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‘AVER’
as part of MDW 2024
Exhibition
as part of MDW 2024
Exhibition
For Sydney based industrial designer Tom Fereday, considering and highlighting the genesis of the design process and embracing the raw origins of materiality, is an essential part of his much awarded practice. It is an opportunity to celebrate the innovations, as well as the products, objects and elevated experiences that good, lasting design can produce. For his show Aver (from the Latin ‘ad’ - to and ‘versus’ - true), showing at Oigåll Projects for Melbourne Design Week, Fereday draws back the curtain for an honest display of material inquiries, experimentations and applications. Displaying early explorations with recycled glass, raw and recycled Aluminium juxtaposed with finished furniture, and art objects presented as functional pieces, Fereday reaffirms the concept of design as something to be felt and experienced rather than just viewed.
The show acts as an incubator for new thoughts and approaches, inviting audiences to interact with design in both a tangible and audible way, with Fereday exhibiting a series of engineered audio sculptures and high performance sound pieces, alongside a combination of new works and early editions from his eponymous studio. This considered dialogue between established and emerging design is core to Fereday’s ethos, accentuating the importance of exploration as well as the impact and true value of longevity, quality and craftsmanship.
Design is often experienced in a way that is final and fully-formed, packaged and presented as a finished glittering object or a complete concept, as if eagerly evading traces of its origin or whispers of earlier development. A destination rather than a journey. It will often deliberately hinge on specificity and the allure of ‘ultra exclusivity’, making a molehill out of a mountain and leaving in its wake a tide of discarded material and off-cuts destined for industrial graveyards. It is a strict performance, all gritting teeth behind a painted-on smile, frantