6 October — 30 October

Curated by Laurie Oxenford + Grace Dewar

Megan Cope, Renato Antinao, Georgia Morgan, Shan Turner-Carroll & Elliot Bastianon

Megan Cope, Untitled (Extractions l) 2020, core drilled cement plug, aggregate, pink acrylic spray paint, beeswax. Detail view from Megan Cope: Fractures & Frequencies at UNSW Galleries as part of Sydney Festival 2021. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Zan Wimberley. — Megan Cope, *Untitled (Extractions l)* 2020, core drilled cement plug, aggregate, pink acrylic spray paint, beeswax. Detail view from *Megan Cope: Fractures & Frequencies* at UNSW Galleries as part of Sydney Festival 2021. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Zan Wimberley.

IT’S ONLY A GIFT (IF YOU SEE IT AS A GIFT) by Grace Dewar and Laurie Oxenford brings together the spatial practices of Megan Cope, Renato Antinao, Georgia Morgan, Shan Turner-Carroll & Elliot Bastianon. Connected by an openness to chance, this group exhibition interrogates the potentials of exhibition-making, curatorial outcomes and social practice.

Across their disparate and resourceful forms of spatial experimentation, these five artists explore industrial materials inviting us to consider the urban landscape and how we move through it. Via photography, video, installation and sculpture, this exhibition exposes the process of making, manifesting in materials that, contextually, can hold intrinsic and physical value. The exhibition positions everydayness as a gift to offer new visual dialogues, multiple perspectives and a deeper understanding of public space.

Exhibition text

JWAC Gallery
Cnr Brunswick and Berwick Streets
420 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley Q 4006
(map here)

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Laurie Oxenford and Grace Dewar’s collaborative practice considers the critical thresholds and potentials of public space. Their site-specific and durational projects are approached with a shared spatial aesthetic that is inherently concerned with process, performance and conceptual practices. Often realised via psycho-geography and social practice, they respond to site and situation as part of the work. Within their interdisciplinary practices, they navigate shared interests in material hierarchies, value and chance as principles for developing critical dialogue.

Megan Cope is a Quandamooka (North Stradbroke Island in South East Queensland) artist. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality and examines psychogeographies that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ and our sense of time and ownership in a settler-colonial state. These explorations result in various material outcomes.

Georgia Morgan lives and works in lutruwita | Tasmania. Her practice explores the assumed hierarchies of materials and places through site-based research, performance/invented ritual, and sculptural installations. She uses photocopies, building materials, and detritus, assembled with ceramics, videos, and paintings that result in a blending of ‘high’ and ‘low’. Morgan’s re-reading of non-prescribed spaces as charged with spiritual energy is an act of transformation. Morgan (b. 1992) graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2019 and was the recipient of the Bett Gallery Award. In 2020 Georgia won a commendation prize and was the people’s choice winner in the Churchie Emerging Art Prize.

Shan Turner-Carroll (b. AUS 1987) is an Australian artist of Burmese descent. Shan’s practice responds to both site and situation specificity, and integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The subjects his works have related to include both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his work. Not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location.

Elliot Bastianon is a designer and artist based in Canberra, Australia. He has a diverse material palette and attempts to extrapolate the most from everyday things around him; often combining materials in ways that he hopes will direct his practice down a path not often taken. His studio is a triangulation of commercial furniture, research-driven projects and sculpture.

Renato Antinao is a Dutch-born photographer of Chilean and indigenous Mapuche descent living in The Netherlands. Antinao actively investigates urban environments to document found objects and spaces of interest, working primarily with the medium of photography. Through serendipity and chance he navigates the streets of Rotterdam through a responsive walking practice.