Open Residencies

Flor Alba

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Flor Alba

Mirage catcher, graduate of Geneva School of Art and Design/Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design (HEAD) in 2012, Flor Alba draws and paints according to her aesthetic inclinations and contemplative imagination. Zig-zag wanderings. Surveying the contradictions of beauty, she feels the surface of humans, then dissects them. She works with oil paints, water colours, embroidery, pencil, and greasy chalk.

Neo-fauvistic chromatic surgery. Engulfed in pure and violent colors, forms sometimes blend into a cluster of graphic ornaments and unexpected scenography. Yet beings remain in the foreground, stripped of their earthly envelopes, letting go of the memories of past gestures: fragments of ancestral stories. The culture of ethnic rituals is the heart of her creative quest. She seeks to own pieces of life, objects and rites of no fixed origins, reinterpreting her own story in that mirror. She questions others, expanding civilizations, what is foreign to us and seems strange to us, as a way to question her own origins.

Flor’s artistic references are:

  • Matisse for his colours and repetitions
  • Gauguin for his freedom in colour
  • Lynette Yadom-Boakye for her portaits
  • Satsuki Shibuya for her abstract lightness
  • Marta Riniker-Radich for her acid colours in her original compositions
  • Karine Rougier for her stunning scenes

Flor will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan from mid-July to mid-September 2017. Check out more of her work on her website and Instagram.

Jeannette and Michel Lambert

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , , ,
Jeannette and Michel Lambert

Michel Lambert is an accomplished jazz drummer, composer and visual artist. He is currently working on a series of visual scores, collages and drawings combined with music that will eventually be performed by improvising musicians as well as classical trios. Jeannette Lambert is a jazz vocalist and multi-media artist who uses active dreamwork in her creative process (click here to see one of her works, Dream Haiku). She uses intuitive techniques to write poetry that is then performed by her trio which includes Michel Lambert and her brother, jazz guitarist Reg Schwager. Currently she is studying the idea that dreams, imagination and improvised music all inhabit the same space. They are both based in Montreal, Canada.

During their residency in July, Jeannette and Michel will gather ideas and inspiration from the surroundings and work on compositions and artwork for their upcoming performance later in the month in Toraja, Sulawesi. They are joined in their stay by their two sons who are also highly artistic, both in music and visual art, like their parents. As a family, they love to travel for inspiration and collaboration while dedicating their time to creating art. In previous summers they have attended artist residencies in Paris, Barcelona and Italy.

Jeannette, Michel and Reg have a musical collective called Jazz from Rant and have produced over 50 recordings of jazz and improvised music. Raised in Canada, Jeannette and Reg are from Dutch Indonesian parents and many of Jeannette’s songs reflect this cultural identity. Michel is from Quebec City, descended from a family of many classical musicians and composers and he draws on this background for many of his orchestral works.

For more information on their projects and creative ideas you can visit Jeannette’s website and Michel’s website.

 

Stephen Eastaugh

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist
Stephen Eastaugh

Stephen Eastaugh is a mixed media visual artist with severe wanderlust as over the past few decades, he has traveled to over ninety countries scattered across all continents. While on the road he has managed to present over one hundred solo exhibitions in a wide range of venues. Studios have been set up on a Russian icebreaker at the North Pole, in a science building one winter in Antarctica, and many places in-between. On three occasions the artist has been awarded the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship along with numerous art residencies, awards and grants. Travel is the artist’s muse as over the past thirty years, rarely has Eastaugh stayed longer than four months in any single location. It is interesting to see all his work as strange maps or landscapes where he attempts to both locate and lose himself simultaneously.

His work is primarily landscape derived, either representational, symbolic or connected to experiences and objects picked up while on the road. There is a strong textural element which ranges from damaged paper to thick paint and currently, embroidery is utilized. In mid 2017 Eastaugh will plant himself at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia to explore new work in a new longitude and latitude.

Eastaugh’s work can be found in the National Gallery of Australia, state galleries across Australia, the Nevada Museum of Art, USA and private collections worldwide. In 2017 the artist will be exhibiting in Melbourne, Sydney and Amsterdam as well as working in temporary studios in Argentina, Norway and elsewhere.

You can find more of his work on his website.

Sabine Reindel

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Sabine Reindel

Sabine Reindel is a German-born fine art painter, whose work concentrates on cityscapes. During her six-weeks residency at Rimbun Dahan she will continue her series of cityscapes she has started to create while she was practicing law as an attorney in the United Arab Emirates. Thereafter she continued working on cityscapes in San Francisco where she earned her master of fine art at the Academy of Art University, in New York where she studied at the New York Academy and the Artist Students League of New York, and in artist residencies in Thailand, Singapore and France.

