This Saturday the 21st, the Art Gallery of NSW members will be visiting Home@735 Gallery during ‘Art Walk Redfern’. The group will be arriving at 1.15pm – come along to hear artists talks by Adam Norton and Hayley Megan French from 1.30pm. The gallery will be open Saturday from 1pm-4pm. All welcome. Visit this link for more details. https://shorturl.at/xJ368

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Alichia van Rhijn next month. Join us for opening drinks on Wednesday the 11th of October. Pictured is Daydream Believer #4, 2023, glazed earthenware (this piece has an inside component that rattles)

Alichia van Rhijn, presents sculptural works that reference early memories of childhood, both before her immigration to Australia and after. A series of works have been presented, some operating as childhood self-portraits, some alluding to memories of childhood toys and some presented as ‘rattles’; asking to be held and listened to.
These multi-faceted elements and anthropomorphic forms are in a constant state of flux. Shifting and changing as they span the fluidity of time, these forms investigate phenomenological notions, alluding to personal and shared experience, memory, nostalgia and trauma. Through the use of distilled minimalist forms, symbolic and ritualistic totems are arranged throughout the space, hoping to initiate pause and contemplation.
van Rhijn’s installations catalogue her experience of displacement through material investigation, where memory and experience of place are key elements. ‘Making as thinking’ paired with an experimental approach to process and technology underpins the creation of objects that float between the real and a child-like whimsical world that elicits an urge to interact and play.

Alichia van Rhijn is a South African born Australian artist. With a background in architecture and design she has a passion for creating sculptural and installation-based objects and forms that examine memory, trace, trauma, experience and loss. Solo shows include; ‘A Sense Of Being’, Gallerysmith (2019); ‘The Middle Distance’, Boom Gallery (2019); ‘My Mother Told Me (Never Wear Pink And Red Together)’, Stockroom Kyneton (2020); ‘Smoke Signals’, Stockroom Kyneton (2021); ‘Lemon Light’ at Sabbia Gallery (2022); ‘Pink Moon’ at Stockroom Kyneton (2023); and most recently ‘Sweet Spot’ at Curatorial+Co (2023).

Home is pleased to be exhibiting a suite of paintings by Hayley Megan French in October. Join us for opening drinks from 6-8pm on Wednesday the 11th. Pictured is Suburban architecture paintings, 2023, acrylic on canvas.

I work primarily in painting, moving between abstraction and representation. I paint the streets of suburbia, homes, yards, and memories of landscapes. I love the capacity of painting to create an intimacy and slowness that can bring different ideas and experiences into conversation with each other. I live on Dharug land in Western Sydney. I believe it is important to engage with the places we live with a renewed wonder and critical attention to better understand who we are and how we live.

Alongside my painting practice, I also write, curate and work as Curator and Artist Development for Parramatta Artists’ Studios. I completed a PhD on Australian Painting in 2015 and work intermittently as a fieldwork researcher in Cultural Economics at Macquarie University. My writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, ADSR Zine, Art Collector Magazine, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts Journal and Semaphore. I exhibit regularly in artist-run, regional and commercial galleries around Australia.

Since 2018 I have been developing a major new body of work titled The Pipeline. This project is a portrait of the suburbs I live and work in. It is a growing archive that engages in a conversation of what suburbia means in the Australian imagination.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Amelia Skelton in October. Join us for opening drinks on Wednesday the 11th. Pictured is Lace Doily, Found textiles, thread, wadding, steel, paint and digital image on Belgium linen.

Pleased to be taking part in a two week residency at Bundanon. I’ll be working on new songs, doing some filming and working on Madeleine’s ‘Darlinghurst Eats Its Young’ short film.

This ceramic and plaster work by Madeleine Preston will be showing with Blackartprojects at the Spring1883 Art Fair from the 9th to the 12th at Hotel Windsor, Melbourne.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Danica Firulovic in 19.07.23. The show opens next Wednesday the 19th from 6-8pm.
Pictured is Two Rectangles within Rectangles, 2019, oil on linen.

Danica Firulovic appears courtesy of Jerico Contemporary.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Nuha Saad in our July exhibition opening on Wednesday the 19^th.

“Nuha Saad has long been interested in the ornamental and the architectural, seeing her practice as an archaeology of the suburbs. Her work seeks to uncover and to highlight the slowly disappearing decorative elements of the suburbs. She is drawn to the turned wood elements of Victorian and Federation era designs, which were typically added to domestic interiors for decorative effect. Through her practice, she utilises these forms to explore the ways in which spatial features and colour can collude to construct a sense of place, or cultural identity. In this enquiry, her work also calls into question whether decoration is simply an addition, or an integral part of our built environment.”

Pictured is Zig Zag Romeo II 2020, acrylic on wood – Photo @docqment

Nuha Saad is represented by James Makin Gallery, Melbourne.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Nancy Constandelia in an upcoming group show opening on Wednesday July the 19th.

Nancy Constandelia is an Australian born Chinese artist. She graduated in 2016 with a Master of Art with Excellence (Painting) from UNSW Art & Design (formerly UNSW College of Fine Arts). She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both in Australia and overseas.

Constandelia has been a finalist in various art awards including the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, the Waverley Art Prize, the Blake Prize, Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize, and the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Her work has been featured in various art publications including Artists Profile and Art Collector and was named one of the top 5 favourites by MCA Director & Art Month Board Member Nick Tobias.

In 2019 she was granted a two month Studio Scholarship, by the Art Gallery of NSW, with an artist residency at the prestigious Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. She was also recently chosen for the highly competitive Artist in Residence program at Bundanon for 2023, granted by Bundanon Trust.

Constandelia’s work has been acquired by significant collections both in Australia and internationally.

