Naima Morelli

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Tag "Residency Program"

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I recently visited the studio of the Australian artist Mark Hilton in Melbourne.
He just moved from his old studio in Fitzroy to a new one in Abbotsford, so unfortunately he did’t have many past works to show me.
Anyways the one he was currently working on was complex enough to monopolize my attention.

The project is a continuation of  “Hunting Where The Ducks Are”, a series of high reliefs depicting the darkest issues of contemporary society.
Every piece was shaped like a letter. In the end they will form the sentence:”Don’t Worry”.
In this work there is a striking contrast between appearance and truth, something in which Mark has always been interested.
Some of the scenes represented on the high reliefs are inspired to current affairs, like often happen in the previous production of the artist, other ones are drawn from the artist’s personal memories. There is no narrative connection between the pieces, although we can find a train as recurrent element.

The aesthetic look of the artwork is inspired by the decoration of the doors of the Duomo in Milan, where the artists had a residency in 2007.

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Since Art Residences were established, artists took advantage and started travelling around the word.
It was such a great possibility. Who can refuse accommodation and a guarantee daily meal in faraway countries, ending with a personal exhibition?

In residence time artists gave birth to projects which are often result of an hybridising process.

Weird installations and psychedelic videos issued out to the artists previous work and the host country influences.
Sometimes is just the exhibition place that is unusual for a kind of art, and that is exactly “The Human Factor” exhibition case.

So, you have to imagine a typical late ‘800 starting ‘900 Italian noble mansion, just in the middle of Villa Borghese Gardens, Rome. There’s were the sculptor an composer Piero Canonica lived, but now it’s a museum filled with statues, paintings and beautiful relics.
Basically the interiors and the furniture remained the same, but sometimes curators tries to renew the environment, making contemporary art exhibitions.

Could sound like a weird experiment to Liang Shuo (China), Charles Lim (Singapore) , Koki Tanaka (Japan) and Wan Hong-Kai (Taiwan), the attendees to the Qwartz Rome Residency Program.
The idea was matching oriental contemporary art with an old typical roman ambience.

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