Do You Know This Feeling?
Curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones
Opening 06.02.19 6-8pm
ATO #1 23.02.19
Artist Talks 28.02.19 6-7pm
Do You Know This Feeling? is an exhibition, broadly concerned with strategies of communication that transcend inherited difference. Poetic contributions to the show open up a moody margin and a collection of attitudes that instruct us as to how our own story may intersect unexpectedly with another’s.
Central to the exhibition is the transformative power of perceiving and expressing one’s struggles, one’s freedoms, and the new identities that may grow around shared knowledge and experience. Do You Know This Feeling? considers how we can articulate our experiences from within uneven power relations to one another, and asks in whose interest it is to suppress such activity. In identifying something that is familiar in another’s circumstances, our own may be powerfully reshaped. Common to the practices of participants in the show is a considered and deliberate use of language. Contributions index courage, tenderness and the transformation of shared affliction as access points to empathy and empowerment. And so, the exhibition seeks simply to render palpable a feeling, that may draw us each to one another within a shared understanding of collective narrative.
An Around The Outside event on the 23rd of February will provide an opportunity to expand upon the themes in the exhibition. Notably, There will be a screening of Trinh T. Minh Ha’s cinematic work Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)
Biographies
Arben Dzika
Arben Dzika is a Melbourne based artist and Dddilae. Across multi-media, they explore themes including time collapse, emotional worm-holes and personal holograms within consumer technologies
Athena Thebus
Athena’s practice spans sculpture, photography, video, and writing. Her works often incorporate tattooing, studded leather, neon lights, holes in walls, and burning blankets. The works have an undercurrent of celestial Catholicism, as influenced by her Filipina heritage, but from the position of the damned. Athena is motivated by the productive force of Desire, understanding that the drive to imagining new futures is to desire something other than what we already can see. Pursuing the pleasure path is often dark and requires decolonizing. She approaches this task with an intentionality that is oceanic and diasporic within the settler colonial context of what is now known as Australia.
Cee Powell
Cee Powell is somewhat of an artist, based in nipaluna, lutruwita (TAS). Their practice considers processes of poetic and structural disorientation to unveil tensions between internal and external wordlings. Invested in the mystical intricacies of assembled space, Powell works to examine pedagogical structures inherent to communal meaning making, and how language forms might be deconstructed to support new, empathetic connections. Often concerned with the motif of dimensionality, Powell seeks to rescript experiences through moments of tension, ambiguity and hopefulness. Powell is a graduate of UNSW: Art & Design and UTAS: School of Creative Arts and has exhibited nationally.
Chi Tran
Chi Tran is a writer and artist who makes poems that may be essay, object, drawing, and sound, and is primarily interested in working with text as a means of coming-to-terms.
Cristine Brache
Cristine Brache (b.1984, Miami) is an artist and writer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent living and working between Miami and Toronto. She holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK). Often unapologetic, diaristic, and placing the viewer in the position of the voyeur, Brache’s work ambiguously deals with identity, power dynamics, and templates of the female body and psyche in relation to public and private space. Recent exhibitions include Locust Projects, Miami; FIERMAN, New York; Team Gallery, New York; Anat Egbi, Los Angeles; MOCA, Miami; Bow Arts, London; Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Paris; and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. She has a debut collection of poetry entitled Poems (Codétte, 2018). Her poetry has been published in Publishing Genius, New York Tyrant, Fanzine, and Apogee, among others. Writing about her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and Cordite Poetry Review.
Frontyard
Frontyard Projects Inc. is a network of people that provides a pro-active, flexible space for practical skills-sharing, futuring, and critical research. Frontyard aims to be community-led in terms of content and usefulness, open and questioning of current systems and structures, and respectful and trusting of our fellow Frontyarders.
IchikawaEdward
IchikawaEdward is an ongoing collaborative project between artists Ichikawa Lee and Joshua Edward, est. 2017 based in Naarm Melbourne. The artist’s practice spans mediums of sculpture, installation, performance, photography and creative writing. IchikawaEdward adopts a vast range of materials and processes that employ new technologies and fabrication systems, in efforts to achieve a nuanced materiality that operates both poetically and politically.
JD Reforma
JD Reforma is an interdisciplinary artist who mines personal and public histories to explore the decolonising potential of the Filipino. His works occupy the interstice between the popular and the political, collecting and collaging narratives of diasporic and marginal experience as a methodology towards unpacking and unlearning cultural shame.
He was named a 2019 artist in residence at Carriageworks, Sydney, and also participated in the 2018 4A Beijing Studio Program. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include the 2018 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, Michelle Newton and Lola Pinder, Artspace, Sydney; The TV Show, 2018, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Wollongong Art Gallery; and Neo-Filipino, 2019, with Caroline Garcia, Verge Gallery, University of Sydney.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha
Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is an award winning filmmaker, writer and composer. She has traveled and lectured extensively internationally on film, art, feminism and cultural politics, and is professor of Gender & Women’s studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Media player partner Lupa
Image
Ichikawa Edward, it feels good to be on top, 2018, stirrups, leather, hardware, 300 x 50cm, photo by Ichikawa Lee