'In Stitches Collective' and Edward Horne.

Opening Friday 6th April 6-8pm

6th - 14th April

Thursday - Saturday 11am - 5pm

'In Stitches Collective' : Claire Conroy, Charlotte Haywood and Michaela Davies.

'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap'

A contemporary visual opera that restructures the music of ACDC into a pictorial grid that physically floats through the gallery.

The installation embeds itself within the intellectual traditions of textiles and the codification of pattern inspired by Joseph Jacquard whose weaving loom is attributed to being the first computer. 'In Stitches' have extended this tradition by creating a unique code to represent the music.

Filled with colour the installation references the 'visual music' traditions of Australian artist Roy De Maistre, utilising his system of correlating the light spectrum to musical notes.

'Dirty deeds done dirt cheap' uses the sensibilities of synaesthesia to separate forms and create disorientation. The installation highlights revelations in technology and innovation of the past while using Australian music titles to question current innovation in Australia particularly in primary industries.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council.

Edward Horne

'Asanawa Tree'

"From antiquity to today, religious ceremonies in Japan involve ropes and ties to symbolize connections among people and the divine, as well as to delineate sacred spaces and times.." Hikari Kesho

'Asanawa Tree' taps into the Japanese aesthetic and process of ritual associated with ornamentation, cleansing and prayer in relation to nature; Attuned to the Shinto belief that all natural objects embody gods and withhold their own powers. This is a work that employs 'Shuro' Rope, honouring the decaying tradition of Japanese rope making techniques using the 'Shuro' palm and consequently, through its form, highlights the impermanence of the environment it comes from.

Japanese rope traditions have been inherent within areas of domestic, farming, fishing and martial life. The Samurai developed Hojo Jitsu - the art of restraining captives; the origins of bondage tying using 'Asanawa' rope. This ceremonious binding, restricting and contorting is alluded to in 'Asanawa Tree'. The rope used has been sourced from the last turn of the century workshop in Japan that produces the 'Shuro' rope.  The owners, a 70 year old couple have no successors, just as cleared forests have no seed.

Edward Horne 'From antiquity to today', 2012.

Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton | Jessica Stewart and James McDonald

Opening Friday 16th March 6-8pm

Thursday - Saturday 11am - 5pm

16th - 31st March

Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton
'Speaking of Toast, The Cardboard Kitchen'

The Cardboard Kitchen is a found object installation of discarded free materials assembled by the artists to make a functional kitchen as a creative hub for eating throughout the exhibition.

Exploring the social role of the artist and the role of the kitchen in the home, this project is staged as a two-week home-made banquet just for you.

Opens 6-8pm 16 March with a Friday night banquet
Saturday 17 March 11am-3pm all day breakfast
Friday 23 March 12-3pm long lunch
Saturday 24 March 11am-3pm pot luck

Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton, 'Speaking of Toast, The Cardboard Kitchen', 2012.

Jessica Stewart

'Body Objects' consists of a number of brightly coloured forms, seeming to occupy a liminal space of both abstraction and function. These diverse elements are all created at a human scale, inviting the viewer to hypothesize potential relationships and interactions that one may have with them. A blue ‘rake’ is leant against the wall beside a wobbly stack of yellow foam discs. Are these objects in a point of stasis, a ‘halftime’, awaiting an audience to interact with them? Is the purple rectangle a door, or a goal, or both? Or rather, none of these?

The vibrant green ‘outfit’ suspended beside these does little to shed light on how these works are to be approached. Mounted, hanging thick and heavy, it alludes to a retired trophy of a past event. Absolutely still, but essentially reminiscent of past actions.

Jessica Stewart, 'Body Objects', 2012.


James McDonald

The works utilise the arbitrary nature of decoration to create camouflage for the irksome and mundane. Through surface treatment objects are elevated to a bizarre status of both humour and reverence.

James McDonald, Frosted Feats, 2011.

Sophie Clague | Lizzie Thomson

WUNDERCRETE

24th Feb - 10th March

Sophie Clague

An urban wasteland is a desert of rifts and ruptures, uninhabitable yet impossibly life-bearing.  Chairs wait for the warmth of a presence as reminders that these still exist, or did exist. Elsewhere lie undulating seas of white folds – soft but glacial, and then the green: luminous, viral and toxically compelling in its tactility. The black road peels away like skin, and exposes a jagged edge diving into the raw surface underneath. Piles of concrete become mountain ranges, and reveal a drama and an irrationality that this utilitarian material is assumed not to have.  

