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october 22 - november 8, 2008
by Heather Jessup and Nikky Morgan-Smith
Recent work by emerging artist Nikky Morgan-Smith is both playful and provocative. Her work explores displacement, disassociation and disconnection with the environment and the self. Through images of abandoned tricycles, ghostly birds, rain and bathtubs she tinkers with our own childhood memories of grief and/or loneliness.
Her use of layered mixed media is complex and thorough and the paint is applied thickly and gesturely. Morgan-Smith’s work is riddled with a touching visual poetry.
Heather Jessup has used collage as a device to reconstruct a landscape and the idea of home.
A consideration of place and travel inspires these mixed media works and each picture invites the viewer to imagine their own story or narrative.
Jessup works with the notion of a landscape being scarred by layers of multiple memories of homes and lives lived. Her collages have a visual poetry of their own.
Heather Jessup grew up in Northern NSW, and is a graduate of the visual arts program at Southern Cross University.
by Kim Mcdonald
Kim McDonald explores the subject of skin. Her interest lies in the study of how skin receives outside information and the effect this has on visual perception.
McDonald’s methodology involves building up skin surfaces using printmaking and drawing processes.
Some of the inspiration for this work has come from her reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s writing on ‘How Do You Build a Body Without Organs?’ Why not, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly’.
It is liberating to question and rethink the body. The body becomes then, a new encounter; it’s remaking, an adventure.
Kim McDonald is currently undertaking a Masters of Visual Art at Monash University. This is her second exhibition at red gallery.
Hatches, matches and despatches
by Robin Astley
Venture into a dreamworld where bodies float and flutter….
Painting with passion and purity, Astley explores the cyclic facility of the human condition and the ceremonial rites of births, marriages and deaths.
Dwelling somewhere between reality, illusion and suggestion, Astley’s imagery explores life’s unforeseen capacity for unbridled joy but also fathomless misery.
opening night drinks
thursday october 23
5 - 7 pm
exhibition duration: october 22 - november 8, 2008