SCOPE Galleries Art Award: Art Concerning Environment

Curated by Liza McCosh, a major exhibition of pre-selected artwork that includes painting, drawing and sculpture. The exhibition included fifty five preselected artists/artworks from across Australia.The Art Concerning Environment Award is a national biennial award and the exhibition attempts to provide a platform that facilitates debate and promotes art as a catalyst for change.  The exhibition was supported by a public lecture on Climate Change (June 2, Warrnambool Art gallery) and facilitated by Guy Abrahams (guest judge).

See:  
www.scopegalleries.com
www.warrnambool.vic.gov.au/index.php?q=node/1266
Ziegeler, Bonnie, "Artworks with a green hue vie for %5000 award in Warrnambool", The Standard, June 3, 2012.

Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum : history and collections

A publication of works from the permanent collection and a history to mark the centenary of the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum. The photographs have been produced using superimposed exposures of polarised and non-polarised light; a technique for the optical and digital enhancement of colour saturation, reflection reduction and surface effects in reprography of painting developed by James McArdle.

Indelicacies

This work combines the forms of photography, creative writing and wire sculpture, and explores the collisions of personal and public psychic interactions with the practices of logging of native forests in Victoria. It uses processes of creative research. Displayed at Gallery One-Three, Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, as part of the Love Forests Exhibition presented by The Wilderness Society, Sep 1-7, 2013.

Knowledge making by pre-service teachers on a professional placement experience in a remote Australian indigenous community

This paper reports on the preliminary investigations of an emerging program of research in which the authors are engaged. The program aims to generate new understandings for effective teacher education drawing on data from non-Indigenous pre-service teachers who undertook a teaching placement in remote Indigenous schools in Australia. The overall goals of this research gather around the notion of ‘building belonging’. The initial stage of this project sought to enable pre-service teachers to increase their awareness of the places and institutional practices operating within and between remote Indigenous communities and themselves. The twelve participants were interviewed while on three-week placements around Katherine and in Maningrida in the Northern Territory, Australia, during 2012. The paper elaborates various ways in which the remote placement experience began to challenge, positively disrupt, question and even (re) shape their professional learning and identities. Existing literature reporting on the experiences of largely white, middle class pre-service teachers in unfamiliar cultural contexts draws attention to themes of disruption, and the potential for meaningful and transformative professional learning experiences in such contexts (eg Gannon, 2010; Marble, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Ryan & Healy, 2009). Drawing on some of these insights from the literature, our preliminary reading of the data reveal the variety of ways and differing extents to which participants experienced disruptive, or potentially transformative professional learning moments during the placement. We conclude the paper by pointing towards some key areas for further investigation, in order to progress our research program around building belonging between pre-service teachers and remote Indigenous communities.

Microscopic / telescopic (universes unfold)

This exhibition was inspired by lens based observation; what is observed through the microscope – plankton and single cell organisms – finds its origin in what is observed through the telescope – stars and galaxies. The project explores two spatially divergent contexts. Artist, Melinda Capp explores the micro-scopic with porcelain objects, artist books and images derived microscopes and Daniel Armstrong references the macro-scopic with video, photography, lens based objects and installation of interactive sculpture / optical instruments to create an experiential connection between celestial phenomena/images and the viewer.

Digital light

Artists Description: Moving rooms and domestic objects pass through the interior of the translucent house as we peer into it. At night they softly emanate a glow much like the glow of a television in the living room. The animated space is choreographed and timed in its movement, broadcasting the contents of the house. There is an interplay between real object and virtual object: the house is made of transparent/translucent glass while the interior objects are virtual images on the screen; total internal reflection occurs so that the image can be seen from certain angles only; the glass is a medium which distorts the animated image, while the animated image permeates the glass with its colour, movement and glow.

Leaf light

A leaf captures light energy and transforms it through the process of photosynthesis. This glass leaf-like form also, in a sense, captures light and transforms it as it bends and refracts the rays, containing it in the deep dimensional reservoirs of the piece.

Circular breathing

Circular Breathing links animated architectural buildings found at Pilchuck Glass School with a glass sculptural house, enabling the glass form to appear to breath through animation.

