Then and Now: Nuha Saad and Michele Beevors - opens Friday 5 October6-8pm

6 – 21 October 

Open 11am-5pm Friday - Sunday

This exhibition addresses the shifts in working methodologies over many years of encounters between two artists, Nuha Saad and Michele Beevors who met while sharing a studio at art college.

From left Nuha Saad, Untitled 2018 (work in progress-detail), acrylic on wood; 
Michele Beevors, Dustcatchers, 2018 ( work in progress-detail), wool

Nuha Saad works with the formal aspects of the space between painting and sculpture. Saad has been engaged for a long period of time with the decorative and the architectural. The work reinvigorates long overlooked spaces and displays an inherited sensibility which is influenced by both (post)colonial woodwork with its turned ornamentalism and a Lebanese/Australian heritage where counting, patterning, and colour have remained consistent themes These themes undermine the grim, muted and dour colour pallet of our colonial past and reinvigorate, playgrounds, public spaces and home furnishings in unique combinations of colour and shape which confront the viewer in surprising ways and overturn our expectations of the inherently bland urban architecture we expect in cities and in vogue living rooms, negotiating the difference between formalisms strict, this not that formula, and Minimalism's phenomenological encounter with a body in space.

Michele Beevors' practice has been interested in figuration as an encounter between feminism and commodity culture attempting a materialist critique in large scale sculptures in a series’ dedicated to disarm Disney Princesses, the typical Hollywood movie star and particular examples from art history, in which the female forms appear as armoured, abject and rampantly humorous in a riotous array of domestic materials and assorted cleaning products that also examines women’s labour in terms of the clean and tidy home and handcrafted traditions of knitting, and sewing. Informed by a pop sensibility, with a nod to the coming environmental crisis brought on by rampant global capitalism and its stockpiles of waste Beevors' work moves between figurative sculpture and the domestic abyss.

Michele Beevors 2018

About the artists:

Michele Beevors is an Australian artist and a Senior Lecturer at Dunedin School of Art in New Zealand. Beevors holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, a Master of Visual Arts from The Australian National University, School of Art and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from City Art Institute. Beevors has exhibited in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

https://www.michelebeevors.org/   https://www.instagram.com/woollyskeletons/

Nuha Saad is a Sydney based sculptor working in the areas of installation, galleries and public art. Saad holds a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from City Art Institute. Saad has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions in public, commercial and artist run galleries and her public artworks have been featured in public buildings and urban renewal projects, including large scale commissions for City of Sydney and Transport for NSW. http://nuhasaad.com/nuha-saad   https://www.instagram.com/nuhasaad1/

Last weekend for De-Interlaced - closes Sunday 30 Sept at 5pm

Closing party last night

De-interlaced is open - Closing Party Friday 28 September 6-8pm

ROOMSHEET

Open 11am - 5pm Friday-Sunday until Sunday 30 September

The endless circulation of data and e-information that now travels in and around everyday existence, like an unabating convergence of starlings blotting out a Roman sunset, is not a subject one tends to frequently consider. Text, images and code fracture before committing to an imperceptible journey and only at their destination do the fragments rearrange themselves into their original forms. This is referred to as de-interlacing. 

De-interlaced is a response by artist Kenneth Lambert to this series of seemingly simple events, taking the form of a multi-panel installation, that examines the commonality between the artistic process of conceptualisation, scrutiny and final outcome and the way in which data behaves in transit. Lambert has created six containers of technological uncertainty that, while imposing due to their size and solitary, almost detached nature, cannot help but invite curious investigation by the viewer.  

As physical objects the installation embodies the sense of the de-interlaced. The outer layer exposed to the viewer is constructed of Mylar, a material commonly utilised when packaging electronic consumer products, while the interior is never revealed. In this sense the object itself and the viewer experience life in a middle ground of sorts, between conceptualisation and active use, both informed of a soon to be functional existence yet unaware of exactly what that existence may entail. Each seems as if it were simply opened whatever is contained would be immediately put to use. 

Through slight visual cues Lambert dares each individual object to reveal a greater purpose, almost breathing life into dormant sentinels. Distinct colours are used to reference specific areas of research in which new media technologies have had a significant impact on the contemporary human psyche; personal identity, social interaction, cultural identity, environmentalism, political preference and spirituality. The de-interlacing of information suggests that increasingly digital selves made up of these varying aspects are perpetually swirling around the world we know, a tempest of our own and our peers’ personalities supposedly laid bare and immediately reachable yet still invisible, like each reflective techno-monolith Lambert presents.  

In De-interlaced microscopic voyages of fantastic proportions are revealed and through an attentiveness to human relationships with current technologies the artist transmutes this surging swarm of unobserved digital intelligence into tangible reflections of the intricacies of our own modern-day identities. Despite an impenetrable aloofness conveyed by the physical structures Lambert somehow pierces the skin to release a clearer picture of what the contents may become when data adrift reaches a terminus. 

Sotiris Sotiriou 

Gallerist and Curator

www.comagallery.com 

Kenneth Lambert's De-Interlaced opens Friday 14 Sept 6-8pm

Open 11am - 5pm, Fri - Sun,  15-30 September 

opening Friday 14 September 6-8pm

Artists talk 11am Sunday 23 September

Closing Party Friday 28 September 6-8pm

Kenneth Lambert De-Interlaced (detail) 2018

De-interlaced is a technical term borrowed from broadcast media, which in this situation represents the artist’s process of investigation, analysis and final response. The response takes the format of a multi-panel installation work. Each panel represents a specific area of research in which media technologies have had a noted impact on the human psyche. The areas of research represented in the work include personal identity, social interaction, cultural identity, environmental, political and spirituality.

These outcomes have been represented as soft metallic colour fields that intrude over the liquid mirror surfaces. The result is a series of suspended multi-dimensional paintings that are simultaneously translucent, reflective and chromatic in materiality. Further the artist’s intention goes beyond the physical work to include the surrounding space. Light and colour refract onto the gallery’s surfaces as the panels spin on their central axis. This immersive experience can be harmonious, sometimes discordant, and totally dependent on the external environmental forces of light, space and time.

“I strive to create work which is a catalyst for an emotive resonance. A way of beguiling the participant into a seemingly simple but deeply layered experience”.

Kenneth Lambert - Artist

Lambert is a conceptually driven artist whose practice investigates the human psyche through the lens of technology. His practice extends across digital media and installation. Lambert approaches his experimental art practice with the deliberation of a scientist and philosopher combined. His intention is to entice the viewer into a state that is self-reflective.

Lambert’s work has been recently recognized with his inclusion in 2018 the Churchie Emerging Artist Prize, Lismore Portrait Prize, Hidden Sculpture Walk and the Alice Prize. He is also this year’s recipient of the Newington Armory Award: Artist in Residency and has been invited to take part in 2019 Arteles Artist residency program in Finland.

www.kclart.com