LoveArt is pleased to present the eleventh iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, with multidisciplinary artist Sam Gold and their three part installation, Words we devour.

Open by appointment
April - July 223 Tuesday – Friday
10am – 6pm

mail@loveart.com
+61 2 9327 7538

SAM GOLD
Its juicy when it all fits and moves in various rhythms
2023
Black stoneware
120 x 60 x 10 cm (irregular)

Warm arms reaching over and holding tight
2023
Black stoneware
100 x 240 x 16 cm (irregular)

Just now, from this perspective, I can see right through you
2023
Black stoneware
29 x 22 cm

You seem a bit taller these days
2023
Black stoneware
35 x 24 cm

Words we Devour is a body of work that exemplifies the continual thread of enquiry in Golds practice. Gold interrogates the layered metaphorical elements inherent in a ceramics practice, takes wisdom from the material and its alchemical processes, a tool to process personal and social queer and relational narratives.

Touch, pressure and movement, dominates and impacts the material and can only echo the truth held within, shining a light on the submissive acts of clay as a mimetic material mirror and the maker a gestural aware or unaware composer. Stories are held in the body, gestures, muscles and movement unlayered and cathartically released into the material; the clay is a source for creating awareness without decree.

Courtesy the Artist and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

Gold lives and works in South Australia, on Kaurna Yerta land. They received a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts from the University of South Australia in 2018. Selected group exhibitions include Primavera: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2021); CERAMIX, Manly Art Gallery and Museum (Sydney, 2021); Section A, Southwest Contemporary (Adelaide, 2021); Material Girls, Praxisartspace (Adelaide, 2020); Material Connections, SALA Floating Goose Studios (Adelaide, 2019); The Ghan 90th Anniversary Residency Exhibition (Adelaide, 2019); and Aequalis, The Australian Ceramic Triennial (Hobart, 2019). Gold is a highly awarded artist. They are the recipient of the Helpmann Academy Grant and Undergraduate Award for Excellence (2019),The Helpmann Creative Investment Fellowship (2021), and the University of South Australia’s Australian Ceramics Council Award (2018) and Merit Award for Academic Excellence (2019). Currently a studio associate at JamFactory, Gold is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

Gold is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide.

LoveArt is pleased to present the tenth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, with multidisciplinary artist Chun Yin Rainbow Chan 陳雋然 and her three part installation, A Cleft Uncovered.

Chan is an interdisciplinary artist working across music, performance, painting and installation. Her practice explores (mis)translation, diasporic experiences, globalisation’s effect on modern Chinese society, and deeply personal tales of love and loss. More recently, she has been exploring women’s oral history, folk songs and language with a focus on her ancestral ties to Weitou people, the first settlers of Hong Kong.

Open by appointment
9 December - 6 February 2023 Tuesday – Friday
10am – 6pm

mail@loveart.com
+61 2 9327 7538

CHUN YIN RAINBOW CHAN
Vegetable Lament菜文
2022
Habotai silk, silk dye, freshwater pearls, 花带 patterned braids, linocut print, polyamide thread, cotton, stereo audio loop (2:30 minutes)
Dimensions variable

One of Us
2022
涼帽Waitau farming hat, 花带 patterned braid, polyamide thread
Dimensions variable

哭嫁 or ‘bridal laments’ refer to a marital mourning ritual of the 圍頭 (Waitau/Weitou) people, the first settlers of Hong Kong. To Waitau women, arranged marriages signified a kind of death. Upon marriage, a bride’s ties to home were severed and she would remain an outsider to the groom’s family. The bride-to-be would perform a lament cycle which involved singing and weeping in front of loved ones for three days.

Chan has Waitau ancestry through her mother who never learnt the laments as the oral tradition faded in the 1960s. With the help of her mother as translator, Chan has relearned these traditional songs from elderly Waitau women in Hong Kong’s New Territories over the last five years.

In Vegetable Lament菜文, Chan takes a lament that uses vegetable metaphors to describe the bride’s pain. The installation comprises silk painting, back-strap loom weaving and sound. Chan transcribes the lyrics onto silk through brushwork, calligraphy and embroidery. Sonically, Chan turns the lament into a pop song using autotune and digital manipulation. Through these imperfect acts of translation, Vegetable Lament菜文 explores themes of loss, rebirth and matrilineal knowledge. By reimagining the lament in a contemporary manner, Chan illuminates the diasporic psyche of connection/disconnection. Her research and practice keeps the dying oral tradition of bridal laments significant to a modern world.

