Lunch-Time Art Forums

Monash Art & Design's Free Lunchtime Art Forums provide a taste of the Faculty's vibrant intellectual community. Speakers reflect the wide breadth of contemporary art practice and each form provides and insight into sources of inspiration and pathways to sucess.

Semester One, 2008

March

March 5
Anne Marsh (speaking about the work of Pat Brassington)
Anne Marsh is Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Art & Design. She is author of Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia,1969-1992 (Oxford University Press, 1993), The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Macmillan, 2003), Pat Brassington: This is Not a Photograph (Quintus/University of Tasmania 2006), she has a book on Contemporary Australian Photography forthcoming with Macmillan (2008).
Pat Brassington
Pat Brassington is one of Australia's leading photo-media artists. During the past 20 years she has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas. A major survey of her work was shown at the Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne in 2003 and her work was included in Reason and Emotion, Biennale of Sydney in 2004.

View the March 5 Lunchtime Forum Lectopia recording online or download to your computer.

March 12
Chicks on Speed (12.30pm)
Chicks on Speed is an electropop group which started in Munich in 1997, after its members had met through the Academy of Fine Arts there. Grouped around them is a large and ever-changing collective of musicians, producers, graphic artists, designers, film and video makers, and so on. Though usually considered part of such musical genres as electroclash, Chicks on Speed started as a multidisciplinary art group who applied a punk-inspired DIY ethic to performance art, collage graphics and home-made fashion
John C. Welchman (3pm)
John C. Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is a prolific writer and commentator. His current book projects include editing the collected writings of Mike Kelley and he is also finalizing two books on the relation between art, film and the representation of faces. His most recent exhibition projects have included catalogue essays for Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and John Baldessari.

March 19
Arlo Mountford (Presented in association with the Monash University Museum of Art)
Arlo Mountford works primarily with large-scale installations that incorporate sound, video and animation. His witty and often macabre works use humour, self-reflexivity and appropriation to explore art history, popular culture, the role of the artist and the contextual relationship between contemporary art practice and the past. Mountford was the winner of the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award 2007 for his digital animation Return to Point 2006.

View the March 19 Lunchtime Forum Lectopia recording online or download to your computer.

April

April 2
Christian Capurro (Presented in association with the Monash University Museum of Art)
Christian Capurro's practice seems more concerned with erasure and masking than visibility. In his Gorgonia series (1999-onwards) pages from lifestyle magazines have been partially erased, and then further distanced from recognition with correction fluid. His Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette featured in Robert Storr's 'Think with the Senses-Feel with the Mind, Art in the Present Tense' exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

April 9
Roger Wood
Roger Wood and Randall Marsh have been in private practice since 1983, after extensive experience in Melbourne architectural offices following theit graduation from RMIT. Wood Marsh architecture has broad experience in interiors, urban design and public infrastructure including road bridges, freeway sound walls and pedestrian links. In addition to a full range of architecture they have designed sets for fashion, video and performance works. One of their best known projects is the ACCA buiding.

April 16
Ash Keating
Melbourne based visual artist Ash Keating, a graduate of both Monash and the VCA, keenly integrates his interest in political activism and environmental concerns with his art strategies. These often vary from process based projects, public art and performance, and installations. Ash travelled to Santiago, Chile in Sept/Oct 2006 as part of The South Project. There he created a diverse media project Pascua Lama, as part of Trans Versa at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo. His other projects include Press Release, where thousands of photographs of the endangered gannet were hand cut from MX magazines and later released in gallery spaces throughout Australia and NZ.

April 23
John Kaldor (Presented in association with the Monash University Museum of Art)
John Kaldor is a significant and important collector of contemporary art and his art projects have marked him as Australia's foremost patron of contemporary art. Since Christo and Jeanne-Claude created Wrapped Coast - One Million Square Feet, Sydney in 1969, Kaldor Art Projects has invited many leading international artists to Australia. He was Commissioner for the Australian participation in the 2005 and 2007 Venice Biennales, and is on the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New.

April 30
Jude Walton
Jude Walton is a performance and video artist, who has worked in Australia, Britain and the US. She currently teaches theory and practice in performance at Victoria University, having set up a Bachelor of Arts degree in Performance Studies there in 1990. She has recently participated in two research residencies: one at the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert museum in London and another at the Meat Market in Melbourne. The V & A residency allowed Jude to research artists' books and ephemera relating to her PhD project, Performing the book: the book as performance.

May

May 7
Kerstin Thompson
Kerstin Thompson Architects is known for its creativity and commitment to design culture in Australia. The practice has won numerous awards for both individual houses and medium density projects and has been recognised for its important role in promoting excellence in design throughout Australia, Asia and Europe. More about the experience of place than the appearance of style, architecture is used to form connections with the greater surrounds. This approach is supported by an inter-disciplinary and collaborative design process.

May 14 - Michael Graeve
Michael Graeve is a visual and sound artist based in Melbourne. He exhibits, performs and teaches internationally, working across painting and sound disciplines through easel painting, site-specific installation, painting and sound installation, sound performance and composition. He has been involved in artist-run galleries as founding committee member of Grey Area Art Space Inc (1996-1999), and Program Manager at West Space Inc (2002-2004). He currently teaches at RMIT University and Victoria University, Melbourne, and has taught at various colleges and universities in Melbourne and Chicago since 1998. His works are held in collections in Australia, Germany and the USA.

May 21
Jenny Watson
Jenny Watson's artwork sits on the cusp of painting and conceptual art. She is a major figure in contemporary art whose work continues to command an international audience engaged by its freshness of execution and the gentle humour and eloquence of its highly individual imagery. Watson's works are drawn from images of her life and from her dreams. Her unconventional approach to painting combines colour, text, figures and recurring motifs, to create a meaningful narrative. Jenny Watson was Australia's representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

May 28
David Bate
Dr David Bate (Reader in Photography and Course Leader of the MA Photographic Studies, University of Westminster) is a theorist and academic. His major publication Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (IB Taurus, 2004) is considered a landmark in the field. He is also an exhibiting artist with recent exhibitions in Europe and North America. Dr Bate is in Melbourne as part of the Faculty of Art & Design's Visiting Artist Program and will be working on the theme of globalization and photography.

Please note: These talks are subject to changes.