The La Trobe Art Institute, the beating heart of the Bendigo arts and cultural offerings is kicking off this year by showcasing some incredible exhibits exploring diverse mediums to entice your creatively and ravel in their splendor. From different methods of screening, videos, sound, sculpture and textiles there is sure to be something for you to enjoy.
Dressings
Dates: 7 February – 21 July 2024
Artists: Jeremy Eaton and Nicholas Smith
Jeremy Eaton and Nicholas Smith have navigated the language of screens, concealment and exposure to develop their installation. Dressings makes visible historically hidden or codified themes, continuing these artists’ investigation of queer sensibilities in Australian modernism. Erotically charged domestic materials have been repurposed as artworks that cite censored archives, introducing experiences of queerness to the recessed space of our large street frontage.
Different methods of screening and display have been used to conceal and frame elements of the installation. Burnished terracotta and painted automotive vinyl upholstery, for example, draw out the sensuality present in ordinary domestic materials. Smith has built disassembled artworks into wooden plinths, physically elevating terracotta vessels that now appear as naked torsos. Eaton’s digitally printed room dividers display the masked edges of photographic slides from an artist’s archive, alongside redactions from papers that document the indictment of a public servant for homosexuality. Dressings subverts historical silencing and queer erasure through its open display, while also preventing full access through elements that obscure and keep from sight.
Pliable planes: expanded textiles & fibre practices
Dates: 21 February – 12 May
The exhibition, Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles & Fibre Practices includes new commissions and recent works by Akira Akira, Sarah Contos, Lucia Dohrmann, Mikala Dwyer, Janet Fieldhouse, Teelah George, Paul Knight, Anne-Marie May, John Nixon, Kate Scardifield, Jacqueline Stojanović, and Katie West. It is co-curated by Karen Hall and Catherine Woolley.
The exhibition takes its title from a 1957 essay by celebrated Bauhaus artist Anni Albers who sought to rethink weaving through the lens of architecture, interpreting textiles as fundamentally structural and endlessly mutable. The exhibition presents works that experiment with materiality, spatial fluidity, and process and features painting, assemblage, sculpture, video, sound, and installation. It reflects artists’ use of textiles and fibre to chart social and cultural change, respond to historical modes of production and representation, and test formal properties through weaving, embroidery, knitting, and sewing.
I wanna be your anti-mirror
Dates: 23 May – 18 August
Curated by leading artist Alicia Frankovich, I wanna be your anti-mirror showcases a selection of emerging Melbourne-based artists working at the intersection of video, sound, and sculpture.
In this exhibition, slippages between artists’ media and positionality are experienced as affect and meaning making. As Alicia explains, ‘When you are young, you are in a rush. There is an urgency to address concerns from a subject position, in time for them to be important, important to this moment, and in hope of any ongoing moment.’ Materials are stressed, beats and voices pulsate, divert and converge to new spaces and differences are celebrated.
Curated by Alicia Frankovich