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.
Local Rocks, 2016, Pastel and digital print on archival paper, Unique print special edition of 5, 57×87 cm
Zulkifli Lee’s creative practice explores the relationship of personalised and impersonalised forms as well as the language of materials. His motifs usually involve very systematic and rhythmic geometric patterns, but rather than striving for total control, he embraces change and chances. Playing with the phenomenological aspect of his materials’ natural properties and using various substances, chemical treatments and exposure to natural forces, he submits part of the image making to the law of nature, to the disposition of art elements outside his personal control. The marks created by chance, deforms or transforms the images created by the artist and vice versa. Zulkifli is invested in creating works that juxtapose the beauty of the relationship and paradox between humans and nature.
Improvisation of Chances Repeating Scars, 2016, iron oxide on canvas, 240 x 137cm
Regular, Irregular, 2016, 96 x 153 cm (diptych)
Shapeshifter, 2015, corrosion patina on canvas, 153 x 153 cm
With the residency at Rimbun Dahan, he wishes to focus on experimenting with new processes and materials apart from his trademark iron oxide or corrosion medium. He is keen to introduce more natural media and experiment with new chemical processes for his new series of work and find new ways to play with chances. He is interested to explore natural mediums such as mineral pigments, fungus, heat marks, etc. To work and experiment with these new methods is to further his interest in working directly with the forces of nature. With this experiment he hopes to innovate new potential methods to his creative process and discover new artistic value.
Tales of Lines, 2015, corrosion patina on canvas and steel, 153 x 153cm
Tentang, 2015, corrosion patina on canvas and steel, 153 x 76.2cm (diptych)
The artist Zulkifli Lee
Zulkifli Lee was born in Raub, Pahang & currently works and is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He completed his M.A. in Fine Art & Technology at Universiti Teknologi MARA in 2013 and received the Master Excellent Award. Prior to that he graduated from the same university with a B.A in fine art, majoring in sculpture. A versatile visual artist, he also endeavours as a graphic designer, concept artist and illustrator. Zul Lee’s work can be found online at his website. He is Rimbun Dahan’s Yearlong Resident Artist for 2017, and will be exhibiting his works in our gallery in November 2017.
Nina Rupena is a Bosnian born project-based artist currently located in Melbourne. She works across mediums and practices using both visual art and design as tools for communicating ideas. Painting and drawing are her passion and she has a great interest in collaborative work. Since 2008, Nina worked on numerous collaborative projects with artists, designers, filmmakers, organisations and communities.
We wrap ourselves in cotton wool and try to iron, bleach and polish our emotions. We constantly try to predict the future and ignore the uncertain and fleeting nature of our existence. But isn’t the intensity of human experience what makes that very existence beautiful? Pain is intrinsic to the human experience. Without it something of our humanity, dignity and beauty of human life is trivialized. Life without experiencing pain breeds complacency, ignorance and passivity. Beauty is all around us I look for it in human experiences such as disability, old age, displacement and tragedy.
Nina is currently in residency at Hotel Penaga in Penang from February to April 2015. While in Penang, she started a project FACE IT:
“What do you wish you had known when you were younger? For the duration of my art residency I posed this question to the guests and staff at Hotel Penaga, trishaw drivers, backpackers, food vendors, people I met on the streets and bars. Then I drew their portraits, often on the spot or later from a photo. FACE IT is an ongoing project. The aim is to create a meaningful interaction and a space where people let their guards down and show their vulnerabilities.
Portraits and answers are uploaded daily at http://ninarupena.com.au/faceit/ or follow on Facebook and Instagram. You can find out more about her and her work at her website.
Anthony and Kaylene, Graphite, synthetic polymer paint, oil paint, sealer, Arches paper, 193x114cm, 2013
Sarajevo Rose, Ink and oil on canvas, 112×122 cm, 2012
Vestige, Ink, colour pencil and watercolour on old doily mounted on canvas-backed wallpaper, 46x51cm, 2011
Jennifer Tyers has been a resident artist at Rimbun Dahan for three months. She works with watercolour and paints landscapes. Sometimes she works in printmaking and book making. She has been based in Asia for several years, working on landscapes at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and was also an artist in resident at AIRY in Kofu, Japan, in 2014. She has an exhibition at Cast Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania in May.
