lowercase focus: March 4, 2021
Welcome to lowercase focus, a bi-monthly program which seeks to highlight emerging artists and exhibitions over the world.
With most of my focus articles, I pick a loose theme to unite and group my five artists of the week. Last run we looked at some artists near me, down in the Pacific region, and this time around I’d like to do the same again.
Tim Meakins
Tim Meakins is a Perth based graphic designer, artist and installation-maker. I’ve found his works exceptionally engaging in terms of the content they examine, and wonderfully challenging in terms of design and production. His recent exhibition for example, Low Energy at Cool Change Contemporary in Perth, featured a large-scale industrial installation which hoped to open dialogue about social pressures and conformity. Meakins is also one half of TERMSOFSERVICE, a contemporary design duo, alongside Simran Singh.
Matthew Harris
Matthew Harris is a Melbourne based artist whose wide-spanning practice encompasses painting, printmaking, zines, video, sculpture and photography. Not a trained artist, Harris’ art is both conceptually dense and visually refreshing. He often makes viewers question the relationship between culture and contemporary art, loosening the concept of art within the institution. Harris is currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary as part of their two-year residency programme.
Aretha Brown
Also from Melbourne and the youngest on this list is Aretha Brown, an indigenous Australian artist and activist. At only twenty years of age, Brown has had a relatively short yet extremely successful career in the arts to date, with features on several magazines and journals, inclusion in exhibitions and commissions for private art projects. She works in a detailed and meticulous muralist style, with a heavy influence from Indigenous Australian imagery.
Matt Fortrose
Matt Fortrose is a fine artist and muralist currently based in Adelaide, South Australia. Drawing influence form Bauhaus graphics and early colour field graphics, Fortrose’s art combines elements of fine art makership with raw, industrial processes. The results are a unique and wonderful deconstruction of objects and materials.
James Dodd
Also from Adelaide, I first saw James Dodd’s works when he exhibited his Painting Mill in my city. Self-described as a ‘kludger’, Dodd’s approach to artmaking is half DIY culture and half colour-focused abstraction. The Painting Mill is the best example of this – a contraption of roller blades, skateboards, scooters, drills and painting arms, entirely mechanised, which Dodd paints/controls with repurposed toy car controllers.
A video demonstrating the Painting Mill better than I could ever explain can be found here: https://vimeo.com/237834881
Emerson Radisich is a curator, writer and educator currently based in Melbourne, Australia.