These extreme environments are passed by everyday, in every urban centre. They are the unacknowledged landscapes of the city, as they technically do not exist on any map or plan, and are not recognized as places in their own right. Yet once the rationality of the ‘complete’ streetscape is removed, the uncanny is exposed, and sublime, unstructured panoramas are revealed.

Shifting Grounds is an alternate model of a city, with foundations and cladding that will not functionally support life. It could be called a ‘dreamscape’ yet its materiality is very much grounded in the everyday, in the tactile memories we establish as wander from place to place. It recalls structural materials that are warped and distorted, at once appearing vulgar and fragile, yet with a delicacy through which the poetry of material can emerge.

Lizzie Thomson

I began this work with an interest in constructing ephemeral situations using cement and the body. Research and inspiration was drawn from a range of activities including an esoteric faith in the healing potential of pyramids, breathing meditations and illusory strategies in conquering space and time.

This process led to investigating sculpture as a performative event. I see these objects as both generated by activity and generating activity. Although the objects are concrete, the situation for engagement is temporal and ever changing. The body acts as our tangible constant.

Recent exhibitions and solo performance works include NORTORIOUS D.I.G at COFA Space (2011), Panto at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2011), I am a dancer at Campbelltown Arts Centre (2010), The Adventure in residence at UDK Berlin (2009)  and The Sacrifice at Campbelltown Arts Centre  (2009).


'The Explorer', 2011, cement and plastic, Photograph: Emma Price.

Alexander Poulet | Nathan Babet (Hrebabetzky)

7th - 18th Feb

Thursday - Saturday 11am - 5pm

Alexander Poulet

CnyMHuk-1

'Volga' is my realisation of dystopia, set in an abandoned brewery, fallen vacant after being bought out by Carlton (an offshore company) and left to crumble in time. A figure sits and drinks beer in the empty annex, back to the majestic view framed by a glassless window. The performance begins at first light: as the sun rises, the setting emerges from the gloom, revealing a state of neglect.

The folk song 'The Boatmen' provides the soundtrack, reminding us of the exuberance and hope that many held for a communist, regime in Russia, sung proudly by many workers prior and during the Soviet era. Yet its evocation has changed, shifting from national pride for the future to a stoic continuation in which the future is obscured. The colorful ideals of the past have faded to a gunmetal grey fog. The sun still rises however, and the decrepit, crumbling building embodies the memory of Soviet Russia that won’t die.

Accompanying this dystopian stalemate is a contrasting look at death and the present. The elderly and sick accept a final pilgrimage to the river Ganges, in Varanasi, as their time comes to a close. A tawdry, twinkly sheet, equivalent to a western body bag, masks an unnamed body. A hawker shrieks, “Feel the quality my friend!” as he hands me an Indian body bag “…okay I’ll take three”. The procession descends upon the funeral pyre as I carry three death sheets under arm. Up in smoke floats the past all at once in the moment, where lives the intervention with these ‘body bags’.

Alexander Poulet, 'VOLGA' performance still, 2011 Photograph: Elliot Holdstock

Nathan Babet (Hrebabetzky)

Wandergesellen, Waldmann (man of the woods and principles of forest economics)

The uncanny has been traced to the 'residual' of animistic origins in the development of primitive peoples. Heidegger furthers this association by conceding that the origin of feeling "not at home" must derive from a primeval phenomenon.

The anthology of Brothers Grimm's stories offer one thread to explore the mythology of the forest. It is into the 'forest' that Grimms' characters often find their way, and it is there that they decipher 'the riddle'. The forest is invariably immense, imposing and mysterious; it possesses the ability to alter one's destiny. It symbolises a longing to return to nature in an attempt to comprehend existence. In the same way that Aragon's romantic arcade ruins speak the uncanny, so too the forest exudes associations with a 'womb' and a 'tomb'.

These photographs sit as a prelude to an exhibition of a larger body of work at Tin Sheds Gallery in April this year. Enacting the traditional guild of 'Wandergesellen' (Travelling Journeymen) as an itinerant 'Zimmerman' (Carpenter) on 'walk-about' (auf der Walz), I intend to embark on a journey through regional Australia. This journey references the Australian folklore of the 'swagman' in association with Germanic mythology. The gesture of embodying facets of this guild acts as a reference point between landscape, the body and my own genealogy, which traces my Great Gradfather's profession as 'district forester' of the region Cervena Voda (Red Water) - Czech Republic.

