The Gallery
Catherine Biocca, Cornelia Baltes, Rosalie SchweikerCurated by Louise Hobson | Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency
19 March - 09 April 2016
ARTIST TALK: Saturday 19 March, 4pm
PUBLIC PREVIEW: Saturday 19 March, 6-8pm
CLOSING EVENT: Saturday 9th April, 12-3pm
The actions that led to the making of this exhibition include: inviting, researching, funding, mentoring, collecting, questioning, doubting, choosing, emailing, chatting, travelling, visiting, explaining, persuading, budgeting, collaborating, facilitating, printing, distributing, communicating, redrafting, coordinating, responding, compromising, adapting, transporting, curating.
Catherine Biocca, Cornelia Baltes, Rosalie Schweiker is presented at Mission Gallery as part of the Jane Phillips Award Curatorial Residency, a new opportunity within the Jane Phillips Award, supporting early career curatorial development.
Catherine Biocca’s installations form trajectories into alternate timelines and realities, exchanging the real and the animated world to generate a new, and unfamiliar stage. She approaches her work through the concept of schadenfreude, a German and relatively untranslatable word loosely meaning ‘the joy of someone else’s failure’.
At Mission Gallery, Catherine creates an inside-out environment, transposing a time some millions of years ago into the gallery in a new work titled Deutscher Fürst. Layering cartoon imagery, science fiction and natural history, the artist produces a lo-fi, deconstructed dinosaur landscape. In this new multidimensional installation, Catherine brings us into a dialogue with our assumption of being on time. In parallel to Deutscher Fürst, 4-handed space drawings from the INTERGALACTIC series will also be exhibited. These new works have been made in collaboration with the artist’s father, a former spacecraft engineer.
Cornelia Baltes’ paintings exist as protagonists, subtly shifting the gallery space into a stage for an abridged visual narrative. Real-world observations inform her works but fall away as gestures are reconsidered, refined, and invested onto her canvases, walls and coloured MDFs, making for rigorously conceived forms imbued with playfulness and humour. At Mission Gallery, Cornelia works directly onto the walls of the gallery, expanding on a recent exploration of making site-specific murals. In this new installation, colour and motifs migrate from the large-scale wall paintings to her framed paintings, escaping the confines of their supports as though both independent and fallen.
Rosalie Schweiker buys a fridge magnet wherever she goes for work. At Mission Gallery, Rosalie presents the migrant worker's fridge magnet collection; displaying her collection for the first time in public, on a fridge stocked with local drinks. If you buy the artist a drink at the public preview, she'll tell you the story behind a magnet. After the opening weekend, the fridge will stay on and serve the exhibition as a bar. Rosalie Schweiker uses social exchanges to find new functions for art in society. Her work often manifests itself in humorous interventions such as sleepovers, pizza portraits, bra shops, confidence building workshops, gardening and other seemingly random activities. Since Rosalie's focus is on the communicative effects of art, most of her work leaves hardly any material trace.
Including contributions from Maria Guggenbichler, San Keller, Madeleine Amsler, David Morris, Rachel Pafe, Romy Rüegger, Peter Schweiker, Sabine Schweiker, Jo Waterhouse and others.
