
B-SIDE Fundraiser
Abbra Kotlarczyk, Annika Koops, Ara Dolatian, Audrey Tan, Badra Aji, Benjamin Woods, Britt Salt, Bryan Foong, Caitlin Royce, Chunxiao Qu, Emma Hamilton, Evelyn Pohl, Francis Carmody, Grace Wood, HeeJoon Youn, Henrik Haukeland, Holly MacDonald, Honey Long + Prue Stent, James Carey, Jasper Jordan-Lang, Jemi Gale, John Brooks, Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher, Josephine Mead, Kaijern Koo, Kate Rohde, Kate Wallace, Katie Paine, Kurt Medenbach, Lachlan Stonehouse, Lauren Dunn, Levi Franco, Lou Hubbard, Madeleine Minack, Madeleine Thornton-Smith, Majed Fayad, Mira Oosterweghel, MJ Flamiano, Olivia Mròz, Pia Johnson, Ponch Hawkes, Rachel Button, Sara Retallick, Siying Zhou, Skye Malu Baker, Tai Snaith, Tamara Marrington, Yvette James, Zainab Hikmet, Alexandra Ragg, Anu Kumar , Beth Downing, Brendan Huntley, Brooke Holiday, Bryce Anderson, Dan Moynihan, Emily Gallagher, Ezz Monem, Georgia Cheesman, Genevieve Elliott, Holly Fewson, Jack Collee, Jacqueline Stojanović, Janelle Low, Jess Tan, Jimmy Nuttall, Jon Hewitt, Kari Lee McInneny McRae, Katherine Hubble, Latifa Elmrini, Lǐ Xīng Yǔ (Echo Li), M33 / Peter Milne, Maddison Kitching, Mateo Muratore, Matt Winstanley, Morganna Magee, Nicholas Jones, Niyanta Sharma, no more poetry, Phoebe Kelly, Samantha Seary, Samuel Murnane, Samuel Nugent, Sarah Bunting, Simon Hearn, Tom Campbell, Troy Emery, Clare Steele, Khi-lee Thorpe, Lekhena Porter, Lucreccia Quintanilla, Lucy Foster, Karl Halliday, Tahlia Smith, Nina Sanadze, Henry Trumble, Lorilee Yang, Daniel Price, Ella Dunn, Sam Foster, Briony Galligan, Briony Galligan and Mel Deerson, Aphra Cheeseman, Jaxon Waterhouse, Chantelle Mitchell
21–28 Oct 2021
After another year of disruption throughout the arts, Blindside launches its annual, online fundraiser, B-side. The artist-run, not-for-profit gallery based in the iconic Nicholas Building presents an exciting showcase of works for sale by 100 local contemporary artists.
Badra Aji, Bryce Anderson, Skye Malu Baker, John Brooks, Sarah Bunting, Rachel Button, Tom Campbell, James Carey, Francis Carmody, Aphra Cheesman, Georgia Cheesman, Jack Collee, Ara Dolatian, Beth Downing, Ella Dunn, Lauren Dunn, Genevieve Elliott, Troy Emery, Majed Fayad, Holly Fewson, MJ Flamiano, Bryan Foong, Lucy Foster, Sam Foster, Levi Franco, Jemi gale, Emily Gallagher, Briony Galligan, Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan, Latifa Elmrini Gonzalez, Karl Halliday, Emma Hamilton, Henrik Haukeland, Ponch Hawkes, Simon Hearn, Jon Hewitt, Zainab Hikmet, Brooke Holiday, Lou Hubbard, Katherine Hubble, Brendan Huntley, Yvette James, Pia Johnson, Nicholas Jones, Jasper Jordan-Lang, Phoebe Kelly, Tess King, Maddison Kitching, Kaijern Koo, Annika Koops, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Anu Kumar, Lǐ Xīng Yǔ (Echo Li), Janelle Low, Holly MacDonald, Morganna Magee, Tamara Marrington, Kari Lee McInnerny McRae, Josephine Mead, Kurt Medenbach, M.33 / Peter Milne, Madeleine Minack, Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher, Ezz Monem, Dan Moynihan, Olivia Mròz, Mateo Muratore, Samuel Murnane, Samuel Nugent, Jimmy Nuttall, Mira Oosterweghel, Katie Paine, no more poetry, Evelyn Pohl, Lekhena Porter, Daniel Price, Chunxiao Qu, Lucreccia Quintanilla, Alexandra Ragg, Sara Retallick, Kate Rohde, Caitlin Royce, Britt Salt, Nina Sanadze, Samantha Seary, Niyanta Sharma, Talia Smith, Tai Snaith, Clare Steele, Honey Long and Prue Stent, Molly Stephenson, Jacqueline Stojanovic, Lachlan Stonehouse, Audrey Tan, Jess Tan, Madeleine Thornton-Smith, Khi-Lee Thorpe, Henry Trumble, Kate Wallace, Jaxon Waterhouse & Chantelle Mitchell, Matt Winstanley, Grace Wood, Benjamin Woods, Lorilee Yang, HeeJoon Youn, Siying Zhou.
