"Sensorium" in Melbourne

I am one of the artists in the Sensorium exhibition, to be held at Red Gallery in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The exhibition engages the senses of sight, hearing, touch and smell, the last through a performance work Potion - Dining with the Scent of Sins by Roundangle (booking needed for these performances). My contribution is my interactive work Cloud Drum. The exhibition is curated by Anna Briers, who is devising a special "Sensorium" cocktail for the opening.

The exhibition is also part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2013.

Opening: Wednesday 25th September, 6.30pm - 8.30pm

Exhibition dates: 25th September - 12th October 2013
"Potion" performances: 26-29 September, bookings through Melbourne Fringe

Red Gallery: 157 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy (opposite Edinburgh Gardens)
Tel: (03) 9482 3550
Web: http://redgallery.com.au/
Hours: Wed - Sat 11am - 5pm

The Flanagan Art Prize Exhibition in Ballarat

I have a work, Ghosts of the Anthropocene, in the Flanagan Art Prize Exhibition held at St Patrick's College, Ballarat.

Exhibition dates: Sat August 24 and Sun August 25, and Sat August 31 and Sun September 1, 11am - 4pm on these days.
Location: St Patricks College, 1451 Sturt Street, Ballarat. The exhibition is in the OCA Pavilion, to the rear of the main buildings.

Globelight Festival, Melbourne

I am one of the artists in the newly-minted GlobeLight '13 event, to be held at Anita Traverso Gallery in Richmond and at the Abbostford Convent. It includes light-based sculpture, installation, design objects and video art, curated by James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin. My work will be in Anita Traverso Gallery but I will be in the opening event at the Convent as well.


Opening (Anita Traverso Gallery): Friday 2nd August, 6-8 pm
Artist talks (Anita Traverso): Saturday 3rd August, 2.30 pm
Opening (Abbotsford Convent): Saturday 3rd August, 6-9 pm


Anita Traverso Gallery: 7 Albert Street Richmond VIC 3121, Australia
Tel: (03) 9428 7557
Web: http://www.anitatraversogallery.com.au/
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–5.
Exhibition dates: 30th July to 24th August 2013.

Abbotsford Convent: 1 St Heliers St Abbotsford VIC 3067, Australia
Precise exhibition locations to be advised.
Tel: (03) 9415 3600
Web: http://www.abbotsfordconvent.com.au
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–5.
Exhibition dates: 3rd August to 25th August 2013.


GlobeLight website: http://globelight.com.au/.

International Symposium on Electronic Art - Part 2 of 2

The ISEA  conference had more than 50 paper sessions and panel sessions, organised in five parallel streams, so I could only attend a small fraction.  It was noticeable that there were relatively few sessions purely on technological gee-whizzery as such; the emphasis was much more on the artistic and social uses of the technology and the broader implications for society and culture.  The word "post-digital" occurred, but there is nothing "post" about it: all this means is that the technology has grown up and permeated everything, so that we no longer particularly focus on it: we are all digital natives now.

Some snippets.  Christiane Paul, a curator from the Whitney Museum in New York, talked about a movement called "The New Aesthetics", inspired by the "eruption of the digital into the physical" and the idea of "seeing like digital devices".  I'm not sure how new it is: Troy Innocent in Australia has been working along these lines for a long time, but British designers have apparently recently caught onto it.  There were other sessions on aesthetics, on the supposed divide between new media art and mainstream contemporary art, on the place of interactive artworks now that the hype has died down.

Stuart Bunt, a Professor of Anatomy from Western Australia, gave a talk on "Unintelligent Design", intended to counter the way that designers talk about the wonders of design in nature.  A prime exhibit here is the human eye: there is a layer of nerve cells in front of the retina, getting in the way of incoming light, and then a whopping great hole in the retina where the nerve fibres join into the optic nerve on the way to the brain.  The sensible arrangement would be the retina in front and the nerve cells behind, which is the layout in the eye of the squid.  Stuart has been involved with the SymbioticA group in Western Australia, who use tissue cultures and the like for artistic projects, and there were a number of talks about what is now called bio-art.  One was by Tash Bates, who told us that of the 100 trillion cells in and around the human body, only 10% are actually human: the other 90% are microscopic organisms that form our "micro-biome".  Although numerous, they only form a small fraction of our body weight.  One such organism is the yeast Candida albicans, which has both good and bad effects on the human body; Tash's project involved cultivating quantities of it.