My art is about journeys, exploring new places and making them my own. My work concentrates on cityscapes of the United Arab Emirates, where I practiced law for the last eighteen years, San Francisco, where I received my education in art, New York, where I took classes at the New York Academy of Art and the Arts Students League of New York, Thailand, Singapore and France where I had artist residencies over the last two years.

My first calling has not been art. I went to law school in Germany and then worked as an attorney in the Emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Over the last two decades I moved a lot and I lived in thriving places that changed and still change a lot. With my paintings I try to explore the similarities of these places, but mostly concentrate on the differences. Each place has its unique architecture, which reflects its own unique location on the globe, its special light, its one of a kind flora and fauna. Seeing what make each place so unique makes painting for me so exciting.

Richard Orjis

Syar S. Alia Asia New Zealand, Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Richard Orjis

Richard Orjis is a multimedia artist based in New Zealand, as well as a PhD student from the Auckland University of Technology. He will be at Rimbun Dahan for a three month residency from February to April thanks to a grant from Asia New Zealand Foundation. To find out more about him and his work, you can visit his website.

My artistic research is driven by an interest in the garden and how I might understand place through these green spaces. I see gardens as exciting and complex intersections of art, nature and culture. They can offer insight into how a culture views the natural world, aesthetics, politics, religion, gender and class.

The proposed project for my time at Rimbun Dahan will be the production of publication containing photographs, text and drawings which be created in response to the green spaces of area. The project will encompass the breadth of the local environment, from the manicured to the accidental, from the civic to the domestic. It takes the premise that a city like Kuala Lumpur could be perceived as a vast garden with a functioning ecology of people, animals, plants and elements.

Grass Circle, a concrete edged circle of grass permitted to grow for one year at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts addressed the perception of suburb and notions of control.

The Apron, a temporary art project “exploring the history of meadows and wildflowers and how they can change the way we think about urban green spaces.” Commissioned by Tauranga Art Gallery for the Bay of Plenty Garden and Art Festival.

Walking In Trees, a two-storey scaffolding bridge and staircase erected between a pair of historic Moreton Bay Figs in Albert Park examined notions of perception.

Veronika Neukirch

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , , , , ,
Veronika Neukirch

Veronika Neukirch is a German artist born in 1986 in Duesseldorf. She completed her Art & Design Foundation in 2010 and graduated with a BA (Honours) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2013. She has been based in Kuala Lumpur since 2014 and has been exhibiting across Malaysia as well as abroad.

As an object-based artist concerned with developing new roles for pre-designed objects, Veronika creates compositions that strive to represent and utilise the pluralistic nature of contemporary art and contemporary life. The combining and finding of a new balance between various selected and handmade components run through her entire practice, consisting predominantly of sculpture, assemblage, collage, installation. The tension between artificial, functional, and ready-made elements and the organic shapes of intuitive material experimentation offers wide haptic diversity.

The rich local flora and fauna will be the starting point of her collaborative residency with local artist Haffendi Anuar. Veronika will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for four months starting in February.

Sterile Jungle (2014) – published in Make8elieve #8, Horror Plants, USA/Switzerland

Granny Smith’s Table (2015)  and Apples & Pineapples (2015) – exhibited at:

  • 2015: ‘RIPEN AT HOME’ (solo), Minut Init, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
  • 2016: ‘Extending Ideas’ (group show kindly supported by Goethe Institute Malaysia), Feeka, Kuala Lumpur & Museum Negeri Pulau Pinang, USM, Penang, Malaysia

 

 

Carol Brown

Syar S. Alia Choreographers Residency, Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , , ,
Carol Brown

I am an inter-disciplinary choreographer working in sustained collaborations with artists and experts from other fields. My research-led practice attends to the creative potentials in working between the cracks; between histories, temporalities and disciplines. Nourished by creative collaborations that explore diverse spaces, places and body memories, my choreographies take multiple forms, as dance installations, inter-media events, site specific performance and theatre dance, and have been presented internationally.

My current research, which I will pursue at Rimbun Dahan involves choreographic writing that negotiates the page, the stage and the ‘outside’. This will lead to a book I am developing on how performance remains rather than disappears through the transmission of body archives and the staging of performance cycles connected to the rhythms and ecologies of place.

I visited Rimbun Dahan in 2015 as part of an Asia New Zealand Performing Arts Tour and am very pleased to be returning with my partner Russell Scoones (musician / sound designer) and children, Rafe and Cass. This visit is part of a period of research leave from the University of Auckland, Creative Arts Industries Faculty where I am an Associate Professor in Dance Studies.

