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Forty inspiring artworks have been shortlisted for the AMES and Multicultural Arts Victoria 2013 Heartlands Refugee Art Prize, including works by thirty-two refugee artists from Victoria.

The shortlisted artwork will be on display at fortyfivedownstairs in the lead up to Refugee Week, as well as at Walker Street Gallery in Dandenong from 4-27 July 2013 as part of the Emerge Festival and The Homestead at Werribee Park from 1-14 September 2013.

The exhibition will showcase shortlisted entries from the Heartlands Refugee Art Prize 2013, including paintings, drawings, photography and mixed media works from talented refugee artists who have arrived in Australia since 1970.  This year artists have shared their interpretation of what they would like to see in the world and reflected the art prize theme ‘I wish to see…’

The prize-winners will be announced and awarded at a special exhibition launch event on Thursday 20 June.  A total prize pool of over $20,000 will be shared by three primary prize-winners, a newly arrived prize and an artist in residence prize.

Images: New Arrivals by Dorota Connellan; Heartlands Refugee Art Prize logo; The Persecuted People by Safar Ali.

The Actual and Properly Truthful Account of the Emigration of Thomas Pender

History is forgetful.

Imagine… it’s the 19^th century. You are 126 days at sea in a sailing ship, crammed into communal cabins with 300 other passengers, hopeful for a better life in the colonies. What would you do to stay sane, and sober? Thomas Pender wrote a diary. VOYAGE adapts this diary to performance.

Like memory, a version of history is created newly in each retelling. However much the historian, or in our case the performance maker, attempts to stay close to the facts, she is always interpreting it with her own lens.

Director Tamara Searle leads an ensemble cast who, in addition to enacting the world of Pender’s diary, stage live the performer’s struggle with the instability of history. Events and characters are multiplied and overwritten with alternatives: ‘it didn’t happen like that, it was like this’. Censures, erasures, corrections and refinements are staged to ‘get it right’, to get the ‘actual and properly truthful’ version of history told.

Does it exist?

Image 1 & 3 by Justin Batchelor; Image 2 by Helen Rekkor.

In conjunction with Heartlands Refugee Art Prize, The Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria in partnership with Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV) and Melbourne Playback Theatre Company presents a unique creative performance inspired by 2013 national Refugee Week theme Restoring Hope.

When refugees settle in Australia there is an emphasis on taking care of the essentials – food, housing, education and employment. Yet refugees also need resilience, courage and hope to face the challenges of settlement.

Melbourne Playback Theatre actors draw on these themes to create a unique performance from the stories of audience members. These actors and musicians bring the audience’s stories of hope and resilience in a way that is entertaining, surprising, and transformative.

RSVP here or email cnunes@eccv.org.au.

For more information click here.

Gallery hours don’t fit your lifestyle schedules? fortyfivedownstairs has a solution!

Get your culture fix and expand your social life at our Friday night extended hours.

a) Unwind after a busy week.

b) Enjoy a drink from the bar.

c) Ponder thought provoking exhibitions.

d) Descend one level further and take in a show.

e) Partake in all of the above!

Castaway is set by the sea, where a group of five women start art classes. Their first subject is a boat. After meeting, the women begin to paint and to share their stories. The script is essentially five revealing monologues of evocative images and lyrical language.

Tribes Theatre presents five great female actors in a rehearsed reading for one performance only. Carmelina Di Guglielmo is a highly respected actor who is well known to Melbourne audiences. She is joined by Maria Theodorakis, an AFI award winning actor, Maureen Edwards (well known to many for her long-standing leading role in A Country Practice), Melbourne actor, director and teacher Annie Fiume and emerging Melbourne based actor Stephanie Morrell.

Writer and Director Chris Dickins is a veteran of Australian Theatre whose work has been produced across Australia and internationally.

White Parachute is a body of work by Lisa Sewards, capturing a childhood memory of her mother’s experience in wartime Russia.  It reveals the human impulse to create order and beauty in the face of displacement and the chaos of war.

As a young child Lisa’s mother lived in a displaced persons camp in Northern Germany and recalls the time when she and her own mother found an abandoned white silk parachute in the neighbouring woods. From this parachute they made clothing and little white silk ribbons for her mother’s hair; her symbols of comfort and hope.

This beautiful story will be told through works on paper, paintings and an installation of a rare WWII white silk parachute canopy which breathes soul and history into this exhibition.

