Exhibitions
Location: Storey Hall Basement 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Opening Hours: Exhibition openings are every second Tuesday from 5.30pm to 7.30pm
Gallery Hours
Tuesday to Friday 11am - 5pm
First Site is one of Melbourne's most innovative galleries for emerging artists, designers and creative practitioners. Showcasing a diverse array of work from students across a range of disciplines, First Site Gallery has new exhibitions opening every two weeks throughout the year.
Floor talks: All artists give floor talks about their work. These take place the last Friday of the show at 1pm in the gallery.
[First Site Gallery Archive online]
First Site Gallery Exhibitions for Semester 1
23 February - 9 March
Artist Talks: 6 March 1pm
Arts Mentorship 2012: Energetic Discipline - Jessie Bullivant & Susan Jacobs
G1 + G2 + G3 | Jessie Bullivant and Susan Jacobs draw from their independent practices, which tend to employ particular trade skills & knowledge or industrial means in the making of their work. Approached as a point of departure, rather than a projected end, the artists will engage in a collaborative exchange
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13 March - 23 March
Artist Talks: 23 March 1pm
Analogue & Digital Fashion Show
G1 + G2 + G3 | Analogue Digital showcases the talent and skills of RMIT students and recent graduates as they explore new digital technologies across a diverse range of mediums. From laser cutting and digital textile printing to electronic knitting and weaving, the exhibition highlights the many ways digital technologies can be integrated into traditional crafts and artforms. Forming part of the 2012 L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program, Analogue Digital is an extraordinary opportunity to view artworks, clothing, textiles and accessories by over fifty students and recent graduates from a wide range of courses at RMIT.
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27 March - 6 April
Artist Talks: 6 April 1pm
Dimensions of Space: Noami Nicholls
G1 | Naomi Nicholls’ work plays with colour and geometric abstraction to explore how we experience space, depicting the three dimensional in two dimensions. Shapes created through folding paper provided the initial impetus for this body of work which has evolved into a series of large wall installations/paintings. The work oscillates between different spatial readings, exploring form and generating images through reprographic processes; reproducing the folded line and form throughout her work.
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Engulf: Ara Dolation & Michele Donegan
G2 | The work involves the construction of a series of spaces that inhabit the length of the gallery by a complex interweaving of coloured wool producing a series of web-like forms enabling the audience to move around and be engulfed. These woven forms continue to develop over the course of the exhibition, encapsulating the element of time while creating a sense of other-worldliness.
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Tension Installation: Bryan Lynch-Wells
G3 | The artwork contrasts the illusion of depth on a 2D plane with a sculptural work. The tension that exists between the 2D and 3D in art is challenged and explored in this installation.
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10 April - 20 April
Artist Talks: 20 April 1pm
Reformation: Josephine Mead, Ellen Fairbairn, Heather Ogilvie, Sara Crotty, Tricia Page, Luke Boslem, Kaitlyn Gibson.
G1 + G2 | 'Reformation’ will see the introduction of 7 emerging RMIT Visual Art students, who over the past year have used study as an avenue to explore and engage. Through shared studio practise, they are challenging and reforming the nature of art. Creating multi-disciplinary work, these artists have begun to explore the adapting qualities of humanity and our innate relationship to environments. ‘Reformation’ is an example of the value of shared ideas.
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Gold Digger: Marianne Diaz
G3 | Marianne Diaz remixes contemporary Asian experience with popular culture. Untitled (trolley) is a humorous commentary on racial stereotypes which categorise Asian women as opportunistic and predatory gold diggers. Beneath the installation's gimmicky facade, audiences are forced to question their own latent cultural stereotypes.
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25 April - 4 May
Artist Talks: 4 May 1pm
Get Real!: Audrey Thomas-Hayes, Bernadette Francis, Ashlea Chong G1 + G3 | From the digital to the tactile, the ephemeral to the static, the unconscious to the actual. Get real! explores these tenuous relationships and observes how materiality can be more than the traditional interweaving of warps and wefts. Garments can be a vehicle for the interplay between the physical and the intangible. Ashlea Chong, Audrey Thomas-Hayes and Bernadette Francis’ respective practises explore what it means to be 'real'.
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Flocculate: Sophie Moorhouse Morris & Jia Jia Ji Chen
G2 | Flocculate:
1. to gather or coagulate loosely
2. to form lumpy or fluffy masses
3. (Biology) covered with tufts or flakes of a waxy or wool-like substance
4. (chemistry) aggregated in woolly cloudlike masses
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8 May - 18 May
Artist Talks: 18 May 1 pm
Render Complete: Spencer Lai, Matthew Berka, Hamish Storrie
G1 | Render Complete explores the use of digital 3D technology and imagery and how these mediums depict, manipulate and project the world in which we live in. The works wish to contemplate and engage in a dialogue with a society that is obsessed with the act of imaging itself and the spaces in which we inhabit.
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TRASHLAND: Lucie McIntosh
G2 | T R A S H L A N D examines the debris of popular culture by pausing throwaway moments and immortalising them in a world of overbearing, graffitied colour and somewhat bad taste. A shrine to instants passed by, trash punk, wasters and party people T R A S H L A N D invites you in for fun and fun-er.
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Cardboard Cabin: Harry Hay
G3 | Sculptures and photography will merge into one within cardboard walls painted in a wood grain pattern. Sculptures of objects will be scattered across the floor, and upon the walls like ornaments, or the prizes of the hut's inhabitant. Photos of the sculptures will adorn the walls. The photos have removed the objects from their context and viewed them as a purely visual thing. Yet by housing them in painted cardboard frames, I brought the content of the photos back into the handmade world they originate from.
