Fuck Your Heroes Michael Ciavarella, Ross Coulter, Deven Marriner, Laith McGregor
Fuck Your Heroes derives from the title of a book of photographs by Glenn E. Friedman that documented emerging sub-cultures from the 1970s whose identities were fashioned largely in relation to their predecessors. This exhibition brings together four male artists who attempt to relate their own experiences as artists in relation to their predecessors, and the implications of masculinity that this entails.
Fuck Your Heroes is an exploration of the themes, materials and processes of artists who have come before us. As Atticus Finch reflected in To Kill a Mocking Bird, ‘you never really understand a person until you consider his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around’. Posing, piss-making, flaunting and fucking; one part homage to every two parts irreverence, Fuck Your Heroes calls into question past and contemporary art practice, as well as hero worship.
Michael Ciavarella, Ross Coulter, Deven Marriner and Laith McGregor are Melbourne-based artists.
Gallery 2
Landscape; a space to think Aimee Fairman
Through the construction of enclosed, kinetic, miniature environments, this project explores temporal experience and the metaphor of the landscape as a psychological space. Employing the use of the miniature and time-based operating systems, the works propose a way of referencing the virtual in relation to the real, the actual in relation to the pictorial, internal in relation to external, and phenomena in relation to process.
Ideas of memory, time and narrative are all considered. The work explores perceptions of transience, time and timelessness, investigating the nature of the symbolic landscape and its use as a potential tool to explore the expression of psychological spaces, whilst re-examining the European Romantic landscape tradition in a contemporary context.
Aimee Fairman is a Melbourne-based artist who completed her Masters of Fine Art at RMIT in 2007. She was a finalist in the Siemens/RMIT Fine Art Scholarship in 2005 and 2007.
Gallery 3
The Room That Was (Mnemonia) Cameron Bishop
The Room That Was creates a new learning space for the improvement of the unco-operative body – a mobile mnemonia room. It is a place where the subject’s memory can be rendered to suit other points of view. The subject can be indoctrinated anytime, anywhere, and by any method inside the The Room That Was – especially designed for the dimensions of the average sized human body (astromonk – an incipient being). It is a mobile asylum for the European consciousness (much like Australia).
Recently, Cameron Bishop has been working with the artist collective, Bozo Ink, on their Mnemonia project, exhibiting a piece at the McClelland Gallery Sculpture Survey and Award. Cameron has exhibited extensively in Melbourne and also in New Zealand. He currently teaches and is trying to finish a PhD at Deakin University.
