Yarra Sculpture Gallery presents four new exhibitions opening in April. 

Tony O'Connor
Thoughts in Miniature

In this exhibition, Tony O'Connor presents two bodies of work, entitled A Pack a Day and Pondering Art. A Pack a Day is made up of seven pieces based around cigarette packets and through satire discusses the perils of smoking and potential death. The aim is to engage with the audience and encourage them to think about the effects of smoking. The pieces present the artist's take on the anti-smoking campaigns that exist and provide a quirky and satirical look at the impact of smoking, as well as some of the old cigarette advertising styles.

Pondering Art is six pieces focusing on viewers' responses to art, that is - to invite questions of the decadence of art and the relationship between viewers. Pondering Art is a study of reactions to gallery art. The pieces invite the viewer to consider the thoughts and emotions that will occur when pondering a piece of art.

Elsie Preston
Operation

Elsie Preston utilises discarded and forgotten material matter that she accumulates through a process of dumpster diving and bartering in an industrial wasteland. Preston uses this as her raw material for the formation of multi-unit sculptural ensembles. These environments generate an open dialogue with a contemporary material culture, reflecting a specific admiration towards industry, architecture and public space. Preston celebrates ad-hoc methods of construction, suggesting modes of re-invention through performative gestures of strength and impulsivity. Preston’s sculptural installations oscillate between the monumental and the fragmented. The ephemeral and precarious nature of her work suggests a state of constant flux; offering a disorientating sense of freedom. At certain points the works appear like barricades, barriers and street furniture, asserting an authority over the viewer’s navigation of space.

Sarah Summers
Evening spread against my eyes

Sarah Summers presents a series of paintings and drawings about the experience of darkness while walking home at night.  Using layers of tone, abstraction of forms, and slippery points of light and colour, the works describe the strange and surprising space of an evening suburb.  Nightfall creates new shapes and colours, and shadows become portals, rich with possibility.  The darkness is a lens, disrupting the stable and expected, inviting the viewer into an intangible encounter with light.  

Sound Forum #2 - curated by Lee-Ann Joy
Xavier Exomène
The Synaesizer

The synæsizer is a device that makes people see what it hears and hear what it sees. Thus, it turns its audience into synesthetes. To do so, it is an artificial (multimodal and bidirectional) synesthete: its senses having been melt together. Its video system is directly plugged into the audio and vice-versa. The main techniques used here is databending, which is a form of hacking in the primary meaning of the word and generative art systems. Numerical still pictures from the series “Introspectrion” by Dorianne Wotton are interpreted as raw audio files thanks to databending. These raw audio files are then refined by a generative system based on spectrograms analysis. Finally, the properties of these sounds (pitch, attack, volume, ...) are used to animate the original still images thanks to a video synthesizer set up both by Dorianne Wotton and Exomène. One of the purposes of this work is to illustrate the proximity between brains and computers like in Herbert Simon's information theory by simulating an affection of the brain into a computer. If the synæsizer is compared with a human being, it hears with its eyes and sees with its ears and what it sees alters what it hears.

Dates: 4 - 21 April
Opening: 6 April 2 - 4 pm