Launching at the same time is the 2021 Blindside artist-edition. This year it’s wearable art – caps designed by leading artists Sanja Pahoki, Jason Phu and Stanislava Pinchuk in a limited run of 100 each. These highly sought-after artist-editions are $55 and are on sale from 13 October 2021. The ultimate summer accessory for stylish Melburnians.
Since 2004, Blindside has championed risk-takers and change-makers, propelling artists, curators and writers forward at pivotal moments in their careers. Blindside is a crucial part of Melbourne’s visual arts ecosystem.
The previous success of the B-side fundraiser has enabled Blindside to expand its artistic program. The gallery can now offer free exhibition spaces, increased artist fees and artist residency opportunities.
The 2021 fundraising goal is $10,000. How can you get involved?
Save the date
Artist edition caps are available from 13 October 2021. B-side launches 21 – 28 October 2021.
Buy an artwork
100 artworks over 8 days are on offer from some of Australia’s most exciting contemporary artists.
Buy a cap
Buy a wearable artwork! Limited edition caps designed by Sanja Pahoki, Jason Phu and Stanslava Pinchuk are on sale from 13 October 2021.
B-SIDE’s aim is to raise funds through the sale of artworks and Blindside artist editions to enable Blindside to continue to program pivotal exhibitions, facilitate critical and engaging public programs, and support arts writers and artists at all stages of their careers.
Abbra Kotlarczyk (based Naarm/Melbourne) maintains a research-based practice that is articulated through modes of conceptual art making and writing of criticism, poetry and prose. She is a freelance academic editor for socially-engaged artistic research and practice as well as an independent curator. Her practice is hinged on visual and linguistic inquiries that often take place trans-historically through expanded notions of care, queerness, publication, citizenry and embodied poetics.
Born 1984, Mullumbimby, Arakwal country, so-called Australia.
Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, so-called Australia.
Annika Koops is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist working between painting and digital media. Her works consider how subjectivity may be distilled and reformatted in the digital realm. Current contrasts imaging technologies associated with biometrics with painterly practice to creatively interpret how bodily traces operate in cultural and economic fields. Annika has exhibited nationally and internationally at a variety of ARI’s, public institutions and private galleries. Works are included in Australian public collections such as Art Bank, MONA Hobart and The University of Melbourne Collection. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart and is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University.
Ara Dolatian received a Bachelor of Fine Art (sculpture) from RMIT University (2012) and Master in Social Science Environment and Planning (2014). His interdisciplinary practice explores the relationships between cultural landscapes and the natural ecosystem. It conflates a number of ideas around the themes of the studio and laboratory and in turn social and environmental politics.
Ara has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been involved with a large number of collaborations and public art projects. To name few: Finalist for the Darebin Art Prize, Deakin Small Sculpture Prize, The Substation Station Contemporary Art Prize, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and a recipient for the 2019 Project Developments Funding from Australian Council for the Arts.
Audrey Tan is an artist and jeweller based in Naarm/Melbourne who is on the cusp of Capricorn and Aquarius. She is interested in smelly colours, broken things u find on the floor, tiny objects, and durational playlists.
Badra Aji is an Indonesian-born artist who left his homeland in his teenage years and has lived and worked in Melbourne ever since. Graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2016, he received the Majlis Traveling Scholarship and has exhibited in First Site Gallery, George Paton Gallery, Red Gallery, and TCB Art Inc. He was nominated as a finalist of the Paul Guest Drawing Prize as well as of the prestigious Dobell Drawing Prize in 2019. His work sits between the poetic and absurd and aims to investigate the notion of normalcy in Western culture from an Eastern point of view. Throughout his practice he works with photo-media, text, video, printmaking and drawing. There is no hierarchy in his mediums. Materiality however is chosen for its distinct qualities.
Benjamin Woods was born in Melbourne in 1988, and grew up with two older sisters, who were role models for a creative life. With their lead, Ben got on the path to become an artist early, studying sculpture at VCA from 2007-2012, where he received BFA Hons and MFA. He has been showing artwork since 2011 and is a current PhD candidate at Monash University (MADA). His research stems from experience in embodied practices, and how sculpture can express and connect these experiences through processes of forming over time, across contexts. Ben enjoys complex Venn diagrams, yoga practice, queer theory, and honey.
I would like to pay respect to elders of the Kulin Nation past, present and becoming, the traditional owners and custodians of the lands, waters and airs that make all our lives possible. I acknowledge that First Nation sovereignty of this land, and all Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island lands, has never been ceded.