Vegetable Lament菜文 is accompanied by second work, titled One of Us. Chan reframes the humble Waitau woman’s farming hat into a symbol of resilience and hope. Through the stitched words which is syntaxically reversed, Chan subverts the idea of linearity and order, forcing the audience to re-read the sentence a few times over until meaning emerges. The hat was gifted to Chan by Waitau elders during their first meeting in 2017. The artist wishes to acknowledge that the patterned braid or花带 was handmade by Granny Leung Siu-Ha.

chunyinrainbowchan.com
@chunyinrainbowchan

Chun Yin Rainbow Chan 陳雋然 is a Sydney-based artist working across music, performance, painting and installation. Her practice explores (mis)translation, diasporic experiences and deeply personal tales of love and loss. In 2022, she was recognised in the 40 Under 40: Most Influential Asian-Australians Award for her contributions to arts and culture, and she won Artist of the Year in the FBi SMAC Awards. Chan has exhibited at Firstdraft, Sydney; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Gallery Lane Cove, Sydney; Granville Centre Art Gallery, Sydney; and I-Project Space, Beijing. Chan has performed at Sydney Opera House; Vivid Festival, Sydney; MONA FOMA, Hobart; QAGOMA, Brisbane; Melbourne Music Week; Iceland Airwaves, Reykjavík; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung; and Tai Kwun, Hong Kong. She was a finalist in the 2022 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, presented by Artspace, Create NSW and National Art School. Songs From a Walled Village, her documentary for ABC Radio National, was a finalist in the 2021 Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Awards. Chan teaches in Contemporary Music at Sydney Conservatorium of Music and is on the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Board. Her pop music record Stanley was released on UK label Eastern Margins in 2021.

LoveArt is pleased to present the ninth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, with Australian sculptor Alex Seton’s There’s No Place Like Home.

Encompassing sculpture, photography, video and installation, Seton’s artworks playfully sit at the junction of an idea, forcing a choice in the viewer as a litmus test of their own disposition. Best known for marble carving that paradoxically exploits classic marble to highlight contemporary issues, his work uses the chemistry and properties of marble as a poetic device to contemplate the problematic relationship between the individual and society.

Open by appointment
30 August - 28 November 2022
Tuesday – Friday
10am – 6pm

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
+61 2 9327 7538

ALEX SETON
My Impeccable Search History (The Waterfall)
2022
14 handheld devices, iPhone/iPads and iPods. Looped videos, infinite, chipboard panel
125 x 70 cm

The Store of All Knowledge (The Bookshed)
2022
Inkjet pigment on cotton rag
50 x 37 cm each, 2 prints
118 x 37 cm overall
Edition of 3 + 2AP

The Sawdust Short Drop Throne
2020
Wombeyan (Gundungurra) Pilbara Green (Nyamal) marble, National Geographic magazines 1977- 1990, stainless steel bucket
104 x 40 x 55 cm
(marble pallet not displayed)

Actual Virtual 16-22
2022 Various marbles, polyester adhesive Marble list: Wombeyan marble (NSW) from the traditional lands of the Gundungurra people; Pilbara Green (WA), Pilbara Red (WA) from the traditional lands of the Nyamal people; Australian Emperador (QLD), Bianca Mist ( QLD), Black Ice (QLD), Champagne White (QLD), Black Ice (Qld) from the traditional land of the Wakaman people; Badglio and Italian Statuario from Italy
Dimensions variable

The Waterhole
2022
Pilbara Green (Nyamal) marble
3 x 115 x 45 cm

Alex Seton There’s No Place Like Home is an installation that brings together several works from the artist’s four previous exhibitions that collectively contemplate memory, forgetting and loss. In this intimate setting, Seton (re)presents works that tell his personal memories of growing up off-grid in the bush near the Wombeyan Caves.

The Sawdust Short Drop Throne (2020) is a faithful reproduction of the original plywood shortdrop sawdust toilet located in the woodshed on the artist’s family property. Carefully recreated in unique Australian marbles, the sculpture replicates the existing, still working toilet. The viewer is invited to sit upon the throne to contemplate a poor digital simulacrum of the actual view and sounds from the outdoors of Guineacor Creek, My Impeccable Search History (The Waterfall) (2022). Reproduced on fourteen second hand iPads and iPhones is various looped footage of the waterfall in flood, captured over many years apart, though shown cascading in unison, as if existing in one moment.

Further contemplation can be found in two photographs of the family book shed, The Store of All Knowledge (The Bookshed) (2022), which play on the simple game of spot the difference. Upon the ground sits a suite of unnatural river stones, Actual Virtual 16-22 (2022), their remarkable artificiality reflecting a human centric and modified view of nature and its otherness.

Alongside these works Seton debuts a new sculpture, The Waterhole (2022), created in the same Pilbara Green marble as The Sawdust Short Drop Throne. Inspired by a rare break in the Guineacor Creek that left behind an idyllic oxbow catchment, The Waterhole marks a poignant reminder of the significance placed on water conservation throughout rural Australia. While at first glance the surface may appear an unassuming substitute for the usual bathroom countertop, upon closer inspection the droplets that pepper the wet sink area reveal themselves to be carved in stone. Each droplet can be read as tiny monuments to the precious commodity of the drought-stricken years witnessed by the bush of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.

For Seton, the act of carving is an act of forgetting, as it is a selective act of removal to uncover the remaining object for presentation. Weaving impressions from unreliable memories and moments from the artist’s own childhood, There’s No Place Like Home creates a gentle eulogy to loss itself.

Alex Seton would like to acknowledge the exhibition was inspired by the traditional lands of the Gundungurra people.

