Resisting dominant Western narratives of settlement, growth, industry and the developmental, the artists instead follow the poetic, speculative threads that the stone itself suggests.
Artist Talk: 3pm, Saturday 8 October, 2022
Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson in conversation with Caitlin Franzmann.
Exhibition Opening 4-6pm, Saturday 8 October 2022.
Kenzee Patterson is an artist and a descendant of transported convicts, cedar-getters and British and Dutch-Sri Lankan immigrants. He lives and works on the unceded sovereign Country of Yugarabul, Yuggera, Jagera, and Turrbal peoples. His expanded sculptural practice combines material experimentation and unorthodox processes with historical research, autobiography and language, often reconstituting spent objects into new forms.
Over his career, Kenzee has regularly focused on long-duration practice-led research involving a multimodal, embodied engagement with Country, people, and material, forming part of his responsive strategy for living and practicing on stolen land.
Kenzee has generated a number of expansive solo exhibitions for regional galleries, artist-run initiatives (ARIs), and a commercial gallery. His work has also been included in group exhibitions throughout Australia and in overseas cities including Paris, New York, Berlin and Vienna. He has been curated into significant group exhibitions at regional galleries, university galleries and in touring exhibitions.
Collective and collaborative modes of working are integral to his practice, and he has been the founding director of three influential ARIs: Locksmith Project Space, Sydney (2007-2011); Cosmopolitan Decline, Broken Hill (2018); and in 2021 Kenzee founded the online reading and field trip working-group Magnetic Topographies with artists Clare Britton and Therese Keogh.
Kenzee has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and grants including the 2009 Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship (University of Sydney), an Australia Council New Work Grant (2012) and an Australia Council 2020 Resilience Fund – Create Grant.
Mitchel Cumming is an artist, poet, and educator living and working on unceded Gadigal and Bidjigal land. His work frequently involves the establishment and/or manipulation of exhibition contexts: a process in which elements generally considered supplementary to artistic production become instead a primary material.
Mitchel has exhibited extensively both in Australia and abroad, presenting work in artist-run, commercial and institutional settings. In 2019, he was included in Primavera 2019: Young Australian Artists, a survey of contemporary practice curated by Mitch Cairns. Other recent highlights include Transplant @ SCA Galleries (2021); No Show @ Carrigeworks, Sydney (2021); Axes @ Goya Curtain, Tokyo (2019).
Deeply interested in the contextual implications of art’s display, the operation of artist-run spaces has been a primary component of Mitchel’s practice over the past decade. In addition to his ongoing role as founding co-director of KNULP gallery, Sydney (2015 – ), Mitchel has established a number of exhibition programs including NEAR (2014) and AJAR (2016-2019). His writing has been published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Running Dog, and Cordite Poetry Review.
Image: Kenzee Patterson, Deep Heat, 2020.