Britt Salt's practice is an ongoing spatial experiment where fundamental elements such as line, form and space intertwine. Employing repetition and materials that have an inherent ability to create movement, her work centres on the symbiosis of art and architectural practice and questions how these genres influence the notion of place and impermanence in contemporary urban environments.
Britt received the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists in 2010, which supported residencies in the U.K., France and China. In 2015 she undertook a residency in Tokyo, which culminated in a public installation at Youkobo Art Space. Her work has been selected as a finalist in numerous awards including the Paramor Prize 2017 and Gold Coast Art Award 2015. Most recently Britt has completed residencies at Arteles (Finland), Heima (Iceland) and the Australian Tapestry Workshop. She has worked on significant large-scale commissioned artworks for Fender Katsalidis Architects, Büro North and Asia Pacific Airports Melbourne.
Bryan Foong (he/him) is an artist of Chinese-Malaysian heritage living and working on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. His queer practice brings together painting and writing as installations to examine body, biology and desire. Foong’s interest lies in situations where these subjects come into conflict with the processes of territorialisation and colonisation within contemporary biopolitics. In his installations, auto-fictional narratives – lifting tropes from science, psychoanalysis and other textual-mythic-cultural encounters – serve as allegories informing haptically sensitive paintings, potentially materialising an affectively heightened and spatialised account of the body turning against its somatic governance.
Caitlin Royce is an emerging artist practicing on Dja Dja Wurrung country in regional Victoria. Her artistic practice engages with themes surrounding cultural and environmental histories and explores the role art plays in offering alternative perceptions through abstraction and postproduction techniques in order to create layered, re-contextualised, and ambiguous, compositions. Along with her image based work, Caitlin likes to work in collaborations and groups to grapple with the realities of our time.
Chunxiao Qu is a multi-genre artist who does not have the artist statement.
Emma Hamilton is a Melbourne-based artist with a keen interest in the materiality of the photograph. Oscillating between sculpture and photography, her practice operates at the intersection between object and image. Hamilton’s work explores disparities between the observed and the recorded: the camera’s view of landscape comparative to our experiential, visual observations.
Hamilton was awarded a residency in the Australia Council Paris studio in 2014, and has since undertaken residencies in Norway and Iceland. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Metro Arts (Brisbane), Alliance Française Gallery (Melbourne) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne).
Evelyn Pohl paints and sometimes makes performances that focus on love and irrational wanting depicted in music, tv shows and pop culture. Thinking about romance alone is a little sad, but sometimes she can think and make things with Yundi so everything is a little better.
Francis Carmody's work is presented as products of distribution and power structures characterised by a wide range of forms, objects and actions. He explores structures of dissemination and narrative through promiscuous research methodologies. Enacted by an initial action from the artist or a constructed model to be carried out by someone else, administrative and hysterical steps are rehearsed to realise projects.
In 2020, Carmody exhibited at Gertrude Glasshouse in Remedy for the Doldrums, curated by Siobhan Sloper and was invited to present at the Project Anywhere Symposium, Buxton Contemporary held in partnership with the Parsons School of Design. Francis remained active over Melbourne’s 111 Day Lockdown with help from the City of Melbourne and NAVA arts Grants assisting in the development of a new body of work for Gateway.
Grace Wood is a Narrm (Melbourne) based artist. Grace creates collage-based installations that anatomise the inconsistencies and eccentricities of the internet archive, art history, and the status of the contemporary photographic document. Her work is concerned with digital technology’s capacity to generate, alter and namelessly disperse images.
Grace’s images of images are presented on fabric, flattened to vinyl on walls, changed into silk, and transformed from photographic prints into wearable items. Her works are objects of adornment, but also flattened representations of objects lost or changed. Using found photographs, internet images, archival documents and iPhone snaps to create new mythologies and alter archives, she manipulates the constructs of power inherent in all image-making.
Grace received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. She exhibits regularly in Australia and overseas, with recent exhibitions including A weird kind of fiction-consumption, LON Gallery, 2019; Ersatz, Cool Change Contemporary, 2019; The world, a liver (receives everyone and everything), Mayfair Gallery, 2019; Edibles, St Heliers Street Gallery, VIC, 2019; AARK Residency, Korpo Finland, 2019; Looking but not seeing, Benalla Art Gallery, 2018; There is a pain - so utter, Gertrude Glasshouse, 2018; and Like a Hasselblad on the moon, West Space, 2017. Grace is represented by LON Gallery, VIC.
HeeJoon YounMelbourne-based artist HeeJoon Youn is a graduate from Victorian College of the Arts. Her works are naive attempts to make sense of a sometimes overwhelming life. Recent exhibitions include Seventh Gallery, Caves and Blindside.
