AusSTS Conference 2025: Signals and Noises

Delighted to be presenting at the Australasian Science and Technology Studies 2025 Conference, on the theme of Signals and Noises. My paper Fresh Eyes on N-rays: the Empirical Impressionism of Rene Blondlot revisits a scientific controversy from the early 1900s, inviting my audience to re-enact the perceptual practice of physicist Rene Blondlot as a way of putting the symmetrical analysis of STS into action. The conference is hosting by the National Communication Museum and Deakin University in Naarm/Melbourne. More information can be found here.

Coming Soon: Dissolving Views

My upcoming solo exhibition Dissolving Views presents variations on the camera obscura, an apparatus with a long history. In addition to shaping the development of photography and cinema, the camera obscura also informed scientific understandings of visual perception and philosophical conceptions of the thinking subject as removed from the world. This exhibition uses mechanised versions of the camera obscura to transform and subvert these traditional models.

The exhibition will be open from 12-5pm, 26-27 October at Wreckers Artspace, Woollongabba. Join us for a closing event from 3-5pm on Sunday 27 October.

Conference Presentation: 2023 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference

I will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Inverted Optics in the White Cube: from Perception to Proprioception’ at the annual conference for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. This paper considers Virtual Reality artworks in the context of my current research, which explores the significance of Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of the apparatus for contemporary technologically engaged art. While VR is often discussed in terms of embodiment and immersion, in practice optical immersion takes the place of full-bodied experience, with audiences carried along predetermined paths as a disembodied eye. This paper considers attempts to use VR in ways that move beyond this constraint by artists including Jess Johnson and Simon Ward, Mat Collishaw and Carsten Höller.

The 2023 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference will be held at Griffith University, Gold Coast from 6-7 December. The full program can be found here.

Conference Presentation: Demonstrations

I’m delighted to be presenting my paper ‘The Mangle of Mondrian: The Dance of Agency in Pure Plastic Art’ at Demonstrations: 2022 Art Association of Australia & New Zealand Conference.

My paper will feature in a session on ‘Machinic Metaphors in Art,’ convened by Tony Curran from the University of Tasmania. I consider the practice of Piet Mondrian through the lens of a specific machine metaphor, drawn from Science and Technology Studies: Andrew Pickering’s “Mangle of Practice.” Pickering construes scientific practice as a ‘dance of agency’ in which scientists’ goals and actions are mangled together with the diverse agencies of machines, materials, disciplinary tradition and social structures. Although Pickering hinted at the mangle’s potential as a “theory of everything,” on the single occasion that Pickering applied it to consider painting, he concluded that the works of Piet Mondrian sublimated rather than celebrated the dance of agency. This paper will reconsider this conclusion from several perspectives.

The 2022 AAANZ Conference ‘DEMONSTRATIONS’ will be held online from 1-3 December and is co-hosted by the Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne and the Faculty of Art, design and Architecture, Monash University.

Coming Soon: Check Website for Details

The project Check Website for Details engages with the changing conditions of exhibition practice, given the ubiquity of photographic-based documentation of artworks, and the accelerated distribution of these via increased access to both digital and print platforms. The central question of this project is: has the mediated experience of physical objects in space come to suffice as an experience of the artwork itself?

Rather than culminating in the display of artworks in the gallery, the project will be shared via a publication that documents activities undertaken in the gallery by Kinly Grey, Melanie Jayne Taylor, Jacqui Shelton, Tim Woodward and myself. The project is curated by Simon Hine for Kuiper Projects.

Bauhaus Now in Brisbane

A new iteration of the Bauhaus Now project will be on show at Museum of Brisbane from Friday 18 September. The exhibition features the Light Space Replicator, alongside works by Grit Kallin-Fischer, Paul Klee, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Frank Hinder, Harry Seidler, Erwin Fabian, Karl Langer, Gertrude Langer, George Teltscher, Gwendolyn Grant, Francis Lymburner, Normana Wight, Josef Albers, El Lissitzky, Marianne Brandt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, Vassily Kandinsky, Udo Sellbach, Laurence Collinson, Laurence Hope, Michael Candy, Eleonore Lange, Paul Bai & Andy Harwood.