Find out more about Carol’s work at her website.

Laura Wills

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , ,
Laura Wills

Laura Wills is an Adelaide based visual artist. She has a multidisciplinary practice and a strong interest in using found materials, collaboration and basing projects on social/ environmental themes. She is represented by Hill Smith Gallery Adelaide. She will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for 5 weeks until mid-February.

At Rimbun Dahan I will be developing a new series of works on maps. My research will be drawing and painting based and also involve exploring the local environment to inform the development of new works, particularly the Taman Sari, vegetable and spice garden. I am interested in the social relationship and connection people have to it. I would like to continue in this line of thinking about intimate relationships, memories and habits we have towards culinary plants and nature.

For more information on Laura’s work, visit her website, Instagram, or Hill Smith Gallery’s website.

Laura’s residency was supported by a professional development grant from the South Australian Government through Arts SA.

 

Grace Blake

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist ,
Grace Blake

Grace Blake is a visual artist working between Canberra and Sydney. She is currently completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts in printmaking and drawing with a Bachelor of Arts art history from ANU.

Her fascination with the virtual landscape manifests in works that map the line between real and simulated. Blake acts as a cartographer of boundless digital space where the tension between the natural dimensions has been compressed into binary logic.

Currently Blake’s studio practice is working to examine ecologies, resulting in attempts to parallel dense natural ecologies with those that exist in data centers and online. Trans-humanism and future predictions of dense mega-city infrastructure lead toward an interest in arcologies. Various Archo-structures will be examined across animation, installation and interactive web platforms with using both recorded-footage and 3D generated material.

Blake was recently included in group show ‘My Feet Would Hurt If They Still Existed’ at Alaska Projects, ‘Personal Geographies’ at the ANU School of Art Foyer gallery and ‘SafARI 2016’.

She is currently on the Australian New Colombo Plan Scholarship studying and interning in Thailand and Singapore and will undergo a three month residency at Rimbun Dahan from August to October.

Soraya Abidin

Syar S. Alia Open Residencies, Resident Artist , , ,
Soraya Abidin

Soraya Abidin (b. 1971) is a textile artist based in Sydney, Australia. The subjects and materials she uses to create her works are born of a love for the Primitive and Spiritual practices within her Malay cultural heritage. Soraya embroiders in natural raffia representing matter from the jungle and embellishes with gold leaf, as a mark of status and the prestigious gold culture worn by her aristocratic ancestors. During as recent visit to Malaysia, where her father is from, interpreted inquiries of her family members revealed her art making practice as an inherent genetic trait directly traceable to her Malay culture, which the artist expands on below:

“I am an Embroidress, the only member in the entire family that has inherited the passion for Benang Emas Sulaman from my Opah (grandmother). I have studied my parents wedding photos for many years, loving and attempting to recreate the motifs seen on all the wedding decorations. I had no idea these works even still existed, till I showed copies of the wedding photos to my family and the next thing I knew these incredible items where in front of me, in my hands to touch and marvel at the perfection of each piece. It was then that I learnt all the embroidered pieces in the photographs had been made by my Opah.

I never could have imagined what this information would do for me, so astounding that I am finally able to make this connection. Now I understand my passion for Embroidery has a strong thread directly linked to my inherent bloodline. This may seem simple but to me it provides powerful and auspicious meaning to the medium I have always instinctually gravitated towards as an artist. Now I have found the origins of my practice and that I am the one to carry on the family tradition.

During the residency I would like to study the use of motifs in traditional Malay textiles, Tekat and Songket, and gather motifs and their meanings to create a glossary for reference in my artmaking. I would like to create an artwork representing my cross cultural parentage, by use of the Traditional Quilting practices of my Australian mother, layered and embedded with embroidered Islamic Arts motifs of my Malay father.

The work will be embroidered with natural raffia and pure white silks and embellish with gold leaf, metallic threads and glass beads. My focus will be on the selection and placement of motifs that are layered over a quilt top created by my mother. The base cloth will be embellished with a combination of appliqued silks motifs then layered with interconnecting embroidered Malay motifs, intentionally leaving gaps and spaces to create a cross cultural conversation in both the positive and negative space.

The intention of the work is to portray a new found clarity and definition in my identity. Through the layering of motifs and utilisation of the powerful meanings in their symbolism to bind together the genetic behavioural traits of my two cultural heritages.”

Soraya will be in residency at Rimbun Dahan for the month of August. You can find more of Soraya and her work on Instagram.