Henrik Haukeland was born 1980 in Sweden, and is now based in Naarm/Melbourne. Conceptually, his work often deals with the body—both physical and social—as well as the corresponding ideas of consumption, excess, and transformation. Arts education includes the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, Norway, the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, U.S., and the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden. He has had many exhibitions in galleries and art institutions predominantly throughout Scandinavia. Solo-exhibitions in Australia include BLINDSIDE in Melbourne, and Airspace Projects in Sydney.
Holly MacDonald is a maker of objects and material observations. Her art practice is founded in ceramics and combines painting, drawing, installation and hand building in clay to explore notions of memory and the uncertain nature of perception. Using the handmade ceramic object as an agent, she interrogates the relationship between process and product, touch and vision, object and image.
Honey Long + Prue StentHoney Long + Prue Stent (both b. 1993, Sydney, Australia) have been making art together since they were teenagers, across photography, performance, installation and sculpture.
Long completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney, in 2015 and Stent completed her Bachelor of Arts (Photography) at RMIT, Melbourne, in 2014.
Their work has been shown across Australia and in various counties internationally, including Zurich, Madrid, the United Kingdom and the United States. Recent exhibitions include London Photo, The Female Lens: 9 Contemporary Female Photographers, HuxleyParlour Gallery, London (2018); Future Feminin, Fahey/ Klein Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Long and Stent, Nicola Von Senger Gallery, Zurich (2018); Players, curated by Cristina De Middle Puch, Photo Espanña Festival, Madrid (2017); and Sites of the Imagination, ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne (2017).
They have participated in a number of projects, including This _ _ _ _ _ _ _ may not protect you but at times it’s enough to know it’s there, collaboration with Amrita Hepi, Underbelly Arts Festival, Sydney (2017); Sound and Vision, Sydney Opera House, Sydney (2016); and Gucci #24 Hour Ace, LA. Long & Stent currently live and work between Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. Represented by ARC ONE, Melbourne.
James Carey is an artist and lecturer in Interior Design, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, and is an artistic director at BLINDSIDE Gallery in Naarm / Melbourne. James’ creative research practice is process-based, having inherent curiosities to notions of duration, labour, maintenance and value in contemporary cultures and societies.
Jasper Jordan-Lang is a Melbourne based Artist currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University. Jordan-Lang also received his undergraduate from Monash University, graduating in 2017, when he was the recipient of the Chapman and Bailey Award for Excellence. Since graduating, Jordan-Lang has shown extensively in Melbourne as well as in Canberra, and Adelaide. Selected recent exhibitions include The world is waiting for the Sunrise, TCB art inc, 2017, Concrete feet, Sister Gallery, Adelaide, 2018, Leave the key under the mat, Bus Projects, 2018, All the rivers run, offsite location, Echuca, 2019, and Out of place, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2021. Jordan-Lang’s work is held in numerous private collections throughout Australia.
Jemi Gale is an emotion painter and pop girl.
John Brooks works with textiles, video and installation, making intuitively and working around the way materials behave. He is interested in connections with things, communicating with rocks and potentially projecting thoughts and ideas onto non-human entities.
Jordan Mitchell-Fletcher’s work is engaged with the idea of materiality as encompassing a conglomerate of relations in which matter is modified by time, change and process, rather than being something inert. Working with responsive, generative and durational materials, the intention is to construct a temporal arc, an open-ended situation in which the presentation is just a moment in the timeline of the work. The practice exemplifies the processual life of the artwork in order to open up possibilities for how the work is engaged and encountered in a given space. Enacted over time, these gestures are assembled into the installation as residues that emerge from the work’s array of processes.
Josephine Mead is a visual artist, curator & writer, residing on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Country. She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening; examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography; and charted notions and experiences of queer-love.
She has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, in Australia and abroad. She has undertaken residency programs in rural Victoria (The Macfarlane Fund), Mexico (Arquetopia Foundation), Portugal (Córtex Frontal), Turkey (Tasarim Bakkali TAB) and Germany (ZK/U). She was an inaugural Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards. She co-founded Co- Publishing (with Christine McFetridge) in 2020 and was a founding Artistic Director of MILK Gallery in 2022. In 2023 she participated in the Writing in the Expanded Field program through the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). She was Chair of Artistic Directors for Blindside Gallery from 2020-2022 and re-joined the Blindside team as Community Coordinator in 2024.
Kaijern Koo is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Naarm / Melbourne. Confounded by the innate human instinct to decipher and make sense, her practice gravitates towards the fantastic slipperiness of interpretation and the strange logics which often ensue.
Kate Rohde completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2001. Since then she has become known for her intensely colourful jewellery and sculptural object based practice, nowadays working predominately with resin and hand casting techniques.
