Head Hunter
Anthony Lister (AUS)
The solo exhibition HEAD HUNTER captures Lister’s transition from global street artist to elite contemporary competitor. Examining the act of head hunting and its relevance in today’s society, Lister raises questions about our own existence by pointing out the similarities between social structures throughout human history. In the modern world, masks are often worn metaphorically, while the equivalent of beheading takes place on a digital stage. The HEAD HUNTER depicts a parade of heroes and villains, encouraging the viewer to explore their perspective on what is right and wrong. A striking representation of Lister’s longstanding signature style, the exhibition is dominated by the artists’ unique brushwork, comic-style colour palette, and superhero characters set against a colossal canvas-like background.
Photography by Nicole Reed
Corpus Flux -
lauren ys (usa)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Corpus Flux addresses the idea of bodies in flux, both in states of identity and physicality. Large churning masses of characters flow and twist around central hubs anchored by areas of dark ink—animal overlords that act like planets around which her characters revolve. At first glance, the viewer is confronted by a complex, intricate fluctuating mass that reveals itself piece by piece at closer inspection. These drawings act almost as visual puzzle chains in which each link in the chain is forged by human connection. The over-arching element is playful, strange, and sensuous sex, a theme that plays out almost with a mind of its own over the course of this body of work.
Using only black ink, Lauren returns to her roots in graphic novels to render out this world. The medium allows exploration of a wide range of characters, most of them mutant, monster, or sporting lovely curiosities, expressing wholeheartedly themes of body positivity and inclusivity. The process of creating these visual puzzles is both complex and organic; paralleling the strange and lovely process of exploring one’s own sexuality. Themes of queer love, empowerment, self-love, and unabashed expression of female sexuality abound, surfacing to combat feelings of fear and shame that have pervaded the national psyche in the past year. All works were created with a powerful weight on the idea that consent is paramount, no matter what sex looks like.
In “Erotic Technologic” Lauren comments on our fetishization of technology, the irony of physical exploration via virtual reality and the continuously blurring line between human and robot, especially in terms of partnerings. In “Anti-War Tactics,” one of Lauren’s characters reclines on the back of a tiger and pleases herself with a makeshift instrument whilst reading Lysistrata, an ancient Greek play in which the women band together to end the Peloponnesian War by denying all the men of the land any sex. The idea of harnessing one’s sexual power as an instrument of nonviolence is empowering and pleasing in itself.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
Art Sucks -
COADY (AUS)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Drowning in affluence, stimulated to suffocation, the slow horror dawns that perhaps there is no bottom. The array of indulgences paraded before us only instructs us in the self-administration of further anxieties. Pills, escapism, AV/VR/AR/ASMR, auto asphyxiation. We are consumed by our solutions like a snake fellating its tail.
As accountability now seems an arbitrary construct divorced from any reckoning of agency, a ventriloquy of the unliving, these works are entirely the product of Morph, an infinitely lethargic counter-self born from the sea of zir own solipsism.
Nothing is beautiful. Everything is a tainted, painted farce. Consider this an autobiography, or not; or a simulated out-of-body experience if it helps at all. Installation, video, sculpture, performance art. It’s all present and unaccounted for, all equally insufficient.
If Morph/Coady are compelled to anything, it is to find the brutal nadir. Only art can take us there.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
Hanging Gardens of Makatron
Mike makatron (AUS)
In Mike’s work, among celebrations of the magical realism of nature in her full glory, we see the uneasy push and pull of our own inner beastly instincts, and the struggle to understand our place within our immediate surroundings.
Hanging Gardens of Makatron will be Mike’s fifth solo exhibition, but the first in a number of years, as he has focussed on the immediacy of murals on a global scale. Mike is presenting numerous new works on canvas, sculpture, and installations. These works further explore meditations on the confluence of human, animal, and the dynamic explosions of pure colour and shape that is solely the domain of our Mother Earth.
Skin and bone -
smug (UK)
Smug is rightfully considered one of the worlds foremost large-scale muralists. His highly refined technique and bold approach to his subjects is what sets him apart, and has helped him carve his name into the minds of people across the globe.
Painting far and wide, and spending the majority of his days travelling the world, honing his craft and bringing joy to the masses, his first ever solo exhibition, Skin and Bone, represents the culmination of 15 years of hard work and experience, expressed on a much smaller scale, but faithfully reproduced with aerosol and acrylic on canvas, in keeping with his unique and highly sought after mural style
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
H E I S T - International group exhibition
Biennial Heist Exhibition with an impressive international collection, showcasing a dynamic range of world-leading contemporary artists at the Juddy Roller Gallery. The lineup consists of artists from six different countries, with names such as Anthony Lister, Smug, Jaw, Sofles, and Jan Kalab.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
Monochrome Organism -
Nychos (Au)
ARTIST STATEMENT
In the Monochrome Organism Nychos revisits his roots, showing the Australian audience a glimpse of his creative process: every big wall starts with a sketch, and some of those are developed further and become ink on paper drawings. These drawings represent the ideas, concepts, and experiments by Nychos that help guide him to create even more anatomically accurate and detailed paintings.