At Rimbun Dahan Jennifer is painting the grounds with particular interest in the various plants and trees on Rimbun Dahan.
Joanna Gambotto, of Sydney, Australia, was in residence at Hotel Penaga in George Town, Penang, from November 2014 to January 2015, and was inspired by all the colours and textures of Georgetown. She gave an informal showing of Oriented, her new body of work, on 30 January 2015 at Hotel Penaga.
Carlo “Caloy” Gernale (b. 1979) is a Filipino visual artist based in Southern Tagalog, Philippines. As a contemporary social-realist artist, he attempts to articulate not only his personal views, but more importantly, the collective stand and the national democratic aspiration of the marginalized.
As an artist, Gernale is driven by the past and present events that mould Philippine history; he also has a penchant for indigenous and contemporary myths, fables, and banter, and tries to incorporate them into his works of art. Guided by his socio-political leaning, he attempts to come up with a cohesive body of works that are visually and semiotically potent.
Gernale studied Bachelor of Fine Arts in Philippine Women’s University. In 2006, he mounted his first solo exhibit “Ispup.” His most recent exhibit titled “Allegories and Allergies” was held in May 2013 at West Gallery, Philippines.
Barbara Wildenboer was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1973. She completed a BA (Ed) with majors in English literature, Psychology and Pedagogics at the University of Pretoria in 1996. In 2003 she obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from UNISA followed by a Masters in Fine Art (with distinction) from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007.
Wildenboer has been awarded several international residencies such as the Unesco-Aschberg residency (Jordan, 2006), the Al Mahatta residency (Palestine, 2009) and the Red De Residencias Artisticas Local (Colombia, 2011) and the Hotel Penaga artist residency (Penang, Malaysia, 2013). In 2011 she was nominated and subsequently selected as one of the top 20 finalists for the Sovereign African Arts Award for which she received the Public Choice Prize.
Sangeeta Sandrasegar works within a research-based practice, building narratives in which every new work connects to previous projects. Her practice consolidates postcolonial and hybridity theory, exploring her context within Australia and its relationship to migrant communities and homelands. Her work concerns itself within the overlap of cultural structures – sexuality, race and identity, in contemporary society – and interpreting and representing these shifts. These themes are explored through a visual language concerned with shadows. From installations of paper cutouts, material works and/or sculpture, the constructed shadows of the installation become a motif for themes of self-hood, otherness and in-between spaces. By extending the scope of the art object the cast shadows simultaneously engage with the history of the shadow in Art, and hint towards cognitive alternatives and sites of transformation.
In 2004 Sandrasegar completed a Doctorate of Philosophy across the Victorian College of the Arts and the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. The content of the exegesis was to formalize a visual practice centred on the creative space of shadows into a theoretical tool. She proposed that the shadow subject could be re-examined and liberated from its historical representations and to be employed as both a positive and salient visual device for representing the ideas being examined in post-colonial and hybridity studies.
Sandrasegar has been represented in group and solo exhibitions since 1996, and is the recipient of several fellowships and prizes. In particular, national showcases for emerging artists: Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NEW04, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne. As well as the Auckland Triennial and SCAPE: New Zealand Community Art & Industry Biennial in New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 05, Gallery of Modern Art Queensland. Last year her work was shown in the Incheon Women Artists Biennale in Korea, and Slash: Paper Under the Knife, Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Sangeeta was in residency at Hotel Penaga from October to December 2012.
Ashly Nandong is a thirty-year old artist from Kuching, Sarawak who joins us for three months as short-stay artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan.
Ahsly completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering at Swinburne University, in Victoria, Australia in 2009, returning to Malaysia in early 2011. However, it was his informal art education and exposure to traditional dance and music during his formative adolescent years that marked him for quite a different life direction. Eventually, and inevitably it seemed, what placed him firmly on this different road was his continued active involvement in the performance and visual arts, while living in Melbourne. Having been taught the sapeh lute as a teenager under different gurus, the traditional Dayak dance of the Orang Ulu and Iban people, and now as painter, Ashly crosses from performance to visual arts and back with ease.
A strong sense of his Iban cultural heritage is what binds; one medium of expression inspires the other in a non-hierarchy. Traditional motifs and metaphors make for meaningful markers and anchor him along the way in his berjalai, an ancient Iban custom of roaming or journeying in search of greener pastures of knowledge and hopefully the ‘wisdom’ that comes from hands-on experience.