Another striking bio-art piece was by Adam Brown, who used micro-organisms (extremophilic bacteria) to produce metallic gold from gold chloride.  He then made a sort of illuminated manuscript by taking scanning electron micrographs of the bacterial films, and applying gold leaf made from the microbial gold to those areas in the micrographs that showed the bacteria depositing gold.

There were other sessions by artists using science or reacting to it.  Chris Henschke (Monash) described the artworks that came out of his residency at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. There was an exhibition of the work in a gallery in Sydney, and I was able to see it.  Deborah Lawler-Dormer (New Zealand) described what sounds like a very ambitious project in Auckland making a computational model of the brain and the face, including things like the action of dopamine in the brain.  One of the people involved is a high-profile computer animator, and an output will be a 3D model of the face that shows emotions.   Deborah is looking at this from the point of view of a curator of new media interested in how this scientific research will inform people working across art and science.

There were also sessions on the history of electronic art, and on preservation, exhibition and curation of electronic artworks.  There was a discussion of how the pervasiveness of digital media is affecting the traditional museum.  Keir Winesmith (at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, but about to take up a post in the U.S.A) described a catalogue the MCA produced.  It was in the form of an app, in three versions.  The first version was prepared in advance, like a traditional catalogue.  The second version was made after installation, and included the (elaborate) installation procedure.  The final version was made after the show closed and contained audience interviews (some quite critical) and other material.  The app was free during the show, and after it ended they charged $3 to download it, as opposed to say $50 for a traditional catalogue.  The MCA has also done things like projecting inside the gallery photographs people took during a visit the the MCA and subsequently posted on the Internet.

Preservation is an enormous problem, though Steven Jones (who was part of the band Severed Heads) has been doing a large project on recovering Australian video art, and thought that with care and attention the preservation problem could be dealt with; nobody else seemed to agree.  I have certainly lost a performance work: I no longer have either the hardware or the software.  At the festival I attended at Osnabrück in April the artist Igor Štromajer described a ritual he was making, of deleting 37 pieces of Internet art he had made, because maintaining them was too onerous.  And he isn't just anybody: he has work in the permanent collection of the Pompidou.

There were over 30 exhibitions associated with ISEA; I only saw a few of them.  I caught the last night of the large projections on the Opera House and the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of Vivid Sydney.  There was a collection of sound-related works at the University of Technology, Sydney, though they had visual elements was well.  I particularly liked Jon Drummond's Twittering Machine (named for the work by Paul Klee).  At Conny Dietschold Gallery, Ernest Edmonds had a responsive piece that looked like colour-field painting.  It was networked with two other pieces by Josh Harle and Sean Clark, so they all affected one another.  Kudos Gallery had the work of Chris Henschke already mentioned, and other works, including a panorama by Volker Kuchelmeister that was activated by walking around it moving a lever.  It turned out to hold considerably more than 360 degrees of images.  The images were made by collaging together photographs of two very different environments, the Tasmanian wilderness and urban Hong Kong.

I saw the three ISEA-related exhibitions in the Powerhouse Museum: an exhibition of work coming from the art-science residencies under the Synapse program, which places artists in scientific organisations; an exhibition of bio-art work associated with the SymbioticA group in Perth; and the Speak to Me exhibition of electronic and computer art organised by Experimenta.  I previously saw this exhibition scattered across several venues in Melbourne; here it is all collected together.

I regret not having seen the installation Test Pattern by Ryoji Ikeda at Carriageworks; it was evidently a highlight.  But I had a very packed few days as it was.

Jon Drummond's Twittering Machine

A bioreactor containing stem cells, In Potentia by Guy Ben-Ari and Kirsten Hudson

International Symposium on Electronic Art - Part 1 of 2

I recently visited Sydney to attend the International Symposium on Electronic Art.  This is an annual event that moves around the world.  In Sydney the slogan was "Resistance is Futile" (to electronic media), with a sub-slogan "Resistance is Fertile".  The events for ISEA went on for ten days but I only had five days there, spent mainly attending the three-day conference at the centre of the program.  The conference was quite a big affair with at least 400 people attending and a very large number of presentations.

There were three keynote addresses.  The first was by Michael Naimark, a digital pioneer who has worked at the MIT Media Lab, Apple, Lucasfilm and other organisations breaking new ground with media research.  He talked about his own practice and also about how an art/technology practice can be sustained financially.  The answer seems to be that there is no one way; different individuals and groups have managed by selling works, by providing services, by licensing intellectual property, and so on.

The second keynote address was by Brian Rogers, a distinguished vision researcher at Oxford University.  His topic was "Perception, art and illusion" and he spent quite a bit of time discussing how we see three-dimensional scenes.  He raised the question "Does perspective have to be learned?"  His answer was no: animals can make use of perspective.  What we do have to do is learn how to draw in perspective.  We see a rectangular table as rectangular, even if we are viewing it at an oblique angle and the image on our retinas is an irregular  quadrilateral.  Brian argued that there are no true visual illusions, only properties of our perceptual apparatus.

Brian was also present at the only workshop I attended, organised by Paula Dawson (from the College of Fine Art, UNSW) on holograms.  A number of her holograms were on display, together with the locally developed 3D drawing software called Holoshop, controlled by a "pen" on a jointed arm.  The pen had force feedback, so that it was possible to feel a virtual surface and draw on it; the pen resisted passing through the surface.  There was a test where the aim was to discover the shape of such a surface by feel alone.    My surface was quite simple, but I got a pronounced tactile illusion: it felt to me as though there was a vertical cliff, which wasn't there in the virtual surface at all.  Brian Rogers saw an analogy with the visual phenomenon called "Mach bands".

The last keynote address was by Julian Assange, delivered by Skype (a good connection) from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.  This was quite remarkable.  Assange is a good speaker, and his talk came just after the revelations by Edward Snowden of the enormous volume of electronic spying that the U.S.A. carries out.  Furthermore the U.S., British and Australian security services all share information, so this is a first-class means for all these governments to spy on their own citizens, as well as everyone else.  Assange referred to the term "turn-key totalitarianism":  all the means for a system of political control that would make the East German Stasi look like rank amateurs are in place already, just waiting to be turned on.  Assange has formed the WikiLeaks party that is running in the upcoming Australian Federal election, and he himself is a Senate candidate in Victoria.

Bremen, Linz and home

The first purely abstract paintings were exhibited in 1912, just over 100 years ago.  The main reason for my trip to Europe was to attend the conference 100 Years of Abstract Art at Jacobs University in Bremen.  Jacobs University is a small private university (under 1500 students), named Jacobs University in acknowledgement of a very generous grant from the Jacobs Foundation, which in turn derived its money from Jacobs coffee.  The language of instruction is English, and about two-thirds of the students are from outside Germany.  The buildings were originally built as a military barracks in the 1930s.  There is a humanities program, and also a Visual Communication research unit, which involves psychologists as well as artists and designers.

The conference was organised by Professor Isabel Wünsche, assisted by Wiebke Gronemeyer and several students.  It was the most concentrated art history endeavour I have encountered.   There were over 25 talks, and all but three were by art historians.  The other three were by artists: Leo Bronstein from Canada and Wendy Kelly and myself from Australia.  The participants were from North America, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and a wide range of countries across Europe, from Britain to Russia and Georgia, as well as three Australians (and another Australian who now works in Scotland.)  

There were two keynote addresses, one by Christiane Paul, a curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, on digital abstract art.  She covered a range of computer-generated art, from early work by Frieder Nake in 1965 - and Frieder was in the audience! - to what amounts to a parody of abstraction by Cory Arcangel just using Photoshop's gradient tool.  The second keynote address was by Eli Bornstein, reflecting on a long career as an abstract sculptor.

A sampling of topics from the paper sessions: the influence of anarchist ideas on Kandinsky and on Kupka, the early photograms of Man Ray and others, the co-option of the forms and colours of abstract art for things like location signage in office buildings, the influence of the surrealists who emigrated to New York on American painting, the political use of art in the Cold War from both the American and the Soviet points of view, the use of abstract art by the fashion industry, "found abstraction" as a motif in contemporary photography (some of which looks like the abstract painting of 40 years ago), and a lot more besides.  There was only one stream of talks, so a conversation could develop.

Wendy Kelly talked about contemporary concerns of abstract art in this post-post-modern era, illustrating her talk with a very wide range of current Australian examples.  I talked about abstraction and representation in the context of artworks that contain or result from a constructed process, typically a computer program.

