This is the third part of RENDER, a series that will be displayed in varying formats confounding the performance of choreography with its rendering. Shelley Lasica with contributions from Louella May Hogan, Claire Leske, Caroline Meaden, Kate Meakin, Indiana Coole, Hayden Stuart, Andrew Wilson, Colby Vexler, Lisa Radford.

With thanks to Phoebe Kelly, Jo Lloyd.

Assistance though Callie’s Berlin Residency 2023/2024 and The Australian Ballet

Haydens is pleased to present Thin Green Mist, Small Grey Stain by Beau Emmett, an offsite project at Cache, 3/46 Little La Trobe Street. The exhibition offers a selection of new sculptural works and a framed jigsaw puzzle, combining elements of mysticism and the occult. Together, these works activate the site of Edmond and Corrigan’s library, as though the forgotten books have taken on a life of their own.

Framed in anodized aluminium reminiscent of movie poster frames, a puzzle of the 1978 edition of Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber depicts the young Sally Field, staring glassy eyed into the distance. The puzzle is missing sixteen pieces, symbolic of the multiple personalities trapped within poor Sybil, instead replaced by oozing pearlescent ectoplasm.

Towards the floor lies a stack of archive boxes and several abandoned books. A copy of Nostradamus 1: Countdown to Apocalypsepublished in 1986 magically levitates, silently spinning around. His glowing, cosmic head blasts laser beams directly towards us from 450 years in the past. An illustration of another other grey-haired visionary, Carl Jung, peers back under raised glasses on the cover of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and another floating head of the teenage psychic Mathew Manning explains his connection to the paranormal in The Link.

Sprouting atop of a triangular mirrored plinth is an intricately formed steel rose, shielded by three copies of The Grand Tour: The Closed Faith, a book covering the ‘the greatest architectural achievements of all time.’ The content of the book is focused on places of worship, such as the Cathedrals of Monreale in Sicily, Santiago di Compostela in Spain, and Aachen in Germany, while the rose references the private inner sanctum of esoteric Swiss UFO cult The Order of the Solar Temple, active in the 1990’s.

Chrome, the largest work in the exhibition, is a serpentine, twisting metallic conduit holding two transparent egg-like forms that contain soil from Roswell USA, frozen within the shell like a galaxy exploding outward. The title of the work is a direct nod to the seminal gay science fiction novel of the same name, written by George Nader. Written during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, there was a proliferation of accounts of anal probing during alleged alien abductions in the United States.

Bringing these works together within the library of Edmond and Corrigan conjures forth a portrait of an individual obsessed with the paranormal. Someone possessed with a desire to learn that which is beyond our understanding.

Beau Emmett was born in 1977 and lives and works in Naarm, Melbourne Australia. He is an honours graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts and works as an artist, lecturer, technician and hairdresser.

Beau is a multimedia artist with a focus on sculpture, installation and photography. He approaches his practice as a site for the creation of sculptural compositions, tracing a relationship between image, object and performance. Common motifs in his work involve mythology, psychology, catastrophism, the occult, and pseudoscience.

Beau is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Art (Research) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Haydens presents a series of recent paintings by Renee Cosgrave for the 2024 edition of The Melbourne Art Fair. These new works continue Cosgrave’s exploration of her Māori heritage and whakapapa [genealogy], challenging the history of abstraction by embedding her paintings with emotion and intergenerational knowledge.

Colour becomes a vehicle, transporting us into a carefully considered site of investigation. While the prismatic hues of Cosgrave’s works can be understood as embodying the complex, heterogeneous experience of human emotion, they also speak to a reflection on our relationship to family, and the lands on which we call home.

There is a significant link in Cosgrave’s paintings to the methodology used in raranga, the Māori art of flax weaving. Used as a process to create practical items such as baskets, bags, and matts, it has traditionally incorporated layered symbology, and played a significant part in Māori culture and society. Like the traditional art of raranga, Cosgrave’s paintings interweave experience and history in their surface by questioning how we express emotion through the symbolic nature of colour.

Cosgrave’s works also embody whakapapa by connecting the artist to whanau [family], land, sea, and sky through the act of painting. The painting Learning Whakapapa (Māori Land Court Archives), 2023, represents the specific lands of her family, rendered opaque through the process of abstraction, and communicated only by her to whānau. This familial understanding speaks to an act of care, and a responsibility to preserving a connection to ancestors, those who came before, and those who will come after.