@alexseton
alexseton.com

Seton lives and works in Sydney. Solo exhibitions include The Great Escape, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (Goulburn, 2020); Alex Seton: The Island, Newcastle Art Gallery (2017, Newcastle); As of Today, Australian War Memorial (2014-15, Canberra), Last Resort, touring McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery and Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (2014-15), Roughing Out, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre (2013, Sydney), Six More, Australian War Memorial (2012, Canberra) and Elegy on Resistance, ARTHK12 (2012, Hong Kong). Recent group exhibitions include Safe Space, Grafton Regional Gallery, Maitland Regional Gallery, Devonport Regional Gallery (2020), Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery, New England Regional Art Museum, University of Sunshine Coast Gallery (2021) [forthcoming]; Young & Free | An Australian Discourse, Bega Valley Regional Gallery (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2016); Contour 556, Canberra Public Art Festival (2016); Sealed Section, Artbank, Sydney (2014-15); Gifted Artists: Donations by Patrick Corrigan AM, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2014); Conflict: Contemporary Responses to War, University of Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2014); and Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2014); and Australia: Contemporary Voices, The Fine Art Society Contemporary (2013, London) and Gravity of Sculpture: Part II, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs (2013, New York). Seton has been the recipient of a number of prizes, such as the Prometheus Visual Arts Prize (2009) and the People’s Choice Award for the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award (2006), as well as being a finalist in the Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2013, 2016). In 2021, The Australian War Memorial awarded Seton the major Sufferings of War and Service commission. His large-scale installation For Every Drop Shed in Anguish will be launched in the Sculpture Garden in 2023. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Art Gallery of South Australia, Australian War Memorial, Newcastle Art Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, the Danish Royal Art Collection, Copenhagen, and Alnoba Art Park New Hampshire, USA, and numerous other private and public collections.

Seton is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney, Singapore).

LoveArt is pleased to present the eighth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, with Australian artist Nell and her 4-piece installation, Everyday Happiness, which comprises above the ground and under the sky, happy days are 7 days a week – TODAY, 2010; Lightning Bolt, 2013; and everyday happiness (gold), 2016.

Nell - the mononymously titled artist - explores a poetic dichotomy of spiritual influences and good old-fashioned rock’n’roll across a variety of mediums including painting, ceramics, sculpture, video and performance. Situated within the parameters of Zen Buddhism, Nell’s work employs a particular vernacular including ghosts, eggs, tears, and lightning bolts to contemplate the binary archetypes of life and death, happiness and sadness, light and dark.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7538
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

NELL
everyday happiness (gold)
2016
gold plated bronze
9 x 13 x 10 cm
Edition of 5 + 2AP

Lightning Bolt
2013
neon 50 x 17 cm Edition of 5 + 2AP

The ghost who walks will never die (sunset #1)
2022
hand blown glass
24 x 19 x 21 cm

above the ground and under the sky, happy days are 7 days a week – TODAY
2010
enamel on NZ kiln dried pine
202.6 x 75.8 cm

@nellartist

Nell lives and works in Sydney. Nell received her Masters of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 2006. Selected solo exhibitions include WORDS and CROSSES, Ramp Gallery, Waikato Institute of Technology (Hamilton NZ, 2017); NE/LL, Shepparton Art Museum (Victoria, 2016); BLACK'n'WHITE, PS, Project Space (Amsterdam, 2015); Let There Be Robe, Alaska Projects (Sydney, 2013); Hometown girl has wet dream, Maitland Regional Art Gallery (Maitland, 2012); Life and Death, ARTBAR, MCA (Sydney, 2012); Chanting to Amps, Let There Be Robe, MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art, Salamanca Place, PW1, Theatre Royal and MONA (Hobart, 2012); It's a Long Way to the Top (If you Wanna Rock'n'Roll), MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art (Sydney, 2011) and The Oracle, Spring/Summer 2011/12 collaboration with Romance Was Born for Australian Fashion Week, Mitchell Library (Sydney, 2011). Selected and recent group exhibitions include Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, 2021); Brown Pots, Shepparton Art Museum (Victoria, 2021); Clay Dynasty, Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, 2021); Looking at Painting, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (Sydney, 2021); Hyper-Aware: 21st Century Highlights from the Collection, HOTA (Queensland, 2021); Just Not Australian, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery NSW, Maitland Regional Art Gallery NSW, Blue Mountains Cultural Centre NSW, NorthSite, Cairns (2021); Full Face: Artists’ Helmets (GOMA, 2020); Just Not Australian, Artspace (Sydney, 2019); From Here to There: Australian art and walking, Lismore Regional Gallery (NSW, 2018); The National: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2017); Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial, The Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide, 2016); Sirens (I Heard Voices In The Night), Gertrude Glasshouse (Melbourne, 2016); Transcendence: Nell, Angelica Mesiti, Aura, Satz, Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne, 2014); Wynne Prize, Art Gallery ofNew South Wales (Sydney, 2011); and Soft Sculpture, National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, 2009). Recent awards include UQ National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize 2013 (Winner) and The Woollahra Sculpture Prize, Winner of the People's Choice Award (2001). Nell has been a finalist in The Blake Prize (2011 and 2013), Redlands Westpac Art Prize (2010), The Woollahra Sculpture Prize (2009). Nell was also a Artspace Studio Artist in 2016, and a Carriageworks Clothing Store Studio Artist in 2017. Her work is in the collections of AGNSW, MONA, MCA, UQ Art Museum, Art Gallery of SA, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Artbank, Austcorp Corporate Collection, Sydney, BFG Superannuation Fund, Deutsche Bank, MBF Australia Ltd, Sydney, Allens, Sydney, Credit Suisse, Sydney. Public Commissions include “Made in the Light”, Allens, Deutsche Bank Building, (2012, Sydney) “Let there be Robe” MONA FOMA, MONA (2012, Hobart), “Let Me Put My Love Into You” Deutsche Bank (2007, Sydney).

