Emerging artists converge in October

Even in a cultural hotspot like the inner west, it’s rare to see four top artists brought together in a single exhibition. But that’s precisely what the Artereal Gallery has managed, with its upcoming exhibition, +/- (Positive/Negative).

It brings together a quartet of Australia’s most promising emerging artists, whose work engages and toys with ideas of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ place, as well as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ space. And, with such a broad ambit, the collection of works is predictably diverse.

The award-winning artists share the characteristic of being ‘shape-shifters’ – using shape and form to draw the viewer in. A compelling example is provided by Vilma Bader, who uses the shaped formats of board games to underpin her assemblages. Bader’s works represent a fusion of painting and sculpture – gridded, geometric objects made of sawn and painted wood segments.

Bader, who is currently completing a doctorate at Rozelle’s Sydney College of the Arts, said the repetitiveness in her classification themes reflects precision, but remains abstract enough for project meanings. “I make use of archives and inventories as frameworks, and points of departure, to activate the gallery into a site for further exploration and interpretation process,” she said. Underpinning the work at its heart is a philosophy of ‘art as play’.

Playfulness is also integral to the work of ACT artist Greg Hodge, whose interpretation of the exhibition’s theme came through investigating the junction between abstract painting and representational image. The surfaces of Hodge’s paintings are constructed out of transparent and opaque layers, with traces of the work’s history often revealing themselves around the edges. An interest in light and surface stemmed from his continuing interest in the use of atmospheric rendering within the Western landscape tradition.

“I think the element of the representational image is pretty new [in my work], one that I’ve been developing over the past 18 months,” Hodge said. “Prior to that it was much more formal, more associated with ‘painting’, which has its limits to an extent – I’m still very much interested in light, space and surfacing, which maybe helps makes the paintings much more light-hearted.”

‘Light-hearted’ is a description which could likewise be applied to the paintings of Victorian artist Kevin Chin, which seek to remake and integrate his histories and that of others. In his Little pieces series, images and fragments drawn from photographs of sites and incidents from personal travels are removed from their everyday context, and juxtaposed against the spatial backdrop of individual canvases. The effect, Chin says, is designed to reference a childhood sensibility. “The images of foxes and rabbits, the kind of thing you might find in a children’s storybook, are about drawing back to a safe place you might imagine from your childhood – and yet, at the same time, defy narrative and conventional spatial propositions.” Chin explores the workings of memory in his installation, citing the slightly artificial brightness of his paintings as contrasting the vivacity of actual memories against the ‘blank canvas’ of forgotten experiences.

Finally, for fellow Victorian artist Chloe Vallance, the focus is on levels of visibility and invisibility – works that, like Chin’s, are developed in response to the experience of travel, and as a way to document the significance of fleeting, passed or potential moments and memory.

‘Positive/Negative’ runs from October 6 to 30 at the Artereal Gallery, 747 Darling Street, Rozelle. The gallery is open from Wednesdays until Saturdays, 11am to 5pm