Bauhaus Now: art+design+architecture
A legacy of migration and modernism in Brisbane.

Curated by Andrew McNamara, the exhibition considers how revolutionary ideas of the Weimar Republic in Germany influenced modernist art, design and architecture in Brisbane and Australia. The exhibition reveals the migrant and refugee contribution to Australian life and art history in the inter-war period and post-Second World War years. Bauhaus Now will feature original artworks from this period, plus a series of vivid contemporary recreations that demonstrate both the impact of this movement in Brisbane and Australian art history, and how the legacy of these powerful ideas is being re-interpreted today.

Studio Residency in Outer Space

For the month of August I will be undertaking a studio residency at Outer Space ARI, in South Brisbane. The residency will conclude with an open studio event on Friday 28 August, from 6.30-8.00pm. At the Montague Road studios you can see work by myself, Dhana Merritt, Caitlin Franzmann, Natalie Billing, Amelia McLeash, Daniel Sherrington, and Darcy Williams. From 5pm on the same day, you can also see works by Olivia Lacey and Rose Manning, presented by Outer Space at the Metro Arts Studio in Hope Street. To find out more about the event, see the listing here.

Optimistically Omnivorous

The exhibition Optimistically Omnivorous includes the work Liquid Crystal Displaced and a new work related to the Talbot Carpet Project. The exhibition is curated by Martin Smith and will be presented at Onespace Gallery from June 19 – August 1. Artists in the exhibition include Cara Coombe, Peter Fischmann, Teresa Fornataro, Julia Scott Green  and James Hornsby.

“Optimistically Omnivorous presents the work of six Queensland-based photographic artists, whose practices utilise materials, places and ideas that are readily available. However, they employ divergent methods, approaches and philosophical connections to the medium. From constructed performances that reveal false narratives to indexical documentations that emphasise a specific time or place, the exhibition highlights photography’s multiple modes for representing us and itself, questioning the very act of looking.” Martin Smith, from the catalogue essay

Through the Looking Glass

The work Cosmic Background   will be featured in the exhibition Through the Looking Glass: Humanity’s Changing Vision of the Universe, an exhibition developed by the London-based collective Lumen. The exhibition seeks to illuminate how technology has influenced a collective view of the Universe, and runs from 15-20 October 2019.

Bodies of Tech

The work Cosmic Background features in Bodies of Tech, a series of artworks and panel sessions curated by Steph Hutchinson which explore the human experience in technological systems. Presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th August, The project showcases the work of Researchers in QUT’s Creative Lab – visit the website for more information.

Featuring: Steph Hutchinson, Louis-Philippe Demers, Chris Handran, Kath Kelly, Kiley Gaffney, Daniel McKewen, Bree Hadley, Jonathan Roberts, John McCormick, Adam Nash and Benjamin Nicoll.

Bauhaus Now!

The work Light Space Replicator features in the exhibition Bauhaus Now! The exhibition is curated by Ann Stephen and runs from 26 July – 20 October 2019 at Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne.

In the year of its centenary the Bauhaus returns to haunt our museums. How do contemporary artists re-imagine a relationship to this legendary school? Are they scavengers raiding the ruins of modernism, appropriators of ‘good design’ kitsch or acolytes of an unholy sect?  Bauhaus Now! explores its legacy in Australia—both for contemporary artists and for art education—highlighting its visionary, collectivist ideals and its radical practices.

Artists: Mikala Dwyer & Justene Williams | Gertrude Herzger-Seligmann, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Paul Klee | Michael Candy, Peter D Cole, Christopher Handran, Shane Haseman, Rose Nolan, Elizabeth Pulie, Jacky Redgate

The exhibition also coincides with the publication of Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, featuring essays by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist and Isabel Wünsche.