Anna Schwartz Gallery

Emily Floyd's This place will always be open, the inaugural Ian Potter Sculpture Commission at MUMA, opens Saturday 6 October, 2012.

Winding an unorthodox itinerary through the sculpture court at MUMA, This place will always be open, 2012 is a text-based sculptural work fabricated from painted and powder-coated steel. With a font designed by the artist, it derives its logic from modernist typography, albeit in a highly abstracted form. Almost – but not quite – pushed to the point of illegibil- ity (attesting to our distance from, and yet ongoing influence of the textual reference), Floyd’s high-key polychrome letters present a declarative, emblematic slogan, whilst being open from behind to reveal the constructivist manufacture and aesthetics of the work.

The letters themselves serve as a marker of place, and vari- ously operate as a form of civic discourse, public furniture, or library stack, creating a place where students and visitors can sit, read and enjoy the landscaped area of the sculpture court, while also reflecting upon a specific history and poten- tial invoked in what is an apparently simple sentence.

Emily Floyd’s work is the first in an annual series of com- missioned sculptural and/or architectural works, developed to establish new opportunities for artists, and new models of practice, thinking and research into public sculpture and architectural practice.

Details of the project are available here.

Work by Daniel von Sturmer is included in 'Contact, Artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand' at Frankfurter Kunstverein.
Exhibition dates: 5 October – 25 November, 2012

The Frankfurter Kunstverein pres- ents the group exhibition CONTACT. ARTISTS FROM AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND on the occasion of New Zealand’s role as guest of honor at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. The title originates from a 1974 performance by Jim Allen in the Auckland Art Gallery, which was centered
on the expanded notion of “contact” as a mental, physical, and social interrelationship and thus exempli- fies a period in which New Zealand artists explored different paths for dealing with their history and cultural context. The word “contact” refers to the network of relation- ships between the two dominant ethnic groups in bicultural Aotearoa/ New Zealand: the indigenous popu- lation of the Māori and the white settlers, “Pakeha”.

The exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein brings together paint- ings, photographs, films, and instal- lations by 25 New Zealand artists, thus offering a complex picture of art production in Aoteaora/New Zealand over the past 40 years.

For more information, please click here.

The first annual commission for the Ian Potter Sculpture Court will see a major new public work by Emily Floyd explore the role and legacy of the university campus (and museum) as a site of political potential. Drawing its title and conceptual framework from the experimental student struggles at Monash University during the 1960s and '70s, and incorporating a series of activities and publications instigated by Floyd, This Place Will Always Be Open serves as a space for social encounter - reinvoking a utopian spirit that is open, inclusive, free, provisional and generative.

For more information, click here

Daniel von Sturmer has been selected as a finalist for the Monash Gallery of Art's annual Bowness Photography Prize, 2012.

Von Sturmer has been selected as one of 42 finalists from a total of 2,500 entries by an eminent judging panel which includes Magnum photographer Trent Parke, the NGV’s Senior Curator of Photography Isobel Crombie, and MGA Gallery Director Shaune Lakin.

An exhibition of new works by the finalists in the $25,000 non-acquisitive prize will be held at the Monash Gallery of Art from 4 October - 18 November, 2012. The winner of the Bowness Prize will also be announced on at the opening of the exhibition.

For more information please click here.