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.

White Parachute is a body of work by Lisa Sewards, capturing a childhood memory of her mother’s experience in wartime Russia. It reveals the human impulse to create order and beauty in the face of displacement and the chaos of war.
 
As a young child Lisa’s mother lived in a displaced persons camp in Northern Germany and recalls the time when she and her own mother found an abandoned white silk parachute in the neighbouring woods. From this parachute they made clothing and little white silk ribbons for her mother’s hair; her symbols of comfort and hope.
 
This beautiful story will be told through works on paper, paintings and an installation of a rare WWII white silk parachute canopy which breathes soul and history into this exhibition.
 
Exhibition to be opened by Sarah Tomasetti, Arts Educator, on Tuesday July 2 from 5-7pm.
 
Artist talk & Russian High Tea will be held on Saturday July 13, 2pm.

Narelle’s exhibition Living China, provided solitude and escapism to its creator, as she documented a concatenation of memories of East meets West and her physical and spiritual displacement of residing in an Asian destination. The autobiographical photographic self-portraits are personalized narratives and the content indulges in dualities of triumphs and tribulations.
 
Narelle made the transition from remote Far North Queensland to Hong Kong, dislocating her from the securities of her birth place Melbourne, Australia and immersed her in the rich diversity of Hong Kong Chinese cultures and traditions. The displacement rendered her both physically and spiritually into a state of isolation, insecurity, vulnerability and alertness as she adhered desperately to her Australian Heritage. However, after time Narelle grew personal tolerance and acceptance as she acknowledged and adapted to her innovation existence in Hong Kong.

Peter Davidson is an internationally renowned architect, best known for designing Melbourne’s Federation Square as co-director of LAB architecture studio. He has also had a distinguished career teaching and lecturing worldwide and has designed buildings across the world, with major projects in the UK and China.
 
Davidson‘s 2013 exhibition at Daine Singer will include a suite of new drawings alongside a display of his poetry and personal art and architecture sketchbooks from the last 30 years. The exhibition provides a rare insight into the creative process of an important figure in Australia’s cultural landscape.
 
Davidson graduated in 1980 from the NSW Institute of Technology in Sydney (now UTS), after which he moved to London and ran his own practice while simultaneously teaching at various institutions. Davidson has taught and lectured internationally including at the AA, London; Bartlett School of Architecture, London; as Adjunct Professor at UTS in Sydney; Visiting Professor at Cooper Union, New York and MIT, Boston. In 1994 Peter Davidson co-founded LAB architecture studio and won the competition to design Federation Square in 1997, at which time he moved from London to Melbourne.
 
After suffering a major stroke in 2010, Davidson stopped practicing as an architect and devoted himself full time to his artistic practice. Davidson’s drawings are meticulous and intricate, tracing a multitude of patterns and forms through the strict constraint of black lines on paper, his recent drawings take his relentless desire to explore the line in architecture to a different dimension of artistic expression. Recent exhibitions of his work include A Fine Line, Daine Singer (2012) and Draw the Line, National Gallery of Victoria (2009).

For his first exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs, Stephen Williams continues his exploration of the tree’s role in contemporary art. In a series of multi-panel paintings, trees float in a shifting white space. Evocation and mystery have taken precedence over traditional depiction of landscape elements such as ground and sky.
 
Stephen’s paintings reference Japanese screens while exploring minimalist responses to flatness and space, form and restrained use of colour. Linkages to abstraction, monochromes, eastern and western artistic traditions are apparent.
 
These works also explore the symbolic potency and responsive properties of white. Stephen says, in The Sum of All Things, “for me white is an embracing unifying concept linking the masculine and the feminine, energy and stillness, the physical and the metaphysical.”

Simon Starling | In Speculum
Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA
Commissioning curator: Max Delany
 
Marked by epic, journeys and explorative narratives, Simon Starling's work investigates the social, cultural and material implications of object-making. His ongoing excavation and transformation of the material world takes the form of associational assemblages that incorporate film, photography and sculptural forms, revealing rich, unexpected and complex histories.
 
The first career survey of the Turner Prize-winning artist’s work in Australasia, Simon Starling: In Speculum, brings together a major new commission and key works from the artists’ oeuvre that focus particularly on the site of the studio and workshop, and the relationships between art, technology, history and modernity. This aspect of Starling’s research-based practice reflects the form and
process of manufacture in both structure and concept.
 
“I have been very preoccupied with the ‘stuff’ of sculpture and indeed photography, in trying to strip things back to their very fundamentals, to go to source or to interrogate materials on a microscopic level as well. As we all grow more and more distant
from the means of production, I’ve felt the need to get closer and closer.”
– Simon Starling (Mousse magazine, no.13, 2008)