Cheralyn Lim graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with a BFA in 2011. In an overenthusiastic attempt to make you laugh, she tells too many jokes. Through a process of reiteration and abstraction, she transforms this tendency into installations that operate like an exaggerated anecdote. Using collage and sculpture, Cheralyn combines photographic imagery, acidic colour and simple construction to explore art as a diaristic outlet.

She informs her nostalgic methodology by obsessively recovering material from her everyday life, both past and present. This manifests in a DIY sensibility that makes use of craft items and household products as the material basis for her work. Combined with her lo-fi image sourcing, her works are riddled with guilty pleasures and juvenile tendencies.

Her practice has a childlike and hermetic nature. Drawing from a personalised  vernacular, banal statements become wordplay, trash becomes symbolic and vice versa – all brought down to rudimentary colours, shapes and patterns. This is a minimalist method with excessive results. What emerges is a chaotic fusion of the real and hallucinatory, the ugly and the beautiful, both pop and esoteric.

Her most recent project with BUS, Silver Vision (I Could Only See the Windows of the Tram), is an environment dedicated to brain mash, an ode to impractical practice. It is through this investigation that her practice tips into a state of inefficiency, a blinding and confusing conglomeration.

Via Flickr:
‘The Warmth of the Curve’
Michelle Sakaris
Opening event Thursday 17 May 5-7pm
17 May – 2 June 2012

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE is a series of new works by Michelle Sakaris that explores cross-cultural practices of ritual walking. The exhibition taking place at BUS Projects presents a dynamic combination of performance, video and found objects which invite audience involvement. Audiences are encourage to extend the performance out into public space by following one of the propositional self-directed walks.

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE focuses on the ritual of walking around a sacred object or site, drawing the form of a circle in space (circumambulation). This ritual appears again and again across a broad range of cultural and religious traditions. The circle is universally seen as enduring, complete and perfect, transcendental and that which is beyond the material. The encircled objects are considered sacred and include books, trees, baptismal fonts, buildings and mountains. THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE extends this ritual to a new set of objects that can be seen simultaneously as ordinary and symbolically loaded. To develop this project Sakaris has been working with a number of places of worship in the City of Melbourne. At the core of Sakaris’ project is the question: can we experience ritual in a secular context?

Michelle Sakaris is a visual artist based in Melbourne working across video, installation and performance. Her main interest is to seek out overlaps between religious ritual and conceptual art. She graduated form the VCA in 2009 and since then has had a number of solos exhibitions including Inhabiting Ritual at Kings ARI (2010), Architectures at Rear View Gallery (2011) and Theophany at White Street Project (2012). In 2010 she was the winner of the Blake Prize John Coburn Emerging Artists Award.

Michelle Sakaris’s project is be presented at BUS Projects as part of the 2012 Next Wave Festival.

nextwave.org.au/event/the-warmth-of-the-curve/

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE is a series of new works by Michelle Sakaris that explores cross-cultural practices of ritual walking. The exhibition taking place at BUS Projects presents a dynamic combination of performance, video and found objects which invite audience involvement. Audiences are encourage to extend the performance out into public space by following one of the propositional self-directed walks.

THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE focuses on the ritual of walking around a sacred object or site, drawing the form of a circle in space (circumambulation). This ritual appears again and again across a broad range of cultural and religious traditions. The circle is universally seen as enduring, complete and perfect, transcendental and that which is beyond the material. The encircled objects are considered sacred and include books, trees, baptismal fonts, buildings and mountains. THE WARMTH OF THE CURVE extends this ritual to a new set of objects that can be seen simultaneously as ordinary and symbolically loaded. To develop this project Sakaris has been working with a number of places of worship in the City of Melbourne. At the core of Sakaris’ project is the question: can we experience ritual in a secular context?

Michelle Sakaris is a visual artist based in Melbourne working across video, installation and performance. Her main interest is to seek out overlaps between religious ritual and conceptual art. She graduated form the VCA in 2009 and since then has had a number of solos exhibitions including Inhabiting Ritual at Kings ARI (2010), Architectures at Rear View Gallery (2011) and Theophany at White Street Project (2012). In 2010 she was the winner of the Blake Prize John Coburn Emerging Artists Award.

Michelle Sakaris’s project is be presented at BUS Projects as part of the 2012 Next Wave Festival.

http://nextwave.org.au/event/the-warmth-of-the-curve/

Image credit:
‘Experiment for The Warmth of the Curve’, Michelle Sakaris, 2011, Digital photography

SLOW DANCE is a solo exhibition of a series of recent works by Katya Grokhovsky. Taking place at BUS Projects in Gallery 1 and 2, SLOW DANCE is a concept, a metaphor of our slow, or incredibly fast, intimate, often coupled and extremely human, dance to the grave. Developed for a participatory live performance in 2010, (during a relocation to the US) with a desire to connect to others and based around the idea of a simple couple dance or an old-fashioned mating ritual, SLOW DANCE is an exploration of our simultaneous desire and fear of closeness, aging, loneliness and the ultimate distance between us. The exhibition is a combination of videos, found objects, drawings, photographs and an opening night and closing day participatory performance.

