other showcases a variety of art forms across film, visual media, sound and text from The 5Five collective: Roderick Newbury, Doula, John DeSatge, Fletcher Glover and Tegan Koster with words by Nalisa Neuendorf.
This exhibition aims to honour and explore the diverse reflections of exhibiting artists responding to their notion of other.
A Mixed Grill performance and visual media event will close the exhibition in January, and spotlight the unique curatorial lens that is The 5Five.
other is curated by Nicholas Mills.
ABOUT THE 5FIVE
The 5Five was born out of the ashes of the producer-run artspace, Arthouse, which closed its Bungalow based venue in 2014. Arthouse was led by Creative Producer Nicholas Mills.
The 5Five continued the Arthouse tradition of diverse artform and artist integration, across a range of new music and performance programs, including In/Off Club (new music), Mixed Grill (multi-artform) and Sub-Merge (experimental performance/media).
At its core, The 5Five is a creative producer, physical art-space, cultural programmer and curator. It enables a broad range of artists and groups to elevate their creative practice through hands on support, critical dialogues and physical resourcing.
For the last 3 years, with a dedicated artspace, The 5Five has been nurturing a diversity of arts and performance groups including Djabugay legends The Pad Boys, who just released their debut album after 30years, the Tegan Koster Project, currently developing its ‘Shapes’ project, and First Nation’s comedian/performer Jay Wymarra, who is developing his new one-person show ‘AmaJayus’ for premier in 2024.
The year 2024 will also see The 5Five open its dedicated new gallery/studio ‘By Appointment Artspace’, and the launch of it’s annual performance and visual media program.
LINKS
Welcome to Paradise
Mid-career Australian artist Jamie Cole presents his first solo exhibition in Cairns this October, since moving to the region in early 2022. This collection of 10 large urban pop paintings entitled ‘Welcome to Paradise’ reflects on Cole’s quirky observations, encounters and story-telling of this unique part of far north Queensland.
Cole offers a central narrative that focuses on the precarious and culturally unique elements fundamental to Cairns and the far north region, including local iconography lifted from crazy-ants, stingers and crocodile warning signage; as well as local advertising, popular culture and suburban life.
Cole’s new work reinvents some pop classics, like Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ into Cole’s Soup Cairns, a cheeky homophone; and Warhol’s ‘Bananas’ given new energy by the road-side Banana Carts in and around Cairns.
No stranger to the far north, a much-loved holiday destination, it was with fresh eyes that Cole began to interpret his new ‘home’; and with eagerness absorb ‘warnings’, from earnest and well-meaning locals; warnings like “Crocs are Real” and “Stingers can Kill”. It was these phrases and the overuse of terms like “paradise” and “resort lifestyle” by resident realtors that spring-boarded Cole’s new art-making and the ‘Welcome to Paradise’ project.
As the many layers of Cairns social and political landscape revealed itself to Cole, the depth and complexity of the work also changed. Clearly visible in ‘Welcome to Paradise’ and ‘Stinger can Kill’, initially fun, bold expressions of FNQ, the imagery is now ‘hidden’ behind a ‘whitewash’ of Lichtenstein-style portraits.
Staying true to Cole’s background in graphic design and illustration, this new survey incorporates bold typography, animation, spray painted stencils, and layers of exhaustive painting and imagery, some historic, some new, but all uniquely Jamie.
Words by Bruce Ferguson BA (Fine Arts and English Literature) Sydney University
The Ascended
The Ascended exhibition crystallises Fraser’s exploration of power and class through her anti-colonial and anti-capitalist strategies, developing a theory that links ornamentation, personal protective devices and protest aesthetics as means to subvert and liberate identities. Fraser’s multimedia practice has garnered significant acclaim within Australian contemporary art and reflects the complexity of lived experiences for diasporic Sāmoan and Pasifika communities.
Chantal Fraser: The Ascended is a Griffith University Art Museum touring exhibition, curated by Naomi Evans. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. NorthSite Contemporary Arts is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body. NorthSite Contemporary Arts is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
NorthSite Art Market
The 2023-2024 NorthSite Art Market will showcase a range of jewellery and small objects from Queensland-based artists and designers. Explore these unique objects and purchase a handmade gift from the gallery this season.
Participating Artists: Akiko Hanazaki | Amber Seale | Artiz | Breath & Essence | Bunda Art | Danish Quapoor | Ellis Road Arts | Far North Studio | Flintstone Designs | Garry Jillett | Hannah Murray | Jennifer Valmadre | Julie McEnerny | Kate Hunter | Kim Gunst | Kim Nolan | Service Ceramics | Lois Hayes | Maharlina Gorospe-Lockie | Malki Studio | Muma.Nai | Nicole Elder | Paul Lester | Peter Morrison
PORTAL
PORTAL is a gateway through to the ephemeral world often beyond our sight. Bare witness to the fleeting, fragility of nature. Reimagined to this present space in time.
A carnivorous carnival of natural occurring elements will draw you through to the other side.
ABOUT
Bob Horan and Selena Murray are the collaborative artist duo Immortal Soil, currently based in Northern NSW, Australia. With over 30 years of experience in event production and flower installations, Immortal Soil pursues and creates worlds within worlds, a blend of nature, emotional fantasy, soundscapes, and a retreat from the real world.
Influenced by the mystery and impermanence of nature, they work with naturally occurring, often unappreciated, materials to create dramatic, large-scale, and site-specific botanical sculptures. Their sculptures often mimic the natural world and act as a gateway to connection, enticing viewers to observe what may not otherwise be visible.
Off site: Planetary Gestures
LOCATION: Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Cnr Walker and Robinson streets, Dandenong
Curated by Tess Maunder, Planetary Gestures is an exhibition devised to explore ideas surrounding ecological systems, ancient knowledge, celestial blueprints and tidal movements across the land, sea and sky known as Australasia, part of the wider Asia Pacific and the ‘Great Ocean’.
