belinda Wiltshire / Irene Wellm March 11 – 28

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Naomi Bishop

Ribbons of light. Hollowed-out plant life. Rock inscrutable. Rock over rock. Inside weather. Outside lakes, townships. Wild pink striking against vertigo. A year shaded at the edges. Threads of harmonic colour. Clustering branches. Spectacular endings, messages, tree roots.

Naomi Bishop understands that the eye is always looking for a place to rest but that the spirit is restless. In her paintings timescales layer, matter and light splitting her objects – ritual, magical – into dimensions beginning here but arriving someplace just beyond us. These paintings have been shaped by her travels across three continents. They bring together the sheer crystalline force of Finland’s winter daylight, the damp edges of Taipei’s forests, the drama of our own dry scrub’s sandpaper heat. The paintings come alive in this way; a portal opens up between them and us. For Naomi perhaps they exist as a kind of map. For us they are a trail.

Emily Stewart

The Unexplained and Unexplored are recurring themes in the work of Naomi Bishop. She interested in exploring darkness, silence, mysterious events and peripheral, other worldly places. A shared interest in both science and metaphysics, searches for the point at which they might converge and reveal secret knowledge from unseen worlds. Her work is based primarily in the areas of painting and works on paper.

Naomi Bishop has been exhibiting internationally since graduating with a Masters of Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in London in 2003. Internationally her work has been exhibited at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Fondation Hippocrene, and Galerie Nicolas Silin in Paris, Arteles Creative Centre, Finland, and The National Univeristy of Taiwan. She has presented several solo exhibitions at Galerie Nicolas Silin, Paris. In Melbourne she has presented solo exhibitions at Blindside, Kings, Rubicon and Alternating Current Art Space. From 2014-2015 Naomi collaborated with Melbourne fashion label Tettmann.Doust, creating prints for two ranges Underland (AW14) and Vellamo (SS14/15)
In 2019 Naomi exhibited in Sydney at the Hazelhurst Arts Centre in The Land of The Green Ghosts and Graphics at AiRSpace Projects. She curated and exhibited in Microcosmographia at fortyfive downstairs Melbourne in 2020. She has been included in significant prizes and curated exhibitions and has received grants from Creative Victoria, The Menzies Foundation, The Wellcome Trust and The Australia Council.

Naomi was artist in residence, at Arteles Creative Centre in Finland in January 2014 and August 2015, and at Heritage Hill Museum and Gardens, Dandenong, and Hawthorn Arts Centre in 2018.

Naomi Bishop’s work is represented in the collections of The Whitechapel Gallery, La Banque Postale, Rachel Whiteread, and Pierre Pradié, and private collections in France, Spain, Germany, Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and The United States. Her work has been featured in FAINT, Gallery (NGV), Elle Decoration and Tèlérama, and Time Out and The Guardian (UK).[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4733" img_size="full"][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4734" img_size="full"][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4735" img_size="full"][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/2"][vc_column_text]

Irene Wellm

Irene Wellm’s beautifully crafted images are moments of much larger stories: indicators of what came before and what may or will come after. Deeply personal, her work is an investigation of her own journey: its challenges, doubts and moments of spiritedness and celebration. However, she does not divulge nor clarify details for the viewer. Not because she doesn’t want to but because the work does not require it. While titles [….] hint at possible meaning, they simply open a door for which we are encouraged to walk through and discover for ourselves. It is not a cop-out to declare that one’s work is open-ended and open to personal interpretation as Wellm does and encourages. In a world where almost everything is instantaneous and meaning is didactic and expected it is reassuring to know that there are artists who have the confidence to allow the viewer to do some work. Without that possibility art does not have the capacity to inspire, move, educate or surprise. Moreover, it fails in its attempt to be creative and in allowing us to enter a world of wonderment, both the artists and our own.

