30 June 2009 - 19 July 2009

Reconstructing the Future - Jelena Telecki

“Every minute of the future is a memory of the past” Laibach, 1981

Works in  ‘Reconstructing the Future’ are part of my ongoing attempts to recover and re-examine memories - the end product of everything that I have successfully mapped in my mind and than replicated on the surface. The need to go through this process comes from the experience of living in a country affected by the failed utopias obsessed with the future.

The Petrol Can Rider - Simon O’Carrigan

The Petrol Can Rider is a hand-drawn animation described as “Mad Max meets Franz Kafka at twelve frames per second”.

www.simonocarrigan.com.au

Hairline - Marc Alperstein

Hairline is a series of drawings focused on hair as a device to create a group of indistinct portraits.

www.marcalperstein.com

9 Jun 09 - 26 Jun 09

Candystripers - Gemma Jones & Lauren Brown

The Candystripers is a collaboration between two Melbourne artists: pop-artist Gemma Jones and installation artist Lauren Brown. Their latest project is in the entrance to Bus Gallery, an artist run space in the heart of Melbourne, and is the third in a series of projects based in Melbourne.

Seeking to create hyper-real spaces that walk the line between exterior and interior experiences, The Candystripers project at Bus transforms the foyer into a cross between Victorian wallpaper, an oversized minimalist painting and a helicopter landing pad.

Saints of the Apocalypse - Nicole Dominic & Sarah Bunting

Imagining a post-apocalyptic society in which familiar objects are recontextualised and raised to the status of icons, a series of shrines and totems have been constructed in the gallery space. Combining the symbolism of religious and financial structures, waste and profligacy are raised to new heights in an absurd paean to consumption. As part of an opening night performance, audience members are invited to contribute a small, clean piece of rubbish as an offering to unknown deities.

Name/Title - Julie Traitsis & Rebecca Joseph

It started with a list- “Girls Names in Songs.” After editing our own compilation of songs, the result of this exhibition is a mixed melody of girl’s names, played through numerous speakers within the installation.

Stripped from both their original form and lyrical narrative, the sequence of names becomes similar to a roll call, still each fragment triggers a more personalised memory, unique to each listener. What were dedications to those of the; past, present and potential are now call outs to what we the audience may provide.

Abracadaver - Lauren Brown

Abracadaver is a show about magic, death and artifice. The exhibition draws on aspects of the macabre and the somber, as well as the fantastic to create architecturally-inspired and objects and spaces of death.

The work by Lauren Brown, including jack-in-the-box funerary urns and hurdy-gurdy coffins, investigates the social taboo of housing death and its links with the secrets of magic and trickery: her sound/light-based work and interactive sculpture actively “put the fun into funeral”.

19 May 09 - 5 Jun 09

Lines Of Flight - Nina Knezevic

The Deleuzian term lines of flight is part of a vocabulary dedicated to emphasising how things connect rather than how they ‘are’, actions and tendencies that could evolve in creative mutations rather than a ‘reality’ that is an inversion of the past. Since 2002, I’ve repeatedly immigrated between three cities (Belgrade, Wellington and Sydney) and progressively compiled a fascicular autobiographical archive (containing elements like familial photographs, correspondence, travel memorabilia etc). I use site-specificity of each city and the elements of the archive as key mnemonic, experiential sources. I seek to connect the process of making art to the temporality of lived experience.

Lines of flight, presented at Bus Gallery, is a body of work created exclusively while living in Belgrade for six months in 2008.

Soft City - Llawella Lewis

Ecology is the study of the ways in which communities of living organisms interact with on another and with their non-living environment.

Soft City is an installation of an illuminated city, reminiscent of an alien landscape. It comprises many building-like structures ranging from one to two and a half metres in height. Each building is individually lit from within, emanating a warm glow. This internal source of energy pulses slowly, as if to imply the city is a living ecosystem or entity.

In a Cheap Exercise Book - Fernando Ariel Gallardo & Duncan McBride

In a Cheap Excercise Book is a series of pop songs performed as a music/performance art event. The songs performed highlight the writings from a series of exercise books that document the beginning and decline of romantic relationships. The writing ranges from short pieces of poetry, song lyrics and anecdotes. The instruments used are non-traditional and vary from vintage Casio’s to glockespiel and from wines glasses to bubble wrap. Even the sound of Tupperware, plastic buckets and disbanded Ikea furniture are put to use. The music will range From 80’s Prince-Style Funk to a cabaret blues using a Melodica. The work does not ignore any musical genre in order to communicate the journey of the relationship but remains experimental in how it conveys text, voice and sound through genre.

