Georgia Button, Brad Darkson, Angelique Joy, James Tylor, and Agnieszka Woznicka.
Presence
May 3 - June 4, 2023
Exhibition launch Saturday May 13 at 5pm
Experience new digital video works by South Australian multidisciplinary artists that explore the relationship between place and identity. These works respond to significant sites and artefacts, contributing new perspectives to our shared history. Curated by Liv Spiers.
Georgia Button
Grow up
2023, digital video (3:08 mins) [still].
Grow Up is a visual collision of the past and the present. Captured in 1996, the archival footage traces my mother using a hand-held video camera to film my eldest brother and myself, exploring the farm with a visiting distant family member. The snippets of current footage were filmed by myself, 27 years later, using a 4K digital video camera, retracing my mother’s steps (3 years older than she was when she filmed the original footage), documenting the same spaces on the family farm.
The wave pattern flowing across the archival screen is a byproduct of using the same video-editing software to edit the archival footage with the new footage. There is a way to engineer this not to happen, but it has been intentionally left in the work. I am interested in seeing visual evidence of the software’s inability to reconcile time – a material reflection on the ideas that drive my practice.
Water tanks, tree lines, sheds, skies, wells, cattle yards, gates, machinery, kites, family, self. A jarring glimpse of what has been lost, replaced, and added.
All footage used in this work has been filmed on Nukunu country, in the Mid North region of South Australia.
Biography
Georgia Button’s multidisciplinary practice embraces moving-image, installation and sound to explore affect, loss, personal histories and rural environments. Button graduated with First Class Honours from Adelaide Central School of Art in 2022. Recent exhibitions and presentations include Petrichor, Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery, 2021; Tactile, Self, Adelaide Film Festival, 2020; Hiraeth, FELTspace, Adelaide, 2020; and recess presents, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, 2019. Button has undertaken a mentorship with internationally acclaimed collective SODA_JERK. Additionally, she has been the recipient of Guildhouse’s CATAPULT grant, funding a mentorship with nationally renowned sculptural and installation artist, Nicholas Folland. Button was selected to participate in the 2023 Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) Studio Program in partnership with Adelaide Central School of Art.
Brad Darkson
Burn the log.
2023, Native grasses (Themeda triandra - kangaroo grass; Cymbopogon ambiguus - lemongrass), HD video duration 06:00 mins, sound recording of traditional burning [still]
Burn the log.
Eat
Drink
Celebrate.
Hold the ceremony close to your heart.
Search for a new world.
Get scurvy
Lose your teeth
Watch your friends and family die.
Fail to grow your grass.
Watch them burn the grass and offer you shelter.
Grow your grass.
Burn the log.
Forget the ceremony.
Buy things
Drink
Celebrate.
Turn to us for guidance.
Ask us for our blessing.
Try to take our ancient fire.
Our fire will burn within.
Listen to our fire.
Watch us burn.
Cultural guidance by Aunty Lynette Crocker
Cultural
Heritage of Adelaide
Estate handed down as
an Inheritance from the
Spirit of our Ancestors.
Humanity.
All footage and materials used in this work are from Kaurna yarta.
Biography
Brad Darkson is a South Australian visual artist currently working across various media including carving, sound, sculpture, multimedia installation, and painting. Darkson's practice is regularly focused on site specific works, and connections between contemporary and traditional cultural practice, language and lore. His current research interests include traditional land management practices, bureaucracy, seaweed, and the neo-capitalist hellhole we're all forced to exist within. Conceptually Darkson's work is often informed by his First Nations and Anglo Australian heritage. Brad's mob on his Dad's side is the Chester family, with lineages to Narungga and many other Nations in South Australia from Ngarrindjeri to Far West Coast. On his Mum's side he's from the Colley and Ball convict and settler migrant families, both arriving in 1839 aboard the Duchess of Northumberland.
In 2015 he completed a BFA at the University of South Australia and in 2017 he completed an MFAD at the University of Tasmania. Selected exhibitions include Make Yourself Comfortable I (solo exhibition) Post Office Projects 2022, Neoteric (group exhibition) 2022, Experimenta Life Forms (international triennial of media art) touring 2021 - 2024; Adelaide//International (group exhibition) Samstag Museum 2020; International Symposium on Electronic Art (South Korea) 2019; VIETNAM – ONE IN, ALL IN (Country Arts SA national exhibition) touring 2019 – 2021; The Return (group exhibition) Dark Mofo 2018; LOSS. GAIN. REVERB. DELAY. (solo exhibition) Vitalstatistix 2017.
Darkson currently sits on the board of The Australian Network for Art and Technology and the Guildhouse Artist Advisory Group.
Angelique Joy
I know I never listened (I am now) (Heather)
2023, single channel video work, dimensions variable [still]
Angelique Joy
I'll take them with us (threads & stitches) (Dulcie)
2023, single channel video work, dimensions variable [still]
A transhistorical sympoesis and technological entanglement: Imaginings for new modes of being.