I didn't see anything of the city of Bremen, but there were two conference excursions, one to Worpswede, a village just outside Bremen that used to be an artists' colony in the Art Deco era - now it is pretty much a tourist place, but there is an interesting gallery about one of the main protagonists, and a strange round house known as the Käseglocke (cheese bell), after the glass cover placed over a plate of cheese.  The other excursion was to Hamburg, to see a big exhibition on Giacometti.  In a café in Hamburg there was a wonderful example of both the use of abstract art by fashion and "found abstraction" in photography.  I idly picked up a fashion magazine and found in it a lavish spread of swirly abstract photographs by a Japanese photographer (I don't have the name).  They turned out to be photographs of a naked dancer, not that one could tell.

A number of people stayed overnight in Hamburg, but I had already booked a train to go to Linz in Austria.  My main reason for visiting Linz was to see the Ars Electronica Center.  For many years there has been an annual festival in Linz called Ars Electronica, and there is now a permanent museum, a unique hybrid of science museum, electronic and computer art museum, and animation and computer special effects theatre.  Jon McCormack, who is my associate supervisor at Monash, recently installed a large work there - 50 prints each one metre square, showing computer-generated imaginary plants derived from oil company logos.  Among other works was the subversive Newstweek, a small device that, if plugged into an ordinary power point in an area with an open wireless Internet hotspot, allowed anyone to intercept news feeds from the BBC (for example) and edit them.  I was interested to see in the museum a detailed attack on Facebook in the context of privacy law.  It appears that Facebook collects and keeps more data than it is allowed to under European privacy laws, and an activist group (Europe versus Facebook) has been attempting to sue Facebook's Irish company.   Facebook has improved its privacy behaviour, possibly in response to this action, but there seems to be a considerable way to go.

Linz also has a more conventional contemporary art museum, the Lentos museum, and I visited it too.  Naturally there is a focus on Austrian artists, though there are a few works by well-known non-Austrians, including Josef Albers, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd.  Certainly worth a visit.

Then back to Frankfurt.  I had a day before my flight home, so I visited an exhibition at the Kunstverein (art society) exhibition space, showing current works that deal in one way or another with the weather.  The most engaging was the Basteltornado (D.I.Y. tornado) by Klaus Weber, involving a small fog machine, an open cylinder and a vacuum cleaner.  When set in motion by a foot pedal it produced a small tornado inside the cylinder, about one metre high.  A nice thing to see at the end of my trip.

Nexus, a small 3D-printed work by Bathsheba Grossman, at the Ars Electronica Center

Basteltornado (detail) by Klaus Weber

Berlin, Berlin

I had a week in Berlin, before going to my conference in Bremen.  I've really only had a couple of single days to myself in Berlin before this.  This time I wanted to see some of the collections from antiquity, and I began with the Pergamon Museum, which is named for the material it has from the ancient Greek altar of Pergamon, including quite a lot of a large and dramatic frieze in high relief showing the battle between the Gods and the Giants.  The realism and freedom of the figures is astonishing.  I also saw the gate of Ishtar built by Nebuchadnezzar, large and impressive, but only a part of a once much larger structure.  Here there is also an interesting collection of Islamic work, including carved stonework (part of the Mshatta fort), ceramics, metalwork and carpets.  Some highly abstracted designs, and the remarkable stylised Kufic scripts.  Later I went to the Neues Musem to see the head of Nefertiti and the other Egyptian antiquities.  Nefertiti was a very beautiful woman, and the sculptor has even shown some slight wrinkles - no Photoshopping in 1340 BC!

Then I looked for modern and contemporary art, starting with the Museum am Hamburger Bahnhof, which I had visited before - but the works by Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and more are worth a second look.  Also I hadn't previously seen the large room/sculpture of Bruce Nauman called Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care, nor the extraordinary 40 metre long Gartenskulptur (Garden Sculpture) by Dieter Roth.  There was also a special exhibition on Martin Kippenberger, a wild man of 1980s German art with a chaotically varied output, who died of "an excessive life" at the age of 44.

For abstract art there were two exhibitions that particularly interested me.  One was a large exhibition showing works of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, with special reference to their use of colour.  The two artists knew each other and both worked at the Bauhaus.  I had vaguely heard of Itten as a colour theorist, but he was painting fully abstract works by 1915.  The works by Klee generally have some figurative reference, but there were a couple of abstract works by Klee in the exhibition.  The other "abstract" exhibition was a smaller exhibition of contemporary abstract drawing (not computer-generated), including works of Carsten Nicolai, whose large projection I had seen in Frankfurt.  No photographs for these exhibitions, unfortunately.

