3 NEW EXHIBITIONS

ERIC BRIDGEMAN New Photographs from KoKwara trail
ARIs PRABAWA In the Service of Nature
TESSA ZETTEL & KARl KHOE Make-do garden city

OpenIng: THURSDAY 25 March
Exhibition Dates: 26 March – 8 May 2010

PUBLIC PROGRAMS:

Artist Floor talk Sat 27 March 3pm

Make Do Garden City Workshops
Saturday 10 April 11am-1pm &
Saturday 8 May 11am-1pm (CLOSING EVENT)

4A is please to announce three solo exhibitions by emerging artists, Aris Prabawa, Eric Bridgeman, and Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe. These exhibitions independently investigate ecology and design, national and environmental politics and the politics of ethnographic representation

Aris Prabawa In the Service of Nature

A founding member of the important Indonesian artist-run collective Taring Padi, Aris Prabawa has been living on the North Coast of Australia for nearly a decade. The work of Taring Padi, is renowned for its raw and uncompromising social activisim in Yogyakarta, Central Java. Formed in 1998, and taking residence in an abandoned school at the fall of the Suharto Regime, Taring Padi work across performance, music and visual arts.

Since moving to Northern New South Wales, Aris Prabawa has continued with some of the environmental and political themes in his earlier work. This new body of painting and drawings takes the environment and the rapacious abuse of the environment by people, governments and corporations as a central theme, expressed through a symbolic visual language. In one painting – a superhero-type figure, wearing a green-mask made from leaves, stands defiant over a landscape of defeated industrial machinery.

Eric Bridgeman New Photographs From Kokwara Trail

In 2009, Brisbane-based artist Eric Bridgeman travelled through remote parts of the Chimbu (Simbu) Province, his mother’s country in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. As he was born in Australia, Bridgeman became increasingly conscious of his own ‘white’ Australian presence, and began to recognise the impact of photography on representations of national and cultural identity in PNG.

In this new body of work, Bridgeman questions the methods of photographic capture of images of the land and indigenous people from PNG during the 20th century till now – from Irving Penn to National Geographic. ‘New Photographs From Kokwara Trail’ (2010) are smart, witty and irreverent – creating alternative scenarios and archetypes resisting the ethnographic convention that aide in the promotion and consumption of PNG as Australia’s next frontier.

Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe Make-do Garden City

4A’s ground floor turns into Make-do Garden City, a place where fictional Chinese gardens of the seventeenth century meet with the personal histories and potential sustainable futures of Sydney’s Chinatown. Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe will be conducting a six-week program of talking, making and growing that explores new ways of remembering and recreating the city around us. Members of the local community are invited to contribute stories of gardens – real, past or imagined – in exchange for edible plants grown by the artists. As conversations unfold throughout the exhibition, the artists will produce a series of experimental domestic micro-farms that respond to the places and ideas being discussed. This timely project investigates what it means to live in this city in the context of urban expansion, climate change and food crisis.
Visit Make-do Garden City for a chance to catch the artists tending their installation, or join them for one of two informal events involving seed-swapping, drawing, tea and conversation.