Contributors
David Attwood
Matthew Greaves
Nick Smith and Jimmy Nuttall
Nick Smith and Jimmy Nuttall both have individual and collective practices. They have engaged in collaborative residencies at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute and Metcalfe Shire Hall. In 2017 they co-presented an exhibition ’I am crying’ at Firstdraft, Sydney. Jimmy and Nick are both currently undertaking MFA’s at La Haute Ecole d’Art et Design, Geneva and ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles respectively. In 2019 they were both recipients of an Ian Potter Cultural Trust travelling scholarship. For now, they have returned to continue their work and study in Australia during the COVID crisis.
Lǐ XīnɡYǔ (李星雨)
Chinese-born artists started live in Melbourne in 2017. My practice spans multiple disciplines; a hybrid of painting, video, writing, photographs, and live performance. My work often involves translation. I translate langue, experiences, identity, reality, etc. To be 'Un' has been the key to my practices, and my works often came from this sense of in-between-ness by being Un. There are nostalgias, stories, humour coming from the 'places' I carry with me that I see them as the politics of identity.
Jen Valender
Jen Valender is an Australasian artist and theorist from Aotearoa based in Narrm Melbourne.
Rebecca Delange, Betra Fraval, Sophie Perillo, Jordan Wood, Elyss McCleary, Marcel Feillafe, Katie Sfetkidis
Rebecca Delange is interested in the physical intersections between temporal histories and material realities embedded in place and landscape. She utilises a range of media, sculpture, drawing, and photography, to create installation works that tell different stories and articulate unseen information, experiences, and connections about the sites she investigates.
Rebecca is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University in the School of Art. In 2015 she completed Master of Contemporary Art at VCA/Melbourne University. Recent exhibitions include Knot Not at Bus Projects, Shut Up Mountain at c3 Contemporary Art Space and Shut Up Mountain/Topology at the Bundoora Homestead for the 2020 Darebin Art Prize.
Marcel Feillafe is a Melbourne based artist who makes work that deals with the liminal and ontology. He works in a variety of mediums, such as sound, drawing, photography, and installation. Feillafe completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2008 and a Master of Contemporary Art, at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015.
Betra Fraval is United Kingdom born, Melbourne based artist interested in the impermanence of all things. Her works contemplate our place in the world, our preoccupation with material things, and the cycle of matter in nature. Her practice incorporates painting, drawing and installation.
Graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Melbourne Australia in 2014, Fraval was the recipient of the annual Galloway Lawson Prize for Excellence; Tolarno Art Prize; The Maude Glover Flea Award; and The Seventh Gallery Exhibition Grant (Making Space ARI Festival 2007). In 2019 Fraval was shortlisted for the R&M McGivern Prize. In 2018 she was awarded the Sachaqa Centro de Arte Artists’ Residency, Peru and the BigCi Artists’ Residency, Blue Mountains. She was shortlisted for the Elisabeth Murdoch Traveling Fellowship in 2009 and received a residency at Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi, India. Selected solo exhibitions include: Wanderer (2019), James Makin Gallery, Melbourne; Moving Mountains (2017), James Makin Gallery, Melbourne; Falling into the Sky (2015), Anna Pappas Gallery; The Rope Doesn’t Hang… The Earth Pulls (2015), Five Walls, Melbourne; Still Remains (2013), c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne; The Dead Trees Gives No Shelter (2012), Linden New Art, Melbourne; Unstable Ground (2008), Victoria Park Gallery, Melbourne. Selected group exhibitions include Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, James Makin Gallery; Stratum (2016), c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne; Expanded Gaze (2016), Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne; McClelland Sculpture Prize (2014) ,McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin; Disappear, (201), Kings ARI, Melbourne; A4 Art, 2011 West Space, Melbourne and Forged, 2010, Trocadero Gallery, Melbourne.
Elyss McCleary’s layered rhythmic paintings synthesize to spaces, these are felt compositions suspended between reality and an orchestrated edge of fantasy.
Elyss is a support worker at Arts Project Australia and teaches drawing at RMIT University Melbourne. She holds a Masters of Contemporary Art from the University of Melbourne Victorian College of the Arts (2016), a Bachelor of Fine Arts Drawing from RMIT University (2007) and in Diploma in Photography from National Arts School, Sydney (1999) has exhibited at Stacks Projects, COMA, LON Gallery, Tristian Koenig and C3 Contemporary Art Space among many others.
