Mathew Bax’s latest solo exhibition Please LIKE me is about social media, or perhaps the noise that surrounds it.  Through a series of sublime abstract paintings, the artist creates a visual allusion to the constant bombardment of chatter we encounter every waking hour and the continual demands of others for our attention. The title of Bax’s exhibition might well be the mantra bellowing through all of our heads in this age of electronic ego-confirmation.

Matthew Bax holds a Masters of Fine Art from LASALLE College of Arts, Singapore and a Bachelor of Commerce from Flinders University, Adelaide. Currently he splits his time between Melbourne, Munich and Singapore. Over the past 10 years he has held solo exhibitions in Germany, Singapore and Australia including: pretty little stupid pictures, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, 2012; Kunst ist schön, macht aber viel Arbeit, Fost Gallery, Singapore, 2012; God’s Away on Business, ICA Gallery, Singapore, 2010; and This Little Piggy Went to Market, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne, 2007.

Jayne Dyer’s new solo exhibition Just suppose… explores mankind’s relationship with the environment. Taking her cues from P.D.Ouspensky’s timeless novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915) and Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence, Dyer questions if we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Her gripping exhibition will ask us to consider the consequences of our actions and the nature of our implicated relationship with an increasingly frail environment.

Jayne Dyer is an Australian artist living in Beijing and Sydney. She completed a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University in 1994. Her practice spans more than twenty years and includes museum and commercial exhibitions, commissions and funding and residencies from government and corporate agencies. Dyer is internationally focused and committed to inter-cultural exchange, particularly between Australia and Asia. She undertakes hybrid, often multidiscipline, collaborative projects and lives for extended periods in countries undergoing massive economic and environmental change. Jayne was recently awarded the inaugural Australian Arts in Asia award for her expansive work The Butterfly Effect, the centerpiece of the Four Seasons Beijing. Jayne is represented in Melbourne by Anna Pappas Gallery.

After predominantly producing abstract work in recent years, Ewen Coates’ art practice takes a figurative turn in his upcoming solo exhibition Hummer and Cyclo in which he considers the rise and fall of civilizations.

Inspired by a recent trip to Cambodia, this body of work takes the form of a sculptural installation and is an allegory of love and brutality, evoking the possibility of recurring histories, the forces that shape them and how we, as individuals, take part in this cyclic journey.

The title for the exhibition Hummer and Cyclo is a play on the hammer and sickle, the communist motif displaying the unity between industrial and agricultural workers. In this, Coates cites the kind of Agrarian rule adopted by Pol Pot, its catastrophic failure and its transition into a new society that flaunts its wealth with expensive 4WDs, while the rest make do with motor bikes and tuk-tuks. Cambodia’s motorbike riders, often young couples or families on bikes carrying up to four passengers – array of legs and tangled arms – fascinated Coates. To him the image of these riders was reminiscent of multi-limbed Hindu deities, sculptures of which are prolific within the watts dotted around the country.

Ewen Coates holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (1999) and a Bachelor of Arts, Fine Art, from Deakin University, Warrnambool (1985).  He has held a number of solo exhibitions including Hatchlings, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne (2011); Post Velcro, Deakin University Art Gallery, Victoria (2010); and Overground, Gippsland Regional Art Gallery and Warrnambool Art Gallery (2007). Coates has participated in group exhibitions at a number of important spaces including presenting his work at the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 with Anna Pappas Gallery, National Gallery of Australia, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Coates has been a finalist in the Melbourne Sculpture Prize, Mt Buller Sculpture Award, McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award, Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Prize and Lorne Sculpture Festival. His works are held in various public gallery collections in Australia including Heide Museum of Modern Art, Werribee Park Sculpture Walk and Deakin University Collection as well as in private collections in Australia, United States and United Kingdom. Coates is represented by Anna Pappas Gallery.

In a never before seen series of video works, Melbourne based artist Sue Dodd will create a flamboyant POP diva – Wendy Airhole.

