Cover Story

Leanne & Naomi Shedlezki, Nagoya Castle, 2006 Works in Match Box Gallery - left to right by Yutaka Katoh, Leanne Shedlezki,
and Zoe MacDonell. Copyright © The Artists

The Japan Foundation, Sydney has planned a busy event calendar for 2008, shining the spotlight on emerging Australian artists through an exciting collaborative art project. The New Visual Artists Project will uncover emerging visual artists based in Australia, whose work contains a strong element of Japanese influence.

Six such artists were selected last year from a large pool of applicants, and the successful six have been invited to produce their own solo or group exhibition or event as part of the collective New Visual Artists Project. The project aims to provide a platform for local artists to further dialogue between Australia and Japan through artistic expression, in keeping with the Japan Foundation’s key goal to further international cultural exchange.

Commencing in February and spanning several months, the six artists will take turns to present exhibitions of their work at the Japan Foundation Gallery. On 21 February, the New Visual Artists Project will be launched with the opening of the first exhibition, People to People, Place to Place: Australia Japan, part of the Australia Japan Match Box Project by emerging Sydney artists Leanne and Naomi Shedlezki. The Australia Japan Match Box Project is a dynamic and ongoing series of ‘portable’ art exhibitions and cultural exchanges between Australian and Japanese arts practitioners. The project has been developed to foster local and international creative networks and to encourage cultural understanding through visual arts.

Throughout 2006 and 2007, co-creators Leanne and Naomi travelled throughout Australia and Japan, inviting Australian and Japanese artists, designers and curators from a wide variety of art and design disciplines to take part in cultural exchange activities and to create and curate small-scale works for the project. These works have subsequent ly been ins tal led in various venues in both countries, and a re t ranspor ted and displayed in hand-held transparent cases known as ‘Match Box Galleries’.

People to People, Place to Place: Australia Japan will present an exhibition of the works of more than seventy Australian and Japanese artists who have taken part in the Match Box Project, as well as a photographic installation of the Match Box Gallery’s journey through Australia and Japan to date.

This opening exhibition will also feature the work of the other five artists selected to take part in the New Visual Artists Project. The five other artists will also hold their own exhibitions throughout the year as indicated below.

We are confident that the New Visual Ar tists Project will, over the next several months, open up a new forum of expression between Australia and Japan, building on more than thirty years of cultural exchange.

People to People, Place to Place: Australia Japan - A Match Box Project

When: 22 Feb - 20 Mar 2008
Venue: Japan Foundation, Sydney - Gallery
www.matchboxprojects.com
Supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW, and by the Japan Foundation, Sydney.

April
In April, the second of our New Visual Artists, William Anderson, will present Totally Flat Consumer Camo, an exhibition based on gatchapon, small toys in capsules which are sold from vending machines outside shops. Consisting of 140 canvas works and figurines contained within gatchapon capsules, Totally Flat Consumer Camo will aim to make a statement about how materialism manifests itself in the products that we consume in daily life for our own and others’ entertainment.

May
Musician and video artist/filmmaker Peter Humble’s Flights into Foreign will be shown during May. With an emphasis on the moving image, it will feature a series of discreet screenings and multiple projections, and will play with the idea of foreignness.

June
June will see the installation of Sydney design studio Symple Creative’s NEOSYDNEY + NEOTOKYO, featuring intimate scenes of Sydney and Tokyo as a narrative of the life and heart of the two cities. Based on the emergence of the pop street photography scene, NEOSYDNEY + NEOTOKYO is the product of five weeks spent in Japan, further fuelling the growing hub of Japaneseinfluenced culture in Sydney.

July
Benedict Ernst ’s sculpture installation The Garden of Love will be shown in July. Inspired by the Japanese art of suiseki and the tradition of Chinese contemplative philosophers’ stones, The Garden of Love will look at the rich tradition of Japanese garden design, recreating a life-size Zen garden using everyday fabricated architectural materials to represent the natural world.

August
The New Visual Artists Project will conclude in August with artist and architect Ainslie Murray’s An Architecture of Thread and Gesture, a series of three-dimensional installations reflecting upon the impact of human gesture on architectural space. The project will aim to extend connections between three-dimensional Japanese textile art and architectural space, drawing on the ritual installation of space and the themes of emptiness, absence and invisibility in Japanese art and architecture.