Curators
Amy Spiers is a Melbourne-based artist and writer interested in socially engaged and participatory art. Her art practice is deals with the complex conditions and contingencies required for people to meet and come together. As such, failed moments of connection are as integral to her works as are their instants of surprising engagement. She employs photography, video, installation, text, performance and public intervention for both site-specific and gallery contexts. She has presented art projects in festivals and galleries across Australia, including Melbourne Fringe, Next Wave, Tiny Stadiums, Performance Space, BUS Projects, Six_A ARI and SASA Gallery. As an arts writer, Amy has written for Live Art List Australia blog, un magazine, Artlink, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and RMIT gallery. amyspiers.tumblr.com
Pip Stafford
is a new media artist whose practice includes video installation, performance, web projects, printed media and illustration. She is primarily interested in personal rituals, private lives and exploring notions of human communication. Pip was the co-founder of ONO Project, a collective that utilises disused urban space for art events. She has collaborated with the League of Imaginary Scientists Los Angeles and has shown at Platform Artists Group, Inflight, Six A and as part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival. Her projects have received support from Arts Tasmania, Next Wave and Salamanca Arts Centre and she has been an artist in residence at Casula Powerhouse, Sydney and Cultural Exchange Station in Tabor (CESTA), Czech Republic.
Artists
CWA CBD Branch is an ongoing art exhibition that appropriates the organisational structure of Country Women’s Association to articulate both ideas, of ‘exhibition’ as a platform for self-representation and of ‘community’ as a heterogeneous group of people aggregated around common self-interests. The CBD Branch was instigated by curator Paula Silva and will operate throughout collaborations with artists who wish to engage with the branch’s mission. The branch’s first activities will be designed, produced and delivered by founding members and Tasmanian artists Rebecca Stevens, Elisabeth Woods and Tasmanian writer Judith Abell. cwa-cbdbranch.com
John Dobbins is a performer, a long-term resident of St Kilda and a current resident of the Sacred Heart Mission Aged Care Facility. During the 1960s and 70s he performed as Joanna Jones at Trisha’s Coffee Shop, one of Melbourne’s early gay performance venues. His repertoire includes Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner and Shirley Bassey. He makes occasional public performances at Sacred Heart residents’ events.
Elizabeth Dunn is an interdisciplinary artist interested in collaboration, participation and social ecology. She has presented work at the Next Wave Festival, Artshouse, Performance Space, On Edge Festival, The National Portrait Gallery, Kickarts Contemporary Arts and Cairns Regional Art Gallery. She works across video, installation, performance and participation. In 2012 Elizabeth will present her current work, FLYWAY, at the Next Wave Festival and On Edge Festival (Cairns). She is based in Melbourne. flywayproject.tumblr.com
Jason James is many things. Typically he spends his time in disguise. For many years he was an improviser for the Hobart Company, then Wapping Theatre Company. To stay working in performing arts he became a technician. That led to design, typically lighting design, for new performance works. The latest one is to light IHOS Opera’s ‘The Barbarians’ in MOFO 2012. He also creates light art, performance art, and has curated for events such as Hobart Fringe Festival and Sound to Light. arduinodiary.blogspot.com
Nancy Mauro-Flude is a researcher, writer and performing artist. In a playful and speculative manner her work engages theatre machines, digital materiality, theories of embodiment and points to the current renaissance of computer hacker culture and the automaton in contemporary art. Her performance practice bends in from our fascinating and complex mortal world into the virtual dark and back again. A PhD Candidate at the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, she was awarded with an MFA in Networked Media & Design, Piet Zwart Inst. Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. Nancy is also an alumni of DasArts: advanced institute for performing arts, Amsterdam School of Art now known as Master of Theatre (2001-4). Nancy has recently founded Miss Desponia’s Hackspace in Hobart has the role of ‘international relations & currency control’ at Dyne.org the FreeSoftware foundary. She often contributes her research about this crossover in forums and publications and recommends everyone to read : FLOSS+Art (2008) London: Mute Publishing. sister0.tv/www.miss-hack.org
Pip O’Brien is a Melbourne based video artist whose work deals with memory, sentimentality, personal history and the experience of “looking”. In O’Brien’s work text is often used to form a barrier between viewer and content, disallowing or obstructing the viewer’s ability to engage comfortably with the image. This forms part of a broader interest in disrupting the experience of relating to media content, as well as examining the relationship between maker and viewer. More recent work explores an interest in natural landscape as a metaphor for unrealised expectations or misplaced desires, and in the remnants of actions whose narrative can still be found or understood via their “debris”. pipobrien.tumblr.com
Sally Rees is an artist based in Hobart, Tasmania. Often but not exclusively, using herself as the subject, Sally depicts human fallibility and vulnerability with humour and sincerity and her works alternately play a documentary-like truth against a more surreal, aspirational invention. www.sallyrees.com.au
Sarah Rodigari works across mediums to create participatory projects through encounters and exchange. These projects, ranging from intimate to large scale are presented in contexts including galleries, performance venues and the public sphere. Sarah collaborates with the collective Field Theory, Mimic Mass and is part of the duo Panther. Sarah’s work has been supported both nationally and internationally: Performance Space, Arts House, Melbourne International Arts Festival (Australia), South Project (Yogyakarta), The National Review of Live Art (UK) and Anti -Contemporary Arts Festival (Finland). Sarah contributes to Runway Magazine, Realtime and Live Art List Australia and has recently presented A Calm Centre in the Heart of Chaos at the symposium Open Engagement in Portland (USA). Sarah Rodigari has a BA (Hons) in Sociology (UNSW) and is a Masters candidate in Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. pantherpanther.com
Catherine Ryan is a Melbourne-based writer interested in philosophy and critical reflection on the modern world. She has been published in Arena Magazine and is editor-in-chief of the journal Colloquy: text theory critique. She has recently completed a Master of Arts at Monash University. Her thesis was on the work of Michel Foucault, and looked at the way his writing compels his readers to adopt critical relationships towards modern institutions such as criminality, madness and sexuality. Catherine has also been part of performances at This is Not Art Festival and The Last Tuesday Society.
Lara Thoms is an artist and curator. She makes projects with people, using mediums such as video goggles, cream pies, telephones and powerpoint. Her work has been shown at place like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Next Wave Festival and Arts House. She curates Night Time at Performance Space and the Tiny Stadiums Festival.
Elizabeth Woods is a public artist as opposed to an artist who makes art for a private space. The core of her practice in the past fifteen years has been work that develops meaningful, inclusive and imaginative relationships between art, a site and the public – art made with the public, for the public. As such, she alternates between permanent public works and large‐scale public-interactive projects/events in Australia and Europe – projects which are firmly situated between the community‐participatory aims of community art and the innovative and imaginative goals of contemporary visual art. She believes in the capacity of art to change our social surrounds into ones that are kinder, more generous, attentive, responsive, affectionate and healthy – a belief that is consistently represented in her work. www.in.situ.net.au
