MELBOURNE.- ACCA is presenting Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions, the third edition of a multi-year partnership that supports the commissioning of ambitious new projects by leading contemporary artists.

Like a Wheel That Turns reflects upon painting practices which extend beyond the frame and from the realm of the studio into the world at large, through the work of Nadia Hernández, Lucina Lane, Gian Manik, Betty Muffler, Jahnne Pasco-White, Jason Phu, JD Reforma and Esther Stewart.

Acknowledging painting’s ability to speak across generations – to personal, social and familial connections and histories, as much as to cultural and artistic references and legacies – and to accommodate multiple modes of time and perception simultaneously, Like a Wheel That Turns brings together a diverse group of artists whose work might collectively derive from a studio-based practice, but who share an interest in the intersection between painting and other materials, forms or disciplines, including architecture, literature, performance, ecology, music, healing and the wider field of human relations.

ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO explains: “The title of the exhibition is drawn from a quote by artist Marlene Dumas who reflects that: ‘Painting doesn’t freeze time, it circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns’. This idea connects to twentieth-century debates about painting while retaining relevance to more recent considerations of painting as subject to constant cycles of circulation, being informed by various networks – social, physical and digital – for production, exhibition and distribution. Referencing these discursive legacies, while also considering the limitations of the art historical canon, works created for this exhibition collectively explore these ideas of networks, recycling and circulation to affirm the ongoing relevance of painting – as well as its expanded potential – in a contemporary age.”

Like a Wheel That Turns presents a series of eight new commissions, with artists who approach the medium of painting as a vehicle through which to consider cultural and family histories, our relationship to Country and the environment, institutional and domestic architectures, the role of art and the gallery as repository of memories, and as a means of communing with those who have come before. Activating ACCA’s gallery spaces through a series of distinct yet intersecting site-responsive projects, Like A Wheel That Turns implicates the viewer within the temporal frame of painterly materiality, inviting us to consider how painting might extend beyond the specificities of its medium and the confines of the frame.

The Macfarlane Commissions

The Macfarlane Commissions is supported by The Macfarlane Fund to encourage the production of ambitious new work by emerging to mid-career contemporary artists. Each artist is offered a generous artist fee and production budget, with the intention of commissioning a major new body of work especially for the exhibition.

The Macfarlane Fund is a philanthropic initiative established in 2017 to honour the life of respected Melbourne businessman Donald (Don) Macfarlane, who throughout his life took immense pleasure in the arts. The Macfarlane Fund’s primary focus is to offer financial support across the career span of artists, with programs developed to support graduate, mid-career and senior artists. Underpinning the development of The Macfarlane Fund is a rigorous approach to decision-making, and a commitment to being flexible, effective and responsive to artistic practice and initiatives in a way that challenges established modes of giving and serves as a role model for contemporary art philanthropy.

ARTISTS

Nadia Hernández

Born 1987 in Merida, Venezuala. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Nadia Hernández’s practice bears witness to the loss of home and the symbolic power of memory and memorialisation. Informed by her experience as a Venezuelan woman living in Australia, and positioning herself both within and outside the Latinx diaspora, Hernández makes art as a means to connect with a sense of place that exists beyond psychic and geographic boundaries. She negotiates complex cultural and familial narratives, weaving the personal and the political, to create a highly recognisable visual language expressed through colourful textiles, paper constructions, paintings, music, installations, sculptures, and murals. Her works weave together the complexities of memory, despair, hope and reconciliation, reminding us that these opposing sensations often co-exist.

Hernández was the winner of the 2019 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, one of Australia’s leading prizes for emerging artists and winner of the 2021 Grace Cossington Smith Art Award. She has been selected as a finalist in the forthcoming inaugural Ellen José Art Award 2022. Hernández has been a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2021), Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award (2021, 2019), Create NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (2020), The John Fries Award (2019), and The Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2021, 2017). She was commissioned to develop an immersive educational program and exhibition as Shepparton Art Museum’s EduLAB artist (2020) and was a recipient of the Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence (2019).

Lucina Lane

Born 1991, lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Lucina Lane interrogates existing models of painting practice specific to art and language and rearticulates them as new potentialities. Disparate objects and experiences are gathered and reconciled, forging new syntactic compounds in the form of poetic provocations. Lane’s conceptual works, which manifest as text, assemblage, painting, installation, and sculpture, present a plethora of slippages between collective and subjective experience, positing as-yet-unidentified bridges between the two. Artworks and exhibitions are treated as testing sites for opposing ideas.

