Each year the directorial team at Flinders Lane Gallery look forward to searching through Melbourne’s end of year graduate
shows, inner city studios and across cyberspace for fresh young things to curate into this annual show. Now in its eighth
consecutive year EXPLORATIONS provides commercial opportunities for emerging artists, while also offering buyers the ability
to purchase works by the promising artists of tomorrow.
EXPLORATIONS has launched the careers of many artists, helping them to achieve national exposure. Such success stories
include Valerie Sparks, whose large format digital landscapes have been acquired by the NGV, Hannah Bertram (Dianne Tanzer
Gallery), Heidi Yardley (Jan Murphy Gallery) and Emma van Leest (John Buckley Gallery) to name a few.
Ry David Bradley
His softly resonant works appear to provide updates to the lineage of various moments in the history of Western painting,
however materially they address emerging vocabularies of the information generation, substituting a knowledge of art historical
images with screen based manipulations and interventions suggesting a passage to experience and re-interpret such cultural
memory. Left with a residue of the transference and his works offer an enquiry into both the painterly and the digital components
of new media practices.
Ben McKeown
McKeown’s Australian Indigenous heritage is a steady source of inspiration in his works. He draws on country and his place in
the complex and differing landscapes and community’s found within, from his traditional country on the West Coast of South
Australia to his place as a young gay man living in Melbourne. His work deals with issues faced by many Indigenous People in
Australia.
Lisa O’Flynn
O’Flynn’s installations, video works and paintings explore the reflective qualities of colour and light. Forms shine against one
another’s surfaces to create a third, elusive dimension.
John Parkinson
John Parkinson likes moving around the city, enjoys the potential of getting lost in neglected parts of buildings. Curious
about anything concealed or cordoned off his photographs are taken on meandering expeditions into department stores,
train stations, through backstreets and other public spaces. Once in the confines of the studio artificial landscapes are built
from these photographs, playing with the familiarity of the cityscape and its logic to produce a otherworldly, compelling
new image.
David Pitt
David Pitt’s oil paintings examine concepts of light and shade in an attempt to bridge the gap between the unknown and
the witnessed. His small studies of unassuming moments - a tree in a park, someone holding a lantern, on old lamp shade
glisten with silky blackness and golden warmth. Utalising the illuminatory and fleeting quality of sun, flame and globe each
scene houses within it a poignancy and emotional purity evocative of the incommunicable human visual experience.
Michael Staniak
Thousands of years ago, the concept of space stretched across distances only measurable by observation but as technology
progressed, the distance travelled increased and the speed at which it could happen reduced dramatically. At this moment,
satellites that have conquered cosmic ‘space’ orbit the globe providing us with the means to be almost anywhere at anytime.
Staniak’s luminous oil paintings and translucent marquets transport the viewer to a very different time and space.
Jee Young Park
The title of Jee Young Parks installation “DoJung” recalls an old Korean word used to describe a process or a journey to
reach a destination or to achieve something.
Referring to both the experience of making and engaging with a work of art her immersive environments literally take the
viewer on a DoJung. Layers of thin plastic sheeting part ways to reveal a pathway through which to travel. The physical
sensation of this encased and enveloping environment soften the senses - disorientating and quiet.
Jean Lyons
Using mainly black and white, matt and glossy surfaces Jean Lyons high gloss enamel painting look more like prints than a
paintings. The silhouetted forms of trees, rocks and sky are decorated and embellished with mottled patterns and flowers,
combat camouflage and bar-codes. These are repeated motifs stirred by disparate ideas of displacement and belonging;
chaos and harmony; transience and permanence. Like a piece of Balinese shadow puppetry her surreal environments reveal
a strange and precarious drama.
This is a wonderful opportunity for collectors to view and acquire exciting and affordable artworks that represent varied
directions in contemporary Australian art. Flinders Lane Gallery makes a continuous important contribution to Australia’s art
scene by supporting the bright talent Australia has to offer. |
