- This event has passed.
Residue
19 February, 2019 - 2 March, 2019
Chaohui Xie & Georgia Simitzis
Residue
19 February – 2 March 2019
hours:
Tuesday – Friday 11am to 5pm,
Saturday 11am to 3pm
admission: Free
The worlds created by both artists are inspired by fragments and residues of mundane matters: tree barks and coins.
Residue pieces together the paintings and installations of Greek-born artist Georgia Simitzis and Chinese-born artist Chaohui Xie. The worlds created by both artists are inspired by fragments and residues of mundane matters: tree barks and coins.
Georgia deploys acrylic paint and tree barks as media. The saturated colour formation of her paintings holds within it intricate tidiness and abstract expanse. The fluidity and the depth of her work embodies nature’s ceaseless metabolism, and challenges the anthropocentric gaze upon the power, the aesthetics and the ethics of nature.
Chaohui’s work explodes in pale silence. She collects coins from a pond, into which global visitors toss their coins as if it was a wishing well. In the chronicle development of her artistic practice, the coins got rotten, melted, disintegrated, abstracted, and allegorised. They could look as small as viruses and bullet holes, or as big as nation-states and gaps of ideology, all of which could easily fade away in the procession of time.
While lacking apparent thematic echoing and contrasting in their styles of presentation, the two artists unite on a deeper level of questioning through materiality: origins, appearances, progresses, finity and infinity, and the humanity as we know it.
Chaohui Xie
For the last couple of years, Chaohui has used international coins as the basis of her art creation. Coins hold significant information, they represent a country’s dignity, and become a window into a nation. They also symbolise the human world by reflecting political systems, recording historical figures and exposing cultural landscapes. Coins then are one of the resources that helps keep a nation bound together.
Through her artwork, Chaohui finds a spiritual meaning with coins by representing complicated social and international relationships within the world community such as immigration, integration, assimilation and identity.
Chaohui was born in China, and moved to Australia in 2010. She began her art journey at RMIT University, with a Diploma of Visual Art in 2012, and later, in 2015, a Bachelor of Visual Art from the VCA and in 2017 she completed her Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art at the VCA.
Georgia Simitzis
Simitzis graduated from RMIT University with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) in 2015. Simitzis’ work was featured as part of Brunswick Street Gallery’s Emerge showcase earlier this year. Her most recent solo exhibition was held in Shoreham at a 100-year-old homestead, Tecnevin, showing her abstract works within the natural landscape.
Simitzis works within the mediums of paint and collage, applying this to sculpture and 2-dimensinal works. These formats lend themselves to exploring the abstract images embodied in nature. Her work focuses on creating a sense of depth and fluidity, giving way to new meanings and aesthetics, solidified with vibrant colours and optical configurations.
Simitzis’ new works are interpretations of what she sees within the landscape that surrounds us, and creates a visual allegory that talks to humans and our visceral relationship to each other and the environment. Her recent sculptural works look at the remnants that are periodically left behind and highlights them with popping colours and 3D collage.