Nell is represented by STATION Australia (Melbourne, Sydney).

LoveArt is pleased to present the seventh iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, with First Nations artist Tony Albert of the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku-Yalanji peoples and a 110 piece installation, Interior Composition Tile (i-CX), from his Conversations with Margaret Preston series, conceived for Love[f]Art.

Albert’s multidisciplinary practice investigates contemporary legacies of colonialism, prompting audiences to contemplate the human condition. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, Albert explores the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses important questions such as; how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories?

Albert’s technique and imagery are distinctly contemporary, displacing traditional Australian Aboriginal aesthetics with an urban conceptuality. Appropriating textual references from sources as diverse as popular music, film, fiction, and art history, Albert plays with the tension arising from the visibility, and in-turn, the invisibility of Aboriginal People across the news media, literature, and the visual world.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
[mail@loveart.com][0]
02 9327 7538
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

TONY ALBERT
Interior Composition Tile
2021
from the ‘Conversations with Margaret Preston’ series
acrylic and appropriated vintage fabric on canvas board
10.2 x 10.2 cm each
110 parts overall, dimensions variable

Tony Albert explores the ways in which optimism can be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses important questions such as how we can remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories.

Renowned for his distinctly contemporary imagery, which engages with political, historical and cultural Indigenous Australian history, Tony has long been fascinated by the tension between the visibility and invisibility of Aboriginal people across the news media, literature and the visual world.

This body of work for the LoveArt’s nano project space, Love[f]Art, is an extension of Albert’s Conversations with Margaret Preston series which dissects 20th-century Australian artist Margaret Preston’s iconography with a reverse ethnography.

Born in 1875, Margaret Preston was progressive for her beliefs that the richness and sophistication of Indigenous Australian iconography should be incorporated into a national visual language that would set Australia apart.

In her quest to foster an Australian identity, she was one of the first non-Indigenous Australian artists to use the unique designs, motifs and natural- pigment colour schemes of Aboriginal art in her work. Whilst Albert perceives that her intentions were meaningful, her success unintentionally opened the door to an onslaught of cultural pillaging. This movement was the gateway to increasing numbers of Aboriginal designs and motifs openly appropriated as adornment for domestic homewares and décor over decades to come.

Using vintage fabrics from his own vast collection, Albert turns the tables on history, audaciously reclaiming the designs and motifs from Preston’s Aboriginal woodblock prints, to honour the subjects and voices of the work’s original creators. Albert implores viewers not to forget the histories they embody but instead begin constructive conversations that can heal past wounds and offer hope.

tonyalbert.com.au
@tonyalbert

Albert lives and works in Queensland, Australia. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Conversations with Margaret Preston, Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney, 2021); Duty of Care, Canberra Glassworks (Canberra, 2020); Wonderland, Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney, 2019); Native Home, Sullivan+Strumpf, Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong (2019); Confessions, Contemporary Art Tasmania (Hobart, 2019); Visible, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane, 2018) and Unity, Sullivan+Strumpf (Sydney, 2018). Recent selected group exhibitions include Occurrent Affair, University of Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane, 2021); NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); The National 2019: New Australian Art, Carriageworks (Sydney, 2019); Dark Mofo, Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart, 2019); I am Visible, commission for Enlighten Festival Canberra, National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, 2019); Just Not Australian, Artspace (Sydney, 2019); Weapons for the Soldier, Hazelhurst Arts Centre (Sydney and touring, 2018); Continental Drift, Cairns Regional Art Gallery (Cairns, 2018); Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, 2017); and When Silence Falls, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, 2016). Albert’s work is well represented in major national collections including the National Gallery of Australia; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art—Queensland Art Gallery.

Albert is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

LoveArt is pleased to present the sixth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art, back in ISO, with Polish-Australian artist Izabela Pluta and her cyanotype-based installation, An over air pursuit of likeness, 2021.

