It is with great pleasure we announce the winner of the Exploration Emerging Artist Award for 2020 to be the talented Ann Ryan. Ann's significant contribution to the current exhibition with a series inspired by the humble tea-towel with all its shared and personal associations as a utilitarian material, object of memorabilia, and representative of the everyday nitty-gritty of suburban life added a much appreciated light hearted and humorous aspect. We very much look forward to hosting a solo exhibition by Ann in 2021.
The People's Choice Award was awarded to Hugo Mathias.
FLG presents our highly anticipated annual showcase of emerging and unsigned artists. Exploration was created to provide a platform for emerging artists to successfully exhibit their art within a commercial gallery context. Now in its 20th year, this tightly curated exhibition showcases the art practices of talented artists with diverse backgrounds, and working across various mediums.
We are delighted to announce the selected Exploration 20 Artists:
JOSH DYKGRAAF
Josh Dykgraafis a photographic manipulation artist based in Melbourne. His work features manipulations of his own photography - each piece is composed of hundreds of photos using material Josh has shot around the world requiring 35-60 hours to make. His work explores world building, sense of scale and wonder - deconstructing and reforming the world we live in.
Dykgraaf's current series, Terraform, recreates animal forms from his landscape photography and shots of floral material from environments that each animal is native to.View Josh Dykgraaf's CV
ALEX HOBBA
The artwork is an edition of 5. It can be projected up to 4m x 2m. Supplied on a USB it is $1500 or as a USB set up with a framed 7 inch LCD screen with a resolution of 1024x600 it is $2000AUD.
Alex says: "A Hormone of Chance is a perpetual 3D animation. It has been entirely created using computer software. In this software you create whatever environment, and whatever lighting. The lighting for such a scene is taken from real photographs of sunny skies, studio light set-ups etc. The colours within an environment are created in the software program, you can then determine texture, reflectance etc. It is the lighting that creates the three-dimensionality which gives the balls a shadow, and where the reflectance of the balls shows the surface they roll over. This is all rendered out in the program much like any video-editing software. " As Alex has staggered the ball timing it develops a mesmerising rhythm over time.
Alex Hobba is an emerging artist based in Melbourne, Australia, who completed her Honours Degree in Fine Art at Monash University in 2019. Hobba has had solo exhibitions at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, MOANA Project Space, and TCB Art Inc. (upcoming). Hobba’s works have been included in group exhibitions at Spring 1883, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Ballarat Regional Gallery, TCB Art Inc., the National Gallery of Australia, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Hobba’s work is held in the collection of Drill Hall Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia.View Alex Hobba's CV
ANTHEA KEMP
Anthea Kemp is a contemporary painter whose practice is a reaction to the questioning of how a sense of place combined with a cognitive understanding of the place can influence your identity. I explore this place and how I have related to it in the past and presently with a new re-thought relationship to place. These investigations gesture toward the emotional and I research this through found compositions and colour, placing my painting in-between abstraction and representation. It is my intention to deepen this knowledge of place and evoke in the viewer a personal response. View Anthea Kemp's CV
SONIA MARTIGNON
Sonia Martignon’s art practice is based in and inspired by the Northern Territory. Her imagery is driven by an intense curiosity with nature, landscape and mythology and her distinctive colour palette echoes the hues found in this unique landscape. Sonia works on hand cut wood and records ideas using the mediums of acrylic, graphite and pyrography.
A Fragile Existence addresses the precarious state of our natural world. Armed with the belief that all living things are connected by the habitat that we share, the work aims to capture this precious wilderness, documenting its riches of colour, shape, spirit and mood. It pays homage to the fertile habitats that are being threatened daily which, in turn, threatens mankind’s own existence.View Sonia Martignon’s CV
HUGO MATHIUS
Hugo Mathias is an artist from New Zealand, based in Melbourne, Australia. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Hugo’s work explores the subjective narratives we associate with every day objects, images & visual language. He employs different aesthetic styles within the same image to explore this subjectivity.