Through this body of work, Cosgrave asks us to question our own relationship to family, land, and history, and the inheritance we might pass on to our kin. It represents a wide array of emotions, both light and dark, and helps us feel comfortable in its expression of vulnerability.

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Renee Cosgrave lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country. She’s from Aotearoa/New Zealand of Irish, Māori (Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi) and Scottish ancestry. Renee’s practice explores abstract painting, her recent works are inspired by raranga (Māori weaving) and reference colours from land, waters, and speaks to concepts of whakapapa, her works become dedicated to people or place.

Renee was awarded the MECCA M-Power National Gallery of Victoria Arts Mentoring Grant in 2019. Her recent exhibitions include: Papa, Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand (2023); Whanaungawith Aunty Dorothy Nilson, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne (2022); Serotonin, Futures Gallery, Melbourne (2022); Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Geelong Gallery, Geelong (2022); Ahi Mahana with Sean Miles, Sutton Projects, Melbourne (2019) and WestFarbe, CoCA, Christchurch, New Zealand (2020). Renee’s work is held in private collections in Australia & Aotearoa and public collections including Artbank, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga and the James Wallace Arts Trust, New Zealand.

Renee Cosgrave is represented by Haydens, Melbourne

Haydens is pleased to present new works by Amalia Lindo and Sam Martin as part of the eighth edition of the Spring188 Art Fair at The Hotel Windsor. As a unique pairing of two seemingly disparate practices, this presentation highlights contemporary questions of labour, technology, and craft.

Amalia Lindo’s suite of twelve CNC trace monotypes are created from over 9,000 descriptive keywords submitted by globally-distributed online workers over one year. The keywords were provided by workers to describe their video submissions for Lindo’s twelve-channel video installation Telltale: Economies of Time (2022-23). Depicting partial images reminiscent of touchscreen gestures, each work reveals a glimpse into the lives of a global digital workforce. The monotype drawings, primarily in silver and earthy tones, share similarities to early surrealist automatic drawings–highlighting the increasingly blurred line between human and machine. These works further emphasise artificial intelligence (AI) as a reflection of our collective conscience, an extension of Lindo’s broader research into the human intelligence behind AI systems.

Sam Martin’s eclectic series of small-scale paintings are framed in skeuomorphic injection moulds of various patterned baskets. As an art form, basketry is one of the few crafts that has yet to be mass-produced via manufacturing. Martin’s faux facsimiles of this ancient craft are used to frame our view of abstract painting as a heterogeneous object. These works use the picture plane as a site to explore the materiality of painting through layering and optical illusion. Paint and its application, via staining, brushing, and the various interweaving of coloured threads, questions and interrogates our understanding of the painted image.

Viewing these bodies of work together raises questions about labour in a contemporary context. Martin’s works Element (2022-23) and Re-enactment (2022-23) act as markers of time through their laborious process of layering, stitching, and sewing, emphasised by gently dragging paint across the surface revealing its peaks and valleys. Just as the collision of tectonic plates slowly forms mountains, the surface of these works only exists through a build-up of time and material. Here, the artist’s labour is directly embedded in the picture plane. Lindo’s work similarly incorporates a build-up of labour over a significant period of time. In this case, it is the result of the labour of roughly 1,800 human workers who are routinely contracted to train AI. The aesthetic of her work is a direct result of the mass volume of its inputs, with its symbolism derived from the common themes identified by these globalised workers.

Just as Martin’s paintings are composed of thousands of layered threads, Lindo’s machine-mediated drawings are an accumulation of thousands of individuals’ labour. As our technology continues to evolve to replicate human creative acts, art will continue to exemplify the layered and at times contradictory conditions that make us human.

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Amalia Lindo (b. 1990, United States) is a multi-disciplinary artist in Naarm/Melbourne. In 2016, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (First Class Honours) at Monash University. By incorporating human and algorithmic decision-making into her image-based practice, Lindo examines the effects of automated technologies, such as artificial intelligence, on human labour, behaviour and decision-making.

Sam Martin (b. 1985, Australia) is a contemporary artist who uses painting as a platform to test the order and location of things. The pictures are created over a number of years. Within the studio environment, each piece undergoes a process of rigorous experimentation - splicing together elements of repetition, circumstance and decoration. Found materials are combined with labour intensive craft and the picture plane reconciles every decision for the viewer. The final outcome is arrived at rather than determined.