28 April until 15 May

Insiders and Outsiders: an everyday tale of a domestic veneer - Main
Fleur Brett

My work looks at everyday objects and settings within my immediate environment; responding to a tension between an attraction to an abstract aesthetic and a more subjective and personal narrative (associations with a material or object). Ideas hover around function and form and the everyday visual and tactile experience we have of our material world.

This body of work uses the language of packaging/concealment to explore the enclosed space to reveal what is often seen as insubstantial (a cardboard box discarded after the contents are removed, the material used to protect furniture and flooring in the home, or the veneers or painted signage used to clad buildings and driveways.

Through a focus on materials and form the work becomes, reductive, abstracted and often removed from the representational. Negative and positive space is explored through the patterning of flat surfaces with cut out and drawn planes that are transformed into 3 dimensional objects themselves.

Structure Pattern - Skinny
Antonia Sellbach

Structure Pattern is an installation of geometric forms created by staining thick printmakers paper with a mixture of linseed oil and pigments until the papers are fully saturated. The surface of these paper after staining reveals a materiality that wasn’t there before. The work explores how tessellating forms open up dead ends and surface patterns with a space.

Siren - Sound
Andrew Goodman

Siren utilizes soft sculpture, electronics and multi-channel audio to create an immersive interactive installation.

Al Ouchtomsky, Joanna Mortreux, Kyoko Imazu, Emmet O’Dwyer - Second Nature

Bringing together works that examine the ways in which our culture perceives nature, Second Nature investigates the role humanity plays in influencing the world in regards to evolution, extinction and cultural manipulation. Second Nature draws attention to the ever increasing gap between civilisation and the wilderness. By using various media such as printmaking, painting and collage, the works become a combined response and a questioning of how we as humans fit into the natural world.

Dell Stewart and Adam Cruickshank - Thing
Skinny Gallery

Working in the same studio on separate things, Adam and Dell have produced a series of amalgamated things, made things and borrowed things glued to other things. These things are things in both form and signification. A playful room of experimentation at its most obvious but also an examination into the nature of things, things we make, things that are made for us, things joined together, and what these things mean. A thing is an object without specific name or form. An item, device, artifact, tool or instrument. You can find them in the supermarket, on the street, from outer space, from within your own blood cells, or at the back of your cupboard behind the shoes.

Kotoe Ishii - Lipstick ON/OFF
Sound Gallery

LIPSTICK ON/OFF depicts two faces of a woman endlessly putting red lipstick on and wiping it off. As she continuously draws and erases circles, it leaves smirch spreading over her face, looks like she got beaten up. While these acts appear simple and a bit childish, there are both sinister and sexual undertones to the performance. This challenges the notion of femininity, replacing them with an uncanny speculation on orifices and embodiment.

Zoe MacDonell - Ecstatic Shadow

Main Gallery

Ecstatic Shadow consists of a new media film work and a large oil painting. Both are complementary pieces, documenting the same imagery construct of light and shadow. The projected film explores a passage of gently dynamic shadow movements, while the painting renders the same relationship between light and dark as an isolated moment in time. Across the gallery space these pieces mirror each other.

My work deals with reality, in particular our understanding of landscape, both personal and physical. This work explores the relationship that we have to our surrounds and investigates the nature of reality and layers of perception.

Debbie Pridmore - Before
Skinny Space

Memory, time, and perception are reoccurring themes within my work, their import relating to the integral role they play in my concept of how we experience the world.

Any given moment is the total sum of the past that precedes it, the present moment, and the future it will impact. Our experiences, and the way in which we negotiate the world, are a perpetual force with no beginning and no end. Everything we do is informed by prior events and managed according to anticipated outcomes.

When attempting to communicate our experiences we must choose a beginning point and decide on an end, often employing  recognisable structures to describe this boundless phenomena, that of memory and experience. While the painted works have no narrative content, I want to suggest the problematic nature of defining these moments in time.

I hope to impart a tension between recognition and obscurity, for the transition between one object and another to defy absolute detection.  Subject and ground tend to bleed into each other and, primarily, the works read as shifts between light and dark.

The subject used to illustrate these themes is light. Light is the means by which we are able to view the world yet it also has the ability to render something visually incomprehensible.

Clare Rae - The Rise and Fall
Sound Gallery

The Rise and Fall is a video work made up of photographic stills, depicting the artist rotating in a circle in mid air. The video is looped, the subject remains locked in an endless cycle, both trepidatious and exultant through each revolution.

Considering notions of the woman in the Australian landscape, The Rise and Fall deals with ideas surrounding contemporary feminism and femininity, whilst investigating the relationships between gender, staging and performance.

Opens: 6pm Tuesday 24 February. Until 13 March.

