REBECCA ROSS

(2024)

2-9 MARCH
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, THE LOCK UP, NEWCASTLE

Navigating personal and geopolitical connections, between earth and sky, this brief residency will support research into aerial phenomena in the vicinity of The Lock Up.

(2023)
OPENING 6-8PM FRIDAY 24 MARCH
CONTINUES UNTIL 15 APRIL
OUTER SPACE, BRISBANE

ESSAY BY TRISTAN SCHULTZ

Dropping a pin on the map in the deep waters of the Asia Pacific region, Greater Sunrise navigates an area in the Timor Sea and Indian Ocean. Remotely honing in on the seabed between Timor-Leste and Northern Australia, the work is an invitation to sink into a meditation centred on narratives of geopolitics and transcendence.

(2021)

ARTIST BOARDRIDERS CLUB

METRO ARTS, GALLERY 1, WEST END

(2020)
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE WITH ERIKA SCOTT

METRO ARTS, FERRYMAN’S HUT, TENERIFFE

FRIDGE NOTES BY ANITA HOLTSCLAW

Hinterland Valerie was a site specific and collaborative response to working in the Ferryman’s Hut. During this creative development Erika Scott and Rebecca Ross embraced actions of team work to create an object-based installation that documented the current moment.

The Ferryman’s Hut acted as a self-contained zone within which the artists expanded on relationships with environment, society, nature, their bodies and the cosmos. The amenity and location of the Ferryman’s Hut marked a place of transitory interactions, and of things drifting and shifting along the river, notions that underpinned the intentions and actions that were carried out during the residency.

mage credit: Marc Pricop

(2020)
SOLO EXHIBITION

GALLERY ONE, METRO ARTS @WEST VILLAGE, BRISBANE

DARK ENTRIES extends on Ross’ July 2020 residency and exhibition DARK MATTERS at Metro Arts @Hope Street.

DARK ENTRIES ESSAY BY HAMISH SAWYER

Dark Entries delves into the simultaneity of experience, the act of looking back whilst looking forward, and the interpolation of memories into a single, yet multi-dimensional timeline. Extending on Ross’ July 2020 residency and exhibition Dark Matter(s) at Metro Arts @Hope Street, Dark Entries steps into a void of past realms, remixing spatial and video elements into a matrix of current situations and sensations. Staged as an installation of video projections and domestic screening devices, the work attempts to synthesise the past and the future, exploring time and zones, and ultimately the moment we find ourselves in...now.

Image credit: Louis Lim

(2020)

BLEACH FESTIVAL, CHEVRON ISLAND, GOLD COAST
LIGHT HOUSE is located at 218 Stanhill Drive, Chevron Island.

LETTER TO HOME BY AARON CHAPMAN

TIMELAPSE VIDEO
WIP VIDEO
EXCERPT OF PROJECTION VIDEO

Waves of colour wake up a house at sundown...enter the garden and the aura of Light House. Both a guiding light and a life-size lava lamp, Light House forms a cocktail of enquiries into site, situation and sensation, all mixed-up on the Club Chez Nous corner block.

Diurnally Light House presents as a matrix of colour fields across the facade of a dormant dwelling, as the sun sets the house is activated by a synchronised array of liquefied light projections. Light House expands on Rebecca’s site-specific practice within natural and architectural environments, a practice that highlights often overlooked zones, bringing elements of the extraordinary to everyday experiences.

This presentation of Light House was originally commissioned and produced by Bleach* Festival 2020.

LIGHT HOUSE has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments.

Image credit: Malika Halpin

(2020)

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE AND SOLO SHOW

METRO ARTS, HOPE STREET, BRISBANE

DARK MATTER(S) ESSAY BY LISA BRYAN-BROWN AND CATALOGUE DESIGNED BY AMELIA HINE. VIEW THE INFLIGHT VIDEO.

