Sarah Oxenham is an emerging artist from Brisbane, Australia. She has completed a Bachelor of Photography with Honours (1st Class) at Queensland College of Art. Her work uses time-based media such as photography and video to deconstruct everyday experiences of time and space. Her works engage with performance, self-representation and abstractions and she has a keen interest in developing non-digital solutions to disrupt a visual experience.

Image: Still Sitting (Video Still), from the series The Interstitial: A Slow Space (2012)

Sarah featured in the annual Brisbane Emerging Art Festival Visual Art Showcase.

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I am drawn to the symbolic potential of materials, words and forms. I work with raw building materials, domestic found objects and various processes and materials from art history. By recontextualising and reorganising each element, I question and respond to my position of ambivalence. I resist grand gestures. I am more interested in presenting tentative forms that are filled with intensely personal, expansive and at times, contradictory ideas. I explore my position as an artist who is both a devotee and critic of the overtly maledominated ‘history’ of art, in association with notions of infatuation, love and relationships, both real and imagined.

Courtney Coombs, 2013

Image: On Show 2012. Theatre cans and extension cords.

Courtney showcased a new work in the Brisbane Emerging Art Festival’s Visual Art Exhibition.

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Artists (first wave): Revy Hamilton, Ryan Fraser, Lynette Letic, Rosie Gardner, Mark Kleine, Jacinta Howard.

Nuclear Family have created a shrine that encompasses the aesthetic confusion and longing in the secular youth community who must reconcile themselves with the unsurmountable historical presence that religion has left to linger in everyday culture.

Just because we are not sure anyone is listening doesn’t mean we should lose the cathartic comfort of a prayer. Make your Pascal’s wager with a shrine that is guaranteed to reach at least one God.

Nuclear Family will be presenting an installation as part of Brisbane Emerging Art Festival.

Rachael Haynes is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Brisbane, Australia. Her art practice explores the limits of language and subjectivity, and re-examines art history and philosophy in relation to gender politics. In her drawing installations and performative video works, Haynes performs a playful mixing of language codes and systems – drawn from abstraction, conceptual art, pop music, modernist literature and philosophical traditions – and enacts a gendered ‘redrawing’ of these texts.

Rachael has exhibited her work in Australia and internationally, most recently with solo exhibitions – A BIG IDEA transmitted pathetically Bus Projects (Melbourne), Muscle-flex Kings ARI (Melbourne), and I build my dwelling Metro Arts (Brisbane); and in group exhibitions – SEXES Performance Space (Sydney), The feeling will pass FirstDraft (Sydney) and Going South Screen Space (Melbourne). She has been awarded the Melville Haysom Memorial Scholarship (Queensland Art Gallery) and the Eddie Hopkins Memorial Drawing Prize (Queensland College of Art). She undertook a Residency at The Lock-Up Cultural Centre, Newcastle in 2011 and presented Food For Thought, a key project in the 2012 Next Wave Festival, with Level.

Haynes completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Arts at the Queensland University of Technology in 2009, with the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award and her research interests include gender politics, alternative exhibition spaces and feminist pedagogy within the visual arts. Rachael has been involved with Brisbane ARI’s since 2003 and is the Gallery Director of Boxcopy, an artist run organisation dedicated to supporting artists to experiment and present new works in a critical context. In 2010 Rachael formed LEVEL with Alice Lang and Courtney Coombs, a feminist collective and artist-run initiative focused on generating dialogue about gender and contemporary art practice.

Image: Untitled (Angry), ink on cardboard, 40 x 30cm, 2011.

Rachael will feature in the annual Brisbane Emerging Art Festival Visual Art Showcase.

Wesbite

In his many ongoing projects, Luke experiments with ambient sounds + atmospheric light + found space + bodily experience + open conversations + basic thinking. He works collaboratively and communally, across Australia and overseas. Common interests across these projects include: situational, embodied and ambient awareness,here-now presence, the formal treatment of the found, open communal processes, the ‘homely’ as site of production, materials and consumption of alternative culture, and what he calls ‘liveliness’ (living in ways that open up more living).

Luke is currently involved in several major sound-based projects. He co-directs SUPER CRITICAL MASS (SCM), a site-specific participatory sound art project which has worked with many community and professional ensembles and major public spaces like Federation Square, Cockatoo Island, Manchester Cathedral, Library of Birmingham and New York’s Central Park. For a few years now, Luke has been collecting dozens of vintage music keyboards (Yamaha PortaSounds, manufactured 1981-1984) as part of his PORTAL project and this year he began setting up installations of the keyboards in people’s homes, parklands, studios and art spaces. And with the newly formed SOUND-BODY AWARENESS Collective, Luke has been developing a body-movement-awareness practice known as DRO FO (DROne FOcusing). As a visual artist, Luke has exhibited installations, still and moving images (including ongoing LONG SHOTS and BEAUTY SPOTS series) and created temporary public art. He also conducts conversational experiments in forums such as ELEVEN ELEPHANTS and BLACKENED WOOD. Current writing projects include A LIVING PROCESS, a commentary on philosopher Eugene Gendlin, and A BOOK WITHOUT A FACE which is collating his Facebook conversations on sound, art, thinking and living.

_Luke Jaaniste will be presenting a sound installation and showcase a
new site-specific sound performance_

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Memories and documentation of my own childhood as well as more current experiences inform my interrogation of understandings of normality in relation to gender. Much of my imagery is driven by a childhood desire to be perceived as male. Resulting self-portraits—typically comprised of a characteristically male body and my face—depict ambiguously gendered selves. I explore transgender identity through this continual self-portraiture, which is politicised by my public failure to conform to gender norms when the works are exhibited. By both resisting and engaging with popular understandings of transsexual narratives, I aim to highlight some alternatives to the strict binary understandings of gender that constantly proliferate within our society.

Tyza is represented by Heiser Gallery Brisbane.

Image: Untitled (self) Instal shot (detail), mixed media, dimensions variable (2012)

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