Alternating Current ArtSpace

Alternating Current ArtSpace is an artist-run-space in Melbourne operating four main gallery spaces plus The Cupboard, a small project space. Their ethos is to encourage artists to experiment and take risks, to provide a supportive environment for artists and to uphold a sustainable model of gallery operations.

Artists and exhibitions showing during PROVOCARÉ 2018

Kate Wallace – Pictures

The spaces we occupy and traverse can offer moments of respite and solitude in the midst of the chaos of our daily lives. Exploring scenes of the everyday, Pictures observes how we relate and engage with familiar sites by examining how painting can be used to construct an image and memory of place and time. Drawing from photographs taken in public and private places, the paintings act as records of times past and places remembered. Using scale, cropping and montage as devices to connect and form multiple narratives, Pictures examines the nature of observation alongside the capacity of paintings to slow the process of viewing down.

Kate Walsh, Andrea Hughes & Olga Tsara – The Quieter you are, the more you can hear

In a cacophonous world, with incessant demands on our senses, we sometimes lose our centeredness. Inspired by the notion that quietness enables heightened perception, three artists respond with work that depicts states of remembrance and peace; states achieved through concentration and meditation. They are works celebrating remembered exotic lands, rich and visceral memory planes, and emerging fleeting sensations. Evocative of memories of discovery, Andrea Hughes’ work uses layers of colour to create depth and movement and achieves a serene energy. Kate Walsh’s watercolours show landscapes of silence: the snowfields of Sweden where spirit and soul became quiet and sounds from the natural world can filter through. Olga Tsara creates still lifes using nostalgic motifs. Receding perspectives allude to the passing of time and the dimming of memory.

Cathy Muhling – My Mother’s Room

‘My Mother’s Room’ relates to the changeability and dissolution of memory through Alzheimer’s. It explores my mother’s mood and memory and the fragile Eco system that exists in her care room. Photographs taken in my mother’s room each week show the variation in her mood and memory over time. There are times of hopefulness in a fleeting visit when parts of my mother’s personality emerge, the true essence remains and all that exists in the end is love – true love. My art practise explores the elusiveness of memory through the psychological state of human frailty, remembrance, and fragmentation.

Anna McGinley – Chrystallinity

Ann McGinley has a preoccupation with paint, water and light. After returning from an artist’s residency in Kyushu, Japan last year she found herself concentrating on transitory glimpses of her immediate environment in Melbourne. Resulting works speak to degrees of crystallinity; amorphous and formed shapes, colours, light and shadows emerging through the chaos of watery paint. The world in an instant.

Mitchel Brannan – Affirmative Action #2 (Encomium)

Accumulation and arrangement; methods of collection and display. These new works continue my exploration of composite, a language of abstraction that seeks dialects, regional variation, inflection imposed by exhibition.Compositions that take their cues from the diagrammatic as much as the expressive; gesture and restraint, form and formlessness, empiricism and intuition all play roles. Coherence and certainty here are defined and undone by aggregation and arrangement.