“Before the steel horse and modern art, there was the horse and rider, a principle subject in the history of painting and sculpture. Donkayote depicts a centaur being ridden by a human and represents the old as much as the new. A nod to the 17th century novel by Cervantes, Donkayote embodies an idealistic leader who has become disenchanted, romanticizing his own efforts he fails to see the societal shift of the times. Belonging to a new body of work I am developing in response to my isolated experiences in a coastal NSW rainforest and a residency abroad in upstate New York; a series that explores the reciprocal relationship humans have to nature and it's ominous future.”

Steven Bellosguardo fuses contemporary techniques with a traditional approach to sculpture’s original subject, the human figure. Utilizing mediums associated with modernist sculpture, figures are rendered from flat sketches on steel, cut out and assembled, creating an interplay between two- and three-dimensional elements.

Max Callaghan is a visual artist from Adelaide. Within his practice he uses processes of painting and writing to examine individual memory and internalised experience. His work interconnects, and juxtaposes formative and everyday memories, feelings and recollections, ruminating upon their personal importance and social meaning. He takes subjects like self-talk, childhood and family memories, suburban social surroundings, experience of mental illness and institutional treatment and the fear of taking without giving back and turns them into contemplative mosaic like paintings.

Nicholas Elliott is an Adelaide born painter, who studied Fine Arts, Art History and Classical Archaeology in Adelaide, followed by private study of Painting in Europe.

His early work involved an intensive exploration of drawing and works on paper, developing into large scale lyrical abstraction employing broad abstract vocabulary. The paintings are resolutely non-narrative, often monochrome, and could be read as both surface and atmosphere, employing multi layering to reveal the image as a found object.

His painting moved towards a less dense, more syncretic and open approach to further developing the vocabulary of abstract painting. The genesis of Nicholas’s images lie in a deepening of his drawing practice were ideas are recycled and developed without respect to linear development.

Elliott’s express wish is to reinstate empathy/feeling or ‘feeling into’ painting. His painting practice now centres on the ‘approach to painting ‘, painting as an inceptive process informed by life’s ultimate brevity. His drive is to continue the search that does not know where it will arrive.

Beginning as heterogenous collages of image, sound, and text, each work in Extra Virgin was pushed towards visual collapse through subversive intervention and error prone translation. Assemblages of digital artefacts are produced, corrupted, and recycled into new aesthetic outcomes, translated off-screen, and returned to the computer in a regenerative cycle of transformation and convergence. These selected prints emerge as fragments of actualised noise, tangible tokens that represent the physical traces of my critical wanderings between media and across mediums.

Finding the edge in painting.

Throughout my art life I’ve had an ideological opposition to painting. This is because when I first studied art, the old genre hierarchies still existed and painting, as always, was at the apex. For me, this was an authority that needed to be resisted, because the painting tradition offered very few new ideas and seemed to be the antithesis of progression. After 20 years of resisting painting, I began painting again.

Through an intuitive process of making and a research driven investigation into the emergence of Abstraction, I kept asking myself, what in the medium of painting offers an artist a relatively fertile arena to express themselves? The edge emerged as a site, for me, to explore a small facet of painting. While many have come before me, the edge represents a vanguard for self-expression in the most dominant mode of artistic practice. So I reduced my painting method to the edge of the canvas and sometimes the paint came off it! Freeing the paint completely from the canvas. The material became the meaning.

When I consider a medium I try to comprehend its material and conceptual meaning. Marshal McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”, this statement, in my opinion, is still an apt cipher to understand the affect new and old media is capable of conveying.

What is an edge? Is it a border? Is it a precipice? Is it an abyss? Is it a division between one reality and another?

In simplicity I find the most complex nuance and the edge, for me, represents a significant arena to explore difficult metaphors and light-hearted analogies.

Anna Gore’s painting and installation practice conjures associations with contradictory, layered, unseen or unfixed experience. This work considers the discipline of abstract painting as an alternative means of understanding worldly experience, at a remove from familiar knowledge and meaning. Here, form and process are informed by the realm of feeling, aesthetic experimentation, and an appreciation for the open-ended relationship abstract painting bears to subject matter. The constant fluctuations of the felt dimension of daily experience and the network of possible references a painting might possibly engage (including those that may only arise in the future) provide a means for furthering this work.

