Red Paint on Concrete Walls - ARIXCHANGE

ARIXCHANGE - a collaborative residency exchange between Sawtooth ARI & and Blindside.

ARIXCHANGE is a collaborative residency exchange between Sawtooth ARI (Palawa Country / Tasmania) and Blindside (Naarm / Melbourne).

In January 2025 Yongping Ren will travel from Blindside to Sawtooth ARI and Olly Read will travel from Sawtooth ARI to Blindside. The artists will work together through two development residency periods to explore synergies between their respective practices. This funded opportunity will culminate in a public offering on Saturday 18th January at Blindside, that will extend into an exhibition that will run until 25th January 2025. This marks the first stage of ongoing collaborations between Blindside and Sawtooth ARI and a celebration of the value of resource sharing between ARIs and artists.

Olly Read (Impious Monk) is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice centres on the use of found materials and soft sculpture to explore and articulate the subject of the body through a trans* lens; including it’s physicality, it’s politics, as well as its role as an individual vessel. Read holds a MFA from the University of Tasmania (2022) after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with first class Honours (2019) from the same and since 2018 has exhibited his works throughout lutruwita/Tasmania.

Yongping Ren is an artist working across clay, paper, drawing and colour. He is currently studying in the MFA program at RMIT and has been running Run Artist Run in Docklands since 2023.

This program is supported by Situate Art in Festivals, Arts Tasmania and Creative Australia.