Art Takes Over The Windsor

Spring 1883 presents a smorgasbord of leading contemporary practitioners from Naarm and beyond, with 35 commercial galleries—both emerging and long-established—presented within the rooms of the historic hotel The Windsor.

For Mary Cherry Contemporary, ever-mothering artist Ruth O’Leary presents three framed inkjet archival prints—Bodywork, Stars, and Diana of Ephesus—offering her own body to consider complexities and labours encountered by women.

Clifford Thompson Japaljarri of Tennant Creek presents for NAP Contemporary, showing a series of unstretched canvases, hung on the walls and strewn across the bed. Created in the radically different environment of Tennant Creek, they stand as testament to cultural sovereignty and counterpoint to the context of the hotel. Presented in this colonial environment, the paintings own the room!

Artist Simone Griffin is of European Australian descent, with her paternal side connecting to the Koa, Wangan, Jagalingou and Wakka Wakka peoples, the traditional custodians of South-East Queensland. For 1301SW, Griffin presents Water bearer—a distinctive painting created with a pointillistic approach through using an airbrush. Griffin redefines an industrial tool to engage with the artistic history of her Peoples and the Western canon.

Darren Knight Gallery celebrates Louise Weaver‘s woven wall works—created with synthetic polymer emulsion, iridescent pigment, Japanese paper and thread on linen. As always, Weaver speaks through a visual language like no other, conversing with vast histories and deep sensitivities.

For CAVES, Clara Joyce presents an acrylic/oil painting on canvas—Light Cortex—a refracted abstraction, created from admiring striations of light through a Coca-Cola bottle.

The meticulous drawings of Simon Paredes, built up with prismacolour pencil on black paper, display striking vessels for Arts Project Australia—a testament to Paredes deeply thematic practice.

For Sarah Scout Presents, Jake Preval‘s free-standing sculptures—vinyl prints on dibond—speak to Preval’s personal experiences of queerness, with descriptive titles offering context, such as, Sculpture the same length as my erect penis made using a broken nail brush, eclipse mints, tube of toothpaste, plasticine and rubber bands from my backpack created whilst watching an episode of Grand Designs Revisited on my laptop on the 18th of April 2014 at 2:31am.

Sculpture by Louise Paramour for Void_Melbourne continues the playful language that is synonymous with Paramour’s practice—one that uses formal principles to play with materiality, scale and history.

For ALPHA60, Jen Valendar performatively encounters the landscape and the Windsor. Following a residency at Police Point, Valendar presents a video capturing sonic explorations of storms. The tension of this is echoed through installing works that simultaneously replicate natural phenomena and consider the domesticity of the hotel suite. The power of the elements and relationship between natural and human are further distilled through the recorded voice of an opera singer.

Föenander Galleries’ Monica Rani Rudhar speaks of longing and loss as she navigates cultural disconnection. Indian / Romanian Rudhar has created oversized earrings—replications of heirlooms that converse with her Indian matrilineal line.

For Sullivan + Strumpf, Polly Borland‘s Untitled (Black and White), a digital print on rice paper, carries on Borland’s engagement with expanding and troubling portraiture—this time creating two photographs in one through sculptural intervention.

The meeting of humour and sincerity that only Scotty So is capable of is on display for MARS Gallery, with a life-size doppelganger sculpture of the artist’s body in repose on the bed, titled Dream of a Floating Life 01.

Open until 7pm Saturday 16th August, Spring 1883 offers an opportunity to experience the strength and sincerity of commercial galleries within our arts ecology.

See further information at www.spring1883.com