ONLINE PROJECT SPACES AND NEW MEDIATIONS
Wed 24 Jun, Arrive 6pm for a 6.30pm start
Venue: c3 Contemporary Art Space, Convent building
Cost: Free
Exploring the interplay of physical and virtual, this program looks at online project spaces as platforms to connect the art world and global audiences and uncovers how our experience of art is mediated by new technologies. Featuring Jackson Eaton, Benji Bradley, Steaphan Paton and Tara McDowell (facilitator).
Jackson Lawlor Eaton is a white, heterosexual, mid-30s, middle-class, cis-male artist currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Originally trained in Psychology, he is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Art degree at Monash University. Eaton’s work questions ideas of selfhood, intimacy, amateurism, networked technology, privacy, photography and masculinity. His recent project Better Half was featured in Primavera 2013 at the MCA, collected by the Art Gallery of WA, and published by Pearce Press. He is the co-founder of siteless art initiative http://some.center
Benji Bradley is an emerging Artist from New Zealand, currently completing an MFA at Monash University. He has exhibited at a number of major institutions in New Zealand and is now building a presence in Australia. He is the co-director of some.center/, an experimental stateless art space, and is currently completing a major research project that looks into global nomad culture and the politics of mobility. As part of this project he will be travelling for the next 12 months through Australia, into Asia and up to Europe visiting sites, meeting people and collecting an array of experiences and artifacts.
some.center is an initiative by Melbourne based artists Benji Bradley and Jackson Eaton that aims to provide an alternative model for framing art actions. some.center is the URL address of a website that acts as a central node, connecting audiences to a series of curated projects that will take place in public or private spaces around Melbourne city and beyond. These projects are developed or adapted specifically for some.center and suit artists who benefit from the expanded presentation contexts offered by the some.center model.
Steaphan Paton is a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist, descendant of the Gunai and Monero peoples, who grew up in Gippsland, Victoria. His works explore the physical and industrial conflicts between cultures, and specifically Indigenous cultures in colonised states. Influenced by his home country, ‘Gippsland’, Paton uses painting, sculpture, installation and video to tell stories that have universality and force us to reflect using technology, humour or by breaking traditional methods. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Melbourne Museum, Brooklyn Art Library and the Wellington Shire Council.
Paton is the founder and director of N/A Space, an artist run space in Brunswick East which aims to foster the careers of young emerging to early career artists. Paton is represented by Anna Pappas Gallery.
Facilitator: Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is Editor-at-Large of The Exhibitionist, a journal on curatorial practice and exhibition making for which she served as Founding Senior Editor, now published and distributed by The MIT Press. She has held curatorial appointments at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, where she mounted over two dozen group and solo exhibitions. In addition to her contemporary curatorial work, McDowell has organized group shows on Minimalism, Fluxus, assemblage, and avant-garde cinema, and worked on retrospectives of Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter, and Richard Tuttle. She publishes and lectures frequently, and writes criticism for art-agenda and artforum.com. McDowell holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include exhibition histories, contemporary curating, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, alternative archives and forms of documentation, and historical and contemporary models of experimental arts education.
Above image: Steaphan Paton, My Bullock