BLACK.2
15 November - 13 December 2025
Tara Denny
Nick Devlin
Mark Hislop
Suzie Idiens
Stephanie Jook
David McBurney
Vincent Ward
Alex Walker
Oliver Wagner
Wei Weng
In contemporary art, the color black operates as a conceptual force rather than a mere pigment. It embodies ideas of absence and totality, concealment and revelation. Artists use black to question visibility, perception, and meaning — transforming it into a space of thought rather than a color of representation. As a conceptual gesture, black resists easy interpretation: it absorbs rather than reflects, inviting contemplation of what is unseen, unsaid, or erased. In its material and symbolic density, black becomes both void and origin — a site where form dissolves and new ideas emerge. Within contemporary practice, black stands as an act of reduction and resistance, a gesture toward silence that paradoxically speaks volumes.
Tara Denny | 2025 | mixed media |
AUD
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Tara Denny marks with her hands literally on the wall, a mouth, a kiss insisting that ‘our’ voices will not be silenced. Open wide or closed this is not an abstraction this is a narrative using the mouth as an expression of protest for reclaiming one's body autonomy and acts of women’s resistance. ‘Rogue Allure’ is an expression of the mouth, one of our most sensual speaking parts our body has as a tool for bodily protest where words, sound, poem, song pour out from.
Rogue Allure
To feel alive and recall what it’s like in a moment, wiping off one’s lipstick stain with your hand onto your silk sleeve,briskly disgusted and eh strange. Moving onto the next thing as fast as I can describe what is a stream of automatic consciousness ‘what is a philosophical fuck painting and how does it feel’ look and observe I can’t explain to you everything…my hands and body merge as one melting into the wall, lean in to apply for sigh…sigh for a rogue memento. I named it after my lipstick.
Nick Devlin | Last Refuge, 2025 | Acrylic polymer paint on canvas flag | 180 x 90 cm
AUD 4200
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Last Refuge takes its title from the well-known adage, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” The sewn Australian flag is redacted—its colonial iconography erased—challenging conventional representations and the narratives they uphold. Hung in an unconventional orientation, with two eye holes cut into the fabric, the flag becomes a mask: a means of concealment and complicity. A figure hides behind it, suggesting both anonymity and accountability, and prompting viewers to consider the ways symbols can be weaponised or subverted. This piece was created in response to recent social and political events in Melbourne and globally, reflecting on identity, national mythologies, and the role that visual culture plays in shaping collective memory.
Suzie Idiens | Untitled #8 2014| MDF, mixed media | 85 x 100 x 15.5cm
AUD 6500
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Stephanie Jook | R & R: PO | Mixed media | 1400 x 1320 x 60 cm
AUD 3600
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With underlying themes of reflection and connection at its conceptual core, Stephanie Jook shares a collection of works inviting a deeper introspection on how we engage, interact and perceive our internal and external worlds. Through using a combination of monochromatic tones, coarse textures and sculptural elements which evoke a sense of movement, a material mapping draws upon the interrelation between light and dark, the oscillating and stagnant, the push and pull of our passage of time.
Living and working in Melbourne, Australia, Stephanie Jook is a contemporary artist, conceptually driven by the emotive result within monochromatic abstraction. Since graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art from RMIT in 2022, she works intuitively incorporating methods of painting and sculpture in her practice. Embedding experience through mark making and materiality, Jook produces works that solidify and represent the power and strength of vulnerability and fragility through opposing visual elements and material matter.
David McBurney | A Mountain is once again a Mountain 2024 (diptych) Screenprint diptych on wood with aluminium subframe, each 102 x 70 cm
AUD 6000
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The black in my Mountain series is negative space, reflective surface, and an unknown—an active site where images are lost, found and relocated. Across luminous LED scrolls and glassy, hand-pulled lacquered screen prints, this work relies on black as a method of arrival, collecting invisible delivery with visible making, and opening room for identity, memory, and belonging to be encountered rather than assumed
David McBurney is an artist of Irish-Vietnamese descent based in Naarm/Melbourne. He is co-founder of the award-winning print project One Three Collective, holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the University of Melbourne, and is currently completing a Fine Art PhD (Monash). Building on his training in silk painting and traditional lacquerware in Vietnam, McBurney works with print as a method to observe generational knowledge-transfer in an age where processes of information-sharing have become instantaneous and invisible.
David McBurney |A Mountain is once again a Mountain 2024 (moving image) Looped image on 3 LED panels, each 100 x 50cm
POA
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Alex Walker | Manual Distortion I 2023 | archival inkjet print with bespoke polished steel frame | 130 x 90 cm
AUD 6500
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Manual Exposure was born from a desire to challenge both the meaning and representation of an ‘ideal photograph’. Using instructional images from analogue photography manuals, which give examples of ideal lighting, exposure and subject, I manually manipulated the images during the process of exposure. Using haptic movements in tandem with the lens to create organic abstractions. I deliberately interrupted the photographic process which is intended to duplicate and represent, instead re-interpreting both the meaning and visual language of these suggested ‘ideal’ images. The resultant works reflect on the temporal nature of photography and its ability to capture more than just what is in front of the lens.
Vincent Ward | Horses of loom | Video loop, 1 min
Horses in Loom
In the small Tūhoe Māori community of Waimana Valley, a narrow gravel road threads through the surrounding ranges. At night, horses roam the road freely. Occasionally a collision reminds residents that these are living creatures - yet most nights they move unhindered, crossing the thresholds of what would normally be boundaries set by humans.
Among locals, some see them as kaitiaki — spiritual guardians, the embodied presence of ancestors whose bond to this valley is too strong to let them leave.
Along with Bird in a Room these videos seen together talk of human brevity and the space left behind,
Bird in a room.
A bird trapped in a room, bounces from corner to corner.
“Out of the dark the sparrow
flits through the banqueting-hall,
a candle’s warmth upon its wings;
then vanishes again
into the dark from which it came.
So brief our knowing.”
(Levertov echoing Bede)
“The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark. A quick bird crosses the room of light. The air remembers the flight.”
(Seamus Heaney echoing Bede)
Oliver Wagner | Reconstructed painting 84| house painting on linen | 91 x 66 cm
AUD 8500
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Oliver Wagner | Reconstructed painting 83 | house painting on linen | 91 x 66 cm
AUD 8500
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Wei Weng | Eggshell Repair Project, 2025 | Urushi lacquer on eggshells, metal chain, calligraphy on custom wooden box | Edition 2/2
AUD 2600
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