An Ever Expanding Universe

Curator: Melissa Keys

Artists: Maria Cruz (NSW/GER), Tim Johnson (NSW), Lara Merrett (VIC), Viv Miller (VIC), Pip & Pop (Nicole Andrijevic & Tanya Schultz) (WA), Ben Pushman (WA), Nusra Latif Qureshi (VIC), Noël Skrzypczak (VIC), Gulumbu Yunupingu (NT)

Featuring exquisite miniatures, work grounded in both Indigenous and Buddhist traditions, images of the cosmos and contemporary abstraction An Ever Expanding Universe brings together a constellation of ten leading artists. Exploring some of the diverse traditions and cultural histories that shape contemporary Australia this exhibition journeys into the universe of painting today.

Friday 13 June, 6pm

Illustrated artist's talk: Nusra Latif Qureshi
PICA's Performance Space

Viv Miller - PLANETARIUM 2006 (detail)
Courtesy of the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne
UBS Art Collection, Brisbane

Curator's talk: Melissa Keys,
PICA's Ground Floor Galleries

Julie Dowling - Oottheroongoo (Your Country)

Making her first foray into multi-media, Julie Dowling is a Perth based Badimaya artist known for her paintings detailing land, country and family. At once gentle and incisive, this installation is both a self-portrait and a wider history. It reveals an unfolding personal journey and offers glimpses of her physical and spiritual reconnection with her ancestral country - an experience Dowling has meticulously documented via film and photography.

Friday 27 June, 1pm

Artist talk: Julie Dowling with an introduction by Carol Dowling
Westend Gallery

Julie Dowling - OOTTHEROONGOO (Your Country) 2008 (dvd still)
Courtesy of the artist and Brigitte Braun, Artplace, Melbourne

Curator: Dr Shaun Wilson

Artists: Alex Avzoglou (VIC), Marsha Berry (VIC), John A Douglas (VIC), Robert Hecimovic (NSW), Larissa Hjorth (VIC), Tammy Honey (VIC), Sam Keene (VIC), Brendan Le (VIC), David McDowell (VIC), Aaron McLoughlin (VIC), Krystal Shultheiss (VIC), Brie Trenerry (VIC), Shaun Wilson (VIC), Marco Kin Ming Wong (VIC)

Well before Australia was charted it was 'imagined as a grotesque space peopled by monsters'. Early settlers found their new land eerie, disorientingly unfamiliar and hostile - a response which became ingrained in our national consciousness, literature and cinema. Tapping into these 'gothic' traditions and unsettling imaginings the fourteen artists featured in Australian Gothic: Video Art Now revel in the dark, creepy and sometimes perversely seductive zones of our collective imagination where menace lurks and nothing is a quite as it seems.

Alex Avzoglou - ONE TWO RED BLUE 2006
Courtesy of the artist

Scary Movie

Curator: Richard Grayson

Artists: Anna Barriball (UK), Mark Boulos (UK), Erik Bünger (Germany), Mark Wallinger (UK)

Scary Movie features four recent video works by UK and Europe based artists. Each work makes references different applications for film or video technology to their ensuing languages and forms - from surveillance and scientific documentation, to the 'home-video', 'the documentary' and finally 'the drama'.

Mark Wallinger - SLEEPER 2004 (DVD still)
Courtesy of the artist.

The works in Scary Movie allude to ideas of the 'fantastic' and the 'uncanny' and explore the media of film and video as repositories and carriers of these in contemporary culture.

Full program notes and images available online at www.pica.org.au