Recent exhibitions include Luminous Realms, a solo survey of her work since 2006 at Craft, Magic Object; the 2016 Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, 21st Century Heide at Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Obsessed: Compelled to make, at the Australian Design Centre. In 2015 she was a finalist in the Rigg Design Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Other projects include collaborating with Sydney fashion house Romance was Born on their 2010/11 S/S collections Renaissance Dinosaur and 2011 A/W Fruits and Flowers. Her work is held in the collections of several institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia and Bendigo Art Gallery.
Kate is represented by Pieces of Eight Gallery, Melbourne.
Kate Wallace is a Melbourne based artist who looks to record and translate experiences of places past and present through the dialogue of representational painting. Informed by photographs taken in wait or transit, Wallace considers our shared view of the world as an intimate counterpoint to the fast and constant experience of today.
Kate holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Wallace has exhibited across Melbourne in galleries including Lon Gallery, Yarra Sculpture Gallery, C3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings Artist Run, Hyper Contemporary and Linden Projects Space. She was awarded the Wingate Student Fellowship Art Prize in 2018, and is a recent recipient of a Career Development Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer investigating semiotics, hauntology and the archive. She recently completed her MFA at the University of Melbourne, for which she was awarded a Graduate Research Scholarship, the Peter Redlich Memorial Art Prize and a Cranbourne Scholarship. She has exhibited at Lon Gallery, F.S. Meyer Gallery, CAVES, TCB, ACMI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Kings ARI, La Trobe Art Institute, Blindside, George Paton Gallery, VOID Gallery, Irene Rose, SEVENTH Gallery and Bus Projects. She writes for publications such as Performance Review, Vault Magazine, Art + Australia, un Magazine, Running Dog, Runway Journal and Art Almanac alongside a variety of art galleries.
Kurt Medenbach is a Naarm/Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist who explores the intersections of identity and technology. Originally a sound artist, their installation-based practice has now expanded towards all senses. The work bridges those gaps between the digital and the physical. Employing a dissociated sense of time — they have a particular interest in the fragmented temporality that exists in contemporary digital spaces, especially the internet.
Lauren Dunn works predominantly with photography and also occupies the idea of photographic thinking through other materials such as sculpture and video as a means of twisting the codes and conventions of photography. As an active participant in post-photographic discourse Lauren believes the many images surrounding us are an indicator of contemporary consumer politics. With an inherent interest in popular consumption trends and their associated images, Lauren utilises her practise to understand and question the power structures influencing our desires, ethics and the broader impact of commodity culture.
Lauren graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a BA in Fine Art honours in 2018. Lauren’s work is held in various public and private collections and she has been the recipient of a number of prizes; including the Myer Family Foundation Prize, Abbotsford Convent start up studio residency award and the David Fell Photography Award. Lauren has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and the USA. Selected exhibitions include: Kyneton Stockroom Greener pastures, BUS projects The Green Sheen, Verge Gallery Sydney Still Life Pt II, LON Gallery Fruit & Veg & Parodies, Cal Arts (USA) Heavy Duty. Lauren participated in Spring 1883 (Sydney 2017, 2018 & 2019) with LON Gallery and was a fnalist in the 2017 Bowness Prize and the 2019 Darebin Art Prize.
Levi Franco makes work that examines the roles of different professions in an endeavour to create scenes that question whether the work is a documentation or invention. Inspiration is drawn from the working roles of different people as well as his own memories and experiences from working different jobs over the years. These roles are explored by removing the subjects from their traditional context and then placing himself in their position. The scenes created extract the environment of the specific venue or workplace from its primary situation and place it inside the gallery space in a state of transposition.
Lou Hubbard uses various media, from any discipline, to examine the nature of training, submission, and subordination. Basic materials of domestic and institutional utility—very often personal objects—are tried and tested, then shaped into formal relationships. Objects are subjected to various modes of control and duress through which they must submit to her rules, and emotional resonances are drawn out through careful selection and placement of these found and readily-at-hand materials.
Lou Hubbard teaches in the School of Art, VCA and is represented by Sarah Scout Presents Melbourne.
Madeleine Minack is an interdisciplinary, contemporary artist who works primarily in installation and sculptural practice. Based in Melbourne, she has recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Art, Painting, at the VCA. Madeleine’s practice derives from a process of accumulating discarded found objects to produce small, intimate sculptures which reflect minute details of normally unnoticed everyday matter. Through this process of collection, she creates something that from a distance looks insignificant but, upon close examination, becomes detailed, complex bodies of works. Formed out of a found materials, wax, and string binders, her sculptures form a home or nest for that which would normally be lost.
Madeleine Thornton-Smith has obtained various qualifications including a Bachelor of Arts/Visual Arts (Monash, 2013), Honours of Fine Art (Monash, 2014) and Diploma of Ceramics (Holmesglen, 2017). In 2017 she achieved First-Class Honours in Object-Based Practice (Ceramics) at RMIT. Madeleine has exhibited in various galleries throughout Melbourne, including Monash University, Topshelf gallery, Seventh, Lamington Drive and Craft Victoria.
