Finalist – Sculpture Walk – Colony 1 – Fibreglass 300 x 300 x 35 cms

Cusp materializes this void in memory by casting the empty space in packaging that once held surgical implements and medical devices used in the operating theatre. “The range of surgical stories re-presented is substantial” says Shiels, “ranging from a breast implant to a prostate biopsy, a cataract correction to a key hole reconstruction on a knee.

“Some of the cast objects look like alien weapons or contraptions from sci-fi movies” says artist Julie Shiels. “Others resemble probes used to pierce and penetrate the body in a gothic chamber of horrors.” Shiels has long made art from the empty spaces in plastic packaging and says the tantalizing thing about her work is that the original implements remain mysterious: “In many cases the objects I create bear little resemblance to the surgical technology once contained in the packaging. We don’t know what happens when we are under the knife but we imagine that experience before and after the event and our imaginations sometimes get things way out of proportion”

The installation at Project Space will presents some of these subterranean imaginings. Prior to surgery fears are like shape-changing monsters in the night – filling the windows and walls and creeping across the floor. When we go under the knife we surrender ourselves to the secret codes of medicine and the language of its technology, body like and cellular. Finally we are left with hard nuggets of frozen experience archaeology of plaster objects – some broken and some in tact.

Cusp examines the surgical intervention, the aesthetics of the anesthetic. Will future archaeologists sift through our ruins and exclaim at our barbarity? Or will they marvel at our ingenuity in managing the suffering of illness and disease in our time?

Catalogue essay:cusp_catalogue_invite.pdf

Cusp
Project Space/Spare Room
23-27 Cardigan St, Carlton
Friday 4 – Friday 25 June

Launched by Jason Smith – CEO and Director, Heidi Museum of Modern Art

SUB12
Substation
30 July – 22 August
Opening night – 6.00pm to 8.00pm on Friday 30 July

1 Market Street
Newport
Victoria 3015

Gallery opening hours
Thursday – Friday | 12.00pm – 7.00pm
Saturday – Sunday | 12.00pm – 5.00pm

The 12 windows in Campbell Arcade have been packed with a collection of objects that have been cast from the empty spaces in plastic packaging after the original object has been removed. These multiple forms have been coated in luminescent fibre (flock) and attached directly into the spaces.

Each display window has a different pattern: patterns of use that reference products that could have been sold in the now defunct department store: computer gear, toys, confection, etc. Other arrangements, mostly crowded, suggest movement and echo the way people pass through the arcade.

Apart from being a mad critique of mass production and the era of the $2 dollar shop this work explores the ideas of material culture and asks questions about what objects will survive and become meaningful beyond their looming use by date. How do changing tastes affect the meaning and value of an object? How will this stuff be viewed in twenty years time? Will we laugh about the old technologies and the crap that filled our lives or will some of these objects have a new meanings and significance? The same question could be asked about this artwork.

‘Flock’ – Julie Shiels and
‘Handcrafted Landscape’ – Tamara Marwood

Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 3pm

To be opened by Professor Lyndal Jones, School of Creative Media, RMIT University and Director of The Avoca Project (TAP Inc).

Sleeper, Julie Shiels’ new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art is the culmination of a four-year project in which she has used discarded mattresses found on the streets of Melbourne as source material for her art.

The mattresses are used in a range of ways. Shiels fashions pyjamas from the upholstery, documents the array of weapons found secreted in the stuffing and in the series Bedtime stories binds their ornate fabrics into artist’s books.

In his catalogue essay Jason Smith, Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art states ‘ Sleeper reminds us why artists undertake the mysterious, compulsive acts they do to externalise their visions and contemplations of the world we inhabit: they tell us it is necessary to look again, to not deny some of the terrors of the everyday, and to see strange beauty and seek solace in some simple (and not so simple) things.

Exhibition Opens Wednesday 23 July 2008, 5 – 7pm
Exhibition Runs 23 July – 2 August 2008

to be opened by Julian Birnside

Our ecological footprint is influenced by the resources we consume and the waste we produce. In western societies, at the heart of this is the commodity. Decorative or functional the commodity is the site of desires and longings. But it is seldom for its intrinsic use value that the commodity is coveted, rather for what it signifies: power, wealth, prestige, success and herein lies its obsolescence. The fashionable artefact is quickly transformed into the old, the despised, the cast-off. Dumped or discarded redundant commodities form the detritus of urban existence.

Redeeming the Ruin – The Art of Consumption exhibition brings together the work of 11 artists from around Australia. Each artist has salvaged consumer waste to consider the elements that underlie consumption behaviour. Employing whimsy, humour and subversion the artists question the role of desire, the influence of the corporate world, the nature of gift giving, the idea of knowledge as a commodity and depletion of natural resources. In this, the International Year of Planet Earth, we owe it to ourselves and future generations to rethink our consumption habits, otherwise the slogan ‘buy now, pay later’ may have dire consequences.

Touring Exhibition Dates & Galleries

Latrobe Regional Gallery
138 Commercial Road, Morwell
19 January – 16 March 2008

Shepparton Art Gallery
70 Welsford Street, Shepparton
28 March – 4 May 2008

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington
16 July – 31 August 2008

Banyule Arts Space
14 Ivanhoe Parade, Ivanhoe
22 October – 29 November 2008

Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery
Horseshoe Bend, Swan Hill
5 December 2008 – 1 February 2009

Artists: Katrina Carter, Laila Maria Costa, Graham Hay, Glenys Hodgeman, Simon Horsburgh, Pamela Kouwenhoven, Giuseppe Romeo, Vin Ryan, Mona Ryder, Julie Shiels, Paul Wood

Just passing through
fortyfive downstairs
45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
November 13 – December 8, 2007.
Tuesday – Friday 11 – 5pm
Saturday 12 – 4pm

During 2007, I’ve been walking the streets of the CBD, observing life as a ‘botanist of the pavement’ and collecting discarded items that can be re-purposed – like the plastic packaging used to cast the objects in this show, and flattened cardboard boxes. The boxes are stencilled and then returned to the piles of flattened cardboard stacked on the street for recycling.

Every object has a story.

Keen to increase the identity of its Cultural Precinct as the heart of the city, Albury undertook a residential project engaging three artists’ imagination to explore possibilities for artwork within the defined site. Artists Ludwika Ogorzelec, Julie Shiels and Nicole Voevodin-Cash have developed ideas which embrace the concepts of artworks on the site. The three exhibitions present their individual approaches to art in public space.

“Ms Muddiman became intrigued in exploring the historic perception of the boudoir as a room of luxurious femininity, allure and seduction which is entwined with the literal meaning of the French word bouder, meaning ‘to sulk’ and the bedroom being a place to escape when in a mood or state of anxiety.”

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
25 January – 8 April 2007

Exhibition to be launched by Jon Cattapan

I was stencilling stories onto dumped mattresses in the streets of St Kilda when the fabric on their covers caught my eye. A whole history of textile design was going off to the tip. They were too gorgeous to stencil, too precious to leave. So I started collecting mattresses, piling them onto the roof of my car and taking them home. As the garage began to overflow I wondered what to do next. I wanted to give these mattresses another life.

I started sewing pyjamas, carefully cutting each garment to fit the cloth avoiding the blemishes where possible but retaining the intimate history. The pyjamas draw our gaze and invite our touch. But as they attract, they also repel, because of their past, their proximity to the skin of a person or persons unknown. They embody someone else’s story but prompt the question “how do you sleep?”

fortyfivedownstairs – 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne