New Blood

​"New Year: New Blood" at (the newly re-branded and directed) Red Gallery promised "creative minds thinking well outside the box" as a tagline for their graduate showcase exhibition, promoting a number of "cherry-picked" art grads from a variety of institutions.  When you are at university, you have the freedom to push the boundaries of your own practice (or the initial beginnings of) more so than when your career becomes more cemented, and the structural norms and status quo of the institutions you are in. Youth brings with it the gift of risk-taking and opportunity. Each art school, and its style, is formed by its lecturers, history, its own mission statement and ethos, and as such, by the end of a creative degree students can (usually) go one of two ways; formed and moulded by these established aesthetics (sometimes "commercial gallery ready") or risky, fresh, experimental and new. "New Blood" sits somewhere between both of these expected outcomes.  Stand out works were Etienne Mantelli's vibrant, bold and playful drawings. The series of works on paper were eye-catching and fun and sat somewhere between a Basquiat and Gorman garment. Highly inoffensive and definitely commercially exploitative. Arthur Dimitriou's concrete architectural sculpture was less commercially viable and more conceptually interesting. The use of structural material to explore formalist forms in large-scale was dynamic and eye-catching. Concrete as a medium has been on trend and in vogue for a while now, often used well when at discord with the artwork's theme, but when the media of concrete (or any construction medium) is used too didactically (an object made from concrete which SHOULD be made from concrete asks no questions) then interest wanes quickly. As a graduate exhibition, the quality was of a high standard. The hang started strong in gallery 1 but then quickly turned chaotic in gallery 2 (especially given the crowd) however it is always difficult to hang such a large show of such varied media and thematic concerns.  Red's decision to move the desk and bar to the back of the space allowed for patrons to be drawn deeper into the gallery instead of loitering around the front door and bottle-necking gallery 1.  A small word of advice for newly graduating students, or anyone really, is to be polite, you never know who is who. And I think we need to be more welcoming and personable in this small art scene in Melbourne regardless. From the website: “Introducing the day-dreamers, night thinkers, game-changers and skinny-dippers. RED Gallery are thrilled to introduce the cherry-picks of the bunch, the creative minds that are thinking well outside the box in multi-modal disciplines and styles. Join us for drinks, design and decadence at our ever popular Graduate Showcase. With our finger firmly on the pulse of the movers and makers we welcome the new decade to NEW BLOOD. INTRODUCING OUR ARTISTS: KIRSTIN BURGHAM | SID CROSS | CHLOE DANN | NATALIE DASKALOU | ARTHUR DIMITRIOU | KAREN ERIKSEN | HIROKO HONGYOK | CAITLIN HUNTER | STEPHANIE JOOK | ANITA LAYZELL | JING LIANG | MONIQUE LUZZA | ETIENNE MANTELLI | REBECCA PIDGEON | ALEC PU PENG MA | OLIVIA ROSKOVIC | ANABELLE STONEHOUSE”