Dark Matter(s) brings together a constellation of works that originate from deep thought, deep storage and deep space. The project began as a search for dark matter — both metaphorically and literally — within personal archives, boxes of materials, and folders packed away in my studio. I’ve been collecting and cutting out images of planets, stars, black holes, galaxies and nebulas for a long time, but now more than ever my search seems to parallel attempts to find meaning when everything else in life is shadowy. The act of bringing these materials to light signifies new beginnings as I employ collage, assemblage, and editing techniques to create new relationships and unearth new meanings between them. The studio at Hope Street will act as a microcosmos where my visual experiments will be installed to establish dynamic spatial narratives in the gallery space.

Image credit: Louis Lim

(2020)

GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

(2020)

PRIVATE (PUBLIC) PROGRAM

PART OF DARK MATTER(S) AT METRO ARTS, HOPE STREET, BRISBANE

Bringing to Light is an invitation to participate in a one-on-one show and tell session. You are invited to bring something to the studio that you would like to share; something with a dark past, something mysterious, something from your archive, retrieved from the kerbside or purchased at a secondhand store. It may be a memory, an object, a song, a poem, a photograph, an artwork, or a star in the night sky. The process of sharing will unfold in a conversation that reveals a previously unshared story and history. The act of Bringing to Light will be documented and archived. Allow 30-60 minutes for your visit. To participate please fill in this form. Thank you for sharing.

(2020)

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

BEHIND THE GOLDEN DOORS, PLACEMAKERS, GOLD COAST

(extra)terrestrial is a video montage anchored in a play between light and dark. Through a non-linear narrative, the work will navigate a practice of gazing outwards at the terrestrial (the light) and then shift focus to look inwards at the psyche and beyond Earth to the far reaches of the universe (the dark). A mélange of moving images, photographs, x-rays, scanned slides, super 8 film, paintings, collages and audio recordings, the work is an experiment in channelling modes and mediums via video, into a single format. The act of bringing these materials together aims to create new relationships and unearth new meanings between them and the universe.

(2020)

ONLINE COLLABORATION WITH BYRON COATHUP

HOTA (HOME OF THE ARTS), GOLD COAST

BOTH | SIDES responded to the 2020 QLD/NSW border closures due to Covid-19. Living on either side of the border, collaborators Rebecca Ross (Queensland) and Byron Coathup (New South Wales), were unable to meet up to make work, conceptualise projects, or surf! The artworks employ a split-screen editing technique with each artist creating one half of the work. The visible line or split in the videos acts as a virtual border, dividing the disparate and distant workspaces of the artists and their work. The work explores the often arbitrary nature of borders; the QLD/NSW border is marked mostly by the 29th Parallel South, a ready-made path in the circle of latitude of 29 degrees south. The 29th Parallel South is not unique to Australia, it circles Earth’s equatorial plane latitude at 29 degrees south and crosses the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Australasia, the Pacific Ocean and South America.

(2020)
CURATORIAL PROJECT

AARON CHAPMAN, JAY JERMYN, RAE SAHELI, GABRIELLE STANLEY, SALLY WRIGHT

METRO ARTS

THE FEEL ESSAY

THE WALLS presented THE FEEL in studio 3.6 at Metro Arts; a group exhibition highlighting the work of Artists in Residence, AARON CHAPMAN, JAY JERMYN, RAE SAHELI, GABRIELLE STANLEY and SALLY WRIGHT.

The exhibition was part of AIRspace curated by Kyle Weis for Metro Arts. Ten local Artist-Run-Initiatives (ARIs) took up residence in the level 3 studios at Metro Arts, a place that was home to many ARIs over the years it was in operation at 108 Edward Street. AIRspace presented a snapshot of Brisbane’s local ARIs, and a chance to explore the studios, and to get together for talks, discussions and performances.

(2019)
GROUP SHOW

WALTER STAHL, NICOLETE BROCCHI, CHRISTOPHER CIPOLLONE, CALLUM GALLETLY, ERIKA SCOTT, REBECCA ROSS

THE SOYLENT SPOT

An object based evening and hotline to new-wave-roof-art.

