Current Studio Artists

Beata Geyer
Sydney

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Beata Geyer has lived and exhibited in Europe, England and Israel. She now lives in Sydney, Australia having emigrated in 1996.

Geyer is a recent graduate of the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts with Masters of Visual Arts Degree where she attained BVA Honours 1st class in 1999. She has also studied architecture, design and photography in Warsaw and in London at City of Westminster College.

Her practice encompasses a variety of media, from painting and photography to large scale, site-specific installation projects. Geyer has exhibited widely in London, Warsaw, and in Sydney at Artspace, Sydney College of the Arts, Tin Sheds, Firstdraft, Gallery 4A and Gallery 132 and also in Melbourne and Newcastle.

A recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts studio residency in Los Angeles in 2002, Geyer spent three months at the 18th Street Arts Complex in 2003 developing ideas and work, furthering her interest in the process of accumulation, designation and negotiation.

Brown Council
Sydney

Kelly Doley, Kate Blackmore, Fran Barrett and Diana Smith have been working collaboratively as Brown Council since 2005 after meeting at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. Brown Council make performance and video works that appropriate, imitate and remix a range of disparate images and ideas from popular culture, cinema, video clips and television. Through a ‘cut and paste’ application as well as an overt theatricality and costuming they subvert and challenge dominant gender stereotypes and interrogate how it is that we should perform. Their video and performance works have been shown in numerous galleries, festivals and theatrical settings including:  Athens Video Art Festival, Greece, Australian Centre for Photography, Performance Space, MOP projects, Blacktown Regional Arts Centre, Firstdraft Gallery in Sydney and The Next Wave Festival and Kings Ari in Melbourne.

Liz Coats

Sydney

Coats makes abstract paintings on canvas, board, paper or glass.  Before beginning a new series, she spends a lot of time experimenting with different combinations of materials. She trials ways that colour media in water dispersal can be shaped to enhance their material characteristics within a co-ordinated framework, and how the connective logic of the process that has meaning for her, can become visually accessible.

Lesley Giovanelli 

Sydney

My work is embedded in extended materiality and process engaging directly with the architectonics of the space to create site-specific installations that are both painterly and sculptural. In the development of immersive environments, I respond to and work with the surrounding architecture. Ideally the exhibition space becomes a studio during installation and I allow strategies such as imprecision, informality and spontaneity to be part of the work. I adhere to the literal properties of a given medium exposing the structures that govern relationships between form and its entropic organization. Forms are unstable tending towards the horizontal or towards dispersion and fragmentation. I use both  pre-made elements and soft highly coloured materials; wools, foams, and cotton wadding. The resulting environments consist of amorphous structures on the verge of disintegration - blobs, flows, floats and dissolves which play with form and anti form, order and disorder. Inspired by many sources from architecture, to Chinese gardens, from art history to  Indian miniatures, they shift between spectacle and detail.

Nat Goodden

London, UK

Nat Goodden has a background in sculptural installation, a proclivity to engage with intermedia, informatics and spatiality, and a practice increasingly based in the digital sphere. He is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Gloucestershire, and formerly lectured in sculpture, photography and 4D practices at UNSW. His current long-term project, Who Knew Whom, is an internet-based, incrementally-evolving map of cultural connectivity. Destined to be permanently incomplete, it brings the spirit of cartography to bear on a territory that eludes easy definition. Its first seed was sown by a chance discovery on a previous Australian visit.

Nat will be using the Artspace Residency to research future developments of this project, and to explore possibilities for other (more terrestrially-based) projects.

Margaret Roberts
Sydney

Margaret Roberts's art practice is concerned with relationships between art and the found, physical space of its location, and with ways of documenting the resulting art work so that literal space is either retained in the documentation, or its role in the artwork is acknowledged in some other way. She is also writing about art and the role it may play in relation to the low social value given to physical space, the consequences of which are seen in environmental decay and global warming. 

www.margaretroberts.org

Recent Studio Artists

Shane Cotton

Palmerston North, New Zealand

Upper Hutt born with affiliations to the Nga Puhi and Ngati Hine of Taitokerau, Shane Cotton has

emerged as a major presence in Contemporary New Zealand art. From his early distinctive sepiatoned ‘history’ paintings (1993) to his most recent Gothic ‘blue’ period (2006), Cotton has consistently redefined his style producing conceptually dense paintings that interrogate the dual heritage of New Zealand’s post-contact history.

The visual evolution of his works belies consistent themes of transformation, permanence, duality

and synthesis. These ideas are articulated through the artist’s complex repository of iconography

accumulated and reinvented over the trajectory of his career. The arrangement of formal elements in the artist’s compositions, though oblique in some instances, is largely derived from the spatial/conceptual dynamics that exist within the architecture of the Maori meeting house. Cultivated by Cotton for over a decade, he has gradually refined these organisational principles to create visually sophisticated works of immense potency.

www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz

Jacque Drinkall

Sydney

During her residency at Artspace, Jacque Drinkall plans to continue her work with telepathy in post-medium art practice by developing new video, photographic, sculptural installation and performance work. In particular, she will use the studio residency to complete a UFO, which has been well under construction for over a year. This UFO is the central prop of her long-term Weatherman UFOlogy project. Weatherman UFOlogy explores the mysticism of countercultural revolutionaries, particularly the US Weatherman activist/terrorist cult. Situationist artist Raymond Pettibon and the band Sonic Youth have already made artwork about the Weathermen’s unusual mysticism, demonstrating a Weatherman’s unusual belief that communist UFOs assisted Weathermen.

Jacque’s art illuminates the cult-like legacy of art, society and contemporary culture and counter-culture. Accompanying her artwork for her upcoming exhibition is her catalogue essay ‘Socio-Political Aesthetics of Telepathy in Recent Art.’

Julianna Joos
Montréal, Canada

Julianna Joos is a Montreal-based artist who combines in her practice traditional and digital techniques in printmaking ( etching, woodcut and digital printing) and in fiber art ( jacquard weaving, embroidery and wearable art).

Culture and collaboration are her ongoing interests. During her residency she will explore themes common to both cultures, Australian and Canadian, through a multi media production using the knot as a metaphore. Developing cooperative projects through this research will be her goal.

Joos is a graduate from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) where she received a Masters in studio art in 1996. She presently teaches at Dawson College, Montréal, in the Fine Arts Department (printmaking, drawing, and digital art).

www.julianna.jujoos.net

jjoos@dawsoncollege.qc.ca

Cesare Pietroiusti

Rome, Italy

Cesare Pietroiusti's art practice focuses on  problematic and paradoxical situations that are hidden in common relationships and in ordinary acts - thoughts that come to mind without a reason, small worries, quasi-obsessions that are usually considered too insignificant to become a matter of discussion, or of self-representation. The artist explores choices and intentions formulated by subjectivities other than his own, and the ways in which to make these choices become his own choices.