Majed Fayad uses video, photographic montage and sculptural practice to address popular western culture’s use of eastern culture, asserting the notion that “culture is for sale”.
Mira Oosterweghel is an artist living and working on the stolen lands of the people of the Kulin Nations. Her recent work is informed by settler narratives and her childhood experiences of farm life and working in a shearing shed on Gunditjmara land. Selected exhibitions include: Objects for ruminant restraint, 2019 at Bus Projects; Figuratively Speaking, 2018 curated by Laura Lantieri at CCP; Fake it til you make it or you’ve got the power, 2017 at TCB Art Inc; Primavera 2016, curated by Emily McCormack at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Screen as a Room, 2016 curated by Nikki Lam at the Substation, Melbourne.
MJ Flamiano is a visual artist and community arts worker, living and working on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation in Melbourne, Australia.
She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) from Monash University Art Design and Architecture, and a Diploma of Library and Information Services from Victoria University. She endeavours to present critical and often playful investigations into sites and their cultural significance. Her present focus is on exploring Filipinx histories and diaspora through sculptural installation, video, printmaking and text.
Olivia Mròz (b. 1989, Melbourne, Australia) currently works and resides in Melbourne. She holds a Bachelor of Photography (Fine Art) from Photography Studies College completed in 2015. She is currently in enrolled in a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Pia Johnson is a photographer and visual artist, whose practice emerged out of a concern with issues of cultural identity and difference, stemming from her mixed background of Chinese Italian Australian descent. These themes underpin her interest in memory, family archive, cultural spaces and performance – she often features in her work – to investigate notions of transcultural identity, belonging and otherness. Pia uses photography, moving image and installation to create works that re-frame, re-image and re-read the shifting social and cultural narratives within our contemporary culture. Her work is deeply personal and resolutely political - it ultimately aims to find connection across generation, time and place.
Pia’s work has been exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including the National Gallery of Victoria, Wollongong Art Gallery, Ballarat Art Gallery, Queensland Centre of Photography, Photography Centre of Perth, Gold Coast City Gallery, Pingyao International Photography Festival (China), The Museum of the City of Cuernavaca (Mexico), PhotoAccess, Stockroom Kyneton, Edward Pearce Gallery, Project Basho Gallery (USA), Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Castlemaine Festival, Bundoora Homestead, Blindside, Mailbox Art Space and Manningham Art Gallery amongst others.
Pia has been a finalist in many photography awards, including the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, PCP’s Iris Award, Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women, Martin Kantor Photographic Portrait Prize. She has held artist residencies at the National University of Singapore and Studio Kura in Japan and her work is collected in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria.
Working across collaborative and generative cross-disciplinary projects, she has had commissions from 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, Punctum Inc and AsiaTOPA, the Australian National Academy of Music and Fraught Outfit; and she is regularly invited as a guest speaker and artistic advisor for a range of organisations. Pia is well known for her commercial practice in portrait and performance photography, working with major to small-medium and independent arts organisations and creatives in Australia.
Pia holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual arts) and Diploma of Modern Languages (Mandarin) from the University of Melbourne, and is currently a PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University where she also lectures.
Ponch Hawkes is a Melbourne-based photographic artist whose work has been widely exhibited and published in Australia. A significant part of Hawkes’ output is documentary, and a commentary on Australian society and cultural life since the 1970s. In her work she considers topics such as: the body and movement; sport; circus and theatre; the environment and community; and relationships—with a feminist purpose. Hawkes is a self-taught photographer and attended art school for the first time in her 70s, having graduated from Latrobe College of Art & Design in 2020.
Rachel Button's practice combines the elemental forces of ‘Spiral Jetty’ with the energy of punk - a clash of prehistory with futurism. The methodology sits between a school play and a science diorama - an enquiry into the relationship between storytelling and the production of meaning. They retreat to an interior world and fire is its beginning. In this mythology, fire was the first tool, and their iPhone camera is its technological successor in the history of human culture.
Sara Retallick is an artist and researcher living and working on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm. Her work explores human perceptions of sound through constructed sonic encounters. Currently, she is investigating sound in underwater environments to expand sonic contexts and to push the physical limits of listening and understandings of sound.
Sara also performs live with exploratory electronics, bass and voice. She has contributed to various live projects over the past 18 years, having performed shows for Dark MOFO (2016), Melbourne Music Week (2021), and Shepparton Art Museum (2022). The evolving nature her live practice aims to harness the freedom to experiment, offering genre-crossing encounters that span soundscape, noise, sound collage, pop music and improvisation.