Sophie Perillo is an interdisciplinary performance artist, musician and writer. Her devised works have been performed at major galleries, festivals and Artist Run Initiatives that include NGV, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Gertrude Contemporary, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Seventh Gallery and Kings ARI. In 2017 Sophie devised and performed ‘Riding the Night Shift’ for the site-specific performance festival Melbourne47, supported by the City of Melbourne arts grant, and has since performed for several Liquid Architecture events, including ‘Polyphonic Social’ at the Abbotsford Convent and performed in several films by media artist Daniel Jenatsch that were screened at ACCA for the 2018 show ‘The Theatre is Lying’ and ‘A Mysterious Illness’ at Arts House. Sophie was recipient of the Liveworks Experimental Art Award for ‘Woman In Car,’ performed at Testing Grounds for the Melbourne International Fringe Festival 2017, in collaboration with The Hunt performance art collective. In recent years Sophie has continued research and writing in Gender theory, Performativity and Theatricality spanning performance studies, film and music culture and contemporary art. Recent publications include a co-editorial project titled Urban Australia and Post-Punk: Exploring Dogs in Space with writer and music historian Dr. David Nichols, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and has contributed an essay examining gender and feminism in the television series Blossom to a future publication titled A Very Special Episode: Sitcoms that Sometimes Got Serious. Her self-devised performance practice focuses on the tensions that arise through the success and failure of gender roles in society within a hyper-theatrical framework and aesthetic.
Katie Sfetkidis is a Melbourne based artist whose work investigates the construction of power structures in contemporary political life. Taking a feminist lens, her trans–disciplinary practice questions the role of women both inside the art world and more broadly in public life. In 2018, she undertook her most ambitious work to date: The Mayor Project. Part campaign/ part performance, in this piece Sfetkidis ran for Mayor of the City of Melbourne, actively participating in the campaign as a genuine candidate speaking at public forums and meeting voters as well staging her own performative campaign events. She has exhibited works in both solo and group exhibitions at Kings Artists Run Space, Trocadero, Festival of Live Art and Metro! Arts and as part of the Feminist Colour In.
Jordan Wood completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2007 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Secondary Teaching at the University of Melbourne in 2014. Her works have been widely exhibited, including group exhibitions As Long as the Night is Dark at [MARS] Gallery and Wagga Wagga Regional Gallery (2017), Horror Show at Strange Neighbour and Gippsland Art Gallery (2015) and solo exhibitions Twofold at Tinning Street Presents (2019), The Dark Passenger at Gippsland Art Gallery (2016), Flat Space at Rubicon Gallery (2015) and Atrophia at West Space (2012).
Shannon Lyons
Shannon Lyons is an artist and educator currently living and working in Naarm, Mebourne. Her work takes the form of sculptures, site-responsive installations, gestures and interventions that critically examine the sites they are produced and exhibited in.
shannonlyons.net
Nadine Christensen, Ruth Cummins, Rozalind Drummond, Elein Fleiss, Yanni Florence, Anna Jankovic, Shelley Lasica, Travis MacDonald, Jacob Raupach, & Mark Rodda.
Nadine Christensen is an artist and teacher whose practice has painting at its core. She has been an active member of the Melbourne art community since graduating from the VCA in 1998. As well as being involved in artist run exhibitions, curatorial and publishing projects, she has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra and has participated in group shows across Australia and internationally including Tokyo, Los Angeles, Tijuana, Turin (Italy), Paris and Venice. Her work has been featured in survey exhibitions including Australian Painting Today, at Tarra Warra Museum of Art, This and other worlds, an exhibition of drawing practices at the National Gallery of Victoria; New04 at ACCA and This was the future at Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Ruth Cummins is an artist from Wagga Wagga, NSW who currently lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne. Working within the framework of textiles, painting and sculpture Ruth hybridizes objects of utility, sentimentality and the decorative. Ruth’s work uses humour and form to highlight and expose the absurdities of contemporary domestic life.
