Rachel Button, Veronica Charmont, Kaijern Koo, Madeleine Minack, HeeJoon Youn

The exhibition explores elevations of the mundane through a distorted, romanticised dream lens. Through examining daily, overlooked moments, the artists attempt to uncover meaning in an overwhelming state of being. The constructed worlds created by each artist bloom from our landscape of chaos and become a retreat away from it; a method of coping which involves manipulating, idolising, and reconfiguring the everyday. This process becomes an attempt to find poetry huddled within the chaos; a hopeful re-examination of reality in an attempt to understand it.

HeeJoon Youn is an interdisciplinary artist who predominantly engraves on glass screens which float over her paintings. Based in Melbourne, her practice explores deceptions inherent in remembering the past. As a response to the seemingly incessant chaos of the information saturated society, reminiscing about the ‘simpler’ times becomes a form of coping strategy. She combines engravings and paintings and takes a comical approach to the defense mechanism as a means of rationalising the otherwise irrational process.

Kaijern Koo is a Singaporean-born, Melbourne based artist working primarily with paintings which incorporate quiet sculptural elements. Her practice is informed by tendencies toward obsession in the face of desperation, bleeding into examinations of the arcane, rituals, mysticism, and belief. Through her work, she hones in on such tendencies as they reveal themselves as attempts to fabricate certainty in, and to understand, an unstable world.

Veronica Charmont is a Melbourne based artist who explores the illusionary and dream-like quality of the cinematic image. Often shooting on super 8 or 16mm film, her films seek to construct an alternate visual world that originates from but lies separate to what is considered reality. Her work is scarcely planned, allowing for those who are being filmed to improvise spontaneously under the eye of the camera. She is interested in the concepts of experimental and surreal cinema, aiming to blend together traditional cinematic components such as narrative, with that which is abstract.

Rachel Button's practice combines the elemental forces of ‘Spiral Jetty’ with the energy of punk - a clash of prehistory with futurism. The methodology sits between a school play and a science diorama - an enquiry into the relationship between storytelling and the production of meaning. They retreat to an interior world and fire is its beginning. In this mythology, fire was the first tool, and their iPhone camera is its technological successor in the history of human culture.

Madeleine Minack is an interdisciplinary, contemporary artist who works primarily in installation and sculptural practice. Based in Melbourne, she has recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Art, Painting, at the VCA. Madeleine’s practice derives from a process of accumulating discarded found objects to produce small, intimate sculptures which reflect minute details of normally unnoticed everyday matter. Through this process of collection, she creates something that from a distance looks insignificant but, upon close examination, becomes detailed, complex bodies of works. Formed out of a found materials, wax, and string binders, her sculptures form a home or nest for that which would normally be lost.

IMAGE | Madeleine Minack, Untitled, mixed media installation, 2019 | Courtesy the artist.

SIX P.M. ON A WEDNESDAY

Rachel Button, Veronica Charmont, Kaijern Koo, Madeleine Minack, HeeJoon Youn