Artist Talks: 1pm, Saturday 28 February

Film Screening: 7.30pm Thursday 26 February at Horse Bazaar 397 Little Lonsdale St. Melbourne

Artists Attending: Tintin Wulia (Denpasar/Melbourne), Bambang ‘Toko’ Witjaksono (Yogyakarta), Bayu (Yogyakarta), Angki Purbandono (Yogyakarta) & Ardi Gunawan (Jakarta/Melbourne)

Also featuring the work of: Video Battles, Ruang MES 56, Taring Padi, Video Babes, Jompet Kuswindananto, Yes No Wave Music, Black Ribbon, Iyok Prayogo, Uji ‘Hahan’ Saputro & Forum Lenteng

KOMPILASI draws upon the contemporary art scene of Yogyakarta, Bandung and Jakarta in Indonesia to present a diverse exhibition of photography, installation, sculpture, interactive art, video, film, drawing, sound, graphic/street art and product design. Co-curated by Kristi Monfries, Timothy O’Donoghue and Georgia Sedgwick with the assistance of the artists involved, the exhibition will he held at one of Melbourne’s most innovative independent arts organisations, Bus Gallery, and will include a program of performances and artist’s talks as well as film screenings at Horse Bazaar and listening stations and product displays at Sunshine & Grease (a record shop located in Bus Gallery).
KOMPILASI attempts to highlight these very real artistic parallels between the contemporary arts scenes of Indonesia and Australia and in doing so uncover the vast opportunities for collaboration and exchange that these parallels offer.

Download the full press release.

Kompilasi is supported by the City of Melbourne.

Opening 6pm Tuesday 3 February. Until Friday 20 February.

From the fantasies of childhood to the awkward rebellion of teenagers, from sub cultures to high-street fashion, dressing up is the most personal and most universal way of expressing oneself. Fun, ritual, celebration, inspiration and remembering – these things are as natural a part of our lives as sleeping and dreaming.

We dress up in order to fit in, stand out, offend, seduce or escape; whether it be behind closed doors or in the public eye, fashion, costume and the way we groom ourselves express who we really are, who we want to be and how we want to be seen. Skin and Bones is a group show that aims to get back to the roots of this kind of human experience. Now in its third year, Skin and Bones is a unique show that celebrates costume, fashion and fantasy at Bus Gallery.

Skin and Bones 2009 and Bus are very proud to be a part of the L’Oréal Melbourne International Fashion Festival and acknowledge the support of the City of Melbourne.

Skin and Bones is also very excited to announce that it has once again been invited out of the Bus closet to exhibit at Penthouse Mouse in 2009.  See you at the show.

Artists: Oliver Hextall, Alex Vivian, Fjorn Butler, Alexander Ouchtomsky, Sean Bailey, Kiki Ando (Japan), Harriett Morgan, Evergreen Terrace, Sally Blenheim, Hyper colour castle, Thomas Bernard (France), Circle Pit (Sydney), Dell Stewart, Tin&Ed, Jarrah de Kuijer.

Curated by Patrick O’Brien.

MAIN GALLERY | Sean Rafferty & Camille Serisier

SKINNY GALLERY | Darcey Arnold

SOUND GALLERY| Jarrah de Kuijer

Opening Tuesday 2nd September 6-8pm…Until 20th September

BACKDROP
Sean Rafferty & Camille Serisier |

Sean Rafferty and Camille Serisier met in 2005 when they exhibited at the now defunct Wren Gallery in Sydney’s Surrey Hills. From their first meeting they recognised in each other’s work sympathetic areas of investigation, not just in the realm of materiality, but also through a parallel use of space and conceptual subject matter. In BACKDROP, both artists focus on the structure of landscape and theatrical space, and the way landscapes are depicted to satisfy a purpose. For both artists, the representation of the landscape as isolated by the image frame or proscenium arch provides a point of departure to explore their relative ideas. Like the diorama, which exists as a type of three-dimensional still life sans performers, the works in this exhibition will be presented in a pictorial space incorporating the depth of the stage space.

EXTERMINATE
Darcey Arnold |

The last fifty years have been particularly fruitful regarding the discoveries and development of technology in our society. We heavily rely on these technological advances, an addiction that has seen prolific growth in inner-city Melbourne. Everyone experiences constant exposure to technology, the social consequences emanating from the development of mobile phones and also social networking websites such as ‘FACEBOOK’/'MYSPACE’ is incredible, and has tangibly influenced etiquette of social interaction. And emulating a relationship or paradigm in which the technology, and the society who creates it, that are joined intimately, perhaps as old friends, society is so intimately entwined with technology to an almost disturbing extent.