Rozalind Drummond is an artist based in Melbourne. Her work in photography video and performance explores constructed spaces, natural environments and landscape. Encompassing an abiding interest in spatiality, each body of work produced obliquely refers to spaces of socialization and how groups of people come together and inhabit locations. Since the early 1990s she has practiced as artist, teacher and curator, realizing projects in museums, galleries, contemporary art spaces, artist run initiatives and alternative art schools, both independently and collaboratively. She has exhibited widely both in Australia and internationally.
Yanni Florence is photographer and book designer. He co-founded and designed Pataphysics Magazine in 1989. He has published seven photographic monographs. His first solo exhibition, Tram Windows, was held at ReadingRoom Gallery in 2019 and his work is being included in
the 2020 NGV Triennial.
Elein Fleiss was born in April 1968 in Boulogne-Billancourt (France). Fleiss has been active as a curator, publisher, editor and writer. Since 1992 Fleiss co-founded and published Purple magazine with Olivier Zahm and from 2003, The Purple Journal, Les Cahiers Purple and Les Chroniques Purple.
In 1998 Fleiss began her photographic work. Her photos and essays have appeared in Purple, Big, Ryuko Tsushin, Brutus, Ecocolo, Here and There, Brutus, Ryuko Tsushin, Kurachi No Techo and Home. She recently took part in the exhibition Fashion and Photography since the 90’s at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Japan.
Anna Jankovic is a Melbourne based Architect, Director of SIMULAA and Lecturer Industry Fellow at the School of Architecture & Urban Design at RMIT.
Jacob Raupach is an artist and publisher based in Melbourne. Jacob’s practice exists at the intersections of photographs, artist books, sculpture and installation. Through these mediums he investigates the invisibility of
labour and the relationship between natural and societal environments, and the ways in which art (work) can help to alter and rewrite our perceptions of place and history.
Mark Rodda was born in Tasmania and lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) at the University of Tasmania, Launceston, in 1994 and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at RMIT, Melbourne in 1999. He is a winner of the Glover Prize and his work is included the MONA, Artbank, and Australian Catholic University Collections.
Travis MacDonald is an artist and musician based in Melbourne, Australia. His work falls between abstraction, realistic representation, and sculpture. He creates his paints from hand-ground pigments mixed with various materials to yield a multitude of textures. MacDonald has regularly exhibited in galleries and public institutions throughout Australia. His work was featured in the 2018 Melbourne Art Fair and in 2016, in Painting. More Painting at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.
For more than 30 years, Shelley Lasica has pushed the confines of dance, choreography and performance. Her practice is defined by an enduring interest in the context and situations of presenting choreography.
Nick Smith and Jimmy Nuttall
Nick Smith and Jimmy Nuttall both have individual and collective practices. They have engaged in collaborative residencies at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute and Metcalfe Shire Hall. In 2017 they co-presented an exhibition ’I am crying’ at Firstdraft, Sydney. Jimmy and Nick are both currently undertaking MFA’s at La Haute Ecole d’Art et Design, Geneva and ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles respectively. In 2019 they were both recipients of an Ian Potter Cultural Trust travelling scholarship. For now, they have returned to continue their work and study in Australia during the COVID crisis.
Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist who examines dominant narratives, often relating to international comparative views on colonialism and modernist histories.
Trent Walter
Trent Walter is an artist, printer and publisher based in Melbourne.
Lana Lopesi
Lana Lopesi is a critic, writer and practitioner based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa.
Brigid Hansen
Alana Kushnir
Alana Kushnir is a freelance curator and lawyer currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Guest Work Agency® is an art advisory and law firm for artists, galleries and collectors.
Fresh and Fruity
Fresh and Fruity is a collective based in Aotearoa.
Elizabeth McInnes
Elizabeth McInnes is an Australian curator, writer and artist currently based between Oslo, Norway and Melbourne, Australia. She is the director of Conch a nomadic gallery and platform for experimental publishing and curatorial practice.
Magnus Myrtveit
Magnus Myrtveit is an Oslo based artist working primarily with painting and digital media.
Pamela Arce
Rae Dancziger
Jotting brainwaves of paranoia and calling them art, Rae Dancziger is a curator cum corporate on Collins st.