Nathan Babet (Hrebabetzky), 'Waldsterben', 2011

Photograph: Josh Raymond

13th - 28th Jan

Damian Dillon Rebecca Shanahan

INTERZONE

Interzone transforms the after-hours shadows and margins of various spaces and places into photographs and videos registering loss, absence, transience, uncertainty, anxiety and alienation. Dillon’s Down by Law examines isolation through a dislocation of people from place and nature. Shanahan’s Neighbours depicts an interzone between public and private, intimacy and distance, voyeurism and documentation. In conflating digital and analogue photography, moving image and still photographs and large-scale printing with hand-made darkroom photographs, the artists iterate a contemporary age of convergence and multi-platform dissemination, declare any remaining debate about digital and analogue values to be marginal and locate themselves irrevocably in the present. Damian Dillon is represented by Artereal.

Damian Dillon, Down by Law (Detail), 2012.

Rebecca Shanahan, Neighbours (Detail), 2012.

Alex Pye and Hannah Steinbauer

Alex Pye

There is a novelty.

Through Pye’s work a sense of laborious repetition is projected through the manipulation and ‘artisinal’ finishing of what might be seen as detritus. Aging is a performative process. The passing of time alters the surface textures of objects, leaving a permanent impression. In the case of Pye’s creations the performative element is seen through brush stroke, sanding, staining and varnishing. An odd juxtaposition is created by Pye’s choice of insignificant objects and her careful restoration of them.

Alex Pye, Awkward Meteoroid, 2011 (image courtesy of Julia Rochford).

Hannah Steinbauer

Mur Rip Van Winkle Angus L. MacDonald

Bridges have led me to and from places where I have been in my element, or extremely removed from it. On show here are sculptural sketches of three bridges and a suite of relief prints which portray the homesickness, yearning nostalgia and romanticism of living in a globalized world full of fragmentation..

Melody Willis
Greenwash

18th November - 3rd December

In the process of transforming failed paintings into soft furnishings,
an awkward dynamic develops between concept and comfort. When a
painting slides down the wall and becomes a cushion – sheds its
uselessness for usefulness – it loses conceptual power. And yet it's
so much more comfortable.

Phoenix Wolfe
Neither Bachelors Nor Brides

28th October - 12th November

For Neither Bachelors Nor Brides I have chosen to retrace personal histories by placing myself in the role of both my father and mother on their wedding day. The images document this ritualised union allowing an alchemical marriage and birth to occur. The symbolic division of the self and the subsequent combination of the two create a third, fertile with the prospect of renewal and transformation.

The drawings in the exhibition literally retrace magazine advertising imagery to destabilise the stereotypical body and identity expectations that popular culture promotes. The layered images create other spaces that transcend the gender binary polemic.

Jonny Niesche 'Stylin'.
7th - 22nd October


The stylistic wanderer. Myth-as-Ism.
                                               Beauty behaving badly.
                       Objects of subjectivity <> at the service of painting.
            Methodical restlessnessnessnessness….. Adult form of child’s play?   
Uh, ha, ha, hu, humming someone else’s melody until you forget that you are humming, until      it becomes your own and the work makes itself.
                                      {{{{{Style as generator.}}}}}
Mutations of surface and substance……‘Accelerating the amalgamation of sources, contexts to an extent that they are, atomised and transformed into the seed in the bush of life of the next idea. The emphasis is less on a certain style or look than on a Method,…(Man).’ Heiser theoretical Kaiser. Jorg sincerely.         
                                        Hermes will kill Panoptes
                      The messenger will triumph over the surveillant   
                                         Kant shoot the messenger!
                                              Serres is serious!
                                          Series are seriously tired.
         Rythmn…..Stylistic solecism.…Armleder/-derr/-nostalgic futurism……
     The ~ritual~ for the relatively serious…… Admitting  failure….. ‘take laughing seriously’, but don’t Arp on about it.

Jonny Niesche, 'Stylin', 2011, Photo by Charles Dennington.

Biljana Jancic 'Shadowgraphy', Sean Lowry '---- ... – (::: ... :)'.
16th September - 1st October

Biljana Jancic
Shadowgraphy takes as its starting point the notion of the gallery space as a stage. Contemporary gallery based art is currently in the privileged position, in that it is able to make use of methodology and modes of presentation from various other arts. The subject of this work is the relationship of the white cube and the aesthetics of theatrical and moving image presentation. Therefore, what will be offered is a space that will simultaneously reference a stage curtain, moving image projection, black cube and shadow play, while not functionally operating as any of these.


