Venture Capital is a Contemporary Art Tasmania initiative that supports independent Tasmanian-based artists undertake speculative, exploratory and ‘thinking-through-making’ activities to stimulate new bodies of work and artistic projects.  The artists and ventures supported in 2020 are: Anita Bacic, Selena de Carvalho, Andy Hutson, Liam James and Loren Kronemyer.

Through Here nor There, Anita Bacic will reimagine her explorations of space and location-specific walks by tailoring and incorporating Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence into the technological devices she employs to facilitate her participatory artworks.

As research for dirty network, Selena de Carvalho has proposed to introduce mycelium into her practice as a participating research collaborator.  In her attempt to work in an experimental partnership with fungi, Selena will allow her thinking and learning to be guided by cues from the collaborative flows and exchanges that mycelium networks assemble and support.

Andy Hutson will research and develop scripts and plans to make discrete kinetic dioramas that – over time – accumulate around a meta-narrative of a fictional, Tasmanian history. Mashing-up real people and events with folklore and disparate mythologies – along with his interests in outdoor adventure culture, doomsday preppers and model making – Hutson will also collaborate with professional screenwriters and kineticists and others to refine these ideas.

For Saltwater and stained wood, Liam James will seek out points of contact in local maritime history that offer insight into postcolonial understandings of the dark economies beneath Australian collective amnesia. James will consider our relations to the watercraft that made this possible – and to different knowledge of oceanic and nautical bonds – in order to reimagine an awareness of our place in the nation and in the larger world.

In response to the influence of Covid19 restrictions slowing the pace of an already unhurried agrarian life, Loren Kronemyer proposed to undertake the creation of an original body of work that both scrutinises and queers the act of scything and the iconography of the scythe. Through immersion in this ancient and traditional skill, Kronemyer expects to gain insight into new imagery, physical gestures and multisensory details that will inform new works founded in a multi-faceted research approach.