Exhibitions SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY PRESENTS 1st October 2020 - 31st October 2020

Flinders Lane Gallery is delighted to be participating in Sydney Contemporary Presents 2020, this year's unique manifestation of the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. As a unique online event SCP aims to encourage audiences to buy a new artwork made during this challenging year and to support Australian artists.

KIM ANDERSON

ARTIST STATEMENT: I am fascinated by the physical manifestation of grief and anxiety associated with climate change and the decimation of fragile ecosystems. My drawings are based on photographs I take of myself physically interacting with rugged, isolated terrains in a solitary performance that oscillates between reverence, mourning, despair and solace. This interaction is witnessed only by a camera lens, and then translated into drawing through a lengthy process of meticulous, emotionally-laden mark-making. ‘The Mourner’ arose out of a 2019 residency on the Isle of Skye, where I felt vulnerable, humbled and penitent in the face of nature’s vastness and resilience.
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RICHARD BLACKWELL:

Engaging with the legacy of Modernism, and adding to the lineage of abstractionists like Frank Stella, Blackwell’s relief panels echo the architectonic contours and surfaces of Doha, with its a surreal hybrid landscape of ultra-modern and ancient Islamic design, futuristic facades and mashrabiya. The works function as urban cartography, and yet they also map the complicated, lonely virtual spaces that are rapidly subsuming contemporary (Western) ontology. Blackwell grapples with the unknown ways in which virtuality is changing our social reality and collapsing geographical space – a concept sharpened during the current Covid crisis. The disorienting convergence of the physical and virtual is visualised in the works’ mesmeric symmetry, repetition and axial reflections, which duplicate the parallel and perpendicular surfaces of the civilised city.

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JACOB LEARY

ARTIST STATEMENT: 'It needs to grow' is in a process of growth and accumulation. Drawing on Tristan Garcia’s conceptualisation of intensity as the prevailing religion defining contemporary (and modern existence), 'It needs to grow' is an embodiment of contemporary perception. This embodiment exists in a world that needs things now, better, more intense, and then repeated, until we’re bored and then we’ll find something else and repeat. As an embodiment of contemporary perception, the work is trying to be noticed and keep your attention for longer. It’s a stronger, faster, better, harder logic. It’s a race to excess. It isn’t what the work is about, it not a packaged concept to takeaway. It’s purely the contemporary conditions which with the art-object grew from and which it must respond to, to perceptual disrupt, seduce, and matter. It's just trying to do its thing.
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BRONWYN HILL
ARTIST STATEMENT: 'Sunny Side' is part of an ongoing series that explores our connection to nature. In a time when so many are being restricted to their homes and discouraged from interacting, the benefits of experiencing our environment are more apparent. Casting plant shadows over the form gives that sense of surroundings while the plain background keeps focus on the figures experience.
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CHELSEA GUSTAFSSON
ARTIST STATEMENT: Gustafsson’s work often explores notions around society and the environment, highlighting experiences common to us all yet feel unique and self-defining. Her series of chairs as subjects aim to address a perceived collective inactivity within society regarding issues concerning the environment and including our own physical and mental health. Chairs and objects are presented like a traditional still life setting, yet the placement or choice of objects suggest a looming sense of unease.
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'Weeds on Vinyl' 2020