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july 31 - august 18

scope³

by Richard Harding

To scope³ is, “to look at or examine something”. Richard Harding’s installation incorporates mirrors, text and traditional printmaking techniques to establish a dialogue between common codes and symbols. Harding constructs an internal space that mimics the disquiet beyond the gallery walls.

The codes used in scope³ are built from the vocabulary of binary. On. Off. Yes. No. 1. 0. The text uses word associations and double entendre to construct narratives from newspaper headlines. The symbols are presented like a visual charade to be decoded and recoded.

The work fractures the viewer while incorporating them into the work. To negotiate the gallery the viewer must pass through the space, decoding the installation. Scope³ asks questions of how we view ourselves, others and the scanable environment.

Richard Harding is a lecturer at RMIT University, School of Art. He has exhibited extensively in Melbourne.

looking back at some dead world that looks so new

by Lucy Dyson

Lucy Dyson's worlds are both dead and alive. Pulsing with vibrant patterns, and saturated in the technicolor of yore, Dyson offers realms rich with movement, life and a compelling dark force. Each image presents an uncanny tableaux: coiffed pushbutton phone androids follow a tin-man robot and his Toto down a psychedelic brick road; bees and dandelion seeds are drawn through space, pulled into the hypnotic vortex of bakelite telephone dials circling the earth.

Telephones feature heavily in Dyson’s new work, and the instruments are given a broadway musical treatment - choreographed into swirling blooms, like precision synchronized swimmers. These dancing phones hark back to the excitement and promise of early technology, but are remodeled to imply the tone of a death knell. The result is a surreal tension between a nostalgic celebration of the past and an ominous prediction of the future. These bells toll a warning – that the ever increasing desire for newer, faster and better technology will come at a price. As we continue to mine the earth for minerals and oil to keep pistons churning, TVs dancing and the capitalist economy show rolling on, the buzz of the humble honey bee is being drowned out by polyphonic ring tones.

Lucy Dyson is a Melbourne based artist and animation director. Deft with a surgical blade, and an avid collector of vintage anatomy and animal kingdom books, Lucy’s work often explores the dark and mysterious with a wry and humorous twist. Since graduating with Honours from RMIT Media Arts in 2005, Lucy has honed her knife skills with regular exhibitions and animation work.  Recent animations projects include music videos for Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males, Gotye, Bird Blobs, TZU, The Stardust Five, and an award winning music video for Sarah Blasko.

more images

Unform

by Jude Bodiam, Pamela Graham, Robert Mangion, Merike Redenbach and Ravina Vertigan

ARTLABPROJECT 2 UNFORM is the second in a series of annual exhibitions which present the work of 5 contemporary artists. ARTLABPROJECT provides a forum for new curatorial and artistic practise and promotes opportunities for emerging artists to present new work within a critical and supportive context. 

The multi media works in UNFORM explore the energetic character of 21^st century travel with its mingling of transitory impressions, mental maps and streams of consciousness leading to feelings of freedom.  All the artists in UNFORM derive their images from wide ranging travels in and out of the urban space and landscape. The works reflect the sensory response to the notion of the journey. Each artist reproduces the spaces they visit in the form of topographical recollections in response to an abstract experience.

The open question of how one makes ones art in relation to a set of experiences, sensations and responses is at the core of each artists practise in UNFORM. The diversity of outcomes range from video works and drawing through to painting and text.

Robert Mangion is the curator of the ARTLABPROJECT and is a committee member and coordinator of Kings Artist Run Initiative. He has been exhibiting in solo and group shows in Australia and overseas since graduating with honours from RMIT in 1988. Robert developed and is currently running the Artways project at the Footscray Community Arts Centre and is lecturing in cultural theory and cross art practise at Victoria University.

Robert Mangion

Merike Redenbach