SYDNEY.- Sydney Contemporary, Australasia’s premier art fair, in partnership with MA Financial Group, today announced AMPLIFY – the newly named and highly anticipated Installation Contemporary program. Designed to exhibit large-scale artworks in a diverse range of media, including moving-image, or more ambitious and conceptually driven projects that extend beyond the traditional booth presentation, AMPLIFY presents an opportunity to view innovative, site-specific, and interactive installations in the environment of Carriageworks. This year’s program is Curated by Annika Kristensen, Visual Arts Curator at Perth Festival, and Associate Curator at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).
Annika Kristensen, AMPLIFY Curator said, “Amidst the atmosphere and hustle of the art fair, the works for AMPLIFY serve as interstices or interruptions, offering moments of curiosity, whimsy, exuberance, respite, and reflection. From a live site-specific drawing to portraits of the audience generated from AI - and across an array of media including sculpture, projection, painting, textiles and moving image - the installations variously reflect upon their surrounding environment: engaging with the time and conditions of their making, the unique architecture of the Carriageworks building, and interacting directly with the context of, and visitors to, the fair.”
The sixth edition of Australasia’s premier art fair, Sydney Contemporary, will present over 90 leading Australian and New Zealand galleries exhibiting the work of over 450 artists hailing from 34 countries, from 8-11 September 2022 at Carriageworks, the largest contemporary multi-arts centre in Australia.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND INSTALLATIONS INCLUDE (A-Z):
Peta Clancy's photographic series Undercurrent will be projected on the exterior façade of Carriageworks. To create her highly acclaimed Undercurrent series (2018-19), Clancy collaborated with the Dja Dja Wurrung community during a 12-month residency at the Koorie Heritage Trust. These soft, blushing landscapes are half out of focus and have alluringly dissonant colours. Clancy sets her lens on re-directed waterways in Dja Dja Wurrung country that submerge the sites of Indigenous massacres, capturing a seemingly serene landscape that masks the dark past of colonial frontier wars. Presented by Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Mikala Dwyer presents Backdrop for Rounders and Backdrop for Base Matter (2016) – conjuring the origins of abstract art in the early 20th century, particularly the work of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) whose spiritualist beliefs and participation in seances led to some of the first purely abstract paintings. Dwyer calls on the diagrammatic nature of Klint’s work in devising her own paintings, referring to a genealogy of innovative women artists who have worked outside rationalist social and cultural norms. Impressive in scale and presence these works gesture to the transformative power of art. Presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Winners of the 2022 Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro present ゴメンね 素直じゃなくて (Gomen ne sunao ja nakute), a title taken from the theme song to the children’s anime Sailor Moon which translates to “Sorry, I’m not straightforward”. This can be said to be a description of our ever-changing moon which waxes and wanes: representing a fluidity of character. It is well known that the Moon is the essential driver of the ebb and flow of tides and therefore responsible for all the forces of nature that are the byproduct of this rhythm, such as human fertility cycles and coral spawning. A giant moon will sit within the Victorian-era industrial structure of Carriageworks; a force of nature entering this human space. Using a paper-machè technique, the entire surface of the moon consists of the Yaoi manga. Yaoi, also known as Boy Love or BL in Japan, is a manga genre that explores gay male romance, mostly written by women, for women. Presented by N.Smith Gallery, Sydney.
Nadia Hernández’s practice is informed by the political climate of her home country and her diasporic experience as a Venezuelan woman. Through textiles, paper constructions, paintings, music, installations, sculptures, and murals, she negotiates complex narratives intersecting the personal with the political. Hernández presents a wall installation incorporating neon and painting elements. Following previous explorations of food and cooking as a means of connecting with family and place, this presentation will use imagery of hands to explore connection across distance and time. Presented by STATION, Melbourne | Sydney.
Sam Leach presents Automatic Evolution of the Art Audience, an evolving portrait generated by Artificial Intelligence, based on images of participating visitors. Viewers are invited to pose for a photo which will be added to an algorithm using a machine learning algorithm generating an endlessly evolving portrait which will be displayed on a screen. Using an algorithm model based off the artist’s previous paintings, an infinite series of portraits will be generated. Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore.
Taree Mackenzie’s video and installation practice explores the optical and effects of colour, light and space, using constructed immersive perceptual experiences for the viewer. Presented by Neon Parc, Melbourne.