Infinity is a single channel video work with sound (by Skullgrabber) and was presented as an audiovisual assemblage made up of a TV, TV mount, hexagonal bricks and occy straps. The work, the soundtrack, the title and the orientation of the work, cornered and looking out into the landscape, pay homage to someone who left this planet on 13 August 2019. It turns out infinity has a timescale…just over 6 and a half minutes.

(2019)
CURATORIAL PROJECT

AGENTS OF CONFUSION, JORDAN AZCUNE, MICHAEL CANDY, KINLY GREY

HOTA (Home of the Arts), GOLD COAST

(2019)
A COLLABORATION WITH BYRON COATHUP

BYRON SCHOOL OF ART

(2019)
GROUP SHOW

ELLIE BECK, CHRIS BENNIE, AARON CHAPMAN, BYRON COATHUP, HANNAH CUTTS, GEOFF DAVIDSON, REE HEGH, AMELIA REID, REBECCA ROSS, MITCHELL SCHULTZ, CHRISTINE WILLCOCKS, TIM WILSON.

LONG GALLERY, M-ARTS, MURWILLUMBAH

ARTICLE IN BLANK MAGAZINE

(2019)
CURATORIAL PROJECT WITH BYRON COATHUP AND HENRY JOCK WALKER

ARTIST BOARDRIDERS CLUB: TESSA BERGAN, DAVID BROPHY, ATLANTA EKE, SHANE FLETCHER, MADDISON KELLY [LADY MUSTARD], CHRISTIAN LOCK, KASPER RAGLUS

THE WALLS ART SPACE, GOLD COAST

SURF SALON was a celebration of contemporary surfrider culture and contemporary art in our paradise city that highlighted the work of surfers who also make art. Public programs included an Australian premiere screening of THE SMILING BAG by SHANE FLETCHER and DION AGIUS, and an artist-led workshop with TESSA BERGAN supported by Bleach Festival. The exhibition included an archive of Tracks magazines from the 1990’s which created a strong sense of dialogue both visually with the work and conversationally with audiences who paused to peruse and reflect.

In SURF SALON the traditional salon hang was reinterpreted in surfing terms as a lineup. In the same way that surfers jostle for position and vie for the best waves out in the water, the artworks in SURF SALON strive for space and for the viewers attention. The salon hang brings together a collection of seemingly disparate objects, all hanging together in a carefully considered and arranged grouping of artworks. In this way all of the artworks are placed on an even playing field, similarly the Coral Sea beckons the same, from novice surfers to World Champions floating around in the lineup, they all occupy the same space.

Images: CHRIS BENNIE

(2019)
CURATORIAL PROJECT
Supported by Screen Queensland

CHRIS​ ​BENNIE, SALVADOR CANTELLANO, BYRON​ ​COATHUP,​ LILY HALTON, LAURINDA JANLEWICZ, JAY JERMYN, ADRIENNE KENAFAKE, COURTENAY MCCUE, CHRIS MOORE, CHERIE​ ​NOBLE, EMILY PATERSON, REBECCA ROSS, BARRON SHERER

THE WALLS ART SPACE AND SURROUNDS AT 18 MOUNTAIN VIEW AVENUE, MIAMI

SUNSCREENING: NETWORKS​ ​was​ ​the third iteration​ ​of the SUNSCREENING program at THE WALLS, a contemporary​ ​screen-based​ ​culture​ ​program​ ​that featured​ ​new​ ​works​ ​by​ ​a collection of ​artists​ ​from​ ​Queensland and beyond. SUNSCREENING: NETWORKS wove together the work of an array of artists whose practices were classified by collaboration and connectivity. Supported by Screen Queensland he program featured a major immersive projection mapping commission inside THE WALLS by local film maker SALVADOR CANTELLANO and a showreel of shorts projected on a wall in an alley way close-by.

