We invite you to enter the baroque world of Gerard O’Connor with his upcoming new exhibition ‘Blood, Sweat & Tears’, opening at the Colour Factory on August 5, 2010.

The elaborate artists that opened the Colour Factory Gallery last year are back with more extravagant and depraved pursuits, however this time there will be no loud fat ladies and bright seventies beach goers. Instead, their incredibly detailed mural images will depict dramatic scenes of loss and murder. The artists- coming from a background in fashion- utilize costume, with its social and political implications as a focal point of the imagery. Drawing from this plentiful history, they create an ornate tableau of meaning and surface. The images take on a painterly affect that, like the costume, reflects images of the period era. Masterfully shot and composited, these artworks are something to behold.

Detail of 'Funeral'

Light Projects
Jeremy Baker
I is another
Opening night Friday July 23, 6 – 8pm

KINGS ARI
9 – 31 July

FRONT GALLERY
Golden World (the Wall and the Door)
Benedict Ernst

Golden World (the Wall and the Door) is a single artwork made up of five panels. These panels, each the size of a large door, placed together span the entire wall of the gallery. They are part picture, part documentation of performance, part sculpture, and part immersive installation. They contain the artist’s life’s collection of gold foil chocolate wrappers (carefully framed). Each of these panels is methodically divided into an intricate matrix that allows a subtle pattern of gold upon gold to be observed.

MIDDLE GALLERY
Annal Beads
Chantal Fraser

Conjoining the annals of travel and tourism, this series shapes the parochial views of the tourist as subject. A series of performative frames, presented as photographic stills, showcase a collection of neckpieces (Ula) from the artist’s Samoan family – gifts of significance, ceremony and value – alongside a collection of metallic beads thrown from the balconies of Bourbon St, New Orleans during Mardi Gras– an herogenous ritual that rewards the female tourist more beads on the exposing of breasts. The work explores the creation of cross-cutlural connotations and representations through silhouette and the embodiment of adornment, and more significantly cultural adornment.

SIDE GALLERY
Psychopompistic
Marcel Feillafe

The Psychopomp is a figure from history whose role is to act as a guide from one realm to another; from life to death, or consciousness to sub-consciousness. You will be accompanied by this figure through space, and transcend banality. Liminality is a central theme in this work; a threshold between states. The enclosed structure is a vehicle to create a ritual-like state where transformation occurs, and divisions can be broken down. By extending the entrance of the gallery space to the exit, Feillafe metaphorically extends a moment normally passed over, given little or no thought. Once suspended in this moment, the intention is for the mechanics of liminality to be revealed.

Melbourne Open House 2010
Various Locations
Sat 24 – Sun 25 July
10am – 6pm Daily.  Free!

With more buildings on the MOH list in 2010, this is a unique opportunity to gain access to buildings or parts of buildings that normally would not be available to the public. From buildings built in the 1800’s steeped with history and the odd ghost or two, to modern buildings that include environmentally sustainable initiatives and 6 star ratings. If you are interested in Melbourne’s unique architecture and design, keep this weekend free and join the tens of thousands of visitors to the open buildings. Buy a program and plan your weekend.

See the Melbourne Open House for more details.

Tim Burton Polaroids
ACMI – Gallery 2
Showing now until  Mon 6 September

As part of Tim Burton: The Exhibition, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) will showcase a selection of Polaroid images in Gallery 2 from Tim Burton’s photography folio. The display will feature a series of 29 large-scale Polaroid photographs, each approximately 33 inches by 22 inches, created by Tim Burton between 1992 and 1999. In these works, Burton found another medium for expressing visual themes and motifs that also appear in his sketchbooks, drawings, paintings and films.

Created in studios and on desert and countryside locations with the aid of live models, many of the Polaroids employ fantastic objects and puppets and props from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), while exploring Burton’s fascination with holidays, body modification, and the Gothic.

Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection
Burrinja Gallery
Showing now until Sun 26 September

Australians can now experience the power and beauty of the early and mid-career work of Australia’s best-known contemporary photographer, Bill Henson.

This exhibition features twenty-nine exquisitely printed examples from many of Henson’s major series from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, all drawn from MGA ’s collection.

Passionate discussions in Australia, especially the media, about Henson’s work and what it says about the nature of art are ongoing. Bill Henson: early work from the MGA collection is a rare opportunity for audiences to experience the diversity and complex materiality of Henson’s work first hand, unhindered by the distortions of reproduction.

David Payne and Natalie Holloway
window99
99 Brunswick St Fitzroy
Exhibition opens this 6-9pm Saturday, July 10 until July 31

The windows of the old Gallery du Mont International building are now window99, an artist run space. window99 was launched in June this year creating an interesting new space for artists to exhibit their work. The windows, on the corner of Brunswick St and Palmer St bring art out of the gallery and into the public setting.

David Payne

This next exhibition features David Payne’s series Still Noise which consists of three images printed at Colour Factory on Duratran, a photographic paper designed to be back lit, used to turn Payne’s photographic series into a large light box installation.

Natalie Holloway

The opening of David Payne and Natalie Holloway’s work is this Saturday the 10th, 6- 9pm and window99 are providing you with some live music and drinks by donation.