Pluta’s studio practice embraces photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present. Negotiating the possibilities of how material forms come together, she draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring things that are both photographed and found. Conceptually anchored in the effects of globalisation and Pluta’s own personal experience as a migrant to Australia, her creative pursuit seeks to articulate a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world. These concepts have cultivated a discursive photographic vocabulary as a purveyor of temporality, mutability and the impermanence of places. Pluta mediates on images with all their potential connections all at once, questioning how things from one place fit into another and speaking to experiences of place in the face of our changing environmental and societal condition.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

IZABELA PLUTA
An over air pursuit of likeness
2021
latex-based ink-jet prints
118 x 196 cm, 100 x 220 cm

Consisting of two composite images affixed to a wall and a mirror, the work blends visual and textual sources, referencing a photograph Pluta’s father took from an aeroplane window in 1987 when her family emigrated from Poland to Australia.

The artist was reminded of a similar picture she had taken in 2019, when she last travelled overseas. “The idea that my father’s photograph documents my first time seeing the earth from the air feels poignant, particularly at the moment when we can’t travel.”

As her father’s photo coalesced in her mind, Pluta consulted her copy of Cloud study: a pictorial guide (1960) to determine the weather and cloud patterns occurring on the day she and her family left Poland. Selecting the page that closely described the type of clouds recorded in her father’s photograph, the artist used the cyanotype process to capture both sides of the book’s page in a set of contact negatives. Pluta is interested in the different ways that making a contact negative with cyanotype creates a unique image that is not reproducible in the same way again. The process harnesses sunlight as an exposing device and enables the artist to engage with the climatic conditions inherent in the source imagery and with the scientific origins of the source text.

Pluta then cuts, collages, scans and enlarges the cyanotype to create two merged images. She works from the contact negatives to further complicate the image plane embracing the vertical tears that occurred through the process of physically superimposing one image onto another, implying a sense of spatial and temporal rupture. While some of the text is decipherable, other parts undulate away and become blurry as a result of the cyanotype process.

This work echoes Pluta’s interests in drawing on and repurposing reference materials such as outdated atlases and pictorial dictionaries to reconsider navigation and land demarcation systems, creating works that query the concept of territory and deep time. She employs imagery, video and re-purposed ephemera that speak to present-day questions about impermanence, belonging, the flows of migration and her personal narrative in relation to place.

izabelapluta.net
@izabelapluta__studio

Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian artist living and working between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Sydney). Pluta’s practice spans photography and installation. Her way of working between numerous photographic materials and surfaces re-conceptualises the function of images by adopting conflating languages of photography to explore the nuances they embody as physical objects. Pluta has exhibited widely throughout Australia and this year presented her first European solo exhibition, Variable depth, shallow water, at Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s National Centre for Creativity. In 2019 Pluta was awarded the Perimeter Small Book Prize that led to her debut artist book, Figures of slippage and oscillation (Perimeter Books). She was also commissioned to create a significant new work, Apparent distance, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for The National 2019: new Australia art. In 2018 Pluta was a finalist in the MAMA Foundation National Photography Award and the inaugural artist for the Marrgu Residency at Durrmu Arts Aboriginal Corporation in Peppimenarti. Pluta presented work in Form N-X00 at the US Pavilion at the 2018 Biennale Architettura, Venice, Italy (in collaboration with Other Architects). She has also been the recipient of various grants and awards including from The Australia Council for the Arts, The Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award (2009), The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant (2008) and The Freedman Traveling Arts Scholarship (2007). She has held solo exhibitions at The Australian Centre for Photography (2018); Artspace, Sydney (2017, 2006); The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie (2019); UTS Gallery, Sydney (2014); Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2012); Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2011); 24 HR Art, Darwin (2010) and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2009). Other notable group exhibitions include Civilization: the way we live now, The National Gallery of Victoria (2019); Watching the clouds pass the moon, MAC Lake Macquarie (2016); Timelapse, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2016); Through the lens, Horsham Regional Gallery (2014); and Foreplay, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2012). Pluta has also undertaken residencies in Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris, Belfast and Beijing, and at International Art Space (IASKA) in Kellerberrin, Western Australia. The artist completed her doctorate in visual arts at the University of Wollongong in 2017.

Izabela Pluta is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.

LoveArt is pleased to present the fifth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art (out of isolation but grounded here) with Sydney based collaborative duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s poignantly titled Don't Shit where you Eat. Drawing inspiration from the 1974 Surrealist comedy Phantom of Liberty by Luis Buñuel and Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century Decameron, Healy & Cordeiro ruminate on social cues, conditions and consequences of pandemic induced isolation.

Healy and Cordeiro are Australian artists who reclaim and transform the fallout of consumer society in their practice. Combining a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, their work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of prefabricated structures and the assemblage of accumulated objects into extraordinary sculptures and installations. Their practice reflects a preoccupation with the dynamics of global mobility—the networks, standards and financial systems that enable and restrict the movement of people and goods in the modern era. Creating tensions between order and disorder, their works are shaped by traditional sculptural concerns such as mass, form and scale, however they also incorporate the expressive potential of motion, speaking to the way things move and change over time.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

CLARE HEALY + SEAN CORDEIRO
Don't Shit where you Eat
2021
polyvinyl chloride, acrylic paint, cardboard

DSWYE is a common enough aphorism. Vaguely speaking it requests the listener not to cause trouble within situations that affect one’s life position. The phrase has been interpreted within a range of meanings from ‘Treat the earth with kindness’ to ‘Don’t have a romantic entanglement in the workplace.’