Cycles of movement and time will be explored by local and international artists in a group exhibition including Amrita Hepi, Susie Losch, Raqs Media Collective, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jimmy John Thaiday and Trevor Yeung.
Together, these artists direct us towards where the sea meets the sun; and dare us to imagine a future deeply respectful for the multiplicity of perspectives derived from the many custodians of the planet.
Planetary Gestures is a NorthSite Contemporary Arts exhibition, curated by Tess Maunder.
Location: Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Cnr Walker and Robinson streets, Dandenong
Opening Hours: Tues-Fri 12pm – 4pm
Exhibition runs from 26 SEPTEMBER 2023 until 3 NOVEMBER 2023
LINKS
Milk Run
Claire Grant worked as a regional flight attendant for over a decade, spending thousands of hours in the sky above the east coast of Australia. Milk Run pays tribute to the spectacular aerial landscape glimpsed out the plane window and invites you to travel along the iconic route – CNS>TSV>MKY>ROK>BNE – all stops!
The phrase ‘milk run’ originated in World War II when combat aircrews used it to describe a mission with little danger, implying similarity to the prosaic rounds of the local milkman. In the airline industry the term is now used to describe a multi-stop, regularly scheduled flight by a single aircraft, often connecting remote or rural areas.
Far North Queensland’s own (in)famous Milk Run spans across a cloud filled sky printed in cyanotype – a historic photographic process commonly known as a blueprint. A light sensitive solution is applied to the delicate washi paper and exposed to the Queensland sunshine, revealing crisscrossed flight paths and navigation waypoints amongst the clouds.
The tilted aerial horizon is intersected by familiar landforms, inlets, and snaking rivers hand painted in a batik inspired wax resist technique. This panoramic scene pays homage to master printmaker Hokusai and his use of the synthetic pigment Prussian Blue, which is also formed during the cyanotype process. Printing on handmade Japanese paper further connects this Queensland landscape to the ukiyo-e tradition.
Future Nostalgia
I am not a noun. I am an ecology.
Future Nostalgia looks at emergent narratives of the future through our relationships to song, dance, craft, food, ecologies, ourselves and each other.
Drawing from evolutionary ecological research and restoration, speculative fiction, surrealism, eco-philosophy and biomimicry, Future Nostalgia works to congeal multiple collaborating participants and networks of knowledge. These include multi-instrumentalist/artist Sue Simpson; evolutionary biologist Dr Katharina Nargar from the Australian Tropical Herbarium; JCU; krump dancer Thv Flood (Maxwell Douglas); resonance artist/harpist Natalia Lagi’itaua Mann; Kuku Yalanji Song Woman/Weaver Merindi Schrieber; harpist Loni Fitzpatrick; the Daintree Rainforest Observatory; the Forum of Sensory Motion; environmental scientist and rainforest seed specialist Michelle Chapman; and wild food researcher and chef Peter Hardwick amongst emerging others.
The future is not shiny. It is gritty and entangled.
Through Haywood’s process-driven ‘everyway’ weaving, she entwines research and immersion, craft thinking and making, film and sound, collaboration and collective tacit knowledge creation.
Cultivating places of care, regeneration and participation.
Part choose your own adventure, part lounge room, part library, part confessional booth and temple of veneration or mourning.
Haywood offers niches of comfort and decay. Through renderings of evolutionary adaptation, DIY maps of survival, embodied and eaten shared knowledge; a cradled space of coalescence is offered to inhabit.
As woven threads of coexistence coil alongside the mycorrhizal fungi midwives of orchid seed germination.
Tied in a single garment of destiny – through implicit ecology, mutualism and alchemy.
Detuning and retuning as a constant unfolding and divergence.
LINKS
- Douglas Rushkoff | I am the jellyfish; I am not the jellyfish
- Art Guide | Charlotte Haywood on joy as an act of resilience
Undara Paintings
Swiss-born, Cairns-based artist Claudine Marzik’s research on Ewamian Country has fostered deep investigation of the ancient lava tubes and cavernous rock formations within Undara Volcanic National Park, located in the centre of lower Cape York, between Cairns and Normanton. The name Undara in local Aboriginal dialects means ‘Long Way’ referencing to a long way from Cairns and the elongated rivers of lava that meandered through the valley over 190,000 years ago.
Marzik’s Undara Paintings, respond to the awe and wonder of this landscape, referencing the voids shaped by volcanic eruption, the pattern, deposition, graffiti and textures, appearing on the ceiling and the walls and speleothem continually accumulating. The layers of the canvas surface reworked and layered like strata.
Marzik has been making and exhibiting work inspired by the unique environment of Far North Queensland for more than three decades. Undara Paintings represents an important exhibition in the artist’s career.
This exhibition has received support from Discovery Holiday Parks Pty Ltd through Undara Experience and Savannah Guides through Manager Russell Boswell. Collins Family through Bram Collins.
LINKS
- Exhibition room brochure
- Ross Searle | Claudine Marzik’s Undara Paintings
- Cairns Local News | Undara Lava tubes on canvas
- Art Guide Australia | Undara Paintings
- Artist Profile | Claudine Marzik’s Undara Paintings
SOVEREIGNTY
In response to the CIAF 2023 theme of “Weaving our stories, claiming our sovereignty” Jamaylya Ballangarry-Kearins invites four female First Nations artists to explore their own perspectives of sovereignty and self-determination – giving thought to the idea that sovereignty is only achievable for colonised indigenous peoples through decolonisation and self-determination.
SOVEREIGNTY is curated by Jamaylya Ballangarry-Kearins