04 10 - LOVE IT OR LOSE IT - Emma Beer & Fernando do Campo / FALSIFYING BETTY -Danny Frommer

LOVE IT OR LOSE IT is an exhibition of new paintings by Canberra based Emma Beer and Tasmanian based Fernando do Campo. Both artists’ fit into a growing group of emerging Australian abstract painters whose interests lie in questioning the implications of paint as a chosen medium and its pictorial potential through abstraction.

Emma Beer engages with questions concerned with the place of abstraction in contemporary painting. Beer explores the experience and the ‘act of painting’ as her subject, where the painting becomes object and model, consequently used to develop ways of understanding what painting can be. Her practice explores an understanding of paint as substance and matter, colour relations and different mixing systems, as well as developing a greater understanding of the process of constructing a painting.  Through this system, Beer questions the implications of making paintings - of and about painting itself. Beer aims to understand and challenge the expectations of painting. Investigating ‘the act of making’ makes the viewer more acutely aware of the relationship between artist and making, finding ways to engage the viewer with formal tensions in the work that hover between levels of stability and instability. Through juxtaposition of tactility, chaos and order she hopes to challenge these expectations along with the understanding of traditional painting techniques. 

Fernando do Campo is interested in the questions that can be asked about one’s own ‘spatial exchange’ on pictorial space. “When we look at the history of painting we find that many of these questions have been asked already. A lot of the reasons why ‘painting is not dead’ is because the pictorial space continues to offer infinite pictorial possibilities. I think it’s a process of re-writing these questions. I am interested in discussing the spatial shift triggered by colour, line and varied forms of abstraction.” Painting vocabularies and varied projection systems are also employed, such as the result of when a modulated green line moves through a flat red space. This brings into question which space is the negative and which space is the positive? Can the painted pictorial space be used to discuss do Campo’s fluid and often nostalgic sense of space?

Emma Beer was born in Echuca, country Victoria in 1987. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class Honours from the Australian National University, Canberra in 2009. Emma is currently a Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) resident and was awarded the Torres Travelling Art Scholarship, by the Embassy of Spain in 2010. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions around Australia with upcoming solo exhibitions in Canberra. She is currently Technical Officer and Sessional Tutor in the Painting Workshop, Australian National University, Canberra. Emma lives and works in Canberra.

Fernando do Campo was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 1987 and migrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1997. He completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts (Visual) at the University of Tasmania in 2007 and received a Bachelor of Visual Arts – Honours from the Australian National University, Canberra in 2008. Fernando has been included in numerous group exhibitions around Australia as well as solo exhibitions in Tasmania, Canberra and Melbourne. He is currently Director of Artsalive Artspace, Launceston and sessional Lecturer in Painting and Art Theory at the University of Tasmania, Launceston.

Fernando lives and works in Launceston and is represented by Colville Street Art Gallery, Hobart.

 PIPE DREAMS - Emily O'brien

An exploration of imaginary palaces that contemplate hope and achieving the impossible, where new forms of meditation and urban mandala's emerge from the least likely places.

 

 

 

FALSIFYING BETTY - Danny Frommer

One fast spinning pom -pom creates a sensation. Lots of spinning pom -poms creates lots of sensation. This is an exploration of the relation between that sensation and the mechanisms that present it.