For the video works, Dodd has written original songs, full of poignant and witty lyrics that encapsulate the celebrity focused nature of popular culture today. Catchy and at times cliché, Dodd’s songs cover all genres of pop music including country, surf, sixties and rap. Dodd’s fictional pop star, the dramatic Wendy Airhole, will be recorded performing these songs, which will be presented across multiple video works. In the films, the over-the-top and drag queen-like Wendy questions the role of the artist and the fan, what it means to follow a stylistic cliché and the notion of living the dream.

Intended as a tribute, Wendy Airhole’s name is derived from the derogatory nickname given to Andy Warhol, when sauntering through to the back bar of Max’s Kansas City, partying and posing. Dodd has appropriated this nickname for her fictional pop star who certainly displays that she knows how to party and to pose.

Throughout her long career, Dodd has developed an artistic practice that incorporates performance, video and installation, and responds to the contemporary cultural landscape of globalisation, homogeneity and desire. Dodd looks at the playful and expressive potentials of pop, mass media and celebrity culture through translation, over-dubbing and performance, challenging audience relationships to the work of art and demonstrating possibilities for hybrid modes of production.

Low Fidelity or ‘Lo-Fi’ is a term commonly used to describe a type of music that contains technical flaws, often due to poor quality or low budget recording equipment.

It was considered to be a movement that was against ‘High Fidelity’ recordings, commonly used in Punk Rock(often without intention but for mere practical reasons) from the 70s and in Indie music from the mid-90s. Lo-Fi reveals something about the time and place in which the music was recorded and it is considered by some to be more ‘authentic’ than High Fidelity recordings.

Stephen Giblett’s recent paintings in Low Fidelity draw a parallel between Lo-Fi music and low-resolution imagery taken from iPhone screen-shots and the Internet. The technical flaws from the original files provide avenues for creativity in that they create a distance between the ‘idea’ of what is seen and what is actually presented –  a shift from idealistic photorealism to freedom at the foot of abstraction.

Grant Nimmo creates intuitive and imaginative paintings. Enveloping himself in the process of painting Nimmo rarely leaves a work until the piece is complete, detaching himself from the chaotic world around him. Within his loose layers of paint Nimmo references a society that is becoming less and less about people seeking enjoyment and contentment, a community that is sinking into a state of perpetual anxiety and excess.

In World headquartes 2013, Nimmo will exhibit a new series of oil on linen paintings, where dreamlike and idealised imagery of nature, Smurfs and Taoist symbology are approached with conceptual sensibility and humor. The works presented in this solo exhibition hint at a desire for psychological balance through a perpetuation of hope and a re-connection with nature, ultimately portraying the artist’s simple desire for self clarity.

Michaela Gleave continues her long term fascination with knowledge systems and ponders our place within reality in her latest solo exhibition Universal Truths. Inspired by a research residency with the CSIRO’s Astronomy and Space Science Division and building on from a successful solo exhibition at ART HK 2012 with Anna Pappas Gallery, Gleave casts her eye out to the furthest reaches of time and space, questioning the essence of reality and the fate of the universe through perceptually challenging wall works and a large-scale LED structure. The exhibition poetically engages with light, space and the formation of meaning.

We Are Made of Stardust (2011-12), the centrepiece of the exhibition, is a large-scale billboard-like structure, installed in the space with its back to the viewer.  Dominating the room with its saturating light, the LEDs on the face of the object display the work’s title as they scroll continuously through the colours of the rainbow.  Dripping with wiring and exposing all of its mechanisms, the object faces away from us, the sensation of colour being the primary experience of the work, the poetry of the text – a meditation on the vastness of existence and our place within it.

Hamish Carr raises the concern of social interactions and their relationship with the contemporary environment, visually representing the way we receive and consume information.