ABOUT THE WORKS:

SALVADOR CANTELLANO
NETWORKS: LINES AND LIVES

Salvador Cantellano’s major projection mapping work will focus on the lines and lives that foster global networks. Ranging from mapping trajectories and connections via shapes and movement across different surfaces in the space, to mapping out the lives of people and populations through the documentation of faces that he captured at the UNESCO Youth Forum, Salvador’s work will present a compelling spatial network within the space where viewers can become intertwined with lives and light in an immersive screening environment.

CHRIS​ ​BENNIE, SALVADOR CANTELLANO, BYRON​ ​COATHUP,​ LILY HALTON, LAURINDA JANLEWICZ, JAY JERMYN, ADRIENNE KENAFAKE, COURTENAY MCCUE, CHRIS MOORE, CHERIE​ ​NOBLE, EMILY PATERSON, REBECCA ROSS, BARRON SHERER

NETWORKS: THE TENNIS GAME
A recently created collaborative work, this will be the first ever screening of this digitised 16mm film. Made in October 2018 at THE WALLS, The Tennis Game showcases the collaborative efforts of 13 artists and community members who participated in manually manipulating 16mm archival film over the span of a 3 hour workshop led by artist and filmmaker Barron Sherer from Obsolete Media Miami (Florida, USA). The film explores the historical context of camera-less film techniques and applies historical methods of abstract filmmaking through direct manipulation: scratching and puncturing, painting and drawing, and the chemical alteration of “found footage” emulsion.

CHRIS BENNIE, LILY HALTON, JAY JERMYN, ADRIENNE KENAFAKE
NETWORKS: SHORTS
A curated selection of solo shorts by a shortlist of the artists and filmmakers who participated in The Tennis Game.

Images: CHRIS BENNIE

(2018)
SOLO SHOW

STABLE, BRISBANE

IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS BENNIE

(2018)

CURATORIAL PROJECT
A joint project with HOTA Gallery. Supported by Shibui Film.

THE WALLS ART SPACE, GOLD COAST

Local photographer Aaron Chapman responded to watercolourist, Edwin Bode’s artworks in the HOTA (Home of the Arts) Gallery Collection by exploring the identity and landscapes of settlements west of the Pacific Highway, and the notion of there being more to the Gold Coast than just its famous coastline. As a result of the partnership with HOTA Gallery one of Aaron’s works was acquired for the permanent collection. Public program included the launch of a limited edition book published by the artist and an artist talk.

Aaron Chapman​ (b. 1990, Denpasar, Indonesia) is a photographer and writer from the Gold Coast, Australia. After several years travelling and working abroad, he returned to the Gold Coast to complete a Bachelor of Arts at Griffith University. This return home marked the start of his focused storytelling practice and its ongoing development. Chapman now poetically engages the two mediums of photography and writing to create a more intimate sense of place. Currently, he is working on long-term projects documenting his hometown by considering how, as a tourist city, its subcultures and associated stereotypes influence the perception of those who live there permanently.

ESSAY
One of my schoolmates had a property out in Beaudesert where we’d test the bravery of our adolescence with motorbikes, guns and alcohol (never at the same time). We learned what hungover was on those car trips home. We learned the heat without a sea breeze. Wonglepong was nothing more than a weird name on a sign. Canungra was the place you stopped for pies and chocolate milk. We figured someone divined the mountain’s winding roads to punish kids like us.

A young boy’s grave lies
a couple over from Edwin’s.
No palette on a tombstone.
No tombstone, no name.
Just a handful of cowboys
and Indians working together
to protect the soil they stand in.
The forest green of toy soldiers
and the red lining of the numbered birthday candles make me miss Christmas.

We didn’t think about the west growing up. The Gold Coast was a line in the sand, not separating geography, but marking it. A physical and emotional guide of how we travel.

Up and down. Up and down.

Up and down.

