Home → Associated Groups → Wattspace → Exhibition 2.08

20 FEBRUARY - 9 MARCH 2008

SIX SOLO SHOWS

Exhibitions opened by Professor Richard Vella, Chair of Music and Head of School, School of Drama, Fine Art and Music, University of Newcastle, on Thursday 21 February at 6.30pm.

The Loading Dock

This Endless Shoreline
ANTHONY WILLIAMS

painting

This Endless Shoreline is a continuation of Anthony’s Honours exhibition shown at the University of Newcastle gallery in November 2007. Carrying over from that show, this exhibition will include daytime seascapes and landscapes from around Newcastle, keeping the use of a vanishing point to minimum, using instead a vanishing line (the horizon) and relying on size relationships (layering the fore, mid and backgrounds)
and atmosphere to create the illusion of depth.
Also included in this show are boat icon constructions similar to those from past exhibitions.

Underpinning this work is the Conventionalists’ debate that pictures are representational of nature by using shared, arbitrary conventional modes of depiction, and that there is no relationship between natural and pictorial visual information. Anthony Williams

Boat Icon mixed media on canvas; Shoreline 3 oil on canvas; Shoreline (detail) oil on canvas

The Long Room

CREATIO (the intersection of art and science)
DEBORAH BAKER

photography

These works were the result of a creative project between photography students and the science department of the University of Newcastle in which students were asked to photograph anything they liked in relation to biotechnology. This includes reproductive cloning, organic and machine forms, creation and new life. My photographs in this exhibition entitled Creatio, meaning the act of creation, represent my interpretation of modern biotechnology. Deborah Baker

Fluidus (detail) digital photograph; Cord (detail) digital photograph; Indagatio(detail) digital photograph

The Pit

Amoebas Are Sweet
DANIEL SMITH

installation

Amoebas are sweet and at times funny. Art can be humorous too. The plasticity of perspex and enamel make for interesting bedfellows. I have developed somewhat of an obsession with these shapes and they have come to stand for much. The shapes are little paintings and liquid objects. They hang, float, move and communicate. They are friends, enemies and little social networks. Some of them look like steaks or bones. They are life in microscopic form as much as they can stand for death.

They are about art and painting. Daniel Smith

Amoebas are sweet (detail) enamel + perspex; Right brain painting (detail) enamel + perspex; Skull (detail) enamel + perspex

The Locker Room

whatever….whatever…maybe
TARYN RAFFAN

photography, drawings and sculpture

In this body of work the artist explores the discarded nature of society and the relics left behind. Subject matter consists of rubbish, organic matter, recycling tips and people. The work places human personal experience on a parallel with the effects we create. The state of the mind vs the state of the world. The title implies our lack of ability to really reconnect to our natural surroundings because of advancement, therefore our lack of ability to really care. There is still a desire to do what is right, but before we fix the world, do we need to fix ourselves? Taryn Raffan

Untitled 11 digital photograph;Untitled 6 digital photograph;Untitled 10 digital photograph

The Hoist

Reflections – view from above and below
FIONA LAIRD

painting

The landscape is initially an appropriation, a momento of what we have each seen and experienced. My works are inspired by the Australian landscape. They are not based on any particular place but rather an expression of memory and experience. The texture and colour create a world almost foreign yet familiar to each of us. Nature reflected, reflected self, a view from above and below.Fiona Laird

Mirror oil on canvas;Terrestial (detail) oil on canvas; Safeguard oil on canvas

The Media Space

Knit me
ELIZABETH WRIGHT

textiles and yarn

Knit me becomes literal in the sense of the idea, the act and the creation of knitting myself or aspects of myself into tiny creatures: my children. Through exploring the act of konitting (which would seem impossible to some due to my disability) a revelation of expectation and prejudice is overthrown. These knitted creatures belong in the worlds of imagination, where difference and ‘other’ ceases to exist. Elizabeth Wright