Current CAST Education Programs

Here, CAST Gallery presents three small solo exhibitions by artists whose works deal with these issues in various ways and provide a great starting point for a much bigger and wider discussion of the role of art and artists in making images of the island of Tasmania. Who owns the image of our land?

Over some years, Ben Booth and Trudi Brinckman have made works that focus on objects which either harness or transfer energy: Booth has utilised many objects recycled from HEC operations in Tasmania and Brinckman has incorporated electric wiring into a number of installations.

Their idea to collaborate on the development of Conduct stemmed from a stop at Tarraleah where they underwent an epiphany before a large Max Angus mural (affectionately re-titled Boy Meets Tractor by Booth). It was a work that gave rise to their desire to investigate the transfer of electricity from its raw state as wild water pulsating through mountain gorges, through its process of being harnessed and tempered through pipes, conduits and various built restrainers, and, finally, into its evolution as a tame, domesticated, architectural form.

Contingency Plan
Curated by Philip Watkins
Work by Jordan Baseman, Mutlu Çerkez, Marco Fusinato, Derek Hart and David Hawley

27 May - 25 June 2006

Contingency Plan deftly juxtaposes a number of visual, aural and textual works in order to unsettle and disturb our sense of objective experience and subjective response to events that are both real in their own right, but also reproductions of something else that is real, but not here. Watkins is interested in the way that we have enabled technology to become a substitute for our own intimacy.

Corrupting Youth
Curated by Tristan Stowards under the 2005 CAST Emerging Curator Program.
Work by Melanie Breen, Annika Koops, Tom O’Hern, Lauren Olney and Jane Tyler

4 March - 2 April 2006

Corrupting Youth asserts that contemporary art does not need to please everyone. In exploring the moral and aesthetic boundaries of society, it is likely that artists from time to time cause offence. The artists in Corrupting Youth are not setting out to offend simply for its own sake. Rather, their works invite us to reflect upon the complex and contradicting plurality of contemporary culture.

Home Again
Curated by Peter Hughes, Curator of Decorative Arts,
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

Work by Evan Adams, Axiom, Peter Battaglene, Lisa Boyter, Hermie Cornelisse, Stuart Houghton, Till Julien, Penny Malone, Brendan Sharpe and Richard Skinner
CAST Gallery

22 October - 20 November 2005

The idea for the exhibition, Home Again, came out of Craft Australia’s 2004 online forum, Interact. I contributed one of the several articles commissioned to initiate the conversation and argued for the retention and rehabilitation of the word craft, rather than what I still regard as the misleading substitute, design. Another contributor, Robert Cook from the Art Gallery of Western Australia made the point in the course of the discussion, that the current emphasis on design had served to refocus thinking and practice on the original object of the crafts movement – the making of things at once beautiful and useful. He contrasted this trend with what he described as “bad sculpture” – by which I assume he meant conceptual galleryorientedcraft.

Fellow Anthropoid
Curated by Philip Watkins

Artists: Mira Gojak, Laresa Kosloff, Belinda Marquis, Peter Prasil and Tristan Stowards
CAST Gallery

17 September - 16 October 2005

Fellow Anthropoid proposes that the important point of meaning in the process of making art, the point where art happens, is not in the private studio of the artist (during the production stage of the work), but in the gallery (in the reception stage of the work). It is after the art is produced, when it begins to circulate in a
social world, that relationships between the artist, the work, the gallery space and the viewer form and re-form.

Downtown prods us to look twice at the urban and suburban environment
around us. Cuthbert’s work re-presents the aestheticisation of the city:
exploring the symbolism of the built environment as an entangled mix of
anonymous international building styles and nostalgic, memory-laden fragments
of the ‘local’. His photographs are reminders of the little things, the
grotesqueries and minor transgressions, existing within and against the
anonymity of the corporate city.

Vehicle
Curated by Felix Ratcliff

Artists: Conductor (NSW), Julia Dowe (QLD), Ralf Hanrieder (Germany), Karin Lettau (TAS), Sara Lindsay (VIC), Anne Mestitz (TAS), Mick O’Shea (Ireland), Jake Walker (NZ/NSW) and Sharyn Woods (TAS)
CAST Gallery

2 - 31 July 2005

Vehicle engages with the historical practice of drawing and brings together a wide range of artists working in different mediums and processes. The curator has selected the artists because drawing forms a major part of their practice and because their works celebrate the communicative vehicle of drawing as an available and accessible working model for producing contemporary art works.

Bimbo Laboratory explores the strangeness of sexuality; the science fiction of sexuality; the digitised, televised, modified world of sex and objects of sexual obsession. Rejecting the notion that radical art is produced through the use of cutting edge technology alone, Haig deliberately pursues the nerdish world of out-dated software programs, discount store plastics, badly written credos and late night advertising.

Surface
Curated by Scott Cotterell through the 2005 CAST Emerging Curator Program.
Artists: Nancy Mauro-Flude, Andrew Harper, Kevin Leong, Emile Zile,
Yasmin Holme and Matt Warren.
CAST Gallery

16 April – 15 May 2005

The screen itself is a common thread in the work of these emerging
contemporary artists, who are perhaps representative of a contemporary
desire to unravel the power and map the territory of the ephemeral but all
pervasive medium of moving image.