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22 May - 1 June
Artist Talks: 1 June 1pm
I Cant believe It's Not Utopia: Carmelo Grasso, Romy Sweetnem, Alex Purchase, Sean Kennedy, curated by Jackson Payne
G1 | In the digital era, we reinterpret the physical in the forming of contemporary myth, creating insular worlds where we understand the rules. These worlds are not constructed through true recreation of the world, but through selective modelling of the appropriate elements, which recontextualizes into an instant mythology capable of creating objects of use, beauty, and a reflection of ourselves.
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this is not a drill: Richard Harding
G2 | 'this is not a drill’ is a print based installation attempting to navigate the notion of 'straight acting' within gay male culture and its relationship to the closet. This work uses found images that are forming an ongoing catalogue of current masculine representations through costume, gesture and posture with text standing in for speech; the original codes of identification. My question here is how can gay men present as masculine and still maintain their otherness thus deconstructing the closet that inevitably builds around a hetero-normative portrayal of masculinity?
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EXTRA SIGNAL: Hyun Tae Lee
G3 | This project presents a fictional scene of an archaeologist finding urban artifacts after thousands of years from now. For us, the artifacts are only discarded rubbish, neglected and overlooked materials after everyday living. However, this naive archaeologist believes that these objects possess some important values and struggles to figure out what they are and what they mean. By looking at this archaeologist’s room full of found items, I hope they could nudge us to look into one side of ourselves.
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5 June - 15 June
Artist Talks: 15 June 1pm
Found & Forgotten: Carolyn Cardinet G1 | Gleaning the beaches daily, Carolyn searches for the objects that will make their way to her studio.The discarded objects are matched, transformed and re-interpreted as whimsical assemblages bearing testimony to our consumer society.The mundane becomes new and intriguing as the ‘Déjà vu’ surfaces.The rebirth of ‘the found & the forgotten’ is represented in delicate portraits, which elevate the detritus status to that of relic of the past.
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illuminati: Kartini Bell & Genevre Becker
G2 | Illuminati shall present an interactive installation that will manipulate the gallery space by creating a false floor, walls and ceiling. The walls of the arched tunnel will be perforated to allow pin-hole light to pass through onto interior surfaces and participants, the pin-holes forming half-dot images relating to captivity. By constructing a physically challenging environment, Illuminati will create a dynamic experience for the audience within the gallery space.
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In Relation to Location: Alica Bryson-Haynes
G3 | This painting installation responds to structures within the gallery space and to newspaper images from global locations, installed on the gallery walls. The artist uses paint to reveal and conceal aspects of structure, form and colour within the paintings and gallery’s architecture, shifting spatial perception. The work occupies the liminal space between abstraction and figuration and seeks to engage the viewer in the act of sensory viewing and projecting.
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19 June - 29 June
Artist Talks: 29 June 1pm
Silence. Repetition. Rhythm: Jennifer Rooke & Simone Nindarra
G1 | Modern life is a constant stream of culture. We are surrounded by an abundance of imagery, words and sound which is always growing. Very rarely do we experience silence. As individual artists, Jennifer Rooke and Simone Nindarra attempt to make touch with a silence, repetition and rhythm found within themselves. Their meditative process of drawing is incredibly slow and involved but discovers a meaning in itself as the work is created.
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Figure: Claus Bredow
G2 | My practice focuses on the relationship between human body and built form. I am interested in figurative and physical expression of the human body. I am exploring surface and volume of the human body with particular interest in texture. I am currently working on a series of portraits and figurative studies of the human body. The works are built in clay and are executed from live models during one or two sittings.
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The Outer: Emily Boyle
G3 | Emily Boyle explores ideas of psychological interactions within physical environments, and the way memory and learned associations can impact on perceptions of space. Photographic imagery of ordinary architecture is transformed through a process of digital manipulation, hand cutting and transfer to create environments that fluctuate between presence and absence, and call to mind the ability for the seemingly familiar to become foreign and unknown.
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3 July- 13 July
Artist Talks: 13 July 1 pm
OneTwo: Shae Rooke
G1 | OneTwo examines conceptions of reality, challenging the nature of perception through an installation of photography, found objects and video. OneTwo draws out hidden meanings, humour and poetics within everyday places and objects through documentation of simple performative gestures. The viewer is invited to arrive at their own uneasy conclusion of the line between reality and fiction within the strange worlds presented.
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Inside, Outside: Tul Suwannakit
G2 | “Inside, Outside” explores habitual dislocation of wild animal within the urban environment. The work utilizes taxidermy with video projection and atmospheric sound to recreate scene of animal vulnerability and dislocation. The staged narrative investigates juxtaposition between homeliness and homelessness, reflecting my journey of migration that is translated into a visual allegorical scenario as a mean of creating an empathetic point of connection towards co-existence between human and animals.
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Heart-Shaped Bruises: Diego Ramirez
G3 | Heart-Shaped Bruises is a two-channel performance based video installation using domestic violence as an allegory to problematize contemporary notions of the identity. The gallery space becomes a broken home and the viewer is invited to witness the violence inside.
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Additional Info on Floor talks:
Email Cassandra Scott to receive updates about First Site Gallery exhibitions, floor talks and special events.
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