Art after dark in Arts West
The award-winning Arts West building will stay open until late on Thursday 27 July to showcase Nite Art – a night of art encouraging art exploration across Melbourne.
Nite Art will present works of more than 50 artists across 3 precincts – Arts, City Central and the University. Artist run initiatives, museums and unique city spaces open simultaneously, encouraging art exploration and discovery across the city until late.
The Faculty of Arts’ Arts West building will feature a performance piece by contemporary Berlin-based artist Fabian Knecht; a collection of ceramic, photography and digital media by contemporary artist Cyrus Tang; and an exhibition titled Excavation in the Object-based Learning gallery, featuring the works of Elyse de Valle, Zoe Scoglio, Melanie Jayne Taylor and curated by Simone Hine and Kyle Weise.
About Nite Art & the University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a partner of Nite Art – an organisation with a mission to ‘make art more accessible, collaborative and engaging for new and broader audiences via an innovative event and digital platform.’ The broader University will host a range of events including the work of US artist Jordan Eagles at the new Science Gallery, and a Free Music Machines exhibition created by Percy Grainger in collaboration with Liquid Architecture and students form the Victorian College of Arts (VCA).
Featured exhibitions in the Arts West building
Exhibition: Cyrus Tang
Where: Arts West building, Level 5
When: Thursday 27 July, 6 – 10pm
Cyrus’s work in ceramic, photography and digital media has often explored ideas of loss and displacement. A selection of recent works will be displayed on Floor Five of Arts West, University of Melbourne.
Cyrus Tang writes of her work: “Throughout my practice, I have employed a range of variously permanent and ephemeral materials including clay, water, ash, steam, snow, human’s heartbeat, animal bones, and human hair in order to produce a visual representation suggestive of the contrast and contradiction between appearance and disappearance, and between ephemerality and permanence.”
Born in Hong Kong, Cyrus Tang moved to Australia in 2003. She studied at the VCA (2004) and Monash University (MFA)(2009). She has held residencies at the Banff Centre, Canada (2008), Cite International de Arts, Paris (2009), National Art Studio, South Korea (2012) and the Helsinki International Artist Program (2013). She was the recipient of awards and grants from the George Mora Foundation (2008), Asialink (2012), the Australia Council (2009, 2011). Cyrus lives and works in Melbourne and is represented by Arc One Gallery. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Australia and Internationally.
Exhibition: Excavation
Where: Object-based Learning gallery, Level 3, Arts West building
When: Thursday 27 July, 6 – 10pm
The Object-based Learning gallery will also be open for the evening featuring artwork by Elyse de Valle, Zoe Scoglio and Melanie Jayne Taylor in an exhibition titled Excavation.
Excavation brings together three artists whose work sits between the certainty of objects and the intangibility of our brief encounters with them. Alongside their own work, the artists will draw upon the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collection to investigate the archive as an evolving process, where objects are altered by our interactions with them.
Alongside their work, these artists will draw upon objects from the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections to investigate the archive as an evolving process, where objects are altered by our interactions with them.
Exhibition: Performance lecture, Fabian Knecht
Where: Forum Theatre, Arts West building
When:Thursday 27 July, 8 – 9:30pm
As the inaugural international guest artist for Nite Art, Knecht will present a Lecture Performance that speaks to his recent global ISOLATION projects and a new work, SPLIT, created in this, his first visit to Australia. Knecht will travel to a remote conservation reserve in the Northern Territory to undertake its making. Drawing on the canon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, SPLIT will bring into question the inherent values of the natural or built environment and our interpretation of these through art frameworks.
Challenging what constitutes a gallery or museum space, the ISOLATION series comprises an exhibition space – a ‘white cube’ – which is built for one evening around a segment of a remote landscape: a riverbed and a base of a vanished monument in Ukraine, a frozen sea in Vladivostok, wasteland in Berlin and an uprooted tree in a forest near Arnsberg. In ISOLATION, nature in all its complexity is elevated to the status of an artwork and exhibited in situ.
To learn more about Nite Art or to register for upcoming events, visit www.niteart.com.au