At Rimbun Dahan, Ashly is given a much-needed time for contemplation in an important part of his berjalai; an introspective time to connect with his creative aspirations in response to his current ‘spiritual’ situation. Ashly is presently working on a painting depicting the Tree of Life, a motif found in Iban symbolism and in religions, mythologies and philosophies throughout many different cultures, in varying permutations.
A unifying principle that unites all cultures and religions is something Ashly gravitates towards, being very keen to understand deeper the creative force that at core animates all living entities with spirit. The living tree, rooted in earth but with branches reaching upwards for the heavens is aptly symbolic of Ashly’s current station of berjalai at Rimbun Dahan, a place of lofty trees and sounds of ancient cicadas and birdsong.
Anima mundi, a work inspired by Rimbun Dahan, currently on display at MAP Publika, Solaris Dutamas.
Tree of Life.
Ashley in his studio at Rimbun Dahan with Tree of Life.
Malaysian Artist for the Malaysia-Australia Visual Artists’ Residency 2012
Azam Tajol Aris in his studio at Rimbun Dahan with some of his army of clones.
Azam Tajol Aris is Rimbun Dahan’s Malaysian year-long artist-in-residence. He graduated in Fine Arts from Universiti Institut Teknologi Malaysia, in 2007. Born in Perak in 1985, and growing up into the digital age of internet technology, it is the popular-culture world of graphic novels, anime and internet ‘ready-made’ third-hand or regurgitated information that informs Azam Tajol Aris’ art practice. In the current state of information saturation, a threat that ‘all is rumour’ requiring a challenging critical response is what seems to push Azam towards the satirical in his work in a light-hearted social commentary.
Azam’s current work at Rimbun Dahan is in three-dimensional form. It is the first step in a slight shift in direction. He has made multiple plaster casts of a male figure resembling a soldier to create an army of ‘clones’. There is also a cast plaster figure of one clone-member who must be the general, his mouth in an ugly gape, shouting out an order for conformity. Instead of a helmet though, the clones all have their hair gathered into a peak at the top, a cross between a headgear found on ancient Ramayanawayang kulit characters and a popular latter day hair style.
As ‘puppet master’ or dalang, Azam himself acts as a conduit for the rapid re-processing and disseminating of information. Gathering a patchwork of data, he re-creates ‘still-life’ mute scenarios or vignettes in three-dimensions. The germ for Azam’s three-dimensional ‘stories’ is information that had already been pre-processed and then re-processed and re-translated. Azam completes the mythologizing process by re-packaging the pieces of information into a critique.
Azam Tajol Aris in his studio at Rimbun Dahan with some of his army of clones.
Azam Tajol Aris in his studio at Rimbun Dahan with some of his army of clones.
Azam Tajol Aris in his studio at Rimbun Dahan with some of his army of clones.
CV
Born 15 December 1983, Taiping Perak.
Address Studio Sebiji Padi, 19A Jalan Unyang, Taman Alam Megah, Seksyen 27, 40000 Shah Alam.
Contact 0125785405, Azam_aris@yahoo.com.
Education
2005 – 2007
BFA (hons.), UiTM Shah Alam.
2004 – 2005
Skim Latihan Graduan, PESDC, Tronoh Perak – MMU
Cyberjaya, 7 Month Training in Video.
2001 – 2004
Diploma in Fine Art, UiTM Sri Iskandar.
Solo Exhibitions
2010
‘PARANOIA’ R.A Gallery, Ampang, Kuala Lumpur.
2008
‘FLOAT’ House Of Matahati, Taman Cempaka, KL
Selected Group Exhibitions
2011
Vertical-Horizontal, House of Matahati, Kuala Lumpur.
2010
The Young Contemporaries Competition, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
Art Triangle, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur.
BAD@MAP, Solaris, Kuala Lumpur.
2009
Malaysian Contemporary, Conpenhangen, Denmark.
MEA Award, Sokka Gakai Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.
B.A.C.A , R.A Gallery
2008
Young n New part 1, HOM KL.
2007
Degree Show, TNZ Galeri, UiTM Shah Alam
Awards
2010
Juror Award, Young Contemporaries 2010, National Art Gallery, KL.
