Then and Now
6 – 21 October
opening Friday 5 October 6-8pm
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.
About the artists:
6 – 21 October
opening Friday 5 October 6-8pm
Open 11am-5pm Friday - Sunday
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.
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/