Room to Create

Room to Create Group Exhibition

Michelle Mantsio is an artist, designer and writer whose practice is research-based. She works within the intersection of multiple practices to explore the potential of pattern to extend the possibilities of embodied experience through art and design. Through video and installation Michelle explores how we situate ourselves and respond to our environment, spatially and temporally. She commonly undertakes interviews and fieldwork that become actual instructions guiding her subsequent making. Her interest in experimentation is applied to her practice and how she interacts with all parties.

Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, Ayman Kaake travelled to Australia in 2011 in pursuit of studying visual arts. A telecommunications engineer and cinematography graduate, he left behind his parents and eleven siblings as he set off on his artistic journey. Applying his creative vision then led to diplomas in photo-imaging and visual arts from Melbourne Polytechnic, winning best conceptual folio with each. In 2014, his passion for cinema and photography eventually developed into a body of digital art works, creating images that delve into the dreamlike world of personal experiences, emotional turmoil, and the complexities of isolation that came from starting a new life in a new country. Although dealing with moving and serious emotions, Kaake’s works are almost hopeful, and he believes that “sometimes imagination is better than reality”.

Guy Grabowsky is a Melbourne-based artist working with analogue photography.Grabowsky’s interest lies in the photographic medium—all aspects of its evolvement, its role in our shifting realities, how it ‘looks’ at us and how we perceive its usefulness. Grabowsky creates photographs with and without the camera, using unconventional and traditional analogue/digital techniques. The work often tests Grabowsky’s perception of an unstable reality often present in the ubiquitous image. In Grabowsky’s images this ambiguous response continually evolves—the hand is present, causing destruction to reveal a new authenticity, a new Image. The emphasis is placed upon the photograph’s textural surface and the underlying resonances it points to.

guygrabowsky.com

Josephine Mead is a visual artist, writer and curator, working and residing on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Country. Interested in exploring personal notions of support, she works through photography, sculpture, installation, sound and poetry. She has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally and has undertaken residency programs in Victoria (The Macfarlane Fund Residency), Mexico (The Arquetopia Foundation Residency), Turkey (The Tasarim Bakkali Residency), Portugal (The Córtex Frontal Residency) and Germany (The ZK/U Residency at Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik). She is co-founder of Co- Publishing and an Artistic Director for Blindside Gallery.

www.josephinemead.com

Scotty So works across media, using painting, photography, site-responsive installation, video and drag performance to explore the often-contradictory relationship between humour and sincerity within our lives. Born and raised in Hong Kong, So graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, 2019. So’s work has been displayed in two solo and several group shows, including exhibitions in Hong Kong, Greater China and Australia.

Hayley Van Ree | Moosedoll

Moosedoll is a Melbourne based artist whose practice is a constant blending of fashion and art. The artist approaches installation art with a sensitivity of dressing a space and is interested in translating a conceptual language of fashion. Currently operating out of Collingwood Yards as part of Yarra Council’s Room to Create program Moosedoll is working on understanding clothing as witness. Moosedoll has graduated Honours from The Victorian College of Fine Arts in 2019, completed a residency in Beijing, shown at Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival multiple times and has shown at the Ian Potter museum.