These artworks show the importance of the artists’ attention to anatomical details: the correct positions of the bones, organs, and skin are key to creating realistic cross-sections, dissections, or translucencies, and to achieve the levels of detail and artistic madness. The artworks are a reflection of Nychos’s countless hours invested into anatomical studies.
Recently, together with animal skulls, Nychos has also been exploring human anatomy through surgical studies found in the libraries in his hometown of Vienna, so it is no coincidence that he has chosen the cross-section of a foetus as the main image for the exhibition.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Rebecca Riley
Future Archae
ology -
Alaistair Mooney (AUS)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Future Archeology is the result of a thought experiment comprising a hypothetical apocalyptic event in which modern knowledge is lost and distant future archaeologists are charged with the task of deciphering and reconstructing pre-apocalyptic lifeways. Taking the form of an anthropological museum exhibit, Future Archaeology replaces the pottery vessels, everyday items, and worship imagery of an ancient civilisationʼs dig site with the equivalent objects and imagery of our contemporary epoch. This collection of cultural signifiers, excavated not from the ground but from the psyche and experience of the artist, has been translated into artefacts that denote daily life and wider societal values, forming a portrait of the times we exist in. Huon Pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) is a rare species of conifer endemic to the wet temperate rainforests of southwestern Tasmania. With specimens recorded to live to over 2,500 years old, this slow-growing tree is among the oldest living organisms on the planet. Using this timber to shape the artefacts of Future Archaeology, Mooney transforms the presumed meanings of the imagery creating contrasting connotations of beauty and waste, mortality and immortality, and how what you leave behind will define your life.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
Bending light
Daniel O’Toole (AUS)
Artist Statement
‘Bending Light’ presents a series of images made through photographic processes; transcribed from photography into paintings, the works become distorted in two stages and are in essence a series of experiments that aim to discover the ways in which light, colour, and form can be manipulated to augment reality.
Stage one is the setting up of props and lighting in the form of translucent coloured plastics, coloured fabrics, and patterned materials as backdrops. Then using mirrors and specific camera angles the portraits are captured on 35mm/11mm film.
Stage two involves an adaptation of the image to the canvas; changes are made to make the composition more interesting or fitting to the shape and size of the material being used.
Curated for Juddy Roller, Photographs by Rebecca Riley
Lonesome souls
loretta lizzio (AUS)
Artist Statement
Occasionally one wakes at 4 am. With the urge to drive south in the dark and feel the dawn peek back. To stop at the deserted beach and swim into the chill of anonymity with no obligation to anyone or anything, salved in loss. Brett Whitely
With a style that’s developed from pen and line drawings, through realistic pencil drawings and blossomed into painting, ‘Lonesome Souls’ explores people. People who soothe themselves by being alone and enjoying solitude in natural places enticing the viewer to feel still and a little more tranquil.
After developing an obsession with water, Lizzio was captured by the underwater photography of Janaka Rodrigue, something which she knew she had to paint. This body of work forms the main theme of ‘Lonesome Souls’, exploring the feeling of weightlessness, the feeling being completely immersed in nothingness. ‘Lonesome Souls’ is the culmination of months of hard work, non-stop creating and no social life, but Lizzio states it’s the most natural thing to her, the best release and something that makes her happier than anything else.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
Make Yourself at Home
Goodie (AUS)
ARTIST STATEMENT
Make Yourself At Home explores notions of comfort, safety and routine - ideas commonly associated with ‘home’. Processes are perpetually underway to render things familiar, form habits and configure certainties, in order for us to feel comfortable. We are continually coming to terms with the relationship between our bodies, other’s bodies and the spaces we inhabit, which function in a way as secondary bodies. Nevertheless, what is familiar is only a recurring strangeness. Make yourself At Home considers the curious relationship between the mundane and the bizarre. The recognisable is married with abstract, private with public, inside with outside, while ideas and mediums reverberate within each other and happen simultaneously on multiple levels. The show is a pattern of hypotheticals and realities, incorporating installation, painting, works on objects, objects in works, works on works, works on paper, collaborative noise works and poetry. 10% of the proceeds from the works sold were donated to the Royal Women’s Hospital.
Curated for Juddy Roller Gallery, Photography by Nicole Reed
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