The human and the non-human; the material (textural) to the virtual (material). From one side of a binary way of being to the other; these are the spaces in-between. Folded into the virtual. A transversal assemblage and an attempt at becoming with our non-human companions and technological future (present); My grandmothers stitches and triangulated points of data - full of seeds and code, if we listen, for evolutionary worlding, unworlding and reworlding.
Biography
Angelique Joy is a Neuroqueer, visual artist working with photography and the expanded nature of the digital image. Angelique’s practice is informed by their Neuroqueer lived experience and through the intersecting frameworks of posthumanism, queer and xenofeminism.
Their practice has emerged out of a concern with identity, otherness and space. They are interested in the cultural and material spaces we all unfold within. Increasingly their practice is interrogating the digital spaces we populate and how the technologically mediated bodymind is contributing to new worlds.
They are particularly interested in exploring how each being, both human and non, unfolds, is constructed and performed within the spaces we inhabit, the spaces we claim, and the spaces we are kept from. Angelique is currently a PHD candidate at RMIT.
James Tylor
Karta Pintingga (The Island of the Dead)
2020, video (10 mins) [still]
Karta Pintingga (The Island of the Dead) is a silent mono-chromatic film about Karta Pintingga Kangaroo Island in South Australia. This visually poetic silent film references the Island’s dark human history. The Island has a long Indigenous history dating back over 45,000 years. Since its isolation from the Australian landmass 10,000 years ago, it was uninhabited by people until the arrival of Matthew Flinders in 1802 and European whalers who colonised it between 1803-1836. Karta Pintingga has cultural importance for Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri people. They have dark stories about the Island’s creation and of its colonial history with European whalers kidnapping Indigenous women and holding them captive there. Karta Pintingga is the Kaurna name for Kangaroo Island and it translates to “the Island of the Dead”.
Biography
James Tylor is an Australian multi-disciplinary contemporary visual artist. He was born in Mildura, Victoria. He spent his childhood in Menindee in far west New South Wales, and then moved to Kununurra and Derby in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in his adolescent years. From 2003 to 2008, James trained and worked as a carpenter in Australia and Denmark. In 2011 he completed a bachelor of Visual Arts (Photography) at the South Australian School of Art in Adelaide and in 2012 he completed Honours in Fine Arts (Photography) at the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart. He returned to Adelaide in 2013 and completed a Masters in Visual Arts and Design (Photography) at the South Australian School of Art. Since completing his tertiary education he has researched Indigenous and European colonial history with a focus on South Australia. He is an experienced writer, designer, curator, historian, researcher, art gallery installation and museum collection conservator. James currently works as a professional visual artist in Tarntanya Adelaide on Kaurna Land in South Australia.
Tylor is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose practice explores Australian environment, culture and social history. These mediums include photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, scents and food. He explores Australian cultural representations through the perspectives of his multicultural heritage that comprises Nunga (Kaurna Miyurna), Māori (Te Arawa) and European (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch and Norwegian) ancestry. Tylor’s work focuses largely on the history of 19th century Australia and its continual effect on present day issues surrounding cultural identity and the environment. His research, writing and artistic practice has focused most specifically on Kaurna indigenous culture from the Adelaide Plains region of South Australia and more broadly European colonial history in Southern Australia. His practice also explores Australian indigenous plants and the environmental landscape of Southern Australia.
All footage used in this work has been filmed on Kaurna yarta.
Agnieszka Woznicka
Here | There
2023, digital video (1:51 mins) [still]
Here | There reflects on a personal experience of migration, loss of home, displacement and living in a permanent state of ‘in-between’.
Inspired by a traditional embroidery sampler from the collection, it reimagines a historical textile practice through animation processes.
Threads connect past with present, mapping shared experience of navigating between borders, places, languages, cultures and traditions.
It’s a rhythmic meditation evoking nostalgia for a home and familiar while transitioning and adapting to a new environment.
Biography
Agnieszka Woznicka is a visual artist, independent animator and educator who works across a wide range of media including animation, film, drawing and fiber art.
In her practice she examines the physical and metaphorical dimensions of materials while exploring the mysteries of the natural world and human existence.
Her work, deeply rooted in the Eastern-European tradition of art and film, is characterized by poetic imagery, meticulous handcraftsmanship and inventive storytelling.
Her films have been shown and recognized at numerous international film and animation festivals and curated programs, including screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, Giffoni International Film Festival and Premiere Plan Film Festival. She was also included in the Short History of Polish Animation program that screened at MoMA New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris.
A native of Poland, Agnieszka graduated from the Polish National School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz. She was Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in USA from 2000-2019. She currently teaches part-time in the Illustration/Animation Program at the University of South Australia and works from her studio in Adelaide Hills.