Spring1883 Art Fair
The Hotel Windsor
Melbourne
9 – 12 August
Simon Denny
Gavin Hipkins
Kate Newby
Michael Stevenson
Simon Denny
Metaverse Landscape 42: Decentraland Parcel -120, -60
2023
Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT
1000 x 1000 x 45mm
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Hong Kong (Cave)
2004
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Hong Kong (Path)
2004
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
Simon Denny
Metaverse Landscape 44: The Sandbox LAND (-179, -50)
2023
Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT
1000 x 1000 x 45mm
Kate Newby
You can hold two things at once
2023
Stoneware, porcelain, glaze
3 pieces (80 x 70 x 90mm) (120 x 80 x 65mm) (155 x 105 x 55mm)
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Shanghai (Field)
2005
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Auckland (Bridge)
2004
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
Michael Stevenson
The Apply Chair: Apply for Funding
2023
laser-engraved polyester tufted pile fabric, shredded documents, chipped foam, breathable non-woven polypropylene, metal rings
1000 × 1000 × 1000mm
Edition of 1 (+1 AP)
Simon Denny
Metaverse Landscape 43: Decentraland Parcel -107, -64
2023
Oil on canvas, UV print, Ethereum paper wallet, dynamic ERC-721 NFT
500 x 500 x 45mm
Kate Newby
Standing up
2023
Stoneware, porcelain, glaze
2 pieces (115 x 90 x 65mm) (210 x 140 x 100mm)
Kate Newby
it doesn’t get any better than this
2023
Stoneware, glaze
3 pieces (120 x 105 x 95mm) (150 x 140 x 140mm) (150 x 165 x 145mm)
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Los Angeles (Fort)
2006
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
Gavin Hipkins
The Sanctuary: Melbourne (Hut)
2004
Unique silver-gelatin print
Image 375 x 375mm / Frame 525 x 517 x 20mm
SIMON DENNY
The most recent body of work by Simon Denny, who has attentively followed the development of digital infrastructure, zooms in on other lands: those that exist in online realms. In other words: the metaverse, which is not so much being discovered as brought into existence via market forces. The privately-owned worlds that make up various so-called metaverses offer their users an array of interactions: from social networking via custom-made characters, known as avatars, to purchasing and selling deliberately limited series of collectible items, to, ultimately, the trading of digital real estate.
In a new series, Denny works with digital imagery in layers of UV print and oil paint to depict these metaverses’ ownership tokens in a series of “landscapes”. The paintings evoke art historical idioms of colonial landscape painting and various modernist painterly tropes that are already resonant with the way that these metaverses represent themselves in their maps and title deeds. The geometry of metaverses recalls grid-based mid-century abstraction or urban planning, and, as with colonial painting, images are produced to incentivise buying and selling.
GAVIN HIPKINS
The Sanctuary (2004–2006) documents gardens, parks and zoos located in various cities around the world, in black and white hand-printed views evoking legacies of Romanticism and the picturesque. Although his medium engages with familiar tropes of historical photographic landscape depiction, he does not offer panoramic vistas with elaborate pictorial constructions.
Instead his images veer more towards the isolated detail, to show us unpopulated images of constructed landscape. As such these images show how these sites have been shaped by complex histories; registering shifting patterns of custodial responsibility and changing fashions in design, proving our desire to harness nature and scale it for human use.
KATE NEWBY
A consistent theme of Newby’s practice is the creation of ceramic sculptures, using clay moulded and fired into forms that resemble rocks, pebbles, sticks or fossilised objects. These sculptures are generally produced in sets of varying numbers, with their distinctive features grouped together, recalling taxonomic modes of classification.
A geological process breaks down mineral deposits over thousands of years, from solid rock to clay, which can then be moulded and shaped. Through the simple act of firing clay, Newby’s sculptures enact a human interference in the geological process—disrupting the natural trajectory of organic materials by reverting them back to their initial solid structure, to be yet again, broke down over time. Newby has described how she plays with time as she plays with scale throughout her work, where a simple process can lead to an immense material transformation, while a sculpture that appears small and unassuming can alter a space and elicit a shift in the viewer’s perspective.Newby’s ceramic rock sets subtly insert themselves into the peripheries of architectural space; a corner, a windowsill, a bookshelf, quietly dissolving the boundaries between inside and outside.
MICHAEL STEVENSON
The Apply Chair: Apply for Funding comes from a recent suite of sit-able art objects in the form of soft cubic furniture or beanbags upon which viewers can relax, remove their shoes, recline and contemplate. Each ‘chair’ archives the content and architecture of the now defunct Future Fund website.
Future Fund was a private sector grantmaking agency operating during a seven-month period in 2022. As the flagship charitable arm of FTX, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange, it came under scrutiny last November when the exchange filed for bankruptcy. Today the FTX founder is under house-arrest and the Fund website is accessible only as cachéd archives and an inactive Twitter feed.