Sam Howie is an Adelaide-based visual artist who works primarily with paint and holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the University of South Australia. Howie has exhibited widely including shows with the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, the Australian Experimental Art Foundation and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

The recent works have been exploring ideas of assimilation and questioning directions of assimilation. While assimilation in Australia is, politically speaking, such a negatively loaded word, speaking of assimilation through the history of painting, which can be viewed through a cultural lens, offers a way of engaging and reshaping the ideas of assimilation in positive and multidirectional ways.

Jonathan Kim was born and raised in South Korea and spent most of his 20s in China and 30s in Australia. Like his nomadic background, Jonathan’s artwork contains various cultural elements. Jonathan’s practice takes the form of painting, sculpture, and installation based on the Japanese sculptural concept of Mono-ha and the Korean painting style Dansaekhwa that rooted in Korean artist Lee Ufan’s philosophy. However, Jonathan is currently attempt to extend his practice by adopting other post-minimal ideas such as Arte Povera.

The Density Series (sculpture) is inspired by Lee Ufan’s theory ‘Encounter’. The physical structures created using materials found in everyday life are intended for a spatial experience, via the interaction between a material and its environments by a little intervention and transformation. This practice investigates to identify the internal value of the material from its external state.

The White Series (works on paper) was made in The British School at Rome, where Jonathan took the three-month residency in early 2019. Jonathan’s crayon painting (drawing) use to emphasises the tactility and texture of materials and the Korean sentiments created using traditional design and colour according to the idea of Dansaekhwa. However, Jonathan tried to apply the results of his intuitive response to environmental impacts on his work. This series is his signature and record during his stay in Rome.

There is an artist (more or less) waiting to blossom in every person. Much to my delight, at a later stage of my life, I have found this to be true. It started as a break from a liberal arts degree. I tried my hand at contemporary art - something so completely different – without knowing whether I had any natural ability, and am finding it very rewarding and satisfying.

The abstraction expressed in my art gives me unlimited potential to explore and develop new concepts on canvas or whatever medium. The term mixed media is especially relevant to me as it removes many of the boundaries in traditional art which can hinder the loose expression in painting. The four staples of abstract art that I find so rewarding are colour, harmony/symmetry, texture

Monika Morgenstern graduated from the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2015 with Honours. She has an Associate Diploma in Finished Art from Swinburne University, Melbourne and studied 2 years Interior Design at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany.

In her art practice Monika researches mystical experiences and encounters with the numinous; she brings to light something that does not exist in an accepted paradigm. Through her work she uncovers and reveals how the mystical exists in present-day society, and how these issues may be in presented in a contemporary art context.

Monika has had many exhibitions both here in SA and Victoria and has been shortlisted for the Fleurieu Art Prize and the Heysen Prize for Landscape in 2018.

Loren Orsillo is an emerging painter who lives and works in Adelaide. Her painting practice homogenises the materials of painting with readymade objects to occupy the precarious niche that lies somewhere in-between historical concerns of painting and narratives of the ‘wider world’. Objects sourced from home, street, second-hand store and supermarket alike are amalgamated with paint, canvas and stretchers to form new compositions that fracture and recontextualise the narratives intrinsic to the materials.

In a visual language that is locked in conflict between sincerity and sarcasm, these works examine the subjective and inconsistent measures of value placed on objects of our daily peripherals. They act out a duel between irreverence and sentimentality within the boxing-ring of the canvas stretcher; earnest in intention, yet inevitably riddled with a sense of the absurd.

Tara Rowhani-Farid is a painter clutching at her brushes and oils, knowingly crouching in the throes of the network. Not quite born into the age of the internet but not too far from it, Rowhani-Farid grapples with the methods and tools it presents alongside those innate to traditional analogue painting in order to create works which consider how a physical painting can be used to allow for a transitory experience of both the virtual and the real.

Joshua Searson is a visual artist practicing in a variety of media. Taking a strong interest in imperfect graphics in all forms, such as vintage type, dot screen imagery, amateur sign-painting and advertising clip-art, his work incorporates an eclectic mix of the old and new.

Josh lectures at Adelaide College of the Arts and is a founding member of Adelaide’s Print Cult collective. Career highlights from the last three years include speaking at the Australian Print Triennial 2018, participating in a printmaking and paper-making residency in Fabriano (Italy) with Vicarious Press and undertaking the Francis Street artist-in-residence program for Adelaide City Libraries.