Paper Bridges
a conference of folding spaces
Takahiro Ando (Jap), Merric Brettle (Aus), Warren Fithie (Aus),
Tomoki Imai (Jap), Tsuneyoshi Nobata (Jap) and Kristian Haggblom (Aus).
CAST Gallery

March 11 - April 10, 2005

Paper Bridges is a visual dialogue between three Japanese and three Australian artists, and between two cultures in the Asia Pacific region. It explores how a cross-cultural flow may effect a recognition of similarities and differences between two seemingly distinct positions. As the works reflect and absorb each other in the gallery, they construct an interconnecting space that becomes, in
itself, a new form or place.

3 into 1
Hermie Cornelisse, Amanda Davies, Mish Meijers
CAST Gallery

February 5 - March 6, 2005

3 into 1 loosely considers aspects of domestic life and its transition into contemporary art works in a gallery setting. A common thread running through these artists’ works is the transformation they have each afforded the mundane familiarity of everyday life as it moves from a private to a public setting. From Davies’ totemic treatment of that Australian tradition - the ‘sickie’ - to Cornelisse’s exploration of the secret interactions that occur in the making process of domestic items and Meijers’ celebration of a sentimental attachment to her favourite household items, 3 into 1 considers the ambiguous qualities of domestic environments, materials and objects.

Interlace
Curated by Blair French (Performance Space, Sydney)
New work in video by Shaun Gladwell, Emil Goh and Kate Murphy
CAST Gallery

October 23 – November 21, 2004

INTERLACE, curated by Blair French, is an exhibition of new video
installations by three of Australia’s most exciting moving image artists:
Shaun Gladwell, Emil Goh and Kate Murphy.

INTERLACE is an exhibition within which video art is treated both as a
means of social representation and as an intervention. The exhibition
addresses means by which our public and private actions are affected by
a consciousness of our self-image; how our performance in various
situations makes us appear to others. But it also addresses how our
performance in a place can mark territory, can disintegrate the
anonymity of a space and ‘prove’ we were there.

Time Piece
Curated by Emerging curator Maria Mac Dermott
Eleanor Ray, Rowan Reynolds, Karen Lunn, Lucienne Rickard, Duncan Marshall, Erin Tappe
CAST Gallery

September 11 – October 10, 2004

timepiece is the exhibition produced by the 2004 Emerging Curator, Maria MacDermott, a post-graduate student at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art. timepiece explores the relationship between time, or the passing of time, and the physical properties of materials used by the six artists in this exhibition.

In Pitch 041, Haddon has focused on domestic painted surfaces and the surfaces of the CAST Gallery walls. In a close examination of damage to the last layer of paint he exposes past colours shimmering in their anxiety. Resisting all efforts to obliterate them beneath the pristine surface of fresh colour, these details become enlarged and form the basis of the works on aluminium; which must, as a result, hover between abstraction and narrative.

Free Time
Ben Booth, Louisa Bufardeci, Marco Fusinato,
Michah Lexier, Elvis Richardson & John Vella.
Curated by Philip Watkins
CAST Gallery

June 26 – July 25, 2004

The artists assembled in Free Time share a focus on the process of making art. The expression of ideas is a driving force in their work, and they challenge the traditional idea that art-making is purely the product of individual creativity and skill. Time is an important element in all the works and, like many contemporary artists making time-based work, the medium of time makes up part of the content and the form of the work.

Sharyn Woods is an artist who works deeply from a very personal and emotional base. She is also an artist who has undertaken many public art commissions and whose work is regularly exhibited in the public arena.

This exhibition highlights some of the issues faced by those contemporary artists who regard the process or performance of making art to be as critical in the construction of a work’s meaning as its finished appearance. Here, the acts are private, conducted in the artist’s own studio or backyard; the documentation of these acts is the work itself, brought into the public arena as though onto a stage.

Perhaps the greatest tension fuelling these works is a struggle many artists face: the struggle to balance the valid and private emotions that may drive an artist’s work with the need to make public their translation through the creation of visual forms that succeed aesthetically and meaningfully. Ultimately, there can be no resolution to the tension in these works – their meaning lies in the struggle to find one.

SHAREDRENOVATION
Jessica Ball, Simon Ancher and Terroir Architects
CAST Gallery

March 6 – 28, 2004

The starting point for the development of this exhibition was the desire of the three participants – Jessica Ball, Simon Ancher and Terroir Architects – to explore the boundaries that exist between art, furniture and architecture. Through a collaborative process they developed a suite of artworks that exist as a singular installation in a contemporary art gallery. The works are a physical realisation of their joint questioning of the traditional boundaries between various art practices and the current trends in architecture and design that have been recently described as ‘McMansion’ solutions to contemporary building development.

The participants selected the shed as the focus of their explorations. An accessible and enduring symbol of Australian suburban living, the shed has always lacked significance as a built structure and yet possessed enormous individual importance as a retreat from the world and business of family life.