Artists
Maria Blackwell
Dexter Rosengrave
Andy Hutson
Jake Walker
CAT Studio Residents in Conversation
Friday 21st May, 5.30 PM (no booking required)
CAT Gallery, 27 Tasma St, North Hobart
Join us for an artist talk with Maria Blackwell, Andy Hutson, Dexter Rosengrave and Jake Walker, discussing their practices and residency at CAT.
CAT Studios are offed annually to professional Tasmanian creative practitioners by application.
Applications for the 2021 Studio Residency will open soon – keep an eye on our website for updates.
Maria Blackwell began her Fine Art studies in Dublin (Colaiste Dhulaigh) before relocating to Melbourne to complete a BA in Fine Art (RMIT). She received a scholarship to study Photography and Painting in Mexico (UDLAP), and in 2015 completed Honours in Painting at the University of Tasmania. Her work explores the strange ebb and flow between displacement and belonging. She is interested in people, the construct of memory, and personal narratives informed by location and relocation. She experiments with communicating these stories through visual material and sound.
Andy Hutson works primarily in sculpture, and sometimes makes jewellery or other ‘useful’ objects. Andy’s practice tends towards the low-fi and handmade, using simple materials such as cardboard and paper-mâché to tell stories about the natural world, and our role within it.
“I’m drawn to the murky realm that lies between human culture and nature. Not only have we taken great pains to distance ourselves from our organic origins, but our technologies and ways of working have so entirely shaped the world we occupy that the two now appear almost indiscernible. Andy attempts to position his art within this uneasy intersection, where we discover that the things made by humans and all the other things that inhabit our lived experience might in fact be one and the same phenomenon.”
Dexter Rosengrave‘s work often explores and repurposes remnants, traces, and residues through a range of mediums including painting, performance, video and sound. Rosengrave is interested in the limits of working with transient materials and processes, and how subjectivity can be articulated through erasure and removal. Their works are often large-scale, created through bodily gestures and a shifting relationship to language and the self.
Rosengrave completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class Honours at the University of Tasmania in 2018. They have had several solo exhibitions including An Invitation to Grieve at Firstdraft, Sydney, and have shown work in numerous group exhibitions across Australia including Hobart Current at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Rosengrave was the 2018 recipient of the funded Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency in Paris, France. They also received an ANZ & Sydney Mardi Gras Grant in 2018 to develop their project, Body as an Archive: Tracking the Transgender Experience in Tasmania. Rosengrave has worked alongside Marina Abramović and Cassils, and they co-performed with Mike Parr as part of Dark Mofo festival in 2019.
Jake Walker’s paintings and practice are a response to the rise in slick, highly resolved contemporary art which de-emphasises the hand made and the mark of the artist. Calling it “Folk Modernism,” Walker comments “the conceptual set will argue that making art based on practice and aesthetic judgment can only result in decoration. Yet standing in front of a Diena Georgetti painting you are confronted with a cosmic power beyond the early 20th century abstract content. It’s as if somewhere in the process of applying acrylic paint to board the art gods got involved and turned the work into a pointer to another world. Aesthetically, society is in a crumby place. Most new buildings, cars, clothes, songs and websites are badly designed and constructed. It’s no wonder artists are looking back more and more, slowing down and reassessing things. Let’s move forward; let’s look back.”
Jake Walker is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne. Solo exhibitions of Walker’s work have been held in New Zealand and Australia. Walker has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and New Zealand.
Image credit: Andy Hutson, maquette & works in progress, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.