Winter Blues
Renee Estée, Merryn Lloyd, Merryn Lloyd & Renee Cosgrave, Rafaella McDonald, Gervaise Netherway, Jahnne Pasco-White
curated by Laura Couttie and Daine Singer
23 May – 23 June 2018
Winter Blues is an exhibition exploring the emotional depths of the colour blue. To ‘have the blues’ is an idiom that commonly refers to feelings of sadness, melancholy, longing and loss. Artists, writers and musicians have long been fascinated with capturing the blues, through paint, poetry, prose, and song. In this spirit, Winter Blues brings together paintings by Renee Estée, Merryn Lloyd, Renee Cosgrave, Rafaella McDonald, Gervaise Netherway and Jahnne Pasco-White, in an aesthetically and emotionally blue exhibition.
Read the catalogue essay >>
Renee Estée
Renee Estée’s paintings and installs conjure a theatrical wilderness, where nature and culture entangle to foster the sublime. Submerged in stories of ritual and communication, her work locates the ways in which we rove in and out of known and fictionalised spaces, and in and out of memory.
Renee is a Melbourne based painter, who graduated with First Class Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts (2016). She was awarded the National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association Award (2016), the Tolarno Painting Award (2015), the John Vickery Scholarship for Excellence (2015) and the Stirling Collective Award (2015). Estée has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows both locally and abroad. Recent solo exhibitions include Love Far From Home, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne and A Blue To Cruise To, Rubicon ARI, Melbourne. In 2017 Estée undertook a residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre in Perth, and was also the artist for the hybrid-documentary film ‘Guilty’. Her works are in private collections in Australia and New York.
Gervaise Netherway
Gervaise Netherway is a Melbourne based painter who received his Bachelor of Fine Art from the VCA (2015). He has exhibited at a number of commercial, public and artist run spaces in both Australia and Germany. Recent exhibitions include The drawing is just not there, West Space, Melbourne; Soft Gestures, LON Gallery, Melbourne; Saturn Returns, Fort Delta, Melbourne; Memory Bliss, Royal Children’s Hospital, Sydney, Blue Highway, Soft Kingdom, GlogauAIR, Berlin; Infinite Gesture, Fort Delta, Melbourne; and Do Sumn’, Christopher LG Hill (*and guests), TCB Art Inc, Melbourne. Gervaise was awarded the John Vickory painting scholarship at the VCA (2015) and a residency at GlogauAIR in Berlin (2016). His work is held in private collections in Australia and Germany.
Merryn Lloyd
Merryn Lloyd works with beeswax and pigment to create textural paintings through a process of accretion, build up, mixing, reworking and scratching back. Her paintings investigate the irregularities of using beeswax as a painting medium, and the possibilities for mindless experimentation in the studio to produce finished works – trial and error, acceptance and rejection of the outcome.
Merryn graduated from a Bachelor of Visual Art (Painting) at Monash University (2008). Selected exhibitions include Invisible Labour, Tributary Projects, Canberra (2017); Hot Mess Paintings, Daine Singer, Melbourne (2017); What’s Happening Here?, Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne (2017); Dusty Plain, PAULNACHE, Gisborne, New Zealand (2016); Oil on a Spoon, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne (2014); Soft Eyes, TCB Art Inc, Melbourne (2013) and Abstract Now, Shepparton Art Museum (2010). Her work is held by Artbank and private collections in Australia and New Zealand.
Renee Cosgrave
Renee Cosgrave was born in New Zealand of Irish, Scottish and Māori descent of Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi, she currently lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Recent solo exhibitions include: Mood, Sister Gallery, Adelaide (2017); Flow, Station, Melbourne (2015); painting, TCB, Melbourne (2014) & Four Paintings, Plinth Projects, Edinburgh Gardens, Melbourne (2013). Recent group exhibitions include: Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, selected by Rose Nolan, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2018); Under Control, Two Rooms, Auckland, New Zealand (2018) & New Babylon, curated by Jessica O’Brien & Pip Wallis, Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2012). Renee has worked collaboratively with artist Merryn Lloyd on a number of exhibitions including: The Hunch, curated by Boe-Lin Bastian, Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne (2016); Window Painting, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2013) and Print Workshop, The Narrows, Melbourne (2008). Renee completed a self-initiated residency in 2017 on tribal land in Taupõ/Turangi, New Zealand. Her work is held in both public collections at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga and private collections in Australia and New Zealand.
Rafaella McDonald
Rafaella McDonald has a painting and sculptural practice and works across gallery settings, public spaces, on clothing and in collaborative performance. Her practice is concerned with the gestural elements of materials, documenting playful and joyous interactions between materials and the body as moments of agency amongst precariousness.
Recent exhibitions have included a solo show Rhyming Stance at TCB Inc, Real Life Fantasies at West Space, Saturn Returns at Fort Delta and Pose Like This, a large-scale commission for The Substation with Emma Collard. Her work has been included in the biennial Next Wave Festival for emerging artists, the National Gallery of Victoria collection, and she has created large-scale mural commissions for the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority at City Square Swanston Street, Shepparton Art Museum and the City of Stonnington. In 2017 she was the recipient of the Midsumma Art Prize Award and received a Vic Arts Grant to undertake a month long residency in Los Angeles. Rafaella received First Class Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts (2015) and hold a Bachelor of Creative Arts from Melbourne University (2009) Her textile work has been included in publications such as Hessian Magazine and The Craft Companion (Thames and Hudson).
Jahnne Pasco-White
Jahnne Pasco-White’s expanded painting practice considers the intersections between temporality and materiality. Her work is characterised by the labouring of delicate supports. Specifically, she is interested in the layers of authorship that are variously evidenced and concealed by the artist’s mark-making, as well as their continual processes of decay and renewal.
Jahnne holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Drawing from RMIT University (2010) and First Class Honours (2015) from the Victorian College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in: New York, (910 Lofts); Sydney (Daine Singer at Spring 1883); Auckland (Artspace); and Melbourne (Daine Singer, Testing Grounds, Bus Projects, Rearview, Long Division Gallery, C3, Counihan Gallery, Seventh, Brunswick Lake). She has participated in group shows in: New York (Pulse Art Fair, Honey Space Gallery); Leipzig, Germany (Westpol A.I.R. Space, LIA, Spinnerei); Auckland (Artspace); and in Melbourne (The Honeymoon Suite, Assembly Point, Town Hall Gallery, Incinerator Gallery, Slopes, Brunswick Sculpture Centre).
Jahnne has been awarded a 2018 scholarship at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Moya Dyring Memorial Studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She has completed residencies in Germany, Italy, Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, including at LIA in Leipzig, the Rome Art Program, and the Icelandic Nes Artist Residency. Jahnne currently lives and works on Wurundjeri land, in Australia.