Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Gordon Bennett: Abstractions, an exhibition of new works that continues Bennett’s interest in challenging conventional representations of Australian cultural identity. Gordon Bennett is internationally acclaimed as one of Australia‘s most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists. He is recognised for his powerful perspectives on the post colonial experience, particularly in the Australian context; with much of his work mapping alternative histories and questioning racial categorisations and stereotypes.
 
Gordon Bennett: Abstractions features a series of superimposed portraits, with the pink-outlined faces of Australian politicians and public figureheads (such as former Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, ALP Minister Peter Garrett and current Governor General of Australia Quentin Bryce) overlaid against raw earth-toned figures. The doubling of the faces obscures each figure but also effectively produces one central image, which is matched with a word relating to the term ‘citizen’, scrolled across the bottom of the canvas. Each term indicates a character or type - for example, ‘commuter’, ‘native’ and ‘city dweller’ – and, while the connection between each political figure and the labels is an intuitive decision on Bennett’s behalf, the conflation of such disparate figures which are distinctly linked to the history of Australia sees Bennett raise issues of nationality, assimilation and ownership.
 
During his career, Gordon Bennett has held over 60 solo exhibitions and achieved national and international recognition for his work, with representation in biennales in Cuba, Kwangju, Shanghai, Sydney and Venice, and in major exhibitions of contemporary art in Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, UK, and USA. He has exhibited with Sutton Gallery since 1993.
 
Significant individual exhibitions include: Outsider / Insider: The Art of Gordon Bennett, AAMU, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2012; Gordon Bennett: A Survey, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2007- 2009; and The Expiation of Guilt, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 2007. Selected group exhibitions include: Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012; Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009; Three Colours: Gordon Bennett and Peter Robinson, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2004; 12th Biennale of Sydney, 2000; 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999; Art-Worlds in Dialogue, Ludwig Museum, Cologne, 1999; in Place(Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1997; TransCulture, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Venice Biennale, 1995; Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Germany, and Hayward Gallery, London, 1993; and Paraculture, Artists’ Space, New York, 1990. Selected awards include: Moët & Chandon Australia Art Fellowship, 1991; MacGeorge Fellowship, University of Melbourne, 1993; Creative Arts Fellow, Australian National University, Canberra, 1996; and John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997.

Hamish Carr raises the concern of social interactions and their relationship with the contemporary environment, visually representing the way we receive and consume information in the current era.
 
Central to the work is a distinct drawing process combined with specific sculptural practice. Carr’s two-dimensional works employ mapping techniques, digitisation and intuitive mark making. This enables the work to capture moments of communication – visually inferring particles and pixels caught in motion. The three-dimensional works operate on a different level, inferring communicative monuments offering points of intersection where the dialogue depicted in the two-dimensional can arrive or disembark.
 
The combination of drawing process and object-based work continues Carr’s investigation into the technocratic and fluid notions of contemporary culture.
 
Hamish Carr was born in Rochester, New York, and currently lives and works in Melbourne. He completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2009. Carr has received a number of highly respected awards and residencies including the Australia Councils ArtStart Grant (2012); Arts Victoria Cultural Exchange Grant (2011); and the Youkobo Artspace Residency, Tokyo, Japan (2011).
 
Carr has held numerous solo exhibitions including A synthetic continuum, BLINDSIDE, Melbourne (2012); Spots of time, Kings ARI, Melbourne (2012); Studio 1: artist in residency exhibition, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, Japan (2011); Study for an Untitled Landscape, John Buckley Gallery, Richmond (2010); and Reoccurring sentiments, Bus Projects Inc (2009). His work has also been selected for prestigious group exhibitions and prizes including the Substation contemporary art prize, The Substation Centre for Art and Culture, Newport, Melbourne (2012); Geelong contemporary art prize, Geelong Gallery, Geelong (2012); Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Ballarat (2012) and Immanent Landscape, Kurumaya Museum of Art, Tochigi, Japan (2011).
Carr’s work has been collected by Artbank, Museum für Gestaltung (Zürich, Switzerland) the Geelong Gallery and Bullseye Glass (USA).
 
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Now in its fourth year, the AMES and Multicultural Arts Victoria Heartlands Refugee Art Prize celebrates the skills, talents and creativity that refugees bring to Australia and the social and cultural contributions they provide to our community.
 
Paintings, drawings, photography and mixed media works by refugee artists who have arrived in Australia since 1970, are now being sought for this year’s prize. Artists are encouraged to consider and share what they would like to see in the world and submit entries that reflect the theme ‘I wish to see…’ A total prize pool of over $20,000 will be shared by three primary prize-winners, a new arrival prize and an artist in residence prize. First prize is $12,000 plus a solo exhibition. Entries close 10 May 2013. Shortlisted entries will be showcased in an exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs.
 
The Heartlands Refugee Art Prize is presented by AMES and Multicultural Arts Victoria in partnership with Parks Victoria, VicHealth and the Victorian Multicultural Commission. The Prize is proudly supported by fortyfivedownstairs, STARTTS, Relationships Australia Victoria, City of Greater Dandenong, Walker Street Gallery, Arts Victoria and the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria.

