Exhibition at Phoenix Gallery

Dr Rob HAYSOM
Senior Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

EN SOI/POUR SOI
Acrylic on linen      

Self Portrait, 2009
Acrylic on linen

My work has been included in solo and group exhibitions.  Recent work has explored archaeology and art that references layers of meanings accrued to objects and locations over time.  This painting is different, as it is an abstract response to exploring the human condition of being in and of the world, and our search for meaning and identity.

Dirk DE BRUYN
Senior Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

2nd Hand Cinema
Digital Video    

2nd Hand Cinema filmstrip
Digital Print             

Traum A Dream
Digital Video           

Traum A Dream filmstrip
Digital Print             

Dirk de Bruyn has been practicing, writing and curating in the area of experimental film and animation for over 30 years.  His direct-on-film animations begun in the early 1980’s cut up and recycle old film material and hand draw, dye, scratch, remove and adhere material directly onto the surface of motion picture film.  In part this research enacts and predicts the manipulative and painterly qualities of the digital image.  In motion, through its flash, afterimage and flicker, this work investigates the direct perceptual qualities of the moving image, on its own and in cluster.

Dr John FORREST
Senior Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Ghosts of Cadaqués
Acrylic on canvas    

The “Ghosts of Cadaqués” is part of a series of paintings from an exhibition by John Forrest held in 2006.  After staying in Cadaqués, Spain, a fascination with the formalized roadside tributes to the dead in that location and the anecdotal stories of Dali, Gala and others, converged into the inspiration for this particular series.

Adrian BRUCH
Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Cyber City #3, 2009
Mixed media with found objects

Quickly drawn & cut out, 2004
pen, ink and index cards

Animator and digital designer Adrian plays with technology and teaches creativity as a by-product. 

Rozalind DRUMMOND
Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Hektik, 2008
Type C Digital Print

Belle and Dan, 2007
Type C Digital Print
Edition 5

“Drummond captures transitional moments found in the everyday, presenting images that appear slightly off-kilter or displaced.  Her photographs sit somewhere between narrative and documentary, ‘to trigger’ as curator Zara Stanhope has written, ‘a connection or free association that is not concerned with (either)’.  The environments in Drummond’s works appear as psychologically charged sites; scenes where something has taken place or is just about to happen.  Her compositions to, are often framed from an awkward vantage point; doorways, empty spaces and boarded up buildings close off and cancel more conventional snapshot perspectives.  Scenes of disorder are often suspended in her photographs, within which odd moments of calm and resolve can be found amidst drama.”

“Drummond is drawn to the relationship of individuals and groups to their environment and surrounding objects.  Recent works have focused on the way in which contemporary youth appropriate sites as spaces of social and cultural identity.  Even in her non-portraiture works, Drummond’s curiosity and fascination for the objects and spaces we position ourselves amongst, reflects an awareness that our interactions with the world are silently and honestly revealed in the remnants, gaps and physical signs left behind.”  Quotation from: “How Fine the Air” catalogue essay by Rosemary Forde, exhibition “How Fine the Air”, LifeLab Digital Harbour, Docklands, May 2009.

Simon WILMOT
Lecturer in Film Production, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Being Fishing
Colour Video          

Simon’s Masters Thesis examined documentary as an ideological practice and how it related to other social practices that shape individual and group identity.  This has become a theme and area of interest in the films he has been making in collaboration with anthropologists.  Kotla Walks. Performing Locality (2005), distributed by Ronin Films in Australia and Berkeley Media in North America, explores how urban locality shapes identity and agency in Delhi.

Since 2006 he has been working on a series of documentaries funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant in collaboration with Museum of Victoria, anthropologist from the University of Queensland and the Lamalama community of East Cape York.  Being Fishing is a short from this series.

Dr Deborah WALKER
Senior Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Hommage  1999
Oil on linen
2000.44; Deakin University Art Collection

The Prayer  1999
Oil on linen
2000.25; Deakin University Art Collection

‘Deborah Walker conjures a parallel world full of imagination, alter egos and dreams. Her enigmatic compositions are metaphors for the roles we play, sometimes unknowingly, in the individual theatre of the psyche. Her paintings are about people and relationships. Sometimes Walker’s figures seem frozen by inaction, stasis, caught in a melancholy and suspended time zone.’

Deborah Walker is a lecturer in the visual arts and has exhibited regularly in Australia and internationally. Her research is concerned with the intersection of art and philosophy, particularly the relationship of enigma and the ideas of the metaphysical painter, Giorgio de Chirico within a Nietzchean perspective.

