Kieran Stewart

Kieran Stewart was our Context and Culture lecturer at VU and his enthusiasm for art is infectious.

He’s also a visual artist who works across the mediums of video, image making and sculptural installation. Kieran explores concepts of labour, systems of commercial promotion and gross capital production.

Kieran makes inflatable sculptures and his Occupy Nothing is a wall that deflates when someone approaches. The work re-inflates when is stops sensing movement. Kieran’s work often has a playful and unusual quality that I like.

Powered up and broken was a modified ATM placed in a gallery that printed the title and description of work on a receipt when you attempted to withdraw cash. This is one of Kieran’s favourite works and I love the craziness of it. More about Kieran here.

Jo Davenport at Flinders Lane Gallery

Today I went to Jo Davenport’s exhibition opening at Flinders Lane Gallery. Her paintings are large, abstract, loose and spontaneous. She uses strong colours, runny paint which bleeds into the canvas and drips, thick paint applied with a palette knife, brushstrokes and scrape marks that combine in a frenzy of colour. This series is based on landscapes inspired by a recent boat trip from Echuca to Adelaide on the Murray River. I loved the looseness, the variation of marks and the colours!

The Substation Contemporary Art Prize

Fauxtopia, ACAB Collective, 2012, mixed media

I went to the opening of the Substation Contemporary Art Prize on 21 September, and revisited the exhibition last Saturday.

There were 50 finalists who had produced sculptures, installations, video works and paintings.

The winner was Ash Keating, who did a video about his mother’s death, A New Lifelong Landscape. I liked paintings by Dane Lovett (who I voted for in the People’s Choice Award) and Hamish Carr best, and an installation by ACAB Collective, a group of young artists who turned a basement room into a crazy fairy grotto.