Michael Needham
Between the Object and the Shadow
30 August - 30 September 2012
Between the Object and the Shadow is an exhibition of sculpture and drawing that mirrors the melancholic constitution of the self and its ongoing search for resolve. Exploring a relationship between physical and interiorised experience, each work is aimed at intensifying liminality between identification and misrecognition, cumulating around a tensive mutation between attachment and loss, representation and death.
Michael Needham is a Melbourne based artist and lecturer in art at Monash and Australian Catholic Universities. His practice primarily incorporates sculptural installation, drawing and architectural intervention. Among other things, Needham’s work explores myth, belief and residual melancholia in the contemporary psyche. Recent exhibitions have probed a relationship between representation and death through a visual and spatial exploration of body-space and trace.
Needham has a PhD in fine art from Australian Catholic University and a BFA (Hons) from Monash University. He has held solo exhibitions at La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, Daine Singer, Death Be Kind, Stockroom Kyneton, Light Projects, Conical, Bus and Kings ARI. He has been the winner of the Stockroom Kyneton Prize (2011), Rookwood Necropolis Sculpture Award (2011) and Montalto Sculpture Prize (2004) and a finalist in the McClelland Sculpture Survey (2007). This year Needham will undertake an Australia Council for the Arts residency in Rome