— Aaron Chapman, 2018

(2018)

CURATORIAL PROJECT
ESSAY BY ANGELA GODDARD

Commissioned for Festival 2018, Gold Coast Commonwealth Games
Supported by City of Gold Coast, Screen Queensland, Griffith University Art Museum, Queensland State Government and Circa

THE WALLS ART SPACE AND OFFSITE AT BROADBEACH, ON THE BEACH AT SURF LIFE SAVER TOWER #30

Taking its name from a famous 16th century Rembrandt painting, The Night Watch is a modern rekindling of the much-loved Gold Coast tradition of the Sunday night beachside gathering. The project explores the act of ‘night watching’ by translating and reinterpreting the Golden Age themes of Rembrandt’s civic guard scene into a portrait of life, Gold Coast style, through a curated program of contemporary screen-based works.

ESSAY
THE NIGHT WATCH

Rembrandt van Rijn would have loved video art. His most acclaimed work, The Night Watch 1642, is of a cinematic scale before the invention of cinema; it measures 363 × 437cm. Notable not just for its size, the work’s dramatic use of light, shadow, energy and movement distinguish it from other stiffly formal civic guard portraits of the era; the company is captured in a tangle of gestures and expressions just as they are about to march. In contrast to the later-appended title, the scene is actually set in daylight, with the sun streaming down from the top left, but the effect of the time-darkened varnish which causes the figures to emerge from inky gloom only adds to the dramatic composition.

Some of the most compelling artworks of the last thirty years employ moving image and sound. The technologies associated with capturing, exhibiting, and documenting these ephemeral media are inherently fast moving and mutable. ‘Video art’ has become a catch-all term for moving image works, which are now pervasive presences within galleries, aligning with the ubiquity of the medium in our daily lives. Within the realm of contemporary art, the increase in production values in recent years is apparent. Artists are embracing VR technology and the spatial possibilities of moving images just as quickly as commercial interests looking for new advertising outlets.

The exhibition The Night Watch features 18 video works by 18 artists and collectives across two venues. All works have been made in the last four years, and are each less than two minutes. Rekindling a much-loved Gold Coast tradition of Sunday night beachside gatherings, the project also captures some of the integral aspects of a Gold Coast visitor’s experience: nightlife and promenading: watching others and being watched.  

The artists included in The Night Watch are distinctive for their diverse approaches to the visual language of the video art medium. These works by this purposefully disparate but distilled group of practitioners give a sense of this time and place; they are snapshots of a scene. In a period where we are all able to access technology to record and edit video through our smartphones, the democratic nature of the medium is pervasive.

The Night Watch is a roll call of some of the most talented and innovative artists working in the medium. Most of the works feature the coastline or the local environment of the Gold Coast in some way, yet others remain abstractly indistinct. From the solarised beachscapes featuring two young women in Hannah Bronte’s Nomi n Nali 2018, to the playful irony of Weekend Immendorff [Suzanne Howard + David M Thomas]’s Human Experience 2017 documenting earnest individuals running and riding past the frame, these works depict complex world views, synthesizing biography within ever-evolving contexts, unencumbered by a limiting definition of what might constitute or need to reflect a local sensibility or specificity.

There are works that convey a profound sense of place and integral connection to country, such as Libby Harward Yabruma 2015, and those which address the aesthetic pleasures of natural conditions such as Michelle Xen’s Submerge 2017, to the impressionist capture of a fragmentary moment as seen in Alex Chomicz’s Pump 2018, and the grittier realism of Ying Ang & Ling Ang’s Gold Coast 2014 as well as the montaged retro-Gold Coast footage used in Byron Coathup’s All Work No Play (Miami/Miami Remix) 2018.

Performance art and video have shared a long relationship, first as a means to document live events, then later through the creation of events specifically for the medium, as seen in Chris Bennie’s posing figures, the awkward, semi-slapstick interpretive dance of Lowana Davies’s Home Ground 2017 and Chantal Fraser’s veiled figures refusing the gaze.

With the release of the Sony Portapak video camera in 1967, video became inexpensive and portable, democratising a medium which, to that point, was monopolised by the commercial interests of broadcast television. The medium has only continued its trajectory to a radical accessibility. Here on the Gold Coast, the Night Watch project’s projection into public space fulfills these early aims. While the belief that artistic agency can lead to social change has lost some of the euphoric edge of the counter-culture era, video remains a valuable tool for artists dealing with political issues as we move deeper into the twenty-first century.

