Zoë Croggon
Melbourne Art Fair
13 - 17 August 2014
Melbourne-based artist Zoë Croggon works with sculpture, video, drawing and primarily, collage. Her work brings different worlds and moments into collision, suggesting unexpected affinities of energy and form. Croggon’s collages are composed of images gleaned from sources such as sports encyclopaedias, photography manuals, film stills and dance catalogues. By exploring texture, light, and form through visual comparison and by making fluid or discordant juxtapositions and connections, she rouses the possibilities of metamorphosis and abstraction.
Croggon’s new series for Melbourne Art Fair combine the work of Australian gymnast photographer Nadia Boyce and found architectural photography. The suite adopts the bold colour palette of the discipline of gymnastics, creating a sense of dynamism and metamorphosis with the contrasting modernist architecture. Using the exacting contortions of young female gymnasts to create abstract, amorphous forms, this work plays with the inherent anthropomorphism in architecture and the fine division between the beautiful and the grotesque.
In the practice of collage, the identity of an object is suspended between its original context and the new conceptual whole in which it is set. An object in a collage surrenders its identity and function and undergoes an aesthetic transformation. Croggon is particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of subconscious perception and the power of suggestion over actual resemblance.
Zoë Croggon has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts with First Class Honours. She has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer and the Melbourne Art Fair and has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Monash University Museum of Art, NGV Studio, Samstag Museum of Art, Ian Potter Museum of Art and the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery.
Croggon is the recipient of an ARTAND Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award (2014), the Asia-Pacific Photobook Prize (2015) and the ACACIA Art Award (2010). She has also been shortlisted for the Churchie Art Prize, Basil Sellers Art Prize at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and the Wallara Travelling Scholarship. Her work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria and Artbank.