RESCORE
8pm, Thursday July 8
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
200 Gertrude St , Fitzroy

As part of Always Moving: A Performance Laboratory in Several Parts, Danae Valenza and Speakeasy Cinema present a re-imaging of silent cinema, inviting local musicians to rescore the experimental visions of seminal filmmakers.

Please note: Strictly limited capacity. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Hold on to your friends
Drew Pettifer
No No Gallery
Exhibition dates July 1-24

Hold on to your friends reclaims the rural spaces of the artist’s youth in a series of photographs of young men taken in country Victoria, as well as a multi-screen video installation. Pettifer photographs his friends in poses appropriated from amateur pornographic images in a defiant yet playful reimagining of formerly oppressive regional locations as sites of queer sexual desire.

Sistagirls
Bindi Cole
Nellie Castan Gallery
Gallery 1
Opening Thurday 8th July 6-8pm

Bindi Cole spent a month living there in the Tiwi Islands creating a series of portraits of a community of Aboriginal Transgender women (men that identify as women) called the Sistagirls.

TWO X TWO
Karl Scullin and Lauren Bamford
Gallery 3
c3 contemporary art space
June 23rd – July 11th

TWO X TWO is a collaborative portraiture project by Melbourne photographers Karl Scullin and Lauren Bamford. Each artist presents a unique portrayal of the coterie of Melbourne’s emergent artistic subculture – with the common theme of ‘two’.

Worm Mountain – perspectives on natural history
Curated by Nicola Page
Amber Wallis, Andy Hutson, Dane Lovett, Jordan Wood, Linda Tegg, Lucy Griggs and Nicola Page.
GALLERY 1
c3 contemporary art space
June 23rd – July 11th

Moving across a range of art forms featuring, video, photography, wall drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media, artists have approached the topic of natural history with unique perspectives and inventive approaches to both subject and media.

All artists list interaction with nature and the sublime as concerns in their work, manifesting in various forms as, decorative, historical, scientific, sociological and spiritual. The exhibition aims to represent the full spectrum of these concerns as a reflection of contemporary art and natural History in 2010.

Gertrude St Projection Festival
Opening Night Friday 9th July
7:00pm-8:30pm
Workers Club
51 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
Exhibition runs at various locations on Gertrude St until 17th July

Colour Factory Festival Picks:
Kotoe Ishii
Gertrudes Brown Couch
30 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

tomorrow
Kristen McIver, Ry David Bradley,Valentina Palonen
Michael Koro Galleries
Opening Friday 2nd July  6-8pm
Exhibition runs til August 1st

Somewhere In Between
Natasha Frisch
Dianna Tanzer Gallery
Opening Saturday June 26, 3-5pm 2010

Delusional Dimensions
Ashlee Laing
Blindside
Gallery One and Two
Exhibition Dates June 17 – July 3

Ashlee Laing’s new body of work Delusional Dimensions interprets the complex emotional spaces of the amorous subject. Referencing excerpts from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse,” Laing has employed video and projected onto objects to visualize responses to the gestures or figures of the lover at work.

Similar to Barthes’ fragments, the visual elements Laing has engaged as responses are not sentences, not a complete message. The active principle is not what is says but what it articulates. Love, here, is a state of mind filled with anxiety, melancholy and beauty.

The Other World
Leigh Backhouse
Kick Gallery
Exhibition dates: June 8 – June 26

Leigh Backhouse is a photographer who explores nocturnal natural landscapes and unpopulated public spaces in a dramatic, cinematic way. Through his selection of imagery, as well as the richness of colour and texture in his final printed works, we are taken to places that are hypnagogic and otherworldly.

Sight & Sound
The Arts Centre
Exhibition dates June 12 – September 19

Sight & Sound is an exhibition that explores the intersections between music and abstract art in Australia from the early 20th century to contemporary practice.

The painters represented are John Aslanidis, Yvonne Audette, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Roger Kemp, Donald Laycock, Roy de Maistre and Robert Owen, while contemporary sound artist Michael Graeve has created a new site-specific installation for the exhibition.

Integrated into the exhibition is a unique soundtrack of music, spanning classical to contemporary, including newly commissioned scores by artist Niels Hutchison after Roy de Maistre’s work, and by Toyko-based musician and composer Benjamin Skepper in collaboration with John Aslanidis.

Leigh Backhouse
The Other World
Kick Gallery
Exhibition dates: June 8 – June 26

Leigh Backhouse is a photographer who explores nocturnal natural landscapes and unpopulated public spaces in a dramatic, cinematic way. Through his selection of imagery, as well as the richness of colour and texture in his final printed works, we are taken to places that are hypnagogic and otherworldly.

Sight & Sound
The Arts Centre
Exhibition dates June 12 – September 19

Sight & Sound is an exhibition that explores the intersections between music and abstract art in Australia from the early 20th century to contemporary practice.

The painters represented are John Aslanidis, Yvonne Audette, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Roger Kemp, Donald Laycock, Roy de Maistre and Robert Owen, while contemporary sound artist Michael Graeve has created a new site-specific installation for the exhibition.

Integrated into the exhibition is a unique soundtrack of music, spanning classical to contemporary, including newly commissioned scores by artist Niels Hutchison after Roy de Maistre’s work, and by Toyko-based musician and composer Benjamin Skepper in collaboration with John Aslanidis.