Lucina has exhibited widely since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), The University of Melbourne, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2013. Notable exhibitions include; Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2019); Painting Amongst Other Things, ANCA, Canberra (2018); Teach the kids to strike, with Nigel Lendon, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2018); breath is a bridge, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2017); Visitor Visitor, presented by CAVES off-site, Gippsland Centre for Art and Design (2016); The 5th/6th Artist Facilitated Biennale as part of the Tarrawarra Biennial – Endless Circulation, Tarrawarra Museum of Art (2016); loosen the earth, West Space Melbourne (2016); and Cold like Concrete, Australian National University, Canberra, (2016). Lane was a finalist in the 2017 biannual Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship and the 2018 Redlands Art Prize.

Gian Manik

Born 1985 in Boorloo/Perth, lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne

Gian Manik’s practice is defined by an ongoing investigation into the boundaries of representation. Previously, the artist staged reflective and malleable materials – such as tin foil – to mirror environments, which he then documents and faithfully reproduces as non-representational paintings. More recently, Manik has broadened this approach by entwining abstraction with figuration.

Continuing to work from digital photographs, Manik’s paint application fluctuates between delicate and sumptuously excessive as he combines preparatory sketches with assured and adept brushwork. References from the fabric of his daily life contend with gestural passages to form a palimpsest of representation and memory. These layering techniques provide visual texture and energy to the artworks while adding depth and weight to his complex review of representation. Nostalgic, melancholic and facetious, Manik’s works vibrate with emotional and compositional intensity.




Gian completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Curtin University in 2006 and a Bachelor of Fine Art Honurs, First Class Honours in 2007, followed by a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include Field works, Spring1883 at Sutton Gallery, 2021 and Marouflage, Bus Projects, 2021, and recent group exhibitions include Between the two at Caves, 2020 and The drawing is just not there, Westpsace in 2018.

Betty Muffler

Born 1944 near Watarru, South Australia. Language group Pitjantjatjara. Lives and works on Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara Country, Indulkana, Southern Desert region.

A highly-respected senior woman based at Indulkana on APY Lands, Betty Muffler works at Iwantja Arts, her practice spanning painting, drawing, printmaking and tjanpi (native grass) weaving. A renowned ngangkari (traditional healer), Betty learnt this practise from her aunties, handed down through her father’s side. Alongside a rigorous art practice, Betty works extensively with NPY Women’s Council and medical practitioners to support Anangu to good health and through times of crisis.

Born near Watarru, Betty Muffler grew up at the Ernabella Mission following the displacement and deaths of family members in the aftermath of the British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field. Witnessing the devastation of Country and surviving this experience motivates Betty Muffler’s recurring depiction of healing sites and the intensity of her connection to these places in her paintings titled ‘Ngangkari Ngura’ (Healing Country).

Muffler has been included in numerous survey exhibitions, with recent project including including Tarnanthi 2020: Open Hands, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2020; The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2021; and Observance, Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2022. For The Macfarlane Commissions at ACCA, she will be making an epic new measuring with an immersive scale (three by five metres) which envelops the viewer and attests to the power of Country.

Jahnne Pasco-White

Born 1987, Naarm/Melbourne, lives and works in Dja Dja Wurring country/Castlemain, Victoria.

Jahnne Pasco-White’s expanded painting practice explores the interconnectedness between humans and our environment. Her intuitive, generous style of abstraction articulates itself in raw, gestural paintings on fabric and canvas. Hand dyed fabrics pigmented with organic materials gathered from her surroundings ¬– including domestic debris and matter collected from the natural environment – are complemented by acrylic paint, oil stick, pastel and crayon. Into these surfaces, she introduces segments of old paintings, cut up and reworked in an ongoing cycle of decay and renewal. She is interested in the generative process of creating, and the layers of authorship that are variously revealed and concealed by mark-making and her continuous process of addition, subtraction and reworking.