This compendium of works provides a unique window into a current moment of the visual arts in Australia during a period of vitality and experimentation. The Night Watch surveys the scene, and enables us to view a richness of perspective, invention and possibility by some of the most exciting artists working in the medium today.
— Angela Goddard
Director, Griffith University Art Museum

(2018)
GROUP SHOW

CURATED BY BYRON COATHUP

FESTIVAL 2018 GOLD COAST COMMONWEALTH GAMES, GOLD COAST

(2017)

COLLABORATION WITH BYRON COATHUP

CURATED BY DAVID PLEDGER (NOT YET IT’S DIFFICULT)

2970 DEGREES CONFERENCE, SURFERS PARADISE, GOLD COAST

(2017)

PERFORMANCE WITH GG (GABRIELLE ROSS) AND T-LORD (ANTHONY PARKE R.I.P.)
PART OF FIRST THURSDAYS CURATED BY MARIAM ARCILLA

INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART

Equipped with a vault of synthesisers and a sample bank of weekly deposits, Skullgrabber (featuring artist Rebecca Ross, and others) return after a few minor renovations and are once again ready to render themselves public.

(2016)

BENJAMIN FORSTER, ANITA HOLTSCLAW, DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM

CURATED BY REBECCA ROSS

THE WALLS ART SPACE, MIAMI, GOLD COAST

LIST OF WORKS
[Flowing in the direction of the ocean currents in the hemisphere of location]

Anita Holtsclaw
The Waves [2013-14] Digital Video
15min 4sec

Benjamin Forster Idiot Box [2015] Custom electronics

Daniel Mudie Cunningham
True Colours​ [2016]
4K single channel video with sound 4min6s​ec

ESSAY
Channel Surfing: a state of ozmosis

You are a seeker, I am a seeker.
In the same way a surfer seeks waves, a channel surfer seeks a channel.

I got hooked on the title Channel Surfing some time ago. It’s a play on the use of the TV screen in the gallery, screen-based works, and is now an exhibition where collectively the artworks can be viewed as channels. In this case, the exhibition comprises artworks by Benjamin Forster, Anita Holtsclaw and Daniel Mudie Cunningham.

A strait of water can be described as a channel, a​ nd typically joins two large areas of water or seas together. In a si​ milar way, the title Channel Surfing brings together three works that are anchoredtov​isionsofthesea,thebeach,surfingandwaves.​Areflectionofitslocation,with close proximity to the Coral Sea and numerous beach and point breaks, the title pays homage to, and is a play on, a site renowned for surfing and surfers.

This site, Miami on the Gold Coast, home of The Walls, is temporarily the collective home of theLCD(l​iquidcrystaldisplay)a​ ndCRT(c​athoderaytube)​ ​TVsintheexhibition;they’veall lived domestic lives prior to their stint in the art space, and will return to their homes

afterwards. There’s dust on the backs and domestic brand names on the fronts. These are lived appliances whose remote control numbers have worn off. They are showing their age. I like to think that within the TVs is the memory of, and the future potential for, the TV’s primary actions - screening, flicking, scanning and surfing (tele)visions. Although at the time of writing one of the CRT’s has just gone on the blink.

The presentation of most screen-based artworks usually requires remote controls in order to be activated. However, in Channel Surfing, one of the works, I​ diot Box​ by Benjamin Forster, is in itself the controller. A ‘close’ control as I have dubbed it, or micro-controller as Benjamin calls it, is a​ piece of hand-built custom electronics that g​ enerate live patterns on the screen. The notion that waves have a genetic code (something I have recently become interested in) echoes in this work, where the micro-controller’s code generates a video signal, creating a mirrored wave pattern that is unpredictable but not random (like surf waves).

