WILBOW GALLERY

Jon Lewis
Kiribati: putting a face to climate change

> 11 February to 12 April 2010
> Opening: 3.00PM Saturday 13 February 2010

Australian photographer and a founder of Greenpeace Australia Jon Lewis will this weekend speak at MGA in response to his latest exhibition. Kiribati: putting a face to climate change, on display at MGA until 11 April, takes on the big issue of our time: climate change.

The Republic of Kiribati consists of 33 atolls and is situated in the Equatorial Pacific. It is a country under threat of storm surges, salination of fresh water, unpredictable weather and tidal increases. The environmental impacts of climate change are contributing to the country’s physical demise – tragically, it is slowly and surely going down.

>more information

> Listen up: artist;s talk with Jon Lewis
2pm Saturday 13 February 2010

Bookings 03 8544 500

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY

Talking Tapa : Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland



> Opening: 3.00PM Saturday 13 February 2010
with opening remarks by judith Ryan, Senior Curator, Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Victoria

Talking Tapa : Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland showcases the diversity of Pacific Islander cultural practices and visual iconography as represented through tapa (beaten bark cloth).

Talking Tapa: Pasifika Bark Cloth in Queensland is a travelling exhibition that showcases Pacific Islander heritage. With a growing number of Pacific Islanders settling in Australia and an increasing awareness of Australia's Pacific neighbours, i t is timely that a major exhibition of tapa (bark cloth) has been developed and will be touring across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria in 2009/2011.

Talking Tapa is a national travelling exhibition presented by Brisbane Multicultural Arts Centre, curated by Joan G Winter and toured by Museum and Gallery Services Queensland. This exhibition is supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia. This project is also proudly funded by Queensland Government's Gambling Community Benefit Fund and Brisbane City Council

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FOCUS GALLERY

Sean Davey and Emmanuel Onom Mel
8 Mile: photographs from the margins of Port Moresby

FOCUS GALLERY
> 28 January–28 February 2010

Monash Gallery of Art begins 2010 with Pasifika: three Oceanic encounters. Pasifica runs from February-April 2010 and focuses attention on our Pacific neighbours. Pasifika begins with a photographic collaboration between Sean Davey and Emmanuel Onom Mel.

Sean and Emmanuel’s exhibition portrays life in the small community of 8 Mile Settlement, located just outside Port Moresby, PNG. Over the past few years, Sean has visited 8 Mile, photographing it and teaching its residents how to take photographs. Emmanuel has also documented his community: together, Sean’s black-and-white and Emmanuel’s colour photographs produce a compellingly gritty picture of contemporary life in PNG.

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SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY

Building as muse: the creative collaboration of Max Dupain and Harry Seidler

Curated by Sandra Byron

>17 December 2009-24 January 2010
Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 19 December 2009
with opening remarks by architectural photographer John Gollings.

There have been few creative collaborations between an architect and photographer as significant, enduring and intimate as that of Seidler and Dupain.

Since the invention of the medium photographers have turned to architecture as subjects and for inspiration. This extraordinary exhibition highlights the importance of Seidler's work in the development of Max Dupain's unparalleled career as a photographer and illustrates the impact of Dupain's photographic vision on Seidler's architecture.

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FOCUS GALLERY

Robert Ashton: photographs from the edge

>10 December 2009 to 24 January 2010
> opening: 3.00pm Saturday 12 December 2009

Over the next four months, Monash Gallery of Art's focus will squarely be on the big question of our time: the environment and man's impact on it.

The forthcoming exhibition Photographs from the edge is a record of photographer Robert Ashton's forty year fascination with the edge of our continent. The line where the land meets the water. 

Monash Gallery of Art is proud to present Photographs from the edge , which includes 32 of Ashton's most intriguing beach photographs. 

>more information

FOCUS GALLERY

Vin Ryan; tree game

>28 October to 6 December 2009

Melbourne artist Vin Ryan has spent four years on his latest drawing project Tree game. Using coloured pencil on paper and a virtuoso realist technique Ryan draws the trees that line our suburban streets.

Ryan's art-making often involves some intervention or unintended gesture in the creative process. In his Tree game drawings, the arbitrary gesture is made by a council arborist who prunes the top of the tree to accommodate overhanging electricity wires.

Eliminating background streets, fences and wires, Ryan's trees are transformed into fantastical silhouettes, absurd found oblects or Rorschach ink blots.

FOCUS GALLERY

Beverley Veasey; habitats

> >15 September to 25 October 2009

For her latest exhibition  Habitats, photographer Beverley Veasey has photographed the spaces we create for animals in zoos. This exhibition, now on display at MGA, provides an intriguing insight into our relationship with the natural world.

>more information

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY
and WILBOW GALLERY

BRUTAL TENDER HUMAN ANIMAL: Roger Ballen photography

> 4 September - 1 November 2009
> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 5 September 2009

Internationally renowned photographer Roger Ballen has produced some of the most intensely confronting and challenging images of our times. Brutal, tender, human, animal: Roger Ballen photography is Melbourne's only opportunity to see the work of this award-winning photographer and the extraordinarily images that thrust Ballen unexpectedly into the world spotlight.