Excerpt from “Between Being and Being – the phantasmagorical works of Irene Wellm” by Dr Vincent Alessi, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Visual Arts, La Trobe University

Irene Wellm’s practice is driven by an internal world of dreams, fairy tales and mythology, anchored by and explored through Jungian psychological differentiation (bringing the unconscious into consciousness). Her current work uses the childhood trope of paper dolls, mimicking collage to communicate a multi-layered expression of the self in flux between light and dark. The paintings are ambiguous, using playful and surreal concepts along with realist technique to create symbolic expressions of a personal nature.

Irene Wellm completed an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. She has held more than fifteen solo and thirty group exhibitions across Australia since 1987, and internationally in the United Kingdom, Korea and Germany. In 2012 she was awarded the New Works Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, to do research and a nine-month residency in Leipzig, Germany. Two further residencies and a solo exhibition followed (2014/15), supported by an Australia Council Visual Arts Travel Fund. She has been a consistent finalist in a number of art prizes, most recently the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2014). Her work was curated into Towards Colour by Robert Lindsay at McClelland Gallery (2002), and into Glacier by Suzanne Davies at R.M.I.T. Gallery (2001). Internationally she represented Australia as one of three artists in the UBS Art Award, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2000). Her works are represented in the collections of ArtBank, the Ballarat Regional Gallery, the City of Darebin Art Collection, La Trobe University, and Stockwell Downs; and in private collections in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.S.A.

www.irenewellm.com
@irene.wellm

[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4736" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]Voce Plena, 2016
Gouache on paper
152 x 104 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4737" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]Rapunzel’s Ladder, 2016
Gouache on paper
152 x 104 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4738" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]The Great Odyssey, 2016
Gouache on paper
152 x 104 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Previous exhibitions

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Space 1: Belinda Wiltshire 19  Feb – 7 March

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Belinda Wiltshire

Existengia, the title for this new series of paintings by Belinda Wiltshire is a portmanteau bringing together simultaneous feelings of existential dread and nostalgia. For instance, knowing the Earth is but a speck of dust floating in space while pausing on how beautifully the dusk light hits the geranium in your neighbour's yard. The very big and the very small, as one.

Created to be explored by the viewer, the large scale paintings can be viewed from a distance as abstract or colourfield works, but as you are then drawn to the epicenter of each work via colour shifts and texture peaks, you'll find a detailed miniature representing the artist's personal experience. 

Video: https://www.belindawiltshire.com/existengia.html

Instagram: @belindawiltshire
www.belindawiltshire.com[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4712" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]Late Night 2020
Oil on canvas
180 x 120 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4713" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]Skinny Dip 2020
Oil on Canvas
180x120 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/6"][vc_single_image image="4714" img_size="full" onclick="link_image"][vc_column_text]Suburban Sunset 2020
Oil on canvas
180 x 120 cm[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/2"][vc_raw_html]JTNDaWZyYW1lJTIwd2lkdGglM0QlMjc4NTMlMjclMjBoZWlnaHQlM0QlMjc0ODAlMjclMjBzcmMlM0QlMjdodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRm15Lm1hdHRlcnBvcnQuY29tJTJGc2hvdyUyRiUzRm0lM0R5UDg0NlIyOUtXMSUyNyUyMGZyYW1lYm9yZGVyJTNEJTI3MCUyNyUyMGFsbG93ZnVsbHNjcmVlbiUyMGFsbG93JTNEJTI3eHItc3BhdGlhbC10cmFja2luZyUyNyUzRSUzQyUyRmlmcmFtZSUzRQ==[/vc_raw_html][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/2"][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class="home-section-divider"][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Space 2: Sonia Payes / Doble & Strong / Simon Strong

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Sonia Payes

Sonia Payes is a conceptual artist working with photography, multi-media, animation and sculpture, who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. A strong environmental narrative permeates Payes’ works and the cycle of re-creation is explored in her wildly dystopian landscapes and portraits.