Exhibition to be opened by Sarah Tomasetti, artist and arts educator, on Tuesday July 2 from 5-7pm.

Artist talk & Russian High Tea will be held on Saturday July 13, 2pm.

Image: What Have We Lost ?, 2012, linocut, monoprint, archival digital print on 300gsm  BFK  Rives cotton rag paper, unique state, 500 x 700mm; Untitled (nineteenfortyfive), 2012, monoprint, embossing, archival digital print on 300gsm BFK  Rives cotton rag paper, unique state, 500 x 700mm.

Narelle’s exhibition Living China,  provided solitude and escapism to its creator, as she documented a concatenation of memories of East meets West and her physical and spiritual displacement of residing in an Asian destination.  The autobiographical photographic self-portraits are personalized narratives and the content indulges in dualities of triumphs and tribulations.

Narelle made the transition from remote Far North Queensland to Hong Kong, dislocating her from the securities of her birth place Melbourne, Australia and immersed her in the rich diversity of Hong Kong Chinese cultures and traditions. The displacement rendered her both physically and spiritually into a state of isolation, insecurity, vulnerability and alertness as she adhered desperately to her Australian Heritage. However, after time Narelle grew personal tolerance and acceptance as she acknowledged and adapted to her innovation existence in Hong Kong.

Image: Living China, 2012, photograph, 508 x 762mm; River Crossing, 2012, photograph, 508 x 762mm.

From writer/director Dean Bryant direct from the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Jersey Boys star Michael Griffiths IS Annie Lennox. No accent, costume or wig. Lyrics plumbed for new meaning, melodies reinterpreted, all peppered with candid musings and remembrances from the moody songstress herself.

From the gender bending early days as one half of 80′s sensation Eurythmics through to her stunning solo career, her bittersweet lyrics share the confessions of her triumphs and her heartbreak. Featuring unforgettable songs like Why, Love is a Stranger, Walking On Broken Glass and There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).

Read rave reviews on his show from 2013 Adelaide Cabaret Festival here.

Images by Chris Parker.

Melbourne’s very own Diva extraordinaire – the feather ruffler, the rabble rouser, the cabaret provocateur Yana Alana, takes to the stage with her first solo show (with two people in it).

Between the Cracks traverses the private places and deepest holes of this multi- award winning diva as she opens up and bares all in this bent night of blues, burlesque and blame.

Directed by Anni Davey, performed by Sarah Ward & Louise Goh.

‘Whether you’re a long-term fan, or have never seen her perform, you’ll never regret seeing Yana Alana, up-close and rather personal. She is a pure force of nature (a blue one, of course), full of wit, a delightful lack of self-dignity, and laugh-out-loud moments’ – Aussie Theatre review, February 2013.

Warning: nudity

Image by Peter Leslie .

Finucane & Smith return from storming Australia, London, Sweden and Paris with their wild winter institution, The Glory Box, and this time we plunge you into Paradise. Seductive spectacle, live art exotica and jaw-dropping cabaret.

Empress of Provocative Variety MOIRA FINUCANE, Goddess of Dark Butoh dementia YUMI UMIUMARE; Parisian dance siren HOLLY DURANT.

WITH GORGEOUS GUEST STARS! Exclusive and live from London! Cult cabaret diva, infamous red hanky stripper URSULA MARTINEZ, wild child of new-circus JESS LOVE and the amazing SARAH WARD performing HOT STUFF! What a PARADISE of dangerous dames!

GUEST PERFORMANCES:
Ursula Martinez, Moira Finucane, Yumi Umiumare, Holly Durant and Jess Love will be performing the full season. Sarah ward will be performing the first 3 weeks.

This is one Glory Box you cannot miss!

5 weeks only! Hurry!

The catwalk tables are ALWAYS the first to go! And this year, for the first time, we introduce The Glory Box Seats! Front and centre, champagne, special treats, lavish attentions, what better way to spoil someone you love! stay tuned!

SPREADING THE JOY
We here at Finucane & Smith believe in spreading the joy, we believe in people’s rights to a safe home, an education, to equal rights. And because of all of that 88c of your ticket will go to Amnesty International who work for basic human rights all around the world, to support the right to joy.

GROUP BOOKINGS
We offer a 10% discount for groups of 6 or above valid on Catwalk and General Tables for all performances including preview.

