MCA Museum of Contemporary Art

Primavera 2012

04 Oct - 02 Dec 2012

Dion Beasley
Animals From Overseas - Running, 2011
soft ground etching and aquatint
Image courtesy and © the artist
Photograph: Rhett Hammerton
PRIMAVERA 2012
4 October - 2 December 2012

In a world of Twitter and Facebook, 24-hour news cycles and two-minute attention spans, re-imagine the world from a slower and more considered perspective in Primavera 2012. Enter into the imaginary territories, spiritual landscapes and private interior realms of seven young artists from around the country and explore the way art can take us to realms that exist outside of the everyday.

Discover new artwork ranging from drawing, printmaking, film and video to performance, installation and photography in the 21st edition of Primavera, the MCA’s annual exhibition of Australian artists aged 35 years and under. Enjoy a moment to be intimate and contemplative with artworks that embrace expanded notions of self portraiture and explore the threshold between our interior self and the exterior world. Primavera 2012 invites us into invisible worlds of memories, beliefs, thoughts and daydreams that question the alternate realities we construct and inhabit on a daily basis.

Tennant Creek-based artist Dion Beasley’s whimsical prints and drawings tell vivid stories of the camp dogs in the remote Aboriginal communities where he grew up. Teho Ropeyarn’s large-scale black and white prints feature totemic animals and landscapes from his home community in Far North Queensland, inspired by stories passed down from Injinoo Elders.

View the personal and whimsical photographs by Justine Varga in which she documents the minute details of her everyday environment, and Todd McMillan’s 16 mm film of a sea voyage he undertook off the coast of Tasmania to document the rare and endangered shy albatross.

Witness artist Benjamin Forster’s attempts to teach a computer to draw just like him, and Kate Mitchell’s pile of hand-counted 11,137 unshelled peanuts, one for every day she has been alive up to the opening of the exhibition – a comic representation of her life in nuts.

Melbourne-based artist Anastasia Klose will relocate to the MCA gallery to re-enact a two-month period of unemployment, watching television, eating junk food and dancing to music video clips in her endurance performance The Re-living Room (2012).

PRIMAVERA IS AN ANNUAL EXHIBITION FOR AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AGED 35 YEARS AND UNDER. THE PRIMAVERA EXHIBITION SERIES WAS FOUNDED THROUGH THE GENEROUS BENEFACTION OF DR EDWARD JACKSON AM AND MRS CYNTHIA JACKSON AM AND THEIR FAMILY IN MEMORY OF THEIR DAUGHTER AND SISTER BELINDA.
 

Tags: Justin