Sara has exhibited internationally at Reina Sofía in Madrid, Sapin (2020) and I.S.E.A. in Durban, South Africa (2018). Nationally, Sara has presented installations at RISING Festival (2021), BLINDSIDE (2019), and Bus Projects (2017).
Siying Zhou is a China-born Australian artist. Her practice is mostly identified within the visual art discipline and drawn upon my self-reflection on my Chinese heritage and my social status as an Asian female immigrant. She obtained the Master of Fine Art, at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne in 2018. She is the recipient of Linden Art Prize 2019. Her works have been exhibited in those, Buxton Contemporary Art (VIC), Newcastle Art Gallery (NSW), Ararat Art Gallery TAMA (VIC), Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NT), and Meinblau Projektraum (Germany).
Skye Malu Baker's practice is influenced by fragmentary cultural histories, the temporal slipperiness of the autobiographical and the active properties of the technologies and materials with which she collaborates. Her work is often concerned with the intertextual, the tension between the graphic and the gestural, and with narrative unwinding. Semiotic instability and inconsistencies are invited into her practice as intriguing communicative tools that make space for the poetic and unsayable. She is grateful to practice on Wurundjeri land.
Tai Snaith investigates the nature of visual storytelling, nostalgic viewpoints and personal histories. She works across a broad range of mediums including painting, sculpture, spoken conversations and large public realm commissions. Her current body of oil paintings were begun during her residency at Bundanon in 2023 and continued into 2024 where she has been working in a whole derelict house in North Fitzroy as her studio. Tai will be presenting a solo exhibition of paintings with Nicholas Thompson Gallery in August 2024.
Tai (born Melbourne 1980) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) from the Victorian College of Art in 2002. Tai has work held in numerous public and private collections, including Artbank, NGA, Bayside, Great Victorian Rail Trail and the State Library of Victoria. Tai has written and illustrated 6 picture books published with Thames and Hudson Australia, shortlisted for the world Illustration Awards in London and the winner of the Banyule works on paper prize.
Tamara Marrington completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing and Printmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2018. In 2017 she was awarded the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship and the year after shortlisted for the Majlis Travelling Scholarship. Most recently she has been included in LON Gallery’s Viewing Room series, and has had solo exhibitions at Pig Melon (WA) and Melbourne University House. She has been included in group exhibitions at Blindside, Chamber Presents, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA Art Space and The Living Museum of the West. In 2021 she will be an artist-in-residence at Fremantle Arts Centre.
Yvette James’ practice focuses on fabricating spaces with the aim to affect the body through pre-intellectualised response. Her work strives for a level of conceptual accessibility by concentrating on individualised reactions. Informed by an amateur interest in astrophysics as well as architectural restraints, her work disrupts assumed physical reliances, creating potential responses of unrest.
Yvette completed her BFA at Monash University in 2018. Since then she has exhibited at Blindside ARI and Bus Projects, alongside participating in Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Yvette has recently completed a residency at Popps Packing in Detroit, Michigan.
Zainab Hikmet completed her Masters of Fine Arts at RMIT in 2015, following Undergraduate and Honours degrees from Auckland University of Technology. She has exhibited in various galleries throughout New Zealand and Australia and in 2015 was selected to complete a residency and exhibition at Singapore’s Tropical Lab at LASALLE College of Arts.
Ezz Monem (born Mohamed Ezzeldin M. Abdelmonem; October 23, 1985) is a photo-based artist from Egypt who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University in 2007, but his explorations in visual arts began years earlier. In 2003, he began to focus on photography besides his work as a software developer. His work has been shown in exhibitions in Egypt, Australia and various other countries in Europe and the Middle East where he received various awards. Monem has recently completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne.
Ezz Monem is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY gallery.
Georgia Cheesman is an artist, curator, researcher and arts worker based in Naarm. Georgia holds a Masters of Art Research (Exhibition Studies) from Central Saint Martins in London, UK, she also gained a Bachelor of Design (Fashion)(Honours) from RMIT University in 2014. Georgia has worked in arts administration, exhibition and project management, digital marketing, public programs and sponsorship. She is passionate about community engagement and is dedicated to supporting artists and their practice. She places emphasis on embracing positive growth and continuous learning in every experience. Georgia also maintains her own creative practice working with glass, metal and the body.
Jacqueline Stojanović (Australian, b. 1992) lives and works in Melbourne, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Monash University in 2014, and a BFA (First Class Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015.
Taking a position that weaving is an ancient carrier of culture, Stojanović’s practice considers histories of the handmade through the processes of weaving, drawing and installation. Stojanović adopts the language of abstraction and explores weaving in an expanded way through an open use of materials from the industrial to the domestic.
Kari Lee McInneny McRaeKari Lee McInneny-McRae would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which they work; the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. Kari would like to pay their respect to elders both past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded on this land. It is a privilege to make and exhibit art on these Countries. As a settler, Kari acknowledges their implicit role in the invasion, colonization and occupation of the stolen lands on which they work. This land was and always will be Aboriginal land .
Clare Steele is an Australian photographer would lives and works in Narrm (Melbourne). Through her practice she seeks to construct a contemporary narrative of people’s emotional and physical connections to place and each other.
In 2015, Clare graduated with a Bachelor of Photography from Photography Studies College, winning the Award for Photojournalism/Documentary Photography. Clare's first book (self-published) J.W. was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award 2016 in Amsterdam and received a commendation from Australian Photobook of the Year Awards 2017. Her publications can be found in the permanent archives of The National Library of Australia, Martin Parr Foundation England, The Library Project Ireland and The Asia Pacific Photobook Archive. Clare’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. In 2018, she took part in a residency program in Sevilla, Spain. And most recently having two solo shows in Melbourne of her series’ Descendants and Beneath.
Khi-lee ThorpeKhi-Lee Thorpe is never more than a hand-span away from art. In addition to her visual art, she has worked in radio as a broadcaster and has previously produced sound montages and video Art. She recently graduated from a Masters of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Art and also holds a Masters of Media and Communication from Swinburne University of Technology. Her recent work includes gestural abstracted paintings on recycled internal doors. She takes inspiration from her Worimi heritage from the Mid North Coast of NSW.
Lekhena Porter is a freelance artist and photographer from Aotearoa, New Zealand based in Birraranga (Melbourne). Their practice is largely based around analogue photography and its ability to capture its subject in a raw and authentic way.
Lucy Foster is a Naarm based artist who works across a range of media including photography and installation. Her practice engages with assemblage through the use of found objects, imagery and texts. Aesthetically, these materials show signs of decay and loss to their function, information or context. This reflects Lucy’s recurrent exploration into experiences of mortality and loss.
Lucy graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 2018 at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has curated and participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally. Selected exhibitions include third eye, Seventh (2020); silent raptures, Stockroom (2020); matter of course, Bus Projects (2019); an end seems very finite, Cathedral Cabinet (2019); healthy loss, Castlemaine Art Space (2019); group show, Low Standards, Oslo, NO (2019); you make me sick, Second Space Projects (2018); crossed hair, Testing Grounds (2018); Majlis Award, Margaret Lawrence Gallery (2016); and more or less, The Běhal Fejér Institute, Prague, CZ (2015).
Karl Halliday is a Belfast-born curator, photographer and writer based between Narrm/Melbourne and Boorloo/Perth. Karl’s curatorial pursuits leverage his specialised interest in contemporary photography, conceptual art and performance theory with a focus on pedagogical approaches to exhibition making and art programming. Karl currently serves as Grants Coordinator and Vice Chair on BLINDSIDE’s board of directors. He holds a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
Nina Sanadze’s artistic practice is dedicated to peacebuilding, often including narratives built upon personal stories from within the experience of conflict; a wall of remembering that acts as a fortification against repeating histories. Presenting appropriated original artefacts, blunt replicas or films as witnesses and evidence, she seeks to re-examine grand political narratives from a diametric personal position. Deploying any appropriate medium, Sanadze’s work responds to the most immediate socio-economic and political global developments with urgency. Described as “conceptual art dressed in classical form” her projects manifest themselves as sizeable installations and social practice.
Henry Trumble is an Australian photographer. Photography fills most of his waking moments. His process is his purpose as he works with traditional and contemporary methods. Henry's lens captures how he sees and what he finds with an eye for the absurdity in life.
Henry works with the best marketing agencies, art galleries, architecture studios and designers. Collaboration is one of his driving forces and he’s inspired by the dynamic nature of photography to simultaneously capture reality and turn it on its head.
Henry holds a Bachelor of Visual Communications from The University of South Australia and completed the Photography Intensive at Columbia University in New York in 2013. He has since spent three years living and working in Berlin. Henry is currently working on projects in Melbourne, Australia.
Chantelle Mitchell is a curator and writer, currently Secretary for BLINDSIDE, advisor for SEVENTH Gallery, and independent producer. Her work has appeared in Plumwood Mountain, Axon Journal, Marrickville Pause¸ The Lifted Brow, Heart of Hearts and others. She has delivered performance lectures for Bus Projects, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Chantelle is one half of Ecological Gyre Theory with Jaxon Waterhouse, an interdisciplinary research practice seeking to continue the momentum guiding the ecological turn which has come to dominate the humanities in the 21st Century. As part of EGT, Chantelle has been published in eflux, art+Australia, presented for ACCA, ANU and Oxford University. Upcoming engagements include presentations for the Norweigan Petroleum Museum and KTH University of Sweden, residencies in Sweden and Broken Hill, with forthcoming exhibitions for the University of Melbourne and Edith Cowan University.
