News from Elements Art Gallery
131A Waratah Avenue, Dalkeith.
Ph:9386 2000
“Elements Ex”
22 August – 6 September 2009
by
Brooke Zeligman
Ken Sealey
Yuliya Lanina
Liz McKay
Mutsuko Bonnardeaux
Priscilla Bracks
Betty T Doll
Opening 22 August at 6.30pm
Special event on opening night: Dance performance by Cathy Young (currently completing final year in Dance at West Australian Academy of Performing Arts)
Elements Art Gallery is pleased to present an exposition of seven exciting new Australian and international artists.
Showcasing works executed in a variety of media, style and technique, “Elements Ex” explores a multiplicity of themes relating to confronting physical as well as spiritual challenges that cause these artists to rethink their own humanity and the meaning of human existence.
On one hand, award winning Japanese artist Mutsuko Bonnardeaux continues to reclaim human individuality by using her own hand made and dyed papers to presents an array of exquisite hand torn collages depicting Australian flora in her latest work.
On the other hand, Ken Sealey, the 2009 Rockingham Castaways Major Prize winner, attempts to allow access to his interface with the outside world to others. While Ken Sealey programmes a computer-driven machine (CNC) to take responsibility for some of the physical reproduction of his “Machine Art”, Perth based Queensland artist Brooke Zeligman works to explore the existing paradoxes of strength and fragility, repulsion and desire to connect to the human condition, alluding to ideas of exile.
New technologies promise to radically alter the human in both positive and negative capacities. It is perhaps in this refashioning of the humanness that the above artists have most in common with the following artists that explore themes relating to dolls.
Queensland artist Priscilla Bracks’ lenticular images examine the influence of mass media and popular culture in shaping identity, belief, history, and truth. The lenticular medium itself plays an integral role in her work's discussion about the need to view our information streams critically. Somewhat similarly, Yuliya Lanina, a Russian-born American artist based in New York, takes cute and cuddly ready-mades and turns them into fetishistic objects. Her misshapen ‘Art in the Box’ objects investigate the new relationships and possible meanings that can surface when things are assembled and juxtaposed.
On the same subject matter, the illuminated paintings/drawings of Dutch-Chinese American painter Betty T Doll provides hope for escaping the flesh in the spiritual realm, as well as representing fear of new technologies. Her depiction of a land between dreams and reality is counterbalanced by the elegant, doe eyed inhabitants of Sydney painter Liz Mckay's latest series of paintings, which explores a magical twilight realm of the imagination and the wonderful world we all dream of in our childhood.
‘Elements Ex’ runs until 6 September 2009.
For further information please contact Jeremy Philips, Assistant Manager on
or mobile: 0417 960 680
Ken Sealey
Yuliya Lanina
Betty T Doll
Liz McKay