Continuing his focus on the personal and social impacts of our built environment, Callum Morton’s monumental wall sculptures are one-to-one scale replicas of the window frames on the facade of the renowned Sirius Building in The Rocks, Sydney. A heritage-listed building that provided affordable housing and a significant piece of Brutalist architecture, Sirius was threatened to be demolished by the government. In adding a theatrical element to The End #3 (2020), Morton has inserted a pulsating light into each sculpture that changes colour to correspond to the audio track of the computerised voice of Siri. Siri is intoning every different term for ‘the end’ that she can compute – the robotic voice of the future talking about having no future. Presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Bold, painterly and conceptually rich, Vincent Namatjira’s work has gained significant recognition in Australia and abroad. Namatjira’s imagery calls on Australia’s colonial history, with recurring references to Captain Cook, the British Royal Family and contemporary aspects of Indigenous life. For AMPLIFY 2022, Namatjira presents The Royal Tour (Diana, Vincent and Charles). Presented by THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran presents a new life-sized bronze sculpture. The bold and contemporary work will explore themes of idolatry in urban Australian environments - asking diverse publics to consider questions of worship and monumentality in contemporary public places. Nithiyendran has recently extended his practice into the public domain and the new sculpture for Sydney Contemporary will take this new trajectory of his work even further in terms of scale and detail. The work is conceived to offer diverse audiences to the Fair a range of access points to explore the histories and futures of contemporary sculptural practice. Further, it attempts to prompt visitors, both local and international, to consider the meaning of idolatry and sculptural monuments in public spaces within the context of democratic society. Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore.
Catherine O’Donnell will create a site-specific durational drawing directly onto a wall within the Fair. O’Donnell’s drawings are clearly representational, however the realism in her work is not merely a reproduction of the visible, it is the elevation of the abstract form, the underpinning geometry and the distillation of the spatial composition that interests her. To this end, she extracts the building from its surroundings, deleting extraneous information, in order to emphasize the simplified form and obtain the final image. O’Donnell sees the suburbs as full of connection and disconnection, sameness and difference; in short, her drawings examine suburban living as a site of complexity. Presented by Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Kenny Pittock captures today’s anxious feelings of confusion, exhibiting a giant inflatable sculpture of a globe in the shape of a pear, titled The World’s Gone Pear Shaped. Pittock deploys his signature puns by using pop culture images, naïve objects and humorous words to deliver his artistic meaning. The work serves as a hopeful reminder that despite going pear shaped things can still be fruitful. Presented by MARS Gallery, Melbourne.
Visiting the sea stack Dwejra on the island of Gozo that collapsed in 2017, Izabela Pluta was captivated by this spectacular expression of geological time. Also known as The Azure Window, the limestone debris of Dwejra – initially 28- metres tall – now lies roughly 12 metres below sea level. Variable depth, shallow water explores the fragmentation of vision under the surface of the ocean. The installation includes small photographs printed on aluminium, traditional darkroom prints, and photographs of aerial footage filmed by a drone – that each descend, hang and jut up from the aluminum structure. The images include depictions of the ocean where rocks appear beneath its surface and pictures that resemble maps — made with a camera-less process of printing full-page maps from an outdated atlas of the world’s oceans. Presented by Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert.
Michael Staniak presents a large-scale sculpture that highlights the intersection between abstraction, post-internet culture and human connectivity. Simultaneously critiquing and embracing technology, Staniak creates these sculptural works by sourcing 3D scans of the interior of caves from an open-source database. He then renders the digital into the real via 3D printing technology. The form will create subtle gradients of texture and colour. The work is Staniak’s first-ever upscaling of previously exhibited small-scale bronze sculptures using the same process. Presented by STATION, Melbourne | Sydney.
Kathy Temin presents Mothering Garden, a large-scale soft sculpture. Temin has sewn, stuffed and amassed over thirty-seven components rendered in white synthetic fur that resemble a gigantic, non-functional playground. Here are arched rainbows, bulbous trees, pointed topiary, striated towers, stacked orbs and a squat stadium propped on a low, white base. Temin alludes to the joyful aspects of play in mothering and the role of games, toys and children’s furniture.
(Words by Natalie King). Presented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Angela Tiatia presents Narcissus, a contemporary reimagining of the classical Greek myth, exploring contemporary visual culture’s worship of the self. Tiatia filmed the work with Director of Photography Benjamin Shirley, production company Finch Company and producer Cath Anderson; working with 80 professional actors, performance artists and crew, Narcissus is the largest production of her career to date. Presented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney | Singapore.