“Post-colonial theorist, Edward Said stated that “Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.”[i] For Katya Grokhovsky, having emigrated from the Ukraine to Australia as a teenager as part of her family’s escape from the collapsing Communist regime, then following her artistic career from Melbourne to London to Chicago to New York, this “inherent loss” in the existence of home and attachment to it have become part and parcel to her artistic practice. In Slow Dance, Grokhovsky performs fleeting moments of intimacy with her family and audience-participants as a marker of time and its passage, as a familiar and as a stranger.

The artist brings with her the only object she has been able to take with her throughout her travels, her own body. Within this body is an urgency to become accessible, to step out of the shadow of the Other, the foreigner, always waiting, always observing, always seeking to get it “right,” and to participate as one who belongs, as one who is, in actuality, home. What occurs out of this desire is a performance of self in the liminal space between these experiences. As a figure of the eternal dance partner, she must remain as others travel in and out of her arms. The artist acts as a messenger, mirror, or in psychoanalytic terms, a carrier of transference. Within the dyad of couples’ dancing, the artist makes herself available as a reflection of the desires, memories, and emotions held by her partners’ within their intimate relationships. Likewise, Grokohvsky literalizes this transference by dancing with her parents, and then opening up the space for even a stranger to act as a substitute. 

In Slow Dance, the act of turning is not only physical, but is also perceptual. As two bodies slowly learn to move synchronously, they communicate with one another through proprioception, sharing a kinesthetic awareness of movement.  Bodies glide apart and converge, sharing their stories without words. There is comfort in this activity, which is not about reaching any ultimate goal but to simply continue turning until someone steps away.  Said continues, “Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up?”[ii] Grokhovsky, poised in dress and heels, her arms arched and ready for the next dance, must experience the bittersweet moment of letting-go (of one partner), and be open to another through constant revolutions in the immediate physical and socio-political senses of the word. 

Through turning again and again without arriving at one partner, the artist celebrates intimacy for its own sake. She abandons a singular definition of place, self, or other, and allows her own perceptions to shift with each dance. Maurice Blanchot described a “great movement of love” as, “when you go beyond the beloved, when you are true to the audacity of this movement which knows neither stop nor limit, [which] surpasses him in order that he not be the screen that would hide the outside.”[iii] For Grokhovsky, Slow Dance is an act of love without a singular love object. It is a movement that is part of a greater flow and movement of coming together and growing apart. Through the other, we see again and again, that which is Other within ourselves. We learn through this interaction how to relate as both foreign and familiar.”

Text from “Together Apart: Slow Dancing with Katya Grokhovsky”, exhibition essay by Marissa Perel.  Exhibition Catalog
Available to purchase online: <LINK>

‘Bewildered’
Jemila MacEwan
Opening Thursday 26 April 6-8pm
GALLERY 1: 26 April – 12 May 2012

‘Bewildered’ presents a crime scene played out in the confines of a vaulted basement space. Four primates are also present at the scene. Instinct, imagination and reason become the tools for negotiation in a world that inhabits conditions of truth and where meaning is made from knowledge. Jemila MacEwan is a Melbourne based visual artist and designer. She is currently completing the Masters of Contemporary Art at the VCA. Jemila creates works that use encounter as a phenomenon to demonstrate the persistence of our imagined realities. Using the human bodily forms found in clothing to create anthropomorphic non-humans, she populates mythic worlds parallel to our own; situations manifest in which the marginalized push against systematic oppression, revealing the possibility to invert power relations.

—

‘trouser wanker piece’
Jon Hewitt
Opening Thursday 26 April 6-8pm
GALLERY 2: 26 April – 12 May 2012

‘trouser wanker piece’ is a continuation of hewitt’s exploration into how the hell to be an artist, and if it really is worth all the bother. hewitt’s work uses text, repetition, humour and appropriation across video, performance, painting and installation. he is an artist because he is not good-looking enough to be a model, athletic enough to be a football player, passionate enough to be an actor, rhythmic enough to be a musician or clever enough to be a scientist. in 2011, hewitt made ‘i am a serious artist’ a performance of hewitt wearing a placard that reads ‘i am a serious artist’. on the back of the placard were changeable texts from hewitt’s studio ramblings. the phrases asserted hewitt to be egocentric, lacking in artistic talent, a football lover, a bald man, a wanker. ‘trouser wanker piece’ and ‘i am a serious artist’ leave off where the artist keith arnatt’s ‘trouser word piece’ from 1972 stopped, a photograph of arnatt wearing a placard that reads ‘i’m a real artist’. after ‘trouser word piece’ keith arnatt never made conceptual art work again…

‘Bewildered’
Jemila MacEwan
Opening Thursday 26 April 6-8pm
GALLERY 1: 26 April – 12 May 2012

‘Bewildered’ presents a crime scene played out in the confines of a vaulted basement space. Four primates are also present at the scene. Instinct, imagination and reason become the tools for negotiation in a world that inhabits conditions of truth and where meaning is made from knowledge. Jemila MacEwan is a Melbourne based visual artist and designer. She is currently completing the Masters of Contemporary Art at the VCA. Jemila creates works that use encounter as a phenomenon to demonstrate the persistence of our imagined realities. Using the human bodily forms found in clothing to create anthropomorphic non-humans, she populates mythic worlds parallel to our own; situations manifest in which the marginalized push against systematic oppression, revealing the possibility to invert power relations.

