Exploration 10 marks a decade of Flinders Lane Gallery's support and presentation of emerging art practices. Over the years this annual showcase has encouraged the practices of many promising artists, allowing them the opportunity to gain commercial exposure and to professionally develop their future directions. Many of these past exhibitors have gone on to achieve commercial success, with several becoming members of the Flinders Lane Gallery stable.

Flinders Lane Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of the Pleysier Perkins Acquisitive Prize.
This $5000 award has been initiated through the kind generosity of Pleysier Perkins Architects.



We are delighted to announce that this year's Pleysier Perkins Acquisitive Prize has been awarded to CHLOE VALLANCE.
Flinders Lane Gallery and Pleysier Perkins wish Chloe the very best with her future practice. The award was judged by Simon Perkins (Pleysier Perkins), Ramon Pleysier (Pleysier Perkins), Carol Schwartz AM (Chair, Qualitas Property Partners) and Marise Maas (artist)
Curated by Phe Rawnsley

Alpha&Omega is a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Allison Juchnevicius and Katren Wood. Formed two years ago, the duo work together adapting found texts to explore the process of communication and the instability of interpretation. For Exploration 10, Alpha&Omega present a new series of collages, each an adaptation of Caravaggio’s painting The Entombment of Christ, ca. 1602-3. Each collage is created through the destruction and reconstruction of one contemporary fashion magazine. The results are fragmented yet familiar, combining the glossy, ephemeral aesthetic of a fashion publication with the iconic and highly emotive imagery of an Old Master.

Held within McIntyre's small scale dioramas are a series of narratives concerning human endeavor. Employing a traditional representational style similar to Keith Harding or New Zealand artist Bill Hammond, McIntyre’s characters pit themselves against the odds in a struggle for existence.

Mottram's large scale canvases reveal a flotsam of real and imagined forms, caught within a vortex of some unparalleled magnetic force. Beyond the sheer effort and meticulous nature of this young artist’s practice, is her obvious sensibility for composition and colour. 'In order to navigate our day-to-day realities we follow 'referential indicators'; symbols, signs, colour codes, lines, structures, tones which help us maintain a state of vegetative cohesion, specific points in time and space where all referential indicators have folded into themselves: creates a dense, destabilised gap resonating a vast, transcendental sub-audible hum. The structures and systems created by referential indicators are thus subjugated by this subtle tone; a tone which neither destroys nor creates, but instead exists within itself as an ultimate truth.'

Stupa-Stack-1,2,3, 2009
Hand cut felt , material and glue.
30 x 30 x 20c

Installation image

Oter’s paintings examine the urban environment and ideas relating to form and process. Her painterly surfaces seek to adhere to nature while framing and presenting the “unpainted painting.” The artist states,'As an informal abstractionist, multiple layers and a diversity of mark making work in symphony to recreate the world that surrounds me. The rich development of surface texture and physicality of paint capture the beauty of nature. These include the natural weathering process and gestures reflective of the small discoveries of accidental beauty ‘found’ within the patina of my local coastal environment.'

Earth in 250 Million Years, 2010
oil on canvas
121 x 151cm

Strange Pink Soil on the Moon, 2010
oil on canvas
107 x 122cm

This young artist addresses the landscape with a palpable sense of exuberance. His use of light and colour come together to produce vistas both enticing and slightly terrifying. Why is the sky glowing hot pink? Is it dawn or the end of time?

Carmel Seymour's watercolours and drawings respond to our psychological need to explore the unknown. She attempts to unlock the hidden power we imbue our domesticity with, while revealing subtle truths about our relationship with superstition. Her narrative watercolours, which dissolve into the ether, and graphite drawings, display her own attempts at conjuring something beyond reason.  She explores the notion of artist as magician and attempts to compare the illusion of drawing and painting directly to the performance of an occult rite.

Chloe Vallance’s work was developed in response to old family photos and her experience of travel. This association between the familiar and the foreign led her to consider questions relating to the role of the individual in society, the figure and its various contextual relationships.

A moment in time, is a series of small colour pencil drawings and oil paintings which can be read together as a series of glimpsed moments. The images explore a rich and diverse range of approaches to define various contexts, situations and individual realities as fluid, difficult to pinpoint beyond the perception a moment in time.

The mediums of colour pencil and paint have been chosen to signify the particular and the general. The fluidity of paint implies change and transience, while coloured pencil implies specificity in terms of application, mark-making and in terms of the conventional association of the particular nature of pencil. Equally both mediums also imply focused moments and generalised (or out of focus) spaces.

For Vallance, to draw and or paint a passed moment can relay an unfixed reality, validate an experience, and allow her to feel closer to the people and places captured in that moment.

Chloe Vallance graduated from RMIT University in 2009 with a bachelor of (Fine Arts) (Honours) First class, majoring in Drawing. She has held several solo shows in galleries around Melbourne and has been selected for prizes and group exhibitions around Australia and Abroad. She was the recipient of the 2009 Graeme Hildebrand Inaugural Biennial Travel grant.