The last thing I went to was a strange hybrid, partly a collection of art installations and partly an extended ad for Olympus cameras.  You received a camera on entry, which of course you had to give back, but you were allowed to keep the memory card.  In general the installations were conceptually simple, but effective.  There was one from the British group United Visual Artists using lasers to make an illusory perspectival space.  Perhaps the most engaging was from the sound artist known as Zimoun, which consisted of a sort of tunnel made of large cardboard boxes.  Each box had a ball attached that was agitated by a small motor and drummed on the box.  The combined effect was meant to sound like a rainstorm, and it succeeded.

I haven't mentioned everything I saw, but a year in Berlin would not be enough to see everything.  I'm pleased with what I did manage to see.

Turkish carpet from around 1500 AD

Zimoun's sound installation

European Media Art Festival - Part 2 of 2

The exhibition for the Festival in Osnabrück mostly took place in the Kunsthalle, an art exhibition space which is in part a converted Dominican church from the 13th-15th centuries.  I didn't see anything really ground-breaking, but a number of the pieces were certainly engaging.  Nadal by Paul Destieu (France) consisted of four machines that threw tennis balls to another in a criss-cross pattern.  The arcs of the balls echoed the shape of the Gothic ceiling high above.  The work 500 by Bianca Patricia (Poland) showed a large projection of a small baby playing desultorily with a 500-Euro note (nearly $A700).  Scattered about on the floor were 50,000 1-Euro-cent coins (so 500 Euro worth).  And All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Donna Szoke and Ricarda McDonald (Canada) was a simple but effective installation consisting of a pair of eyes on a screen that moved to follow visitors, controlled by a Microsoft Kinect.  Disconcertingly, both eyes were right eyes.  I talked to Donna about this, and the idea was to introduce some strangeness to emphasise that this is a machine.

Kyosei - Coexistence by Lea Nagano (Japan/Germany) was a 360-degree panoramic video based on a view of Tokyo that referred to the earthquake and release of radiation from the Fukushima reactor complex.  The artist was in Tokyo when this happened.  Vanished Forest by Tviga Vasilyeva and Igor Line (Russia/Finland) showed a large image of a forest.  A touch-pad allowed the visitor to select a specific tree, and then sounds recorded from that tree were played.  The forest was an old-growth forest, but has been chopped down for its timber.

The most complex was the ambitious installation The Way Things May Go by a consortium of students from several universities, led by staff members.  This consisted of 13 fairly small separate devices or installations, each of which could perform an action with at least two outcomes.  For example one device agitated ping-pong balls, some of which were yellow, until one jumped into a channel where it passed by a detector which identified it as either white or yellow.  Which colour the ball was determined which device would be activated next.  The installation was inspired by the video Der Lauf der Dinge  by Peter Fischli and David Weiss (also called The Way Things Go - it is 30 mins long - parts of it are on YouTube - check it out).  The project was to make a non-deterministic Lauf der Dinge.  I thought it didn't quite come off as an installation, as only one device was active at once.  The controlling software could have been written to allow say three actions at once.

The two that held my attention most were Versus by David Letellier (France/Germany) and Méchaniques Discursives by Yannik Jacquet and Fred Penelle (Belgium).  Versus consisted of two large black flower-like structures, consisting however of triangular and rectangular pieces,  that could change configuration via a hydraulic mechanism.  They exchanged sounds and movements across the space, and also responded to other sounds in the space.  A combination of incomprehensibility and menace, and a certain delicacy.  Méchaniques Discursives was a video projection by Jacquet onto a wall with quite a few prints (woodcuts I believe) and drawings by Penelle.  The two were designed to work together and did so very well.  The imagery was a combination of Dada and Steampunk (or perhaps Victorian electro-punk, as there were references to radio waves, and an anachronistic defibrillator). 

And there was a lot more!  The Festival was well worth the visit for me.

General view of the main space in the Kunsthalle.

 Detail of David Letellier's installation Versus.

European Media Art Festival - Part 1 of 2

I spent four days at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany (purely as a visitor, not an exhibitor).  The festival takes place here every year, and this was the 26th Festival, so it has been going for quite a while.  There were a lot of Germans here, naturally, but there was a strong international contingent, with people who are working in the U.S.A., Canada, and numerous European countries stretching from Russia to Great Britain.  I'm not sure that there was anyone exhibiting who is currently working in Australia or New Zealand, but I talked with a New Zealander who had a film in the Festival and currently works in Norway - this sort of mobility seems pretty common.

