11 - 29 September 2024

Opening Night: Wed 11 September, 630-8pm

In this latest solo, Merrian Dennis explores through her mark making on paper the Japanese craft of Ikebana. The art of refinement, Ikebana places importance on shape, line and form - an integral part of Merrian Dennis' art practice.⁠

11 - 29 September 2024

Opening Night: Wed 11 Sept, 630-8pm

To escape is at the core of my being. 

Escape into passion, creativity, knowledge and freedom, and away from the realities of life. Through pigment and oil, I explore my deepest escape and envelop: a friend, a lover, a muse. And now you.  

Welcome to the shadows of my internal world, centre and core. Allowing queer expression and trust to lead, I work from life through hours of conversation, emotion and artistry to capture each portrait. Contextualising modern subjects in historical themes and medium, each portrait sits timeless in a world that has long since passed yet is violently present.

11 - 29 September 2024

Opening Night: Wed 11 Sept, 630-8pm

The Crystal Palace, Madrid is adorned with expansive glass panels on an iron structure that is clover shaped and crowned by a dome. The ingenious use of cast iron columns and generous glass surfaces allows for a spacious and grand interior, which compliments the description as a glass cathedral. It mirrors a sense of duplicate spaces, transparent, inside out. 

With its reflective surfaces and the refractions of light from the sun, Palacio de Cristal inspired this body of work. Each day that I spent on location resulted in differed shards of light and shapes that sparked an imagined new space for me; the inside was outside and vice versa. Transparent layers and multiple reflections created an optical illusion: surrounded by glass and encased in glass, the surrounding areas of space formed its own selection of fabricated façades.

2 - 20 October 2024

Opening Night: Wed 2 Oct, 630-8pm

A Walk in the Black Forest is a selection of paintings from a larger body of work that addresses the search for a level of enlightenment and being able to recognise spiritual identities and their relationships. Uncovering their relationship is to find a moving, shifting procession inhabiting the subconscious.

As in the German tradition of Waldeinsamkeit, solitude is found in the forest. It affords the mystery of an environment where the spiritual and physical intertwine. A Walk in the Black Forest analogously presents an opportunity to access a similar liminal space, engaging with the dark and light to gain an increased understanding of location, both ethereal and tangible.

Different hilltops allow for different views. 

2 - 20 October 2024

Opening Night: Wed 2 Oct, 630-8pm

Why  illustrate a poem?

As a child I loved the illustrated books of Edward Ardizzone, the celebrated British painter/printmaker, war artist /children’s author and illustrator and how the words work together with the pictures to tell the story. Enjoying the magic and play of words and pictures together inspired the illustration of the poem We Are Just.

The lithographs were all produced in 2023 working with master lithographer Petr Korbelar in Prague. The resultant book was bound by Krupka, a family book binders on the outskirts of the Czech capital city.

2 - 20 October 2024

Shirley Ploog is a visual artist based in Barwon Heads, Victoria who is passionate about the environment and capturing the beauty and fragility of nature. 

Walking is a key part of Ploog's art practice enabling her to slow down, to observe and to participate in the beauty of her coastal town.

Her paintings are vignettes of the responses to the coastal wonderland she cherishes. They are intimate, tranquil and calming, inviting the viewers to pause and take a closer look. There is a sense that by slowing down, one might uncover hidden depths and subtleties within the work.

Meandering through her paintings allows the viewer to capture the essence of nature’s experience. Subtle and translucent shifts of colour imbue the works with a presence and reverence for coastal beauty. These pieces celebrate the hidden, the unassuming, the intricate, the fragile – the minutiae of nature’s splendour.

23 October - 10 November 2024

Opening Night: Wed 23 Oct, 630-8pm

The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building: the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art. 

The title for the body of work is inspired by the book by William Gibson's Neuromancer, the first in the Sprawl trilogy and considered a Cyberpunk genre classic.

The works depict abstract figures who represent Cyber Hackers, present day bad actors with futuristic dystopian and artificial intelligent features, whose main objective is to cause major disruptions in various fields including political, economic and mostly societal.

We have all now become potential targets for this type of nefarious activity as our dependency on technology ever increases.