Jacqui Shelton
Nithya Iyer
Nithya Iyer is a Melbourne-based researcher, writer and performer of South Indian Tamil-descent.
Rowan McNaught
Rowan McNaught is an artist and writer in Melbourne; current PhD candidate at VCA; former editor of West Space Journal.
David Ashley Kerr
David Ashley Kerr is an artist-curator living and working between Helsinki, Finland and Weimar, Germany.
Diego Ramírez
Grace Connors and Jack Caddy
Grace Connors and Jack Caddy are a collaborative duo based in Perth, Western Australia who work predominantly in text and film.
Corinna Berndt
Corinna Berndt is a Melbourne-based artist and current PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Amy May Stuart
Amy May Stuart is a Japanese-Australian artist based in Naarm (Melbourne).
Alice Heyward
Alice Heyward is a dancer and choreographer.
Megan Payne
Megan Payne is a dancer, choreographer and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne).
Clara Murphy
Clara Murphy is an artist living in Melbourne, Australia.
Kirsten Mairead Gill
Kirsten Mairead Gill is an art historian, writer, educator, and curator based in New York.
Julia Murphy
Julia Murphy is a curator and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne).
Rachel Pakula
Rachel Pakula is a Naarm/Melbourne-based Australian writer whose practice focuses on walking, the body and site-specificity in art and literature.
Le Collective
Le Collective is a non for profit exhibition project organised by artists, established in 2018
Benjamin Clay
Clay is an arts worker and writer living on Gadigal land. He is particularly interested in expanded photographic practice and the degree to which its avant-garde is backward glancing. Benjamin’s current research spans Art and critical Queer theory, allowing his writing to draw upon one discipline in the context of the other — a resourceful means to centre their perceived edges.
Hannah Wu
Hannah Wu is a writer and musician based in Melbourne.
Ben Eltham
Dr Ben Eltham is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism. Ben’s primary research interest is the public policy of culture in Australia, particularly at the federal level. Ben also works extensively in the popular media as a journalist and essayist, has covered federal politics for a decade as the National Affairs Correspondent at New Matilda, and is a regular contributor to several Australian journals.
Catherine Ryan
Catherine Ryan is an artist, writer and performer from Melbourne. Catherine works in time-based media including performance, sound, video and installation. She has exhibited at galleries and festivals in Australia and Europe, including Gertrude Contemporary, MUMA, the Royal College of Art (London), the Vienna Biennale and the Melbourne Art Fair.
Guy Louden
Guy Louden is an Australian artist and curator living in Fremantle/ Walyalup and born in Toronto. He has run and founded experimental galleries and curated major exhibitions. Louden’s artwork has been exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and online. guylouden.com
Michael Sandford
Michael Sandford lives and works in Narrm Melbourne. Recent projects and exhibitions include Niche Fetisch #001, 2020; Themselves, Copeland Park, London, 2019 and Meeting Place, George Paton Gallery, 2018. Michael is currently undertaking Fine Art Honours at Monash University having completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and Slade School of Fine Art.
Zara Sully
Zara Sully is a queer-identifying, multi-disciplinary, photography-based artist. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons). Sully’s practice explores the queer experience through a contemporary lens, with a focus on queering the mundane.Recent exhibitions include I Want to Believe (2019) at Trocadero Art Space (with Penny Walker-Keefe) and Mother at Bus Projects (2020). In 2021 Sully will present their first curated exhibition, Yours, Queerly at Sawtooth ARI in mid-2021.
Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse
Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse are researchers and writers from so-called Australia, working across academic and contemporary arts settings through their research project Ecological Gyre Theory. Together, their work has appeared in e-flux, art+Australia, on_Culture and Unlikely Journal, with other publication outcomes currently under peer review. They have presented their work at conferences nationally and internationally, and have forthcoming exhibitions for Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Gallery, Sawtooth ARI and the University of Melbourne.
About
Island Island is an online platform that presents a watersmeet of arts and writing within a discursive digital landscape. In response to an ever expanding ocean of digital content, Island Island aims to foster critical engagement with contemporary visual culture across borders.
Island Island is produced by Bus Projects and Public Office. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Creative Victoria, The Cultural Fund - Copyright Agency, and the Australia Council for the Arts.
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