Click here for ticket type and seating information.

View Glory Box: Paradise media release here.

Image: Moira Finucane, Finucane & Smith’s Glory Box courtesy of Jodie Hutchinson with Elissa Northrop and Rebecca Hayes.

For his first exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs, Stephen Williams continues his exploration of the tree’s role in contemporary art. In a series of multi-panel paintings, trees float in a shifting white space. Evocation and mystery have taken precedence over traditional depiction of landscape elements such as ground and sky.

Stephen’s paintings reference Japanese screens while exploring minimalist responses to flatness and space, form and restrained use of colour. Linkages to abstraction, monochromes, eastern and western artistic traditions are apparent.

These works also explore the symbolic potency and responsive properties of white. Stephen says, in The Sum of All Things, “for me white is an embracing unifying concept linking the masculine and the feminine, energy and stillness, the physical and the metaphysical.”

Image: White #2 (detail), 2012, acrylic on canvas, 1220 x 3960mm

This exhibition is the culmination of the inaugural fortyfivedownstairs Artist in Resident.

In this exhibition Greg Ades draws upon the places he has journeyed to over recent years. He explores the interaction between natural structures, their surrounding space and neighbouring objects to create a series of narratives around Australian landscape.

The roots of a strangler fig engulf the tree upon which it dwells. Interlacing, they coalesce and thicken, depriving the host tree of life until it rots away revealing the elongated cage that once engulfed the host.

Within the entanglement of mangrove roots and branches a singular tree loses itself amidst its neighbours.

A myrtle and a fern germinate next to each other. As they grow the roots of the myrtle become attached to the fern. Eventually the myrtle is growing on the fern, its roots taking hold, engulfing its neighbour. As the two grow the weight of the myrtle forces its neighbour ever closer to its eventual collapse. – Greg Ades

Funded with assistance from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Click here for more information on our Artist in Residence program.

Image: Mangroves, 2012, oil on linen, 1070 x 910mm

Survival: A conversation with the artist will be a talk between our artist in residence, Greg Ades, and host Joe Pascoe. Some topics of conversation will be the content of and inspiration for Greg’s current exhibition Places, including the impact of the Australian landscape on his works.

“I am looking forward to exploring with Greg his ideas about the sublime in the Australian landscape and to ask the question, how does he achieve that sense of presence in his work whilst denying the overt representation of the human figure? And also, do the colours he uses have a special symbolic value?” – Joe Pasoe.

Paul Newcombe’s upcoming exhibition is a culmination of his artistic ‘double life’, working in both visual arts and performance theatre in his early career. The exhibition is a continuation of Newcombe’s most recent exhibition at Melbourne’s G3 Artspace, Compositions In Paint (27 March – 23^rd April).

These works are as various in colour as the colour spectrum itself. This is no parameter set by the artist and no predetermined end to the painting. Nor is there an apparent ‘subject’ of these paintings, no obvious figure or horizon line, but colour and mass played optically against  the circle and square.

Of  Newcombe’s latest work, independent art curator Kirsten Rann, says: “In Compositions in Paint: This is the End, we witness the finale of two years of discipline and endurance Newcombe has committed to this project – part of an ongoing experiment with Process Art.”

Watch a video showing the performance of Newcombe painting his largest work over 8 weeks.

Image: Carnivale, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 100cm; Vapour, 2012,  acrylic on canvas, 170cm x 170cm

At the heart of Ysabelle’s body of work is a fascination with architectural structures and the desire to combine layers of occupied landscape sporadically with human presence. She constructs her works in a process of layering recognisable elements of the built environment along with many traces of crowds or pedestrians.

Crossings is a body of congested compositions; highlighting a world swamped with information, digital communication and structural design accompanied by a drift of people and a rich evocation of colour. Ysabelle’s phantom figures move in and out of her pictures, alluding to a greater sense of energy when present, that parallels the fragmentation of a city.

Ysabelle Dauguet is a Mauritian born artist living and working in Melbourne. Since graduating from Monash in 2011, she has received the Langridge Painting Award 2012 and was nominated and selected to be part of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) national exhibition.

Image: Building block near work and Italian church (orange), 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas, 800 x 800mm; Disperse, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas, 400 x 300mm.