Osnabrück itself is a medium-sized city of about 150,000 people in north-western Germany.  I was able to stay in the middle of the old part of the city, which was obviously badly damaged in World War II, but there are still quite a few old buildings, including some of the towers that were part of the city's defences.  The festival venues were conveniently located close to where I was staying, and some of them made use of the old buildings.

Short films formed the greater part of the Festival, but there was also an extensive exhibition of installations, artist talks, workshops, and some live performances.  Within this there was an extensive stream involving University students from the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).  Generally there were about four things going on at once.

I was most interested in the exhibition of installations and in a series of showings of short films under the heading "Konstrukt Film oder filmischer Konstructivismus / Film as a construct or filmic constructivism" (most things were in both German and English).  There were nearly 40 short films in this series. It started off with early experiments in abstract film from the 1920s-1930s, including pieces by Oskar Fischinger, Lázló  Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Duchamp (Anémic Cinéma).  Then it went on to post-WWII pieces, mostly from the U.S.A., including pieces by Harry Smith, Len Lye (Free Radicals), Jordan Belson and more.  Included were a couple of "flicker films" that were really quite hard to watch.  The last session included works from about the last 30 years, including pieces from Larry Cuba and Takashi Ito (Spacy).  Apart from the Len Lye and Moholy-Nagy pieces, I hadn't seen any of these before, though I had heard of some of them.  Since my own videos arguably fit into a constructivist tradition I really needed to see these.

A film I didn't see, but now wish I had, was the longer film (over an hour)  Transcalar Investment Vehicles by Hilary Koob-Sassen (U.S.A./Great Britain).  This was awarded the main prize of the Festival, and an extract was shown at the award ceremony.  I suspect this film will go down as the outstanding event of the Festival.

The robots Vincent und Emily, by Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler and Carolin Liebl

 Performance  Special Effect by Peter Burr

Carsten Nicolai in Frankfurt

I'm in Europe again, two years after my last trip overseas.  This one is shorter and almost entirely inside Germany, with a quick detour into Austria.  It counts as fieldwork for my studies at Monash, though I am funding it myself (Monash does provide travel insurance).

At the start I had a day in Frankfurt.  I visited the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Museum for Modern Art - http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/  or http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/en/home/), which has works by quite a few big names, including Roy Lichtenstein, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik.  What particularly caught my eye was a large video projection by Carsten Nicolai called unidisplay.  For some reason the sound that goes with it has a separate name, uni(psycho)acoustic, though the sound and images are very closely related.

Carsten Nicolai (http://www.carstennicolai.de/) is a distinguished German artist, many of whose works are inspired by geometrical constructions, light and sound.

This is an instant of one of maybe 20 different sections in unidisplay.   The room was already big, but mirrors make it look even bigger.  Altogether an impressive thing to find on the first day of my trip, which is largely concerned with abstract art.

Exhibition in Bendigo

The four-person exhibition Non-Objective Conversations x 4 that was in Sydney Non-Objective last year is migrating to Bendigo, to the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre. Four abstract artists: Louise Blyton, Magda Cebokli, Wendy Kelly and Gordon Monro, exhibition curated by Wendy Kelly.

La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre (VAC): 121 View St Bendigo (across the road from the Bendigo Art Gallery).
Tel: 5441 8724
Web: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/vac
Hours: Tuesday to Friday 10am - 5pm, weekends 12 - 5pm.

Exhibition dates: 27th March to 5th May 2013.

Opening: Wednesday 27th March, 6 - 8pm.

Exhibition in Ararat

I have an exhibition of videos in the Ararat Regional Art Gallery, to complement a touring exhibition from the Museum of Contemprary Art in Sydney of moving image work by Daniel Crooks, Tracey Moffatt, Patricia Piccini and more, company I'm very happy to be in!

For my show there won't be a formal opening, but there will be a closing event on Sunday 14th April.

Arart Regional Art Gallery: Corner Vincent Street and the Western Highway, Ararat, in the Town Hall building.
Tel: (03) 5352 2836
Web: http://arts-events-tourism.ararat.vic.gov.au/ararat-regional-art-gallery
Hours: Mon - Fri: 10am - 4.30pm; Sat, Sun, public holidays: 12 - 4pm.

Exhibition dates: 14th March to 14th April 2013.

Closing event: On Sunday 14 April 2013 at 3pm. I will be presenting an illustrated talk on Generative Art, followed by celebratory drinks at 4pm.