Minna Gilligan‘s most recent body of work cites the Beach Boy’s song ‘Feel Flows’, from their 1971 album ‘Surf’s Up‘. ’Feel Flows‘ was recorded with a reverse echo, and unlike their other recordings, has a sinister, haunting reverie that lingers long after the last reverb of the line: “White hot glistening shadowy flows”.
 
Gilligan’s large scale paintings, on found bed-sheets and fabric, resonate and resound with similar echos. The work is full with lust, longing, and painterly psychedelia. They are the artist‘s imagined extracts of time, particularly the yellowed, sun-drenched ’60s and ‘70s, spliced together to create new composites. The paintings bear an eerie, almost imperceptible trace of bodies that long ago slept on the very sheets now serving as canvas surface. Through the artist as a medium come psychic re-imaginings of a time-warped past in which universal ’feel‘ can ebb and flow.
 
“Unbending never ending tablets of time
Record all the yearning
Unfearing all appearing message divine
Eases the burning
Whether willing witness waits at my mind
Whether hope dampens memory
Whether wondrous will stands tall at my side
Feel flows (White hot glistening shadowy flows)”
- The Beach Boys, 1971
 
Minna Gilligan (b.1990) works primarily with painting, drawing and collage. Her practice speaks largely of fleeting, personal encounters with the past and present, and manifests in a tumultuous reconciliation of both. Her works are eerie playgrounds of colour, often inhabited by lone protagonists trapped in states of longing, sadness or exhalation.
 
Gilligan has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at West Space and Dudspace and group exhibitions at Ontario College of Art and Design, Canada; Space 15 Twenty, Los Angeles, PICA, Perth; Papermill ARI, Sydney; Rearview ARI, Knight Street Art Space, George Paton Gallery and Gilligan Grant Gallery, Melbourne. Feel Flows at Daine Singer will be her first solo commercial exhibition.
 
She also maintains an illustration practice that begun upon being appointed as an artist for New York-based online magazine ROOKIE [www.rookiemag.com] in 2011 which reached a million hits in the first week the site went live. Since then she has worked for many American clients such as clothing companies Urban Outfitters and Nasty Gal. In 2011 she became a member of artist collective ’The Ardorous‘ [www.theardorous.com], curated by Canadian photographer Petra Collins. Recently she formed a band ’Pamela' with Melbourne-based artists Jon Campbell and Georgina Glanville, performed at the National Gallery of Victoria and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA
Caulfield campus, Melbourne, Australia
Curator: Geraldine Barlow
 
Artists: Laylah Ali, Hany Armanious, Natalie Bookchin, A Centre for Everything, DAMP, Destiny Deacon, Alicia Frankovich, Will French, Gail Hastings, Alex Martinis Roe, Andrew McQualter, John Miller, Alex Monteith, Raquel Ormella, Mike Parr, Simon Perry, Carl Scrase, Milica Tomic, Kostis Velonis, Jemima Wyman
 
Direct Democracy explores the changing nature of our engagement with the democratic tradition and looks to the emergence of new democratic models. The exhibition reflects contemporary social movements, unrest and the desire for change; modelling key social dynamics and possible futures. In Direct Democracy destruction and resistance are connected with the need to collaborate and rebuild. Recent political shifts such as the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis and movements such as Occupy are considered in relation to earlier struggles for autonomy and self-definition, as well as the interplay of constructive and corrosive dynamics in leadership and governance. The exhibition examines the shifting forms of political agency, in both emerging and foundational democracies.
 
Direct Democracy continues MUMA’s ongoing series of thematic and discursive exhibitions, such as Networks (Cells & Silos) and Liquid Archive. Curated by MUMA’s Senior Curator Geraldine Barlow, Direct Democracy features the work of a number of international artists together with artists and artist collectives from Australia.
 
For further information: www.monash.edu.au/muma/

For three months fortyfivedownstairs will be hosting Greg Ades as its artist in residence. Positioned in a studio space at the back of the large gallery Greg will be working in the space on material for his upcoming exhibition from 16-27 July.
 
“Usually you work isolated in the studio with a rough plan of the final show, but when you put it up and look at it there arises new possibilities in the work. In a sense thoughts go through you regarding what could have been, however working next to the space I think will produce that otherwise might not happen ordinarily until the show is over,” says Greg.
 
Greg currently teaches at Latrobe College of Art and Design and is involved with Port Melbourne Primary School as a teacher’s aid. Greg also works closely with, and was the Director of, Artists for Kids Culture; an organisation that seeks to provide arts and cultural opportunities to kids experiencing disadvantage in their lives due to factors including poverty, health or social issues or cultural dislocation.
 
Artist talks, discussions and studio visits available by prior arrangement via contact with our Gallery Manager.

Gallery hours don’t fit your lifestyle schedules? fortyfivedownstairs has a solution!
 
Get your culture fix and expand your social life at our Friday night extended hours.
 
a) Unwind after a busy week.
 
b) Enjoy a drink from the bar.
 
c) Ponder thought provoking exhibitions.
 
d) Descend one level further and take in a show.
 
e) Partake in all of the above!