>more information

FOCUS GALLERY

Louis Porter: Australian colour

> 5 August - 13 September, 2009
> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 8 August 2009

From Altona to Hoppers Crossing, Deer Park to Thornbury, Louis Porter has traversed the urban landscape of greater Melbourne and Victoria, capturing colourful and uncanny moments with his camera.

Australian colour presents a series of ink-jet prints, individually titled after the places where each image was shot. Exploring the character of contemporary Australia in the context of parking lots, industrial estates, shopping precincts and residential cul-de-sacs, Porter ' s photographs re-imagined our everyday environment as a dreamscape, full of quirky possibilities and kooky coincidences.

Art critic and writer Ashley Crawford says "Porter photographs suburbia like an antipodean David Lynch"

>more information

FOCUS GALLERY

David Hempenstall: Camp Slayer

> 1 July - 2 August, 2009
> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 4 July2009

During 2005-06 David Hempenstall lived and worked on the US military base, Camp Slayer inside the Abu Ghurayb complex, Iraq. This exhibition presents photographs of that experience.

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SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY
and WILBOW GALLERY

presentation/representation: photography from Germany

> 2 July - 30 August, 2009
> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 4 July2009

Presentation/representation: photography from Germany brings to Melbourne the work of ten of Germany's best contemporary photographers. Curated by Thomas Weski (also curator of the survey of Thomas Gursky recently seen at the National Gallery of Victoria), Presentation/representation covers the work of the generation of German photographers that has followed the now-legendary Kunstakademie Düsseldorf generation of Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. The exhibition shows that, in the wake of the highly formal serialism of the Düsseldorf generation , new German photography is defined by the diversity of its style and interests.

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WILBOW GALLERY

Vertigo

>8 May-28 June 2009

Artists include: Max DUPAIN, Wolfgang SIEVERS, David MOORE, John GOLLINGS, David STEPHENSON, Arthur WICKS, Simon TERRILL, Deborah PAAUWE

Looking at photographs that have been shot from high above the ground might make us feel dizzy, powerful or even otherworldly. Photographs that turn our gaze up to the sky can produce feelings of awe and disorientation.

These sensations are an effect of the technology of the camera. The curved lens of the camera works in a similar way to the human eye, and it is traditionally held at the height of the human eye, pointed toward the horizon. This makes it easy to imagine ourselves physically occupying the scene presented to us in the photograph. For this reason, when the camera's point of view moves away from the conventions of human vision, the photograph can challenge our sense of equilibrium and provoke feelings of vertigo.

Twentieth-century avant-garde artists regularly exploited such destabilising photographic effects. The Bauhaus photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy often used high and low angles, oblique views and extreme close ups in order to make things appear strange. For early modernist photographers such as Moholy-Nagy, we had become so accustomed to seeing the world in a particular way, that we rarely actually looked at it; he wanted to destabilise the lazy viewer by photographing the world in ways that rendered it strange and unfamiliar. By creating a new way of seeing things, he hoped to create a whole new way of being in the world.

Vertigo explores the camera's capacity to unsettle our everyday perception of the world through the work of a number of Australian photographers from MGA's collection. It includes a range of photographs that use extreme camera angles to produce different formal and psychological effects, so that we might see the world afresh.

>Download exhibition texts

FOCUS GALLERY

David Callow: 40 000 + 40

>17 May-28 June 2009

> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 17 May 2009
to be opened by Rupert Myer AM
Chairman, National Gallery of Australia

David Callow's exhibition 40 000 + 40 presents a series of twenty-three portraits of Indigenous Australians.

David has had 20 years experience as a documentary photographer and since 1997 has worked extensively in the Northern Territory in some of Australia's most remote communities. Making up to 6 visits a year Callow has developed strong ties to the region and with this exhibition has produced a remarkable series of portraits that focus on the strength, humour and vitality of the individuals in these communities.

major supporters:

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY

Beyond visibility: light and dust

>8 May-28 June 2009

> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 9 May 2009

Bringing together the work of Felicity Spear, David Malin and Gulumbu Yunupingu the exhibition creates an environment that explores human efforts to make pictures of whatever lies beyond Earth's atmosphere.

>more information

FOCUS GALLERY

Julie Shiels: sleeper

>1 April -10 May 2009

> Opening: 3.00pm Saturday 4 April 2009

Sleeper, Julie Shiels' new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art is the culmination of a four-year project in which she has used discarded mattresses found on the streets of Melbourne as source material for her art.

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FOCUS GALLERY

2009 Fundraising preview exhibition dinner & auction

Preview exhibition:
>13 March to 28 March 2009

Fundraising Dinner & Auction:
>7.00pm Saturday 28 March 2009

>more information

Twenty-three of Australia's most significant emerging, mid-career and senior artists have demonstrated the importance of MGA as a unique public gallery by generously donating their works to MGA's Fundraising auction.