—

‘trouser wanker piece’
Jon Hewitt
Opening Thursday 26 April 6-8pm
GALLERY 2: 26 April – 12 May 2012

‘trouser wanker piece’ is a continuation of hewitt’s exploration into how the hell to be an artist, and if it really is worth all the bother. hewitt’s work uses text, repetition, humour and appropriation across video, performance, painting and installation. he is an artist because he is not good-looking enough to be a model, athletic enough to be a football player, passionate enough to be an actor, rhythmic enough to be a musician or clever enough to be a scientist. in 2011, hewitt made ‘i am a serious artist’ a performance of hewitt wearing a placard that reads ‘i am a serious artist’. on the back of the placard were changeable texts from hewitt’s studio ramblings. the phrases asserted hewitt to be egocentric, lacking in artistic talent, a football lover, a bald man, a wanker. ‘trouser wanker piece’ and ‘i am a serious artist’ leave off where the artist keith arnatt’s ‘trouser word piece’ from 1972 stopped, a photograph of arnatt wearing a placard that reads ‘i’m a real artist’. after ‘trouser word piece’ keith arnatt never made conceptual art work again…

‘Bewildered’ presents a crime scene played out in the confines of a vaulted basement space. Four primates are also present at the scene. Instinct, imagination and reason become the tools for negotiation in a world that inhabits conditions of truth and where meaning is made from knowledge.

Jemila MacEwan is a Melbourne based visual artist and designer. She is currently completing the Masters of Contemporary Art at the VCA

Jemila creates works that use encounter as a phenomenon to demonstrate the persistence of our imagined realities. Using the human bodily forms found in clothing to create anthropomorphic non-humans, she populates mythic worlds parallel to our own; situations manifest in which the marginalized push against systematic oppression, revealing the possibility to invert power relations.

‘trouser wanker piece’ is a continuation of hewitt’s exploration into how the hell to be an artist, and if it really is worth all the bother. hewitt’s work uses text, repetition, humour and appropriation across video, performance, painting and installation.

he is an artist because he is not good-looking enough to be a model, athletic enough to be a football player, passionate enough to be an actor, rhythmic enough to be a musician or clever enough to be a scientist.

in 2011, hewitt made ‘i am a serious artist’ a performance of hewitt wearing a placard that reads ‘i am a serious artist’. on the back of the placard were changeable texts from hewitt’s studio ramblings. the phrases asserted hewitt to be egocentric, lacking in artistic talent, a football lover, a bald man, a wanker.

‘trouser wanker piece’ and ‘i am a serious artist’ leave off where the artist keith arnatt’s ‘trouser word piece’ from 1972 stopped, a photograph of arnatt wearing a placard that reads ‘i’m a real artist’. after ‘trouser word piece’ keith arnatt never made conceptual art work again…

i am a serious artist, 2011.
c-type print. 23 x 31.9cm. photo by britt salt.

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‘Cenotaph to a Momentary Triumph’
Sarah Bunting
Opening night Wednesday 4th April 6-8pm
GALLERY 1: 4 – 21 April 2012

Historically, the monument has acted as a site for the remembrance and celebration of human achievement. Cenotaph to a Momentary Triumph returns to its linguistic origin, monere, which translates as ‘to remind’, or ‘to warn’. Explored via a series of paintings, and sculptural objects that may have emerged from the painted space, within these works the monument perversely stands as a paean to failure: personal, social and political. These peculiar constructions stand abandoned, misunderstood and unlamented by their invisible observers. The ‘failed’ medium of painting becomes enfolded with the anachronism of fallible structures intended to reify events and peoples of the past.

Sarah Bunting is a Melbourne-based artist who is endlessly fascinated by the potential of the painted space. Exploring the painting as the locus of a collapse in time and space, her work explodes the fictional with a highly subjective ‘real’ in order to comment on systems of authority and notions of failure and success, both in a personal and broader political and social sense.

‘L’OCCUPANT or for the tactics of mental material’
Sherry McLane Alejos
Opening night Wednesday 4th April 6-8pm
GALLERY 2: 4 – 21 April 2012

… I already see the promontories of new lands. Those people who have the resolution to set forth on the undertaking will set foot on these lands and have the pleasure of designating them with their very own names.
-I. Kant

Driven by uncertainty, this work in progress plays with design, sound, electronics, and text. Theorems expand the corpus of fiction and create the ensemble to swing between validity and hoax.

McLane Alejos’ practice follows from a fascination with espionage and scientific data recording, connected with philosophical and metaphysical practices that are stimulated by language encryption and quasi-mathematical equations. She is currently undertaking Masters of Fine Art candidature at the VCA Faculty, University of Melbourne.

This project in proudly supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award and by The Mexican Arts and Culture Council (FONCA).