The idea of an office romance during the work from home era of covid isolation is laughable. An illicit affair with one’s spouse sounds like a comedic episode from the Decameron. Yet it may be Boccaccio’s 14th century plague-era tale that best teaches us about our own pandemic circumstance. Broadly speaking, the Decameron was an expression of the masses’ loss of faith in the church due to its ineffectiveness against the ravages of the Black Death. Will there also be a similar post-pandemic loss of faith in the institutions of our contemporary age?

The digital concertinaing of work life and home life has thrust our industrial-age routines back into a cottage industry existence: toiling away at home with children under foot, while #BLM and the #MeToo movements have rattled the hegemony of White Patriarchy.

What will be the long-term effects of this virus? Right now, there is a possible branch of a future reality that takes the iconoclastic lessons of the Covid era and forms a socially and ecologically sustainable framework to live within. Our ability to change and adapt to our circumstances is proof that we have what it takes to face the challenges of our age. The world has gone topsy turvy but we are still standing (just).

It is with this spirit that we question current social mores: A half-eaten takeaway pizza lies abandoned in a bathroom. This vision creates a schism in our mind like a scene from Luis Buñuel’s 1974 Phantom of Liberty in which a party of guests sit upon individual toilets while chatting around a table, meanwhile down the hallway, a man furtively dines inside a concealed closet. Something breaks within our mind, and we wonder ‘what the hell am I doing?’

The stress and strangeness of this pandemic-age just might cause us to snap out of our collective Stockholm syndrome and finally admit that the Emperor is in a state of undress….

Courtesy of the artist.

claireandsean.com
@clairehealyandseancordeiro

Cordeiro and Healy live and work in Sydney. The duo each received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) (1997) and a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. In 2005 Healy and Cordeiro were awarded Australia Council residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and Tokyo, Japan. In 2006—2007 they were Guest Artists at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, having been both awarded the Samstag Scholarship. In 2010 they participated in the residency program at the Akiyoshidai International Artist Village, Japan. In the same year they took part in the inaugural Art Setouchi Festival, Japan. In 2017 they were invited by Massey University to undertake a 6 month residency at Te Whare Hēra in Wellington. In 2018 they were Asialink funded artists in residence at Tenjinyama Studio in Sapporo. Their Solo exhibitions include flatpack at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2006, The Paper Trail at the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2007, PREMS at La bf15, Lyon 2009, Are we there Yet? at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC 2011 and a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2012. Healy and Cordeiro’s installation Life Span was part of the Australian representation at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They took park in the 5th Auckland Triennale, curated by Hou Hanru. In 2018 they exhibited two major new works at the Australian Biennial of Art in Adelaide. In 2018, they debuted their major public installation Cloud Nation in Green Square Library, commissioned by The City of Sydney. Most recently, they unveiled their latest commission Tower of Power at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair 2019. Upcoming Public Artworks include Place of the Eels for Parramatta Square, 2022. Upcoming exhibitions include a new commission for The 2021 Oku-Noto Triennale in Japan and a solo presentation scheduled Post-haste for The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.

LoveArt is pleased to present the fourth iteration of our nano project space, Love[for]Art, in and emerging from iso, with Paris-based (but Sydney bound) artist Mel O'Callaghan and her single channel video, Sea Mount. The work was filmed in the Eastern Pacific where she undertook a three-week expedition on the Research Vessel Atlantis - the same trip from which her recent major exhibition Centre of the Centre derives. From the trusty submersible HOV Alvin, Sea Mount captures a descent through the sea’s five layers - zones that extend from the surface to the most extreme of largely unexplored depths - in an epic journey of genesis and regeneration.

O’Callaghan’s works often explore human behaviour and psychology in relation to notions of resistance, endurance and transformation. Her works depict the human body pushed to its limits, such as Ensemble, where a single performer stands in a field struggling against the force of a high-pressure water cannon and ultimately wins. Here and in much of her work, the human body is a site of agency and resilience through which to investigate individual and collective freedom.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

MEL O’CALLAGHAN
Sea Mount
2020
single channel 4K colour video, 16:9, sound
1 hour 28 minutes
Edition of 3 + 1AP

Sea Mount descends through the five layers in the sea. These layers, known as "zones", extend backwards from the surface to the most extreme depths where light can no longer penetrate. These deep zones are largely unexplored, the temperature drops and the pressure increases. Moving through multiple thresholds the film captures phases of genesis and regeneration.