Lisa SCHAROUN
Lecturer in Graphic Design, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Frances TATAROVIC
Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education
                               

Fruits of the Harvest
Digital Photographic Print       

The Burden of Plenty
Digital Photographic Print       

Since 1949, propaganda posters have been produced in China as a visual language to unite the masses. Posters and billboards portraying images of youth in minority costumes, traditional paper cuts and China’s abundant workforce engaged in modernisation were meant to unite the masses through ‘revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism’. These images offer interesting insight into Mao’s version ‘socialist utopia’. With the opening of China to foreign investment and trade in 1979, the vision of a ‘socialist utopia’ has changed once again. Propaganda posters are replaced with large-scale billboards featuring luxury cars, clothing and products from the West.

Fruits of the Harvest references techniques and the visual language of contemporary western commercial fashion photography. Within the work, the past and present visual culture of China is juxtaposed to create a dialogue between the icons of the Maoist vision of a socialist utopia and the contemporary visual icons of fashion and luxury advertising.

Simon GRENNAN
Lecturer in Visual Arts, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Untitled 1 
Oil on canvas   

Untitled 2
Oil on canvas      

The Search
Oil on canvas          

These works depict local sites such as Gardiners Creek Path.  They pick up on one of the enduring themes of the Australian landscape tradition; getting lost in the bush (and it endures partly because we are still so good at it!).  This is epitomised by such iconic works as McCubbin’s “Lost” (1886), painted not far from here.  I’m more interested however in representing the other side of this narrative; the ones who do the searching.  The forensic or police search is consequently present in these works – either implicitly or explicitly – as a way of making connections, both with this art historical tradition and with current popular culture trends (specifically with this relentless and tedious stream of imported CSI dramas).  The indexical reference to crime is a response to a real incident, (almost) seen, (not quite) witnessed, along these paths.  On a more fundamental level, the police search serves as an analogue for making a looking at art.  It points to what art, and painting in particular, demands of us but is not often bestowed, and that is a readiness to look at things first hand, to look more closely, more patiently, and to slow down the act of looking so that it leads to something like comprehending.

Daniel ARMSTRONG
Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Star Map 3
Digital print        

Star Map 6
Digital print             

Daniel Armstrong is a practicing artist and educator his art production encompasses photo-media, installation art, sound and video. His current research investigates relationships between science and art and in particular between astronomy and photography. He exhibits regularly and is currently undertaking Australia Council for the Arts residency at several astronomical observatories in the USA.

2 Star Maps from the series  Traces From The Astrolabe  and  Azimuth. 2006

The desire to find shapes and patterns in the night sky is ancient in origin. The visualisation of these patterns, constellations, is as much a projection by the viewer upon the heavens as it is one of recognition.

Daniel Armstrong takes photographs of the night sky. From these images each star is individually selected, digitally magnified and then mapped into grid like alignments. These simple star grids then have fundamental spatial forms and deformations, such as concave and convex, applied to them. These images also make reference to the qualities of Op and Minimalist art with a sense of the sublime which is invoked when we look to that which is infinitely complex.

“My images are not scientific in themselves but I do draw inspiration from the history of astronomy and the imaging of the universe and in particular the role photography has played during this history. The works make a playful reference to the notion of the lens (optics), the mapping and modelling of universe and the projection of shapes and symbols which have historically been anchored to the tiny points of star light which we see when we look into the night sky.”

From the catalogue for Traces From The Astrolabe. 2006

Libby Pilkington HIRSH
Lecturer, School of Education
Faculty of Arts and Education

Kangaroo Memorial
Oil on Canvas with mixed media drawing               

Libby’s work is represented in various private collections in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia including those of the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens, Monash and Latrobe Universities, the Caulfield Hospital Permanent Art Collection and the Education Department’s Australian Prints in Secondary Schools Collection.  She has participated in over 25 exhibitions including 7 solo exhibitions and 18 group shows.

Kim CORBEL
Lecturer, School of Communication & Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts and Education

Untitled Video (#3 Pumping)
Video

Untitled Video (#3 Pumping), is from an ongoing project of Still Photography, Installation and Video entitled, (the) Elimination of Process, (2005 - ).

Tat Ming YU
Associate Lecturer in Graphic Design & Photography,
School of Communication & Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts and Education

Nude 1
Photo  

Nude 2
Photo      

Tat Ming Yu has been practicing graphic design, art direction, photography and TVC directing in London, Hong Kong, Beijing and Australia for over 20 years.

Two of my photographs submitted in the exhibition are part of the “Body” series experimented with Chinese calligraphy, positive and negative space on photographic images.  The prints were originally created in the darkroom and with alternative darkroom processing. Both images then scanned and printed on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching 350gsm inkjet paper.