Payes has exhibited in public and private galleries and museums nationally and internationally, as well as participated in Art Fairs, most recently 2019 Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, NSW.

www.soniapayes.com
@sonia__payes[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Sonia Payes Interzone #5 2013
Durotran print, electric lightbox, black box frame
Edition of 1
139.7 x 100 cm

Sonia Payes Woman in Black 2016
Fibreglass, automotive paint, UV gel coat, black painted wooden base
Limited editions available
60 x 30 x 30 cm

Sonia Payes Woman in Silver 2016
Fibreglass, automotive paint, UV gel coat, black painted wooden base
Limited editions available
60 x 30 x 30 cm

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Sonia Payes Interzone #9 2013
Type-C print on flex paper, 6 mm acrylic mount
Edition 2/3 available
72 x 72 cm

Sonia Payes Transient Information 2019
Lenticular Print, stained timber frame
120 x 89 cm (print size)

Sonia Payes Regeneration 2016
Lenticular Print, stained timber frame
160 x 120 cm

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Simon Strong / Doble & Strong

Doble & Strong are concerned with highlighting and disrupting traditional notions of beauty; the female form is marked by glutinous paint that transforms the body into a strangely sensuous object of desire.

Doble & Strong is the collaborative practice of painter Robert Doble and photographer Simon Strong. Chromogenic prints are layered with thick, textural paint to create glossy, deeply alluring works. Each artist takes an active role in the image-making process, stating, “The realisation that, within our own bodies of work, we were both concerned with many of the same issues and aesthetics led to the decision to create collaborative works which incorporated both our art practices—photography and painting, but only on the condition that they were combined in a cohesive and logical manner.”

Taking the female nude as their inspiration, Doble & Strong’s images are opulent, bordering on the grotesque and fetishistic. Their disruption of traditional notions of beauty invites participation in a radically sensuous exchange, prompted by enigmatically perfect technical execution.

www.dobleandstrong.com

Simon Strong has a bachelor of Graphic Design from the National School of Design. Strong has been included in numerous group shows including “Snap Freeze: Still Life Now”, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2007 and “Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund” at the National Gallery of Victoria 2006-07. Most recently, he was one of five photographers to be included in the exhibition “Phantasia” at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, which then toured around Australia and was also shown at the Gallery of the Australian Embassy as part of “Photoquai”, Paris at the end of 2009.

www.simonstrong.com
@simonjstrong

[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/2"][vc_single_image image="4697" img_size="full"][vc_column_text]Doble & Strong Playing God (triptych) 2015
Gloss enamel and Iriodin® on chromogenic print
Mounted on aluminium composite board, perspex boxes
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Simon Strong My Love Will Return 2015
Chromogenic print
120 x 240 cm
Edition of 10

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Space 1: Saffron Newey / Marion Abraham

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Saffron Newey

Saffron Newey is an artist who interrogates the Internet in a new and promiscuous way.

Through random Google image searches she sources and appropriates a broad array of artworks from unrelated histories and genres. Featured in this exhibition is a Romantic cloud painting after Hans Güde alongside a fantasy art dragon, a stock image of an ocean and a horse, painted after George Stubbs.
As a body of work a new brand of “sublime” emerges; one that considers both the original, Romantic definition and also a new, contemporary, digital sublime.

Saffron Newey lives and works in Melbourne. In 2020 she was awarded a PhD in Fine Art at RMIT.

Instagram: @saffron_newey
www.saffronnewey.com[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]above:
Equine Vignette
Hand etched ink on board
Mounted in perspex
20 x 20 x 5 cm

below:
Deep Sea Vignette
Hand etched ink on board
Mounted in perspex
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Marion Abraham

Marion Abraham has a deep love for the sculptural capacity of paint combined with story-heavy imagery. Her practice is an extension of experience in the natural world and carries the signifiers of bygone eras and old lands.

Traditional power structures and gender roles are reimagined in Marion's painting: she loves the humorous, the violent and the beautiful. In 2019 Marion had solo shows at Tinning Street Presents, Brunswick Street Gallery and The Motley Bauhaus and in 2020 at Counihan Gallery.

Instagram @minminmarion

Contact details:
0437 258 653
marionabra@yahoo.com.au[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width="1/2"][vc_single_image image="4685" img_size="full"][vc_column_text]Thunder, Finally 2020, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm.[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]