The work was filmed during a three-week expedition in the eastern Pacific on the Research Vessel Atlantis from the submersible HOV Alvin, with the support of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and US National Science Foundation. Captured on AT4206 onboard the R/V Atlantis in December 2018: D. Fornari, WHOI/NSF/HOV Alvin, 2018, ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Courtesy of the artist and Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney.

melocallaghan.com
@mel_ocallaghan

O'Callaghan lives and works between Sydney and Paris. She has recently presented major commissions such as Centre of the Centre, a solo exhibition presented at Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2019); Artspace, Sydney (2019) and UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (2020/21). The exhibition toured to Museum of Contemporary Art and Design MCAD, Manila (2019) and will tour to a further ten regional venues across Australia through to 2023 with Museums and Galleries of NSW. Previous solo exhibitions include, Dangerous On The Way, a solo exhibition at the Palais de Toyko, Paris (2017); Ensemble, National Gallery of Victoria NGV, Melbourne (2017); Centre Pompidou in Paris and Malaga (2016), with a live version commissioned by the Serralves Museum, Porto (2016); Parade, 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016) and Gillman Barracks, Singapore (2017).

O’Callaghan’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions in the following institutions: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museo D’Art Contemporanea Di Roma (MACRO), Rome; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (CASM), Barcelona; Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon; Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga; National Gallery of Australia (NGA); Institut d’art contemporain (IAC), Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, Lyon; Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; Yo-Chang Art Museum, National Taiwan University of Arts, Taipei; Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Budelsdorf; The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei; Centre d’art Contemporain Les Tanneries, Amilly; Kunstverein Konstanz, Konstanz; The Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, Rochechouart; Kunstmuseum, Ravensburg; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Museo Ar/ge Kunst, Bolzano; Centre d’art contemporain, Malakoff; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne; Maison d’art Bernard Anthonioz, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Nogent- sur-Marne; Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse; Videobrasil 05 15°, Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc Videobrasil, São Paulo.

A monograph of her work was published in 2020 by Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Artspace, Sydney and UQ Art Museum, Brisbane.

Mel O'Callaghan is represented by Galerie Allen, Paris; Kronenberg Mais Wright, Sydney; and Galeria Belo Galsterer, Lisbon.

LoveArt is pleased to present the third iteration of our nano project space, Love[for]Art, in-iso, with Sydney-based artist Elizabeth Pulie. Pulie’s thematically resonant and site-similar work, #110 (Crisis of the Contemporary) (2020) centres on a written disposition musing the end of art via a conference paper and audio recording prepared with artist Tina Havelock Stevens.

Pulie’s practice, which extends back to 1989, both materially and academically responds to her research into contemporary art’s ontology, post-conceptualism and ‘the end of art’. Her material practice moves between media and form, from painting to craft and decorative techniques using textiles like jute, hessian, cotton or linen to represent her personal history with 1970s craft applications and centering the feminine as a potentially critical concern. Her use of utilitarian fabrics like hessian sit in an ambiguous state between function and art, challenging the aesthetic value of commodity objects.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

ELIZABETH PULIE
#110 (Crisis of the Contemporary)
2020
sound, conference paper
audio track: Tina Havelock Stevens

The ‘crisis of the contemporary’ refers to the challenge of conducting a critical practice as an artist in the current moment, as well as the difficulties encountered in defining or theorising that which is known as ‘contemporary art’. This work, #110 (Crisis of the Contemporary) (2020), contemplates this crisis and represents an attempt to embody the art of the current moment. This action is taken in spite of my belief that a defining characteristic of artworks in the post-conceptual era is that they cannot, in fact, embody their definition. - Elizabeth Pulie

@elizabethpulie

Pulie lives and works in Sydney. Recent group exhibitions include Dialogue 2: On Hessian, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2020); Bauhaus Now!, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne (2019); Redlands Konica Minolta Prize, National Art School, Sydney (2018); The National 2017: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017); Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2017); Fabrik, Ian Potter Gallery, Melbourne (2016); Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016). Solo exhibitions include #80 Knulp, Sydney (2018) and The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney (2018). Between 2000 and 2005, Pulie co-directed Front Room gallery and edited and published Lives of the Artists magazine.

Elizabeth is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

LoveArt is pleased to present the second iteration of our nano project space, Love[for]Art, in-iso, with Sydney-based artist Clare Milledge's site specific work, Little shrike-thrush calling in the gully: in praise of shadows (2020), a pentaptych in the Byzantine hinterglasmalerei technique. Words gathered from following ecologists in the field and dating apps draw together environmental and anthropological observations to formulate a unique lexicon.

Milledge's practice re-examines contemporary environments with a focus on our engagement with ecology through art, in particular through the use of the historical figure of the artist-shaman. Working with fieldwork as her primary methodology she collects, re-organises, transforms and re-presents recordings, information and material gathered on ecological surveys and site visits. Her research output takes the form of public installation environments that variously incorporate glass paintings, textile works, costumes, sets, collaborative experimental sound and performance.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

CLARE MILLEDGE
Little shrike-thrush calling in the gully: in praise of shadows
2020
oil on toughened glass, lead, galvanised steel wire
47.5 x 46 cm five parts each

