Summer Projects is an annual group exhibition highlighting what the invited artists have been up to over the Summer break. The third edition will feature work by 5 new artists to Boom, Vanessa Oter, Loralee Newitt, Louise Tate, Darren Munce and Mickey Egan. We are excited to bring this dynamic group of artists to Boom and support their emerging practices. Vanessa Oter “As an informal lyrical abstractionist my work presents a symphony of the world that envelopes me. The current vista is the local landscape of Thorpdale in Gippsland, Country Victoria. My mark making, which constructs the image, is a layering reflective of natural weathering processes and gestures suggestive of the small discoveries of accidental beauty ‘found’ within the patina of the landscape. Filtering through the layers are stencils, scribbles and random marks subconsciously influenced by my experience of living in ‘urban’ environments for most of my life: Melbourne, NYC, Berlin, Toronto…prior to this radical switch to experience ‘country’ life.” Loralee Newitt Loralee Newitt is a recent Fine Arts graduate from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Newitt’s practice predominately focuses on painting; utilizing the medium to look at what can be represented beyond the use of language and the material limits of painting – be that as an image or sculpture or somewhere between the two. The delicate, intuitively developed surfaces of Newitt’s artworks draw upon memory and personal experience, offering the viewer an evocative visual space that is at times both savage and familiar, suggestive of figuration, and at others dissolves into abstraction. The experience is sensuous, luscious, bodily, and emotional. Louise Tate Recent RMIT graduate Louise Tate reinterprets the formlessness of seemingly endless summer days. “Loosely applied paint drips, determined to escape pictorial boundaries. Found objects appear to float in liminal space: a freshly sprouting banksia pod, warmly rotting leaves, grapefruit peel hardened by the sun. Collected ephemera that have been gathered from the shores of Cabarita beach. Or by the banks of the Merri Creek… Or was it mum’s bamboo-fenced back garden? Thinking back, it all becomes a bit hazy; summer has a way of muddling things.” Darren Munce During a tour of Europe as part of a travelling scholarship in 2011, Munce became captivated by the history, art, architecture and people of Germany. In 2014, a three-month residency at The Spinnerei in Leipzig allowed for a deeper exploration of German culture and sparked new lines of inquiry in his practice. Moving away from a process of spontaneity and chance, a recognisable characteristic of Munce’s early work, this new series reflects a demand for precision. Informed by Paul Klee’s teachings at the Bauhaus and driven by Munce’s own research as an educator at the Victorian College of the Arts, these works investigate the rational assemblage of exact geometric forms to achieve an aesthetic paraphrase of our techno-industrial times. Inspired by German cultural production and its continued interweaving of aesthetic principals between art, architecture and design, each work here strives toward an elementary harmony of surface, colour and form; a concentrated investigation of pigment and process. Mickey Egan “Art interests me from an aesthetic, historic & chronological point of view. It’s a visual form of language that I use to explore my observation, notions of broken narrative, abstract fragmentation, psychology, and the human condition. These paintings are an attempt to record natural phenomena, occurrences and experiences of motion or commuting through landscape and time. They are a progressive result of drawing as a beginning, either “en plein air” or later from memory. Painting is then a sequential link or extension of drawing.” Mickey Egan lives on the Surf Coast with his family. He is an apparel designer that presently works in Geelong. He has worked for major brands both in Australia & the USA. His work & lifestlye has led him travel frequently and extensively which has further enabled him to access his interests; cities, art museums, galleries, cultural events, historic sites, surfing locations & the great outdoors. Summer Projects / 18 Feb – 12 Mar /opening Fri 19 Feb 5:30 – 8pm see a full listing of work here