Biljana Jancic, 'Shadowgraphy'

Sarah Mosca and Tim Bruniges
26th August - 10th September

The project at Eastern Bloc Gallery is a collaborative work between the two artists. Bruniges will sonically respond to Mosca's temporal installation looking at the performative possibilities of photography. The project intends to bring together image, object and sound playing with ideas of reactivity, static and (non)temporality.

Sarah Mosca's work examines the relationship between image and object, her practice surveys perspectives in photography with a particular interest in the paradoxes inherent in the medium, and an anxiety surrounding the representation of the photographic image. Mosca's work presents an idea, not an actual occurrence and in doing so examines our relationship with the photographic image as a document of truth and purveyor of memory.

Tim Bruniges creates site-specific sound works exploring notions of regeneration of the local environment. He creates subliminally interactive installations with an emphasis on enquiry into perception and the fallibility of memory.

Image of the Day, 2011
Courtesy of: NASA, ESA, and Erich Karkoschka.

Izabela Pluta
Reservoir
5th - 20st August


A reservoir is a place where anything can be collected and stored, however, more commonly the term refers to an artificial lake. If the reservoir bursts, the spillage may lead to a condition of ruin. The motivation for this exhibition is a set of ideas that Pluta has been considering which relate to this term.

Izabela Pluta is a Sydney-based, Polish-born artist who's practice examines the various ways that place is manifested or experienced. Her work investigates both a physical place of belonging, existing within a specific cultural framework, and space, which has its abstract quality in the language we use to describe an area or a distance between these physical places. Pluta's works have often comprised of photographs, found and collected ephemera, and photomurals to explore these interests. She is represented by Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne.

Izabela Pluta, 'Termite nest', 2011, Lambda photograph, 66 x 66cm.

Ron Adams, Harriet Body, Richard Kean
15th - 30st July


Richard David Valentine Kean, Outdoor acrylic, shadow play (3:30 until sunset on every sunny day), dimensions variable, 2011.

3. ‘Metaphorphosis: The Battle for Ginnungagap’.
Part One: Shadow Play Before Evening Interlude: Sol
Part Two: Yggdrasil Part
Three: The Void and Everything.

Ron Adams, 'Phaedra' Arcylic on board, 2011

Harriet Body's new work 'Expression Impression' uses the artist's breath and skin as a medium to create a tangible and lasting impression. Harriet is an emerging artist who's time-based art practice explores the performance within the act of creating.

www.harrietbody.com

Harriet Body, 'Expression Impression', 2011, performance documentation.

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The inaugural 'Salon' fundraiser exhibition features a recognised selection of local contemporary artists.

Opening Friday 17th June, 6pm. Special guest Renny Kogers will auction off works from 8pm, post auction tunes by Dj Biffo and DJ niknak!

Exhibition open from 18th June - 10th July, Wed - Sun, 11 - 5pm.

Or by appointment, ph: (02) 9555 8816, info@easternblocgallery.com

'Salon' featured artists include

Ron Adams

Zanny Begg

Cash Brown

Mark Brown

Vicky Browne

Mitch Cairns

Carla Cescon

Sarah Contos

Ryszard Dabek

Kelly Doley

John A Douglas

Chris Fox

Alex Gawronski

John Gillies

Agatha Gothe-Snape

David Griggs

Michelle Hanlin

Chris Hanrahan

Swerve

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

Sam James

Richard Kean

Locust Jones

Mimi Kelly

Renny Kodgers

Dan Kojita

Sumugan Sivanesan / Melletios Kyriakidis / James Hancock

Jonny Niesche

Nana Ohnesorge

Lena Obergfell

Tara Marynowsky

Nigel Milsom

Daniel Morse

Emma Price

Elizabeth Pulie

Joan Ross

Keg de Souza

Mark Titmarsh

Marian Tubbs

Mathew Tumbers

Melody Willis

Oscar Yanez

Marian Tubbs

Installation | Objects are shit | (On the way to the studio, a plane was coming in to land. I was on a bus on a curving bridge, the direction we were traveling made the plane appear heavy and still, so I was like okay, ‘you will be a sky object’)

9th-13th June

| mariantubbs.com |