Nine Australian artists commissioned for ACCA's New16

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art announces the artists featured in its latest exhibition

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) has announced the nine emerging Australian artists selected for New16, an exhibition curated by Annika Kristensen that examines relationships between humans and their surroundings.

The projects use visual art as a form of storytelling, with this year’s pieces based on a theme of navigation and negotiation. The newly commissioned works not only explore the relationships between the artists and their creation, but also question the evolving relationship between visitors and art, and the connection between art and its surrounding environment.

ACCA is Melbourne’s leading contemporary art space, and the only major gallery in Australia that focuses primarily on commissioning rather than collecting. Max Delaney, former Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, has recently taken up the post of Artistic Director of the exhibition space. Limelight’s online editor Maxim Boon spoke with Delaney about his curatorship of the NGV’s hugely successful Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition, his last offering at Victoria’s largest gallery before taking up the top post at ACCA.

The role call of artists Kristensen has assembled for New16 work in a range of different disciplines and mediums.

Jacobus Capone is a Perth-born artist whose works mixes elements of visual mediums, such as photography and film, with durational performance art. His art often explores the relationship between the world and humanity.

Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft have been working together as Catherine or Kate since 2008. They were awarded the Melville Haysom Memorial Scholarship by the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art and have exhibited work across Australia including at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In early 2011, they were residents at the Skatfell Centre of Art in Ireland.

Julian Day is an artist, composer, writer and broadcaster who looks to the relational and territorial properties of sound as a series of tensions between abstract and political forces. He has presented work at the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, the Prague Quadrennial, the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. In 2015, Day was awarded the prestigious Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship from the Sydney College of the Arts.

Gabriella Hirst combines the mediums of painting, sculpture, video and performance in works that investigate notions of permanence and processes of forgetting. Hirst was awarded the 2011 Sewing Seeds International Artist Village residency alongside Estonian artist Kristino Rav, collaborating on a performative installation art project.

Tanya Lee draws on everyday tasks to create humourous and often mundane narratives that subvert the rules, protocols and politics of suburbia. The West Australian-based artist works with sculpture, performance and drawing, and recently exhibited her first solo show Personal Space at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Mason Kimber is interested in the idea of ‘architectural memory’ and primarily works with oils on canvas and traditional fresco techniques. After graduating with a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Sydney’s National Art School, he undertook a three-month residency at the prestigious British School in Rome.

Liam O’Brien is a Brisbane-based artist who works across performance, photography and video to create art that situates the body as object and subject. He graduated from Griffith University in 2010 with a first class honours degree in photography and has spent the past 5 years creating pieces that address contemporary societal pressures and the resulting sense of confusion and alienation. He was a resident at 501 Artspace in Chongqing in China and has presented work at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art.

Anna Varendorff is a Melbourne-based jeweller and sculptor who creates brass sculptures and large-scale installations as well as fine jewellery. Her jewellery practice considers minimalist forms that can be worn, whilst her sculptural practice creates an opportunity for encounters between objects, space and observer, and perceptual outcomes of these combinations.

Haima Marriott is a music producer and sound artists, whose work offers interactive experiences with space and sound. In 2015, he collaborated with Anna Varendorff to produce Bouba, a place of sonic and visual interaction. Marriot performs under his own name, and is also half of duo Hagus, with Gus Franklin.

New16 runs from 5 March to 8 May 2016 at the ACCA Main Exhibition Gallery in Melbourne. Entry is free, and the Gallery is open 10am-5pm Tuesday to Friday and 12pm-5pm on weekends and public holidays. For more information, visit the website.