Pasco-White was the winner of the prestigious Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize in 2019, and a finalist in the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize, Australia’s premier prize for emerging artists. She was the recipient of a 2018 Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Moya Dyring Memorial Studio scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and was awarded a Martin Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Painting 2018-20 from the Australian Council for the Arts. Pasco-White has completed residencies in Germany, Italy, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, including at LIA in Leipzig, the Rome Art Program, the Icelandic Nes Artist Residency, and Gertrude Contemporary.

Jason Phu

Born 1989 Gadigal land/Sydney. Lives and works between Gadigal land/Sydney and Naarm/Melbourne

Jason Phu’s multi-disciplinary practice brings together a wide range of references, including traditional ink paintings, calligraphy, readymade objects, everyday vernacular, ancient folklore, personal narratives and historical events. Working across drawing, installation, painting, performance and film, Phu frequently uses humour as a device to address identity and cultural dislocation within an Australian context. Often employing stories of ghosts, spirits, demons and gods from Chinese culture as a personification of these concepts, Phu’s playful, deliberately naïve style and tongue-in-cheek subject matter convey a sense of connection to today’s world while being simultaneously timeless.

Phu was the winner of the prestigious Sir John Sulman Prize in 2015, and the Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship, also in 2015. He has been a finalist in the Sulman Prize (2019, 2018), Ramsay Art Prize (2017), the NSW Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship (2017), the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2016), and the Archibald Prize (2015, 2014). In 2019 Phu was awarded the inaugural Art Assembly commission for the Sydney Opera House, and in 2017 was awarded the West Space commission, presenting My parents met at the fish market. In 2018 he was included in the annual curated exhibition Primavera 2018: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Phu was awarded the 2021 ACMI X Mordant Family Moving Image Commission for Young Australian Artists.

JD Reforma

Born 1988, Gadigal land/Sydney. Lives and works Gadigal land/Sydney

JD Reforma is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, installation, painting, and writing. His work often explores the dynamics of power, race and class that intersect across our relations, visual cultures, institutions, and society. He is also a humourist, a practice enacted online through the Instagram persona @kuwtkpis (Keeping Up With the KPIs), a meme-based institutional critique that positions the ubiquitous Kardashian clan as players within the art world.

Recent exhibitions include Free/State, the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, curated by Sebastian Goldspink, Art Gallery of South Australia; the 67th Blake Prize, Casula Powerhouse; the 2020 John Fries Award, curated by Miriam Kelly, UNSW Galleries; Acid Mantle, COMA, Sydney; Hyper-linked, 2020, curated by Isobel Parker Philip, Art Gallery of New South Wales; HI-VIS, 2020, curated by Luke Letourneau, Casula Powerhouse; Don’t Let Yourself Go, 2020, curated by Megan Monte and Josephine Skinner, Cement Fondu, Sydney; and Collective Trace, 2020, curated by Anna May Kirk, Sophie Penkethman-Young and Nerida Ross, PACT, Sydney. His work has been extensively profiled by Broadsheet Sydney, Art Collector Magazine, Artlink, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, RUSSH Magazine, Running Dog and Runway Journal. He was a 2020 City of Sydney Live/Work Space Artist; a 2019-20 Resident Artist at The Clothing Store, Carriageworks; and a recipient of the 2018 4A Beijing Studio, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. His work is held in various private collections and by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Esther Stewart

Born 1988, Naarm/Melbourne. Lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne and Daylesford, Victoria.

Esther Stewart’s practice is characterised by distinctive abstract hard-edge paintings and installations that examine the possibilities offered through the visual languages of architecture, design and geometry. Her hybrid sculpture-paintings utilise bold geometrical forms, precise lines and a colour palette that references the ornamental features of domestic architecture such as awnings, balustrades, lattices and tiles, and the patterning of marble veneers, carpets or wood panelling. In 2015, Italian designer Valentino engaged Stewart to collaborate on translating her paintings into the Autumn/Winter 2015-2016 menswear collection. This successful collaboration illustrates her ability to push boundaries and play sophisticated games with the elastic relationship between art and design, form and function. She is currently working on a public art commission for a new train station in Sydney.

Stewart was the winner of the prestigious Sir John Sulman Prize in 2016. She was a recipient of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 2018 studio scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and institutions, including Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park; Mornington; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn; Ballarat Art Gallery, Ballarat; Kunsthalle Schaffhausen Vebikus, Switzerland; and Galleria dell’ Accademia, Florence.