NEXT ON NOW ART BLAST
Punctum is excited to be producing and presenting the Next On Now Art Blast. This nationally recognised program, created over the past year, supports the work of young and emerging artists in Central Victoria. We are proud to celebrate the talent and vitality that these artists bring to the greater Bendigo community.
We hope you are as inspired by their work as we are!
ETERNITY LEAVE
CREATED BY LEONIE KELSALL
Leonie Kelsall’s art is not only about death itself; it is also about transcending culturally inherited attitudes towards death. Through the ages, death has presented us with a blank canvas on which to project our hopes and fears. But is it so final? Can we learn to overcome fear of the unknown by stepping out of the box and into another one? Eternity Leave attempts to help us do just that. Death may not only represent an end to the physical, but also presents us with a new beginning, an opportunity for renewal within the cycles of life.
Leonie is interested in dealing with things that are difficult and taboo. She believes that if something is difficult we need to look at it. One of our cultural taboos, death, is a subject with which Leonie tempts us to interact with by giving us a chance to try death on for size. Eternity Leave will give you the opportunity to try your coffin out to see what it is like to step into the other world. Through a series of photographs, drawings, and installations, Leonie invites her viewers to step beyond their comfort zone and contemplate the inevitable.
DARK MATTERS
CREATED BY KATIE SFETKIDIS
Katie Sfetkidis is a current member of Punctum and has worked on In Habit (2010) and as a Seedpod artist devising Who’s Afraid of the Dark? (2010). She is also a mentoring artist for Next on Now. This year Katie will also be mentored by Punctum’s Jude Anderson as part of the JUMP national mentoring program.
Dark Matters is an exploration of our experience of darkness and dark spaces. It aims to question our preconceived ideas of darkness as a place of fear. As part of Katie’s research, she camped alone without light at Melville Caves in the middle of winter. Dark Matters invites you to experience dark space as a quiet and peaceful place through the creation of an immersive environment. This piece was originally developed as part of Punctum’s Seedpod program in 2010.
HAVEN
CREATED BY ISOBELLE SIRIANNI
Isobelle Sirianni is an artist living in Bendigo. She studied a Bachelor of Visual Arts at LaTrobe Bendigo in 2004 majoring in Painting and Drawing, and Printmaking. Isobelle returned to Bendigo in 2010 to study a Diploma of Education and is returning to study honours in Visual Arts this year after traveling nationally and internationally. Isobelle has recently begun developing installations and sculptures focusing on the idea of creating emotions through experiencing and interacting with objects and space.
Haven is an installation of sculptures that encourages reminiscing upon childhood feelings. The installation provides four sculptures in different areas that look at varying levels of comfort or security and fear. Specific textures, tones, forms and sounds are used to link familiar experiences of contentment while the scale, visibility and unfamiliarity of the sculptures may also evoke awe. The audience are encouraged to actively interact with the artworks to experience these emotions by allowing their body to be encased and surrounded by each sculpture.
THE NEXT ON NOW FAMILY
CREATED BY CHRISTINE SAYER
In many families there’s ‘a photographer’. Their familiarity with their subjects allows them to pass unobserved. They are the quiet observer who, through their personal prism documents the antics at gatherings, moments of celebration, play, combat and quietude. Since the invention of photography the family photographer’s photos have ended up on walls, in albums, and sometimes in galleries. Now they’re also found on blogs, Facebook and screen savers. As the Next On Now family photographer, Christine has chosen to present her ‘family photos’ in a 19th century domestic space that is at the same time a gallery. Here you can sit back in a light filled lounge room with our family, and enjoy playing the quiet observer as Christine has done over the past months.
THE NON-BLOG
CREATED BY KELLY ROBSON
Over the course of the Next On Now program, local blogger Kelly Robson has worked on creating a blog for the program. Documenting the artists’ creative processes through photographs, artist profiles and stories, the blog shares with us the many experiences that have lead to the Next On Now Art Blast.
BIRDS, BEES, BATS AND RATS
CREATED AND PERFORMED BY AMY TURTON
WITH STELLA BARTA-WONG
Amy Turton is a Melbourne based theatre maker, originally from Carisbrook in Central Victoria. In this work she draws on her personal experience as a teenager in Bendigo as well as from interviews with young women in the area whose voices are at the centre of the work.
Birds, Bees, Bats and Rats is a guided tour through Rosalind Park, uncovering stories of adolescent female desire in Bendigo's lush, green heart. Desire is positioned as a strong, guiding voice that can empower young women to make active, safe and healthy decisions. The work explores Rosalind Park as the historical site for the performance of sexuality.
FLUX
CREATED BY RICK WHATELEY
Rick Whateley comes from an illustration and street art background, working primarily with charcoal, ink, watercolour and pencil in his illustrative work and using a range of materials for street based work. Recently Rick has been exploring ways in which street art techniques and the various mediums of drawing, painting and photography can be fused to create an installation work.
The core of this work is the transformation of an empty space into something emotive, yet at the same time utilising the space and the feelings it conjures as part of the work, rather than attempting to override it. In doing so, Rick creates a certain symbiosis between the space, the work and the viewer, making the viewing a personal experience. That the work is part of a dark and confined space suggests themes of alienation, inertia, claustrophobia, void and secrecy yet it is often in such spaces we find our strengths and hidden beauty. We all have a dark stairwell in our minds, and perhaps we should have the courage to go there more often.
MARGINAL SPACE
CREATED BY TOM PENDER
Marginal spaces occur within the built environment as a result of urban progress. These spaces can occur in the form of abandoned buildings, disused parcels of land and the non-spaces created as a result of construction of modern bridges and motorways. Often destroyed by the same process by which they were created, Marginal Space is a state of flux.
Marginal people are those who use these marginal spaces for reasons as varying as the individuals themselves; the homeless find shelter, the addict finds temporary sanctuary and the graffiti artist finds a canvas. Anonymous and clandestine encounters take place. Sometimes all these things happen within the same space.
Tom Pender’s work seeks to explore the way in which people can use a space on their own terms, how society can view these people as the ‘other’. Marginal Space is a created space in which visitors enter to enjoy as they will and experience what it is to be the ‘other’.