On Saturday 28 March 2009, the MGA will host its 11th Fundraising dinner and auction, a gala evening of fabulous entertainment, fine dining and exceptional photo-based art.   Photographic works by Australia's most collectible contemporary artists including Del Kathryn Barton, Bill Henson, Robyn Stacey, Polixeni Papapetrou, Matthew Sleeth and many, many more!

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WILBOW GALLERY

Black & white: documenting Indigenous Australia

>12 February-03 May 2009

> Opening: 6.30pm Friday 13 February 2009

Monash Gallery of Art's latest exhibition Black & white: documenting Indigenous Australia surveys the history of photographers' efforts to document Indigenous Australians. Drawing primarily on material in the MGA Collection, this exhibition features 35 black-and-white photographs by some of Australia's best-known photographers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

As we mark the anniversary of the Prime Minister's apology to the Stolen Generation, it is a good time to look at the ways Indigenous Australians have been depicted in the history of Australian photography.

>Download exhibition texts

>more information

SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY

Then & now: South African photography

>12 February-03 May 2009

> Opening: 6.30pm Friday 13 February 2009

Presented in association with Southern Exchange

Then & Now: South African photography is a dialogue between eight documentary photographers whose practices traverse two highly distinctive periods in South African history: before and after the country's transition to democracy.

Artists include: David Goldblatt, George Hallett, Eric Miller, Cedric Nunn, Guy Tillim, Paul Weinberg, Graeme Williams, Gisèle Wulfsohn.

Then & now: South African photography showcases 80 photographs by some of South Africa's most famous photographers. Many of these photographs, which are among the most powerful images of the twentieth century, will be seen in Australia for the first time.

>more information

WILBOW GALLERY

THE MGA COLLECTION:
Quiet Earth

>20 November 2008-01 February 2009

The medium of photography is often associated with the noisy proliferation of information that characterises the modern world, but it is a medium that also has the capacity to create opportunities for reflection and pause within the hubbub of contemporary life. This exhibition brings together a number of contemporary artists who understand photography's capacity for deadening the racket of our information age, and drawing viewers into a contemplative visual space. The show will feature works from the MGA permanent collection by Marcia Lochhead, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Beverley Veasey and Paul Cox.

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SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY

THE MGA COLLECTION: Tracey Moffatt

> 07 November 2008-01 February 2009

MGA is a leading public art museum holding a nationally significant collection of Australian photography. Among the Museum's recent acquisitions are two series of works by Tracey Moffatt, Up in the sky (1997) and Invocations (2000). These series were generously donated to the Collection through the Cultural Gifts Program in early 2008. They are a complement to the Moffatt series already held by MGA, Scarred for life (1994).

In celebration of this donation, MGA will be holding an exhibition incorporating all three of these series. The exhibition, The MGA Collection: Tracey Moffatt, will be displayed in the Special Exhibitions Gallery from 08 November 2008 to 25 January 2009.

Dr Shaune Lakin, Director of MGA states: "Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia's most internationally recognised photographers and MGA is delighted to be able to show the recent acquisitions alongside the Moffatt work we already have in the collection."

These three series by Moffatt are linked by their filmic references and the way they speak of the human psyche, dealing with emotions, memories, dreams, fears and the subconscious.

MGA Curator Stephen Zagala has said of these works: "They are significant images that challenge our perceptions and expectations of what photography can achieve."

Moffatt first came to public attention for her series of photographs, Something more (1989) and Scarred for life (1994). Moffatt has since gained a reputation both nationally and internationally as a significant contemporary artist and is particularly well known for her photography. Her works are held in major public collections.

>more information

FOCUS GALLERY

JOACHIM FROESE: Archive

>7 November, 2008-01 February 2009

MGA presents two series of works by the Brisbane-based photographer Joachim Froese, Archive and Portrait of my mother .

Portrait of my mother is the earliest of the works and documents Froese's mother's library. While visiting his mother in Germany in the last weeks of her life in 2006, Froese photographed her books as if they sat on a continuous bookshelf. Presented in the form of a panorama, the photographs circumnavigate the gallery wall like a chronological sequence. Froese has said that this work "shows an eclectic cross section of literature. But more than that it has become a manifestation of the woman my mother was, a metaphor for life and a diary of the time I spent with her - a portrait of my mother."

Archive is a deeply personal and autobiographical work and relates directly to the earlier Portrait of my mother . Archive  was made after the death of the artist's mother. Having sent a selection of his mother's library to Australia, Froese re-photographed piles of his mother'd books in Brisbane. Now in his possession, the books tell a different story to that suggested in Portrait of my mother , one that reveals as much about the artist as it does his mother.

Dr Shaune Lakin, Director of MGA, has said that "death has been a preoccupation of photography since its inception, and it has been the subject of Froese's work for some time now. We are looking forward to presenting these photographs that, even without depicting the artist's mother, provide an intimate and unusual insight into family relationships and the role that photography plays in family memory."