Usually depicting iconic commercial products, the work hints at ideas of global trade, capital, monopoly, mass production, exploitation, consumerism, sustainability & environment.View Hugo Mathias' CV
MADELINE MINACK
Madeleine Minackis an interdisciplinary, contemporary artist who works primarily in installation and sculptural practice. Based in Melbourne, Minacks practice derives from a process of accumulation, collecting discarded found objects to produce small, intimate sculptures which reflect minute details of normally unnoticed everyday matter. Through this process of collection, she creates something that from a distance looks insignificant but upon close examination becomes detailed, complex bodies of works. Made out of forgotten things and re-presented with wax and string as binders, the small sculptures (often no larger than a thumb nail) form a home or nest for that which would normally be lost. Much like the bower-bird, Minack collects certain objects, encases and protects them, creating new value for the minuscule. This selection of foraged goods is made through degrees of chance, psycho-geography and the desire to protect that which is unprotected. Initially exploring journeys/ passages, her work speaks to the everyday mundane and repetition. These constructed wax forms create a safe space for discarded objects which would otherwise deteriorate into nothing. View Madeleine Minack's CV
MATTHEW PORTCH
Using a scrupulous method of capture, Matthew Portch’s work looks to alter our view of familiar habitats as conscious retrospections in Fine Art Photography. His creative vision captures a calm and melancholic disposition in the landscape evoking an emotional response from within. Environments are appraised as simple, clean, and graphic impressions, and convoluted vistas are reduced to modest visions of wistful clarity. Purposefully devoid of people and any notable present-day objects, the images appear to have no concept of time. The discernibly banal metamorphosises into a perception of aesthetic beauty. View Matthew Portch's CV
ARIEL RUBY
Working across a range of mediums spanning video, photography and sculpture - culminating in experiential installation contexts - Ariel Ruby’s practice explores a liquid relationship between distinct polarities. Heavily saturated landscapes draw on a variety of objects to generate portals into manipulated and enhanced realities or unrealities, that consider the merging of nature and culture, organic or synthetic and the human or nonhuman. These landscapes hover on the verge of beautiful and grotesquely kitsch, embracing a synthetic aesthetic to emulate similar connections as sensuous experiences of ‘natural’ phenomena. Strong notions of nostalgia drawn from personal and collective experiences aim to tell a unique story to any given viewer based on their own experience. View Ariel Ruby's CV
ANN RYAN
Working with a range of mediums, Ann Ryan creates collages that interpret and present fashion and culture with an affectionate irony. Drawing on past and present remnants; magazines; the digital world and street life, Ryan reworks, re-cycles and re-visits. The processes of mending and stitching-together become metaphors for sustainability and give nod to the slow fashion and visible mending movements. This series is inspired by the humble tea-towel with all its shared and personal associations as a utilitarian material, object of memorabilia, and representative of the everyday nitty-gritty of suburban life.View Ann Ryan's CV
JON SETTER
Jon Setterwas born in Detroit, Michigan (1989) and is based in Sydney, Australia. Setter’s work is part of an ongoing exploration that attempts to reveal the unseen aspects that shape how we experience urban spaces and architecture. Often working with subjects discovered by chance on unprescribed walks, he documents from peculiar viewpoints the details people walk past and use daily but may not consciously observe. He methodically organises the repeated colours, patterns, materials and textures of the urban vernacular to develop an abstracted expression of space. His hope is that by cutting through the chaos of our urban surroundings and instead presenting them as simple and clean compositions can help expand our reading and understanding of the spaces we interact with most. View Jon Setter's CV
Previous Exploration artists include: William Breen, Kathryn Ryan, Jo Davenport, Michelle Molinari, Chelsea Gustafsson, Zac Koukoravas, Richard Blackwell, Meg Cowell, Valerie Sparks, Sophia Hewson, Rob McHaffie, Ry David Bradley, Camilla Tadich, Heidi Yardley, Camille Hannah, Carmel Seymour, Kai Wasikowski, Archie Barry & Zoe Croggan among many others.