In his upcoming solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery, Transmission, Carr explores the visualisation of information in transit. Central to the work is a distinct drawing process combined with specific sculptural practice. Carr’s two-dimensional works employ mapping techniques, digitisation and intuitive mark making. This enables the work to capture moments of communication – visually inferring particles and pixels caught in motion. The three-dimensional pieces operate on a different level, inferring communicative monuments offering points of intersection where the dialogue depicted can arrive or disembark. The combination of drawing process and object-based work continues Carr’s investigation into the technocratic and fluid notions of contemporary culture.

Anna Pappas Gallery is the first Australian gallery to be invited to participate in Art-Athina, one of the worlds longest running art fairs.

The gallery will present works by Holly-Anne Buck, Paolo Consorti, Stephen Giblett, Grant Nimmo and Marc Standing.

Anna Pappas Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Nackt, a solo exhibition of works by Sam Grigorian, the master of collage.

The urge to constantly see something new and make something visible what one would otherwise only feel, is the thing that drives me to make art.
– Sam Grigorian

Sam Grigorian’s Armenian roots are clearly manifested in his art, especially through his special relationship to paper.

A master in his technique, working on both large and small scale projects, Grigorian uses parchment and recyclable materials to create his collage artworks. Fascinated by the life of these papers, Grigorian features the natural beauty of his materials by exposing their rips, marks and frayed textures; the very traces of their original use. Grigorian’s method is intimate and unique, building upon these tactile materials by overlapping layers, tearing, folding and staining to enhance the papers imperfections and reveal its innate artistry. In his minimalist décollages, Grigorian creates compositions that at once pose an air of chance, impulse and disarray yet emit a sense of order, refinement and balance.

Nackt, Grigorian’s fourth solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery, will present a series of large and small scale works on paper. Born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1957, Grigorian moved to Berlin in 1992 where he now lives and works. He has participated in multiple group and solo exhibitions as well as art fairs across the globe. His long exhibition history includes the Year of Germany in Russia (A3 Gallery Moscow), the Holland Paper Biennial 2010 (Museum Rijswijk and Museum of Apeldoorn), Haus der Kunst – St. Josef (Solothurn, Switzerland), Armenian Modern Art (Musee Du Luxemburg, Paris), Armenian Abstract Artists (Modern Art Museum of Armenia, Yerevan), numerous exhibitions with Galerie Molow (Basel), Art Stage Singapore, Art Fair Köln and the Melbourne Art Fair. His works are in various public and private collections including the Museum of New Orleans, USA.

Grigorian has been exclusively represented in Australia by Anna Pappas Gallery since 2004 and has had numerous group, solo and art fair exhibitions here and in Asia.

Born in a country of colossal pyramids, these forms began to appear almost unconsciously in the work of Ernesto Rios. Accessing this visual element prompted Rios towards architect, academic and theorist Bernard Tshumi’s celebrated text, Questions of Space, which proposes the idea of an architecture of the senses and of the mind.

In ‘The Architectural Paradox: the Pyramid and the Labyrinth’ Tschumi analyses the contrast between the pyramid as a symbol of the rational mind and the labyrinth as a symbol of the irrational body. He demonstrates that such oppositions are, in fact, complimentary and that one could not exist without the other. For him, the problem lies not in perception, rather in representation. As a result, the fundamental paradox in the practice and experience of architecture is the impossibility of questioning the nature of space and at the same time making or experiencing real space. In Pyramidal-labyrinths at Anna Pappas Gallery, Rios presents a new body of work which continues his examination of this binary opposition.

Ernesto Rios was born in Mexico City where he studied photography, hispanic literature and linguistics, history of art and fine arts. Rios holds a Masters Degree from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne. Rios has exhibited extensively both in Australia and overseas, including 17 solo exhibitions and 60 group exhibitions in major cities such as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Valencia, Sao Paulo, Melbourne and Mexico City.

Anna Pappas Gallery introduces Tom Vincent in his first solo show which explores the ‘sacred geometry’ concept. Revealing how shape and form are the underlying principles of all manifestation, Toroidal Fields focuses on the torus – a structure that is present in every facet of life, from galactic energies and planetary forces, through to the smallest being and atom present on earth. Key to this investigation is an understanding of platonic solids and the realisation that the humble triangle is at the base of all shapes and the building block in the fabric of our existence.

