02c3talks20152015
ART, FORCES, ACTION
Wed 17 Jun, Arrive 6pm for a 6.30pm start
Venue: c3 Contemporary Art Space, Convent building
Cost: Free

Bodies and objects in space, provide both reference and catalyst for the dynamic forces around us. Join artists in a presentation and discussion around movement mapping, action based work and sculptural intervention. Featuring Helen Grogan, Benjamin Woods, Melanie Irwin, Isadora Vaughan and Hannah Matthews (facilitator).

Helen Grogan is a Melbourne-based artist. As an extension of her experience and research within cross-contextual frames, Grogan also undertakes curatorial and research projects. Her practice encompasses installation, photography/video, sculpture, score and choreography. Grogan is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary. Recent works have been exhibited at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; Melbourne International Arts Festival; National Gallery of Victoria International (Melbourne Now); Liquid Architecture – The Ear is a Brain; Gertrude Contemporary; Slopes; Margaret Lawrence Gallery; West Space; ALASKA PROJECTS (Sydney); and KULTURHUSET (Stockholm). Helen Grogan initially studied Philosophy and Contemporary Dance concurrently at Deakin University then The City University of New York. From 2001-­2005 she continued this research at The School For New Dance Development, Amsterdam School for The Arts.

Benjamin Woods engages with action-based practice across sculptural, spatial and movement processes, touching on, inhabiting and responding to many intensities over time. They are interested in how art practice can be considered an opening, often focusing on the simultaneously indeterminate and particular happenings of materiality, perception, actions/consequences and embodiment. Their practice becomes public through writing, improvisations and actions (generated with sculptural objects, installations, images, sounds). Woods studied sculpture and spatial practice and received an MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne in 2012. For the last 4 years Woods has exhibited nationally and overseas, participated in conferences and research projects, and written for publications.

Melanie Irwin is a Melbourne-based visual artist who explores the ways in which human bodies fit into geometric forms and utilitarian structures. Her work merges sculpture and drawing with performance art. Recent projects have incorporated modified metal objects, oversized balloons and machine-sewn textile membranes. In works that are variously seductive, absurd or comical, the human body’s capacity for elastic adaptability in response to demanding and constrictive circumstances is emphasized and celebrated. Irwin completed her Masters of Fine Art by research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2013. She has exhibited and performed widely since 2006, including solo and group projects in Australia, group exhibitions in Warsaw and Rotterdam and residencies, performances and exhibitions in Berlin and Chengdu. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including ArtStart and New Work grants from the Australia Council, City of Melbourne Arts Project grants and an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant, which supported her participation in the PICTURE BERLIN residency in 2013.

Isadora Vaughan
Working with material in an open, non-determinate way, my practice explores the intensities of matter as sculpture. Entering into conversation with the properties and responding to the behaviors of material gestures, the work plays with what happens when doing and trying confront the forces of gravity, mass, and form. Informed by an intensive studio practice dealing with the physical act of making and doing, I work with basic sculptural principles and materials to effect and enable understandings of the active body through matter.
Recent projects include Slippery Mattering, Westspace; Das Boot (curated by Oscar Perry and Esther Stewart) Next Wave Festival; Soft Eyes, (curated by Pip Wallis) TCB; Buridins Ass, Collaboration with Kieren Seymour, Utopian Slumps, 2013; Interpreting Variable Arrangements, SUPERMARKET, Collaboration with Jessie Bullivant (Stockholm); Common Room, (curated by Isabelle Sully) Rear View; We Are That Within Which We Operate, Kings ARI.

Facilitator: Hannah Mathews is a Melbourne-based curator with a particular interest in contemporary practice. She graduated with a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne in 2002 and has worked in curatorial positions at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2005-07); Monash University Museum of Art (2005); Next Wave Festival (2003-04); The South Project (2003-04); Vizard Foundation Art Collection, the Ian Potter Museum of Art (2002); and the Biennale of Sydney (2000-02). Hannah has curated a number of institutional and independent exhibitions, including Rhys Lee: Capitol Hill Rooting King, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne (2003), Drawn Out: a drawing project, PICA (2005); Winners are Grinners, Artshouse, Melbourne (2006); Old skool (never lose that feeling), PICA (2007); Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2008); Linden1968, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne (2008); Johanna Billing: Tiny Movements, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2009); and NEW11, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Hannah has completed curatorial residencies in New York, Berlin, Tokyo and Venice, and in early 2008 moved to Melbourne to undertake freelance curatorial work, including an ongoing role as an associate curator with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. For ACCA she curated their ART series which included a range of artists’ projects embedded in regional galleries throughout Victoria. Her most recent exhibitions include, Power to the People: Contemporary Conceptualism and the Object in Art which launched the Melbourne International Arts Festival’s Visual Arts Program in 2011 and Action/Response, a two night cross-disciplinary program for Dance Massive 2013. Hannah teaches curatorial studies at RMIT University of Melbourne and sits on the boards of NAVA, Art Monthly Australia and International Art Space.

Above image: Melanie Irwin, Geodesic Envelopes. Performance with textile membrane and found, modified objects. Duration: 2 hours. Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 7 April 2014. Photo: Christian Capurro. Performer: Melanie Irwin.