Taking its name from the two parts that comprise this exhibition, TIMES/TABLES is a collaborative installation that sees Melbourne-based artist and architect Katica Pedisic and Adelaide-based artist and architect Rachel Hurst use an eclectic mix of relief castings, compressed charcoal drawings, paintings and installation.

Disseminating their spatial practice, Pedisic and Hurst work with a range of architectural and non-architectural conventions and materials. Utilising a conceptual system of binary opposites such as solid/void, expansion/compression and alternating dimensionalities, the various drawings, paintings and plaster pieces explore the patterns established in everyday spaces, at the same time examining the nature of representational media.

Image: Tabulation by Rachel Hurst, plaster & mixed media relief castings, 75 x 75 x 40mm; the minutes, the hours (detail) by Katica Pedisic, ink on arches paper mounted on plywood panel, 420 x 300mm.

The dark side of mateship

Multi award-winning playwright Patricia Cornelius has created a dynamic new Australian play – Savages – which takes a tough look at masculinity and misogyny amongst a pack of ordinary young men.

Premiering at fortyfivedownstairs, Savages is a cautionary tale about a group of men who don’t really know themselves or what they can become.

Four friends embark on the holiday of a life time – but their excitement is soured by anger, bitterness and the disappointment of their own lives … as the pack forms, the dark side of mateship takes over.

With Savages, Patricia Cornelius frankly confronts the realities and nuances of contemporary life with engaging characters and poetic text.

Directed by Susie Dee and featuring Mark Tregonning, Lyall Brooks, James O’Connell and Luke Elliot, the premiere of Savages is produced by leading Melbourne independent arts organisation fortyfivedownstairs and presented in its unique basement theatre.

“tonight’s the night – got to be tonight … the first night – sets the tone for the other nights”

Warning: coarse language and partial nudity.

View our in-house production page for more details.

All images by Sarah Walker.

CURRENTLY POSTPONED

Highly acclaimed Streeton Trio return for their second performance at fortyfivedownstairs in 2013. Formed in 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland, from three of Australia’s leading young musicians, the Streeton Trio is the first Australian ensemble to be selected for the prestigious European Chamber Music Academy, where it has been in residence since 2010. The trio’s second album, “Elation” (2012), was featured as CD of the Week on ABC FM, 3MBS, 2MBS, Radio National and SBS Radio and received great acclaim from Limelight magazine; (June 2012)

“Australia’s most internationally successful trio makes a welcome return to Melbourne for this rewarding program.  Intensive European studies have given the Streeton Trio the rare sheen of true excellence – complemented by their warm and expressive onstage charisma,” – Musica Viva Australia 2013

Program:
W A Mozart: Piano Trio in E major, K.542
Elena Kats-Chernin: Calliope Dreaming
Elena Kats-Chernin: Russian Rag
P Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor, Op.50

Come and experience a rare and unusual duo concert by two diverse and beautiful violinists.

Violin for 2 is the collaboration of two talented performers, Anne Harvey-Nagl and Susannah Ng, exploring the joys of the violin duo repertoire. From the charm of Boccherini to the strange allure of Honnegger, take a musical journey culminating in Prokofiev’s Sonata in C for 2 Violins.

Program:
Boccherini – Trois Duo’s for 2 violins Op.5
Honegger- Sonatine for Two Violins in G Major
I:  Allegro non tanto
II:  Andantino
III:  Allegro moderato
Werner Pirchner – Concerto for Two Violins PWV 33
Schnittke – Moz-Art (based on KV 416d) for 2 Violins
Prokofiev - Sonata in C for 2 Violins, Op.56
I: Andante cantabile
II:  Allegro
III: Commodo (quasi Allegretto)
IV: Allegro con brio

Images: Susannah Ng; Anne Harvey-Nagl.

The catalyst for Stephen’s current show came in the form of an old, wooden desktop loom; a humble item of domestic life that raised questions of the psychological and physical associations connected to the ideas and meaning of ‘home’.

As a result Stephen’s works developed an architectural vocabulary. The paintings themselves function as architectural sketches as a means of planning and imagining new built environments. Stephen presents these forms within an imaginative space so his structures and objects take on a new meaning, allowing the viewer to actively participate within the space and discover new meanings in things that are normally familiar to us in our everyday lives.

Click here to visit his website.

Image: House and Garden, 2013, oil on canvas, 1120 x 1220mm; The Neighbours, 2013, oil on canvas, 770 x 1120mm