Hailing from Melbourne, Tom Vincent’s first experiences of the art world were through street art and graffiti. Whilst painting train corridors and laneways as a teen he uncovered the concept of ‘sacred geometry’, a science that gives a multi-faceted understanding of our reality.  Through the study of this science, Vincent was prompted to move his practice into the studio and hence began a detailed investigation of the patterns of this world.

Julia Robinson’s Some to the stone is a compelling body of work first exhibited at La Trobe Regional Gallery, Gippsland (Victoria) in September 2012. These sculptural works investigate the notion of superstition and explore some lesser known superstitions trying to make sense of the complex human need to trust things beyond our power, to take meaning from nothingness and find comfort in language, ritual and gesture.
‘Superstition features prominently throughout history in all cultures, as humans have long attached significance to items and rituals that can logically have no real power of their own. While many simple superstitions survive today (including touching wood to stave off ill events or avoiding black cats), these commonplace practices sit alongside long forgotten beliefs that are decidedly more obscure and elaborate, although still grounded in the everyday.

‘The work in Some to the stone explores European and Scandinavian superstition, including the belief that witches could transform into trees and use their branches to milk the cows in a barn or drive an axe into a doorpost to bring forth milk via the axe.

‘Although the works in Some to the stone draw on various specific superstitions, they do not seek to recreate or illustrate them. I am interested in how the work can speak of protection, the talisman, the use of magical symbols and the occult without being tied down to one interpretation.

‘Ultimately it is important to me that my works don’t appear to criticise the practice of superstition or the beliefs surrounding witchcraft but rather draw on their rich, fascinating history.’ – Julia Robinson 2012

Born in Zimbabwe, based in Sydney and now more recently in Hong Kong, Standing’s iconic and haunting paintings have developed along a complex path of progression. Driven by an innate compulsion to paint, Standing explores tension felt by a personal search for identity, embodied by complexities felt by a mass consciousness – one which has been left with toxic traces of colonialism.

This is what packs such a punch in Standing’s work – worldly layering of textures and imagery which evoke a surreal clarity in the viewer. Standing’s recent eerie yet peaceful paintings use a palette and compositional platform, mixed with sinister imagery to explore the tensions felt between light and dark; comfort and discomfort; a sense of belonging and a sense of void.

As he states ‘…in my current painting practice I have been using a lot of layering of imagery with the intention of barraging the viewer with a plethora of pictorial stimulus. Images derived from nature bleed and blend amongst more sinister imagery portraying a narrative that embraces the notion of both dreamscape and nightmare. Storytelling and imagination fuse into a visual mirage of wonderment.’

Held in February each year, our annual project exhibition promotes and inspires innovative contemporary artists through a specific curatorial theme. This year, Project 13 – Jamais Vu, will include the works of thirteen contemporary Australian and international artists, working in a wide range of disciplines from video, collage, installation, drawing and painting, exploring this psychological and philosophical concept.

Widely viewed as the opposite of Déjà Vu, Jamais Vu is a phenomenon in which the familiar becomes unfamiliar, moments in which our cultural perspective is replaced with an instinctive perspective. The realisation that we can lose control of our minds in such a way as Jamais Vu can fill us with sensations that are both thrilling and disquieting.

In such instances, recognition leaves us and we are abandoned to plunge into a psychosomatic chasm of vacant delusion and isolation. In that moment, every pulse of confidence exits our body, every thread of social camouflage is ripped from our naked skin. It is at once horrifying and exhilarating to realise that what you thought you knew is completely unrecognisable.

Artists: Holly-Anne Buck, Danny Devos, Heath Franco, Will French, Stephen Giblett, Christopher L G Hill, William Mackinnon, Clare Rae, Ernesto Rios, Cameron Robbins, Marc Standing, Paul Williams, Soo-Joo Yoo