Pictured is Slow Motion, 2020, acrylic on Italian linen. Photo: Jessica Maurer.

Home’s is pleased to be exhibiting ceramics by Charlie Komsic in the upcoming group show opening on the 19^th of July.

Komsic is an emerging artist based in Sydney on Gadigal Country. Trained in ceramics and drawing at the National Art School, Komsic completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2022. Her interest in what it is to inhabit one’s body and how the body is informed by memory governs Komsic’s ceramic practice. She imbues her personal experiences and memories into totemic forms that meet the viewer on an intimate level. Responding to Aegean archaeological objects, Komsic’s hand-built sculptures challenge previous ideas of how feminine figures occupy space and reference ancient material that lives in our memory.

Pictured is Votive Ovum, earthenware, white and pink gloss glaze and lustre.

Home is pleased to be exhibiting work by Graziela Guardino next month. Join us for opening drinks on Wednesday the 19^th July.

“ Graziela’s work starts from the deconstruction of linen, re-signifying the support and materiality of both the painting and textile works. In this sense, the artist takes the opposite path expected for the construction of the two works: instead of adding layers, she removes them.

Her experimentation with colour, form, material, and composition transform the idea of weaving from a two-dimensional element to an architectural component that challenges the limits, not only of the support, but also of space. Her lines seem to always be unconsciously testing the boundaries between the object and the work of art.

It is in this unraveling of the wefts that the artist’s work reveals itself. Guardino’s woven paintings-sculptures are the result of experimentations and studies of materials forming a unique visual language of minimalist abstraction. They are based on deconstruction to expand new possibilities of reading about reconnection, the feminine, and ancestry.

Graziela does not renounce the knowledge of the mystic process associated with textile work. In contrast, she freely incorporates her inquiries, regarding this support and the interpretations, into the contemporary art world, in the sense that it still succinctly conjures up in our imaginary. Unaware of its subordinate condition, it produced systematic abstract composition long before suprematism, a knowledge that inscribes concrete and conceptual intangible symbols. Graziela retraces our way of thinking about this construction, from ancestral to contemporary”.

Carolina Lauriano, Curator

Pictured is Divide Light If You Dare, 2021, acrylic on Belgian linen.

Material Threads: Anthony Bartok, Sarah Edmondson, Sassy Park and Sean Wadey in 26.04.2023 at Home@735

By Zali Matthews

On the opening night of 26.04.2023, the bright red door of Home@735 is thrown open to the street. Inside, the terrace house-cum-gallery’s rabbit warren corridors lead to small rooms and steep staircases, through which the thick crowd navigates past one another to catch a look at the works on show.

Named simply for the date of its opening, 26.04.2023 brings together recent works by four Sydney based artists: Anthony Bartok, Sarah Edmondson, Sassy Park and Sean Wadey. Working across a variety of mediums and techniques, these artists are linked by their splintered explorations into consumerism and hypermediated digital realities, materiality and objecthood, and familial love.

In the living room hangs several monochromatic paintings by Anthony Bartok. Painted with acrylic pen on readymade white gesso board, these comic-like works comprise of images sourced from Google image searches and the artist’s own photographic archive, collaged into bemusing compositions featuring domestic interiors, cityscapes, human figures and animals. Obfuscated by their monochromacy, these composite images, with their odd and jilted narratives, are in danger of blurring into enmeshed compositions.

Bartok describes these works as unconscious and intuitive constructions devoid of clear narratives. “Take the duck,” he says in reference to Duck. “What does a duck symbolise?” It’s a question that, for Bartok, has no answer – like the images in his works, it resists interpretation. Through these disordered and seemingly random archival excavations into our hypermediated digital reality, Bartok creates works that wryly reflect on the incomprehensible and meaningless mass of images online.  

Placed upon nearby cabinets and side boards are select ceramics by Sassy Park. Hand-built and hand-painted, they take shape as chickens and budgies with flowers sprouting from holes in their backs, and as figures shown side by side, hugging their pets and posing in their swimwear. Covered in shallow dimples left by the movement of fingers over clay, these ceramics offer familiar, intimate depictions of the people and animals surrounding Park in her everyday life in an infusion of love, warmth and care.

Upstairs, a series of bright and glossy vases by Sean Wadey can be found in the hallway. Adorned in softly gradated, metallic shades of airbrushed enamel paint, they are each embossed with the “turbo” emblem from the rear of the Porsche 911 Turbo model, which retails from over AU$400,000. Sleek and glamorous, these vases are in fact copies of a $7 vase purchased by the artist from a thrift store, duplicated through a slip-casting technique used in the mass production of goods such as car parts. Similarly, the acrylic and auto enamel paintings beside them, which resemble glazed ceramic tiles, are applied onto cardboard sheets. By coating these cheap, mass-produced objects with such high-end finishes, Wadey playfully explores the boundaries between high and low-end consumer products to unveil gulfing disjunctions between functional and commercial values in luxury products, rendering the luxury good wholly nonsensical in its pretensions and consumerist ego.

At the opposite end of the hallway, Sarah Edmondson’s textiles burst from the walls in vivid faux fur tufts, looping tucks and strings of loose thread. They depict fragments of texts from childhood books warped by a photocopier and collaged together into colourful textile compositions, where Edmondson quickly noticed their resemblance to digital reCAPTCHA images designed to differentiate humans from computers. While Edmondson’s works can be interpreted as subversions of the vacuousness of digital images through the laborious and painstaking process of threading, these works truly stand as explorations into childhood memories in reference to her mother.

Across themes and mediums, then, these four artists find loose threads connecting them to each other, not only in their concern of our consumption of digital images and luxury goods, but also in their strong affection for material objects and their capacity to hold memories. At Home@735, unique as both a gallery and intimate domestic space, these themes ring resoundingly true.