Friday 30 September – Sunday 2 October, 2016 | Newcastle, New South Wales

Things Might Have Changed | Dexter Rosengrave and Elissa Ritson

Taking over the liminal spaces of the Elderly Citizens Centre for the duration of the festival, the artists respond to the rhythms, routines and community use of the site. Comprising of audio, video, and photographic installation, the works investigate modes of being, and the cross-pollination of memory and imagination that occurs in constructing the self.

Curated by Lucy Parakhina

Presented by Crack Theatre Festival under the Setting the Stages initiative, with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts through the Creative Australia Emerging Presenter grant.

Some writing about the project by Zoe Street for Crack Festival: Through The Cracks: Site Responsive Installations Created to Connect
Dexter Rosengrave
Elissa Ritson

Dexter Rosengrave is a Hobart based artist attempting to highlight experiences and perspectives that are often disregarded or hidden. Dexter regularly examines social institutions such as class, gender and age in an attempt to create awareness of social issues through her practice. She works primarily within the photographic medium and is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania

Dexter’s work, ‘Mollie, age 5‘ is an installation consisting of 30 days of 35mm film shot by a five year girl and is accompanied by a video interview. The interview features Mollie answering questions regarding her intention behind each image whilst discussing her feelings associated with the subject matter. The work investigates the intersection of memory and imagination and how these elements are influenced by time and place.

4 February – 10 March, 2016

Somewhere, Away

Aiden Morse
Fernando do Campo
James Newitt
Laura Hindmarsh

Curated by Liam James

Somewhere, Away is an exhibition of works presented by CONSTANCE ARI. The show posits a want for belonging, and proposes that distance and desire can lead to a deeper individual understanding of place and persons.

The artists selected for Somewhere, Away belong to our island, but are currently gone, (New York, London, Portugal, Melbourne), and in their state of absence they create and send back an expression of yearning.

CONSTANCE ARI is currently ‘away’. Away from a physical space, on-going funding, and a traditional form. This doesn’t mean we don’t belong. We are always away, but always somewhere.

Wednesday 15th June, 2016 – Sunday 19th June, 2016 sunrise | pedestrian tunnels beneath Railway Roundabout (aka. Fountain Roundabout), Brooker Highway

Neither Here Nor There

Water Index, 2016, Connie Anthes & James Wilson in collaboration with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre

Descend into the tunnels beneath Railway Roundabout, as artistic minds merge in confined spaces.
Neither here nor there brings together two artists and an architect based in Tasmania, and three mainland artists, to explore creative practice in public spaces through distant collaborations.
Collaborations: Lucy Parakhina (TAS) and Natasha Manners (VIC), Karin Chan (TAS) and Todd Fuller (NSW), James Wilson (TAS) and Connie Anthes (NSW)

Curated by Rebecca Holmes

Dark MOFO festival 2016

Water Index, 2016
by Connie Anthes & James Wilson in collaboration with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre

The artists would like to acknowledge that we are working on Aboriginal land. We pay respect to the original owners of this land, the Muwinina people. We pay respect to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community who have never ceded ownership of this land and we pay respect to elders past, present and future.

Water Index is a site-specific participatory artwork that asks passers by to tell a story in language over 3 days by writing it out word by word in water on the floor of one of the Memorial Fountain tunnels. The artists have built large scale custom brushes and installed a janitors locker and instruction panel on site to guide the action.

Visitors are supplied with a series of palawa kani* words which are at once a list or ‘index’, as well as a story of that particular place: plants, trees, birds, animals, soil, water and weather. As it was before invasion, before the Park St Rivulet was enclosed, before the traffic and spray of the fountain.

Stories and lists are ways of remembering. Over three days these words will accumulate and evaporate, bringing awareness to a place that most people now only pass through and almost never spend time in. It is also an acknowledgement of the continuing trauma of cultural loss for Aboriginal people, of which the loss of language is one important part. Because language records the experiences of people who live or have lived in a certain place – their relationships, beliefs and shared knowledges of that place – reclaiming language is a powerful way to reclaim collective cultural memory.

* palawa kani is the revived language of Tasmanian Aborigines, taught and spoken within the Tasmanian Aboriginal community through the work of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. Thank you to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre for their generosity in sharing palawa kani language, and their assistance with this project.

Destination: West Coast
by Natasha Manners and Lucy Parakhina

Responding to the architectural influences of the Memorial Fountain, Manners and Parakhina have transposed a slice of 1950s Californian sunshine into a wintry Tasmanian tunnel. Utilising geometric shapes, warm lighting and select imagery, the installation alters pedestrians views from within the tunnel, reframing scenery and perspectives of the site.

The pink eclipse
by Karin Chan and Todd Fuller

According to the North American Innu Nation, Kuekuatsheu was the original lover of the moon who was tricked into leaving the spirit world, taking the form of a dog and losing his partner. Similarly Chang’e and Hou Yi from the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival were destined to watch one another from afar after drinking a magical elixir. In both stories, two lovers, yearn for each other from afar. Starting with the Railway Roundabout Memorial fountain as a meeting place, Chan and Fuller offer these dispersed lovers an opportunity to reunite for one last duet; by the pink light of a tunnel in Tasmania.

Todd is represented by Brenda May Gallery, Sydney.

January 14 – January 17 2016 | Old Harrington House

Every Mirror on Earth

Lewis Doherty (NSW)
Eloise Kirk (TAS)
Tess Campbell (TAS)

‘Amongst other things he lacked the essential quality that makes an artist, which is the choice of forms, to be among the most excellent’
-Giulio Paolini

Jorges Luis Borges wrote in the Aleph, ‘I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me’. This is perhaps a little romantic, but likely true for all of us. A mirror offers no accurate vision of ourselves. Art on the other hand, can offer an infinitely more interesting one.

Some artists have the ability to project pieces of ourselves back at us, in form and material, distorted and abstracted. They create works which objectively speaking, look nothing like us, yet somehow do a much better job at infiltrating the self than a mirror.

The work of artists Eloise Kirk, Lewis Doherty and Tess Campbell all arouse, in one way or another, an alternate reflection.

Housed in 121 Harrington Street, a building restored after fire damage and years of neglect, Every Mirror on Earth presents the work of three young artists. The show offers an opportunity to contemplate ourselves as individuals, as a species and to cast a critical eye over the way in which we interact with one another and our surrounds.

CONSTANCE is an off-site, project based A.R.I based in nipaluna / Hobart. CONSTANCE is focused on creating critical dialogues and engagement within, and beyond, the local Tasmanian arts community through supporting experimental and critical praxis.

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CONSTANCE acknowledges and respects the palawa people as the traditional and ongoing owners and custodians of lutruwita. We pay our respects to elders past, present and future, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.

Constance ARI 2018 program is assisted
through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts._.