SafARI 2008SafARI 2008 Curator: Lisa Corsi Capitalising on the national and international focus on the visual arts in Sydney during the Biennale, SafARI 2008 will present the work of eleven emerging, unrepresented Australian artists across three Artist Run Initiative (ARI) venues over three weeks this June. SafARI 2008 - an unofficial fringe to the Biennale of Sydney - is set to showcase experimental and exuberant new work from eleven emerging Australian artists. Capitalising on the national and international focus on the visual arts in Sydney during the Biennale, SafARI 2008 will present the work of eleven emerging, unrepresented Australian artists across three Artist Run Initiative (ARI) venues over three weeks this June. From it's inception in 2006, SafARI has aimed to serve as a platform for emerging artists and the spaces that support them during an important moment on the Australian and international arts calendar.All have been selected by SafARI 2008 curator, Lisa Corsi, from a national call for submissions and each work in a range of media from video and sound to drawing and performance. Their work will appear across three ARI venues in Sydney's cultural hot-spots of Surry Hills and Chippendale - China Heights, Gaffa Gallery and MOP Projects. Each venue plays a significant, often unsung, role in supporting Australia's contemporary art scene.
Ron Adams - With influences ranging from Bauhaus to linguistics, Adams investigates how ‘signs' operate by creating paintings of texts using bold graphics and colour. The texts, not immediately decipherable, are laden with personal and communal meaning. Liam Benson - Benson's documented performances cross-reference images from mainstream culture and sub-cultures to investigate the concept of prejudice seeing it as "a human condition caused by ignorance and cured by knowledge".
Mark Brown - Brown presents Metaspin, a looped video installation that explores physics and uncanny motion through the ‘virtual re-creation' of real physical actions. David Capra - Referencing craft traditions and Outsider art, Capra mixes the banal with the spectacular to create collages that reconnect him with a playful creativity often enjoyed in childhood. Justin Cooper - Cooper expresses the difficulty of representational form in a world that insists on visible parameters. He collapses his micro maniplulation of the ceramic medium with the macro destruction of our world which makes for complex, non-representational form. Timothy Kendall Edser - Edser will present the 14th in a series of performance installations entitled Tension that centre around the artist's body, its mass and the way in which it interacts within the environment in which it appears. Jessica Geron - Geron's heavily rendered impasto paintings that are jam-packed with colourful and bold references to popular culture. Using images chosen through chance discovery in magazines, comics and junk mail, Geron creates intriguing hybrid narratives. Lucas Grogan - Following the debates surrounding appropriation Grogan provides a platform that questions his own art making in the current socio-political landscape that is specific to Australia. He demonstrates a sincere investigation into an often difficult area. Chris Jones - Jones' work represents his acute awareness of himself in the physical world; the multifaceted intangible concepts that allow it form and the role that language plas in an attempt to define ‘it'. The results are very quiet yet powefully and pleasurably moving. Saskia Pandji Sakti - Pandji Sakti's work explores the concept of ‘surface'. She questions the glamorisation of violence in the media, film and advertising in an attempt to intersect the truth of violence with the world of film and fantasy.
Luke Thurgate - Thurgate's large-scale, site-specific, charcoal works are executed rapidly; he references figuration and anatomy to create a visual metaphor for concepts of time - flux, status and impermanence.
SafARI 2008 Public Programs - Free admission:
SafARI 2008 Public Forum with special guest speaker Barbara Flynn
SafARI 2008 Artist Talks and Tour of SafARI ARIs
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WHERE & WHEN: Friday 13 to Sunday 29 June 2008
- China Heights, Level 3, 16-28 Foster Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010
- MOP Projects, 2/39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, NSW 2008 Opening hours across all venues: Wednesday to Friday 12 - 6pm; Saturday and Sunday 12 - 5pm
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