The work was developed partly through reflection on the influential 1933 text In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, who wrote of the beauty of the outdoor Japanese toilet, set in nature. Tanizaki praised the Japanese toilet as a place of repose to experience nature and applauded the virtues of natural textures and lighting while rejecting the Western modernist white toilet. Taking this into account, I undertook fieldwork with ecologists and bush regenerators as well as using other sources such as dating apps to gather text and material reflecting current environments. The resulting text paintings are designed to be read in the quiet of the toilet setting with the light of candles and/or natural light. - Clare Milledge

claremilledge.com
@claremilledge

Milledge lives and works between the lands of the Arakwal people in Bundjalung country (Broken Head, Northern NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people (Paddington, Sydney). She obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts in 2005, completed her honours in painting from Sydney College of the Arts in 2006, and received a Doctor of Philosophy from the Sydney College of the Arts in 2013. Selected solo exhibitions include Strigiformes: Binocular, Binaural, performance for Tori Wrånes solo exhibition Hot Pocket, curated by Stina Høgkvist, Museet for Samtidskunst (Oslo, 2017); Altus Duel: Total Environment, Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne, 2014); Maximalist Ritualist (with Carla Cescon), Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide, 2012); and Lord Owl, Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (Sydney, 2010). Selected group exhibitions include Second Sight: Witchcraft, Ritual, Power, UQ Art Museum (Brisbane, 2019); Ruler, rete, Arndt Art Agency, (Berlin 2019); What Remains, Fotogalleriet, (Oslo 2017); Remedial Works, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (Perth, 2017); Erewhon, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 2016 and touring NetsVIC to 2018); The Mnemonic Mirror, Griffith University Art Gallery and UTS (Brisbane and Sydney 2016); Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial, (Adelaide, 2016); Dämmerschlaf, Artspace (Sydney, 2016); Neverwhere, Gaia Gallery, (Istanbul 2015); Writing Art, Artspace (Sydney, 2015); Unstable Parts in an Unfriendly Place, Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (Sydney, 2013); Un-Acclimatised, Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne, 2012); and Neo Goth: Back in Black, University of Queensland Art Museum (Brisbane, 2008). Her work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne), 10 Cubed (Melbourne), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne), and Artbank (Sydney). Milledge has been awarded a number of grants and scholarships, and was one of the inaugural Artspace studio resident artists in 2015.

Clare is represented by STATION.

LoveArt is pleased to present our nano project space, Love[for]Art with the inaugural, in-iso iteration featuring Caroline Rothwell.

Located in Woollahra at the home of art advisor and collector, Amanda Love, the project aims to activate a micro-site that, particularly in light of current lockdown conditions, will explore creative practice via the micro and one-to-one, as a means of showcasing and experiencing current artistic expression which is, by necessity, innovative and ingenious.

The project will present a spectrum of works from a diverse mix of artists over the course of the year.

Caroline Rothwell is launching the program with her sight specific work, Carbon Emission 5 Constructivist Rococo (2020). British-born, Sydney and London based artist Caroline Rothwell's practice centres on a research-based enquiry into humankind's interaction with the natural world. Carbon Emission 5, conceived for Love[for]Art follows from a series of projects centred on and informed by carbon emissions - their cause, impact, and materiality.

The remaining 2020 program will feature works by artists Clare Milledge, Elizabeth Pulie and Mel O’Callaghan.

Personal view by appointment.

Isabella Chow
mail@loveart.com
02 9327 7738
10am – 6pm
Tuesday – Friday

Use your mobile’s camera to scan the QR code, follow the prompt and turn device to landscape to view the animation and browse a selection of material curated by the artist.

CAROLINE ROTHWELL
Carbon Emission 5, Constructivist Rococo
2020
4k Digital animation
30 second loop Edition of 8 + 1AP

Caroline Rothwell - the daughter of an industrial chemist - investigates the intersection of mankind and nature, time, history and science. With a practice that spans two and three dimensions, Rothwell considers our compulsion to master and dominate natural phenomena. Carbon Emission 5, Constructivist Rococo (2020) follows a series of projects centred on and informed by carbon emissions - their cause, impact, and materiality. In Carbon Emission 5, Constructivist Rococo, Rothwell’s ornate gas emission painting breathes softly in animation, evoking both the baroque cartouche and hybridised forms of flora and fauna that is so distinctive of her practice.

carolinerothwell.net
carolinerothwellcarbon.art.blog
@carolinerothwell

Caroline Rothwell, born in Yorkshire, England has a BA from the University of the Arts, London, an MFA in sculpture from Hunter College, City University of New York and University of Auckland. She has a research-driven practice, working across two and three dimensions in a variety of media. Her work explores the intersection of art and science, nature and history, ideology and society. Rothwell has been included in significant national and international exhibitions, biennales and residencies including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2019, 2018); Inspiracje, Trafo Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (2017); XIII Biennale of Cuenca, Ecuador (2016); Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge Museums (2016); Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, USA (2015); Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide (2014); 2014 Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia; and the Shepparton Art Museum (Shepparton, 2012). Her work is held in major collections including Cambridge University, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Deutschebank, OMI International Arts Center, New York, Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK.

Rothwell has been commissioned to make numerous public art projects including for: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Composer, 2016); The Economist plaza, London (Dispersed, 2009) for Contemporary Art Society); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (2005). She has undertaken international residencies at Cambridge University Museums (2015), OMI International Arts Centre, New York (2014), and Nottingham University (2004).

Caroline Rothwell is represented by Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney and Yavuz Gallery, Singapore.