Intimate Realities & SAM

​Despite being Melbourne Art Review, we decided to take the three-and-a-half-hour journey to the Northern Regional Victorian town of Shepparton to attend the Shepparton Art Museum. We had been receiving invited for a while now from SAM to attend openings, but it had just not been feasible until the opportunity for a long-weekend country escape presented itself! So we hopped on the VLine and booked a hotel room, and ended up in a nice little bushy pocket of Victoria. First thing’s first, SAM is a beautiful building, and we are excited that we got to see it before it relocates and begins it’s enormous and incredibly exciting new phase and new gallery construction near Shepparton Lake. The plans and concept look incredible and it will be exciting to return in 2020 (when the construction is predicted to be complete) to attend the new space. “Intimate Realities” - the major exhibition on display in the Roy O’Brien Gallery, brought together recent acquisitions from the SAM collection of prominent and exciting artists and artworks. From the curation of the works themselves, to the space, to the artwork, we were impressed, inspired and transported through this collection. Some of our favourite artists were included; Heather B. Swann, Tracey Moffatt and Pat Brassington, as well as Benjamin Armstorng, Nici Cumpston, Naomi Eller, Michal Fargo, Sam Jinks, Juz Kitson, John Perceval, Sally Ross, Angela and Hossein Valamanesh and Paul Wood. The exhibition description tells us that the show draws “from the potent realms of artists’ imaginations, Intimate Realities evokes the uncanny and the surreal. This exhibition features sculpture, video, photography, screen-printing, painting and ceramics by leading contemporary artists, presented in a ways that invite visitors to look more closely. Each of the works reveals fleeting glimpses of the unknown. Dreamlike and fantastical, they allude to inner states, psychological undercurrents, and unconscious fears and desires. Benjamin Armstrong’s floor-based sculpture is part Cyclops, the one-eyed monster blinded by Odysseus in ancient Greek myths, and part sea-creature from the deep. Rendered in white marble-dust, Heather B. Swann’s female form is part young girl, and part soft-serve confection of vanilla and ice. The accompanying musical score becomes a celestial refrain to the video and sculptural form, entering our subconscious as the sensory experience of sound takes over and extends our understanding of sight. Intimate Realities rewards us with a series of intimate moments, windows into imaginative worlds we can carry with us as we go about the rest of our daily lives.” - and that it does. The gallery, painted a soft dove lavender and dimly lit, immediately creates and nurtures a cinematic, intimate and surreal space. Although the gallery is not that large of a space, the choices in curation of the works creates a vast area filled with dream-like objects. Aesthetically as well, the works have been curated into a specific minimalist palette and design. From the opening work; the gapingly beautiful and haunting “It’s All Embracing Boundless-ness, no II” by Juz Kitson, a pure white fur and porcelain totem of hair and antlers with intimate phallic and entendre bulging out is a showstopper of a work. Spiritual, shamanistic and decorative, the work emanates both an angelic and ominous energy. Scoring this surreal exhibition is the beautiful and angelic operatic from Heather B. Swann’s video work, projected large on the back wall of the gallery, accompanying her eerily playful “Vanilla” sculpture of a girl transforming into a softserve ice-cream. the entire exhibition seems to jump from a highly stylised psycho-analytical Freudian text combined with the surreal playfulness of a Ren and Stimpy or Adventure Time cartoon. We have also included some images from the Indigenous collection exhibition on display. Upstairs at SAM is a split gallery and education space with a new creative education program. A true contender to the Bendigo art Gallery, for an exciting and activated regional space, SAM looks like it is forging ahead in leaps and bounds and it’s collection is grand and competitive. Take a country weekend getaway and give SAM a visit. We will be back in 2020 to excitedly check out the new space.