Anita Holtsclaw’s work T​ he Waves​ combines the artist’s stated “interests in the landscape and the role it plays in recorded media, where our experience of place is altered and framed by the experience of viewing rather than visiting places.” Over a timeframe of 15 minutes, Anita’s waves wash over the screen, almost spilling on the gallery floor, creating a cross-current in the TV’s perpendicular orientation to the real sea lapping at the shore, just 200 metres away.

Set on Cronulla Beach, D​ aniel Mudie Cunningham’s T​ rue Colours​ remakes Cyndi Lauper’s hit music video of the same name. Here, the artist reimagines the stylised beach setting of the original True Colors video as the Sydney beach Cronulla; as he describes it, “a lurid scene awash with the true blue colours of Australian nationalism.” It’s a remake that Daniel says “amplifies these connotations as a device to ‘queer’ the distorted symbols of Australian nationalism that initiated the homosocial mob violence and territorial tribalism performed at Cronulla on the day of the riots”.

These works are exhibited on their various monitors, media players and controllers, with minimal regard for intervening in the gallery construct. The cables and cords lie as they fell, coiling and twisting on the floor like surfboard leg-ropes, tethering screens to their power outlets in the same way a surfer is connected to her surfboard.

[Insert reality TV program here]

You read this far and you didn’t change channels - thank you, I hope you enjoy the show.

— Rebecca Ross, 2016

ANNA CAREY, CLAUDIA DE SALVO, ANJA LOUGHHEAD, MONIQUE MONTFROY, MILLAN PINTOS-LOPEZ, KAEL STASCE
9 December, 2016 – 11 February, 2017

Curated by David Broker and Rebecca Ross
Essays by Chris Bennie and David Broker

The Walls Art Space and Canberra Contemporary Art Space

High Rise Low Rise is a contemporary art Contiki Tour: artworks packed in suitcases, curators on flights to far-flung locales and artists emerging from airport terminals to the sea air of the Gold Coast. It is a touring exhibition of artists from Canberra and the Gold Coast whose disparate practices share regional connections, architectural references and touristic motifs. The exhibition focuses on the opportunity for exchange and highlights the importance of regional connectivity between art spaces, places and artists.

High Rise Low Rise emerged from Rebecca Ross’ [Artistic Director,The Walls] mentorship with David Broker [Director, Canberra Contemporary Art Space]. During conversation and research, in both Miami and Canberra, David and Rebecca identified some uncanny similarities between Canberra and the Gold Coast and then set out to explore their differences, connectivity, and the architecture of these purpose-built regional cities, each inviting 3 local artists to exhibit in both Canberra and the Gold Coast.

A joint project between THE WALLS and Canberra Contemporary Art Space

HIGH RISE LOW RISE was supported by The Regional Arts Development Fund. The Regional Arts Development Fund is a Queensland Government and City of Gold Coast Council partnership to support local arts and culture.

(2016)

BOXCOPY CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE, BRISBANE

(2014)

FIBRO COAST, GOLD COAST CITY GALLERY & ROOM 11, COOLOONGATTA OCEAN VIEW MOTEL

(2013)

SPIRO GRACE ART ROOMS PROJECT SPACE, BRISBANE

(2012)

BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME, ROME, ITALY

(2010)

IE & THE WANDERING ROOM, SOUTH BRISBANE

(2010)

JJ MORGAN & CO. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND

(2010)

MEZZANINE GALLERY, MUSEUM OF BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND

(2009)

VENICE, VENETO, ITALY

(2009)

BOXCOPY CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE, BRISBANE

(2009)

IVORY 24/7 ARTISAN, FORTITUDE VALLEY

(2008)

665 ANN STREET, FORTITUDE VALLEY

(2008)

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

(2008)

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

(2006)
TURRBAL JAGERA CURATED BY DAVID PESTORIUS
THE GREAT COURT, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND, BRISBANE

(2006)

BLINDSIDE, MELBOURNE

(2003)

MAIN GALLERY, METRO ARTS, BRISBANE

OLD MINT STREET ESSAY BY RACHAEL HAYNES