When William Wallace was a unionist

  James Russell Thompson was a successful businessman from Airdrie in Scotland. He arrived in the Victorian gold-mining town of Ballarat in 1853, having previously struck gold on the Ovens goldfields. Deafness caused by his earlier career in mining prevented Thompson from becoming involved in public life in Ballarat but, dying a wealthy man in May 1886, he was able to leave significant bequests to relatives and requested that his remaining estate be put towards the purchase of statues for Ballarat's sprawling botanic gardens. A fellow Scot, Thomas Stoddart, was executor of Thompson's estate, and was able to procure for the gardens numerous monuments and statues made of Italian Carrara marble. The most notable of Stoddart's procurements was the statue of the Scottish hero William Wallace. The Ballarat Star noted that "the statue of Wallace was decided on as a compliment to Mr Thompson's love for the country he came from-an effigy of the greatest character ... in Scottish history or legend". The statue of Wallace in Ballarat's botanic gardens was unveiled and bequeathed to the city on May 24, 1889. It is one of very few outside Scotland.

Neil Taylor’s experimental animation

This paper explores from a phenomenological perspective the work of Australian Experimental Animator Neil Taylor (1945-), works situated between animation, performance and sculpture. Taylor’s animated scribbling repetitively and automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks or note pads (Short Lives (1980-90)) and cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990 and Copy Copy 1998) often enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ designed to facilitate and shape this idiosyncratic activity. Taylor’s work is informed by his successful wire-based sculptural practice and his 20 years experience of teaching animation to tertiary students and 8 years previously in the Australian Technical School system (a system that has since been dismantled but for which these animations remain as an aesthetic trace). His work can be generally situated inside an avant-garde project ‘that continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film.’ (John Hanhardt, 1976: 44) This is performative research into the minutiae of the moving image and its ability to register body gesture. Hanhardt, John G. (1976) The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film. A History of American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York, American federation of the Arts.

Magnetic liquid marbles : Toward “Lab in a Droplet“

Liquid marbles exhibit great potential for use as miniature labs for small-scale laboratory operations, such as experiment and measurement. While important progress has been made recently in exploring their applications as microreactions, “on-line“ measurement of the components inside the liquid still remains a challenge. Herein, it is demonstrated that “on-line“ detection can be realized on magnetic liquid marbles by taking advantage of their unique magnetic opening feature. By partially opening the particle shell, electrochemical measurement is carried out with a miniaturized three-electrode probe and the application of this technique for quantitative measurement of dopamine is demonstrated. Fully opened magnetic liquid marble makes it feasible to detect the optical absorbance of the liquid in a transmission mode. With this optical method, a glucose assay is demonstrated. Moreover, when magnetic particle shell contains low melting point material, e.g., wax, the liquid marble shows a unique encapsulation ability to form a rigid shell after heating, which facilitates the storage of the non-volatile ingredients. These unique features, together with the versatile use as microreactors, enable magnetic liquid marbles to function as a miniature lab (or called “lab in a droplet“), which may find applications in clinical diagnostics, biotechnology, chemical synthesis, and analytical chemistry.

Outlaw-in

For the 2014 McClelland Gallery Sculpture Survey and Award Bozo ink created a scaled down model of The McClelland Gallery. Crash-landed in the Australian bush, the gallery’s belly is exposed, and into it the viewer can poke their head. Continuing our investigation into space, identity and Australian art history we look to the viewer to become panoptic in their view of the gallery and its surrounds, and at the same time the subject under surveillance. We encourage the viewer to cross the threshold from subject to object – to break the sanctity of the object/gallery. Like most of our works the invitations are many, we layer real-time experience with fictional narratives, illusions and copies. As much as we question the integrity of space we ask the viewer to consider their complicity in the history and occupation of it.

Listening in

Two neighbouring glass houses, with large ears protruding from their structures, sit quietly. They seem to be listening carefully. Are these sentient forms? They are each broadcasting animations from within – revealing their contents and their inner selves, and blurring the division between personal and public space.