ENDGAME
Jarrah de Kuijer |

As a Modern society we are continuously imagining our own demise. Likewise, Art has been declared dead over and over again since the days of Dada. Yet still new things are found in the refuge. It seems we are constantly on the edge of the end.
And then what? What follows the apocalypse? As human beings we have no concept of nothingness. The end only brings more endings. Thus, an ending can also be seen as another beginning. Like the saying goes; every destructive act is also an act of creation.
Endgame is a reinterpretation of technology and materials. The low-fi aesthetic and theatricality of the work creates a dialogue between notions of quality and gimmickry. Human attributes are embodied in banal objects using humour to play on the progressive role of technology and it’s effect on the human condition.
Four duplicate sculptures wave blankly back at their spectators. Blind, deaf and dumb, the crude kinetic machines incessantly attempt to communicate with a single universal gesture: the waving of a hand. Although appearing inane, waving has two obvious connotations; ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’
Like the four riders of the apocalypse or the doomsayer on the street corner, these degenerate commodities act as ironic signs to a future end that will never happen.

MAIN GALLERY | Vittoria di Stefano, Kirsten Perry & Clair Dougherty

SKINNY GALLERY | Ian Wadley

SOUND GALLERY | dimple…)

Opening Tuesday 12 August 6-8pm …Until Saturday 30 August

I EAT MEMORIES | Vittoria di Stefano, Kirsten Perry & Clair Dougherty

They say that at the moment of death, one’s life flashes before them. This montage of images documents the moments that comprise our own private story. How would this movie play out? Which images would be pulled from the recesses of consciousness to illustrate our own journey? Which images remain significant to us, and which fade into the ether? How accurate would our recollections be? Often through the muddy lens of memory, images are distorted, the order of events muddled, the size and proportion of objects misjudged, with results ranging from amusing to terrifying.
Vittoria Di Stefano, Clair Dougherty and Kirsten Perry are three Melbourne-based artists who explore these ideas through their respective practices of installation, sculpture and animation. They examine the role that memory plays in our lives today and how it affects our current experiences, including the idea of “collective memory”: archetypal memories that many of us share. I Eat Memories is an exhibition of new, site-specific work for Bus that investigates these themes.

ROOM TO LIVE AGAIN | Ian Wadley

Combining audio, photography, installation, and an artist-residency with a twist, Room To Live Again is a show about living nowhere in particular and feeling at home anywhere; about leaving home for work and not being sure if you’ve arrived; and the eternal question of when to go home again and where exactly that might be.
One end of the space is a “residency”, furnished with a couch, sleeping bag, lamp, guitar and laptop, where the artist will live and work for 3 weeks. At the other end is an “exhibition” of larger photographic prints - in the residential end, screen images and smaller prints will be available for the audience to view and leaf through. The artist inhabits the space, living and working on audio (and visual) projects. Visitors are welcome to interrupt with enquiries. Sound is an integral part of the exhibition, as musical as it is improvised.
Ian Wadley, a musician and photographer, has lived the last 3 years out of a suitcase, since a brief tour of Europe (with avant-rock band Bird Blobs) turned into a year in Berlin, 5 months back in Melbourne, then another year travelling in the USA, UK, Europe and Japan. He has never stayed more than 5 weeks at any address in this time (much less as a rule), traveling mostly for musical reasons, but also pausing to live in Leipzig, Lisbon and the Basque district of Spain. In 3 years Ian Wadley has made tens of thousands of photographs (ranging from ’serious photography’ to tourist snaps) since buying the first of three Contax i4R cameras, days before leaving to go on a brief tour..
Room To Live Again is, in part, a reconsideration of an earlier (and similar) exhibition Room To Live (Arch Lane, 1989) which in turn was inspired by the Fall album of the same name (lampooning as it does the WW2 Nazi expansionist policy of that name). It is also, in some ways, a response to the current rent crisis as much as it is an attempt to redefine notions of an “artist residency”.

THE RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT: THE INEVITABLE BEGINNING | dimple…)

The Reconstruction Project (2002-current) is an on-going exercise in and an exploration of a cultural/existentially deconstructed subject who attempts to reconstruct their identity through structures present within language which provide boundaries of understanding. In this current project the artist/subject traces back to her liminal attempts to conceptualise, realise and understand elements of this project and of her identity by creating conceptual diagrams (aka = brain maps, ideas maps, concept maps). Conceptual diagrams are commonly used to demonstrate of ideas, concepts, theories, to clarify concepts, to theorise. In this case the artist attempts to find clarity… clarity in her identity by conceptualising through several demonstrative diagrams which become obsessive because one is never suffice. How one is defined, never ends in this place because one is in a state of continual reconstruction, recreation, and revaluation, faced with countless cultural possibilities, translations and interpretations. Being lost in translation is a reality. I am investigating this space in my project between my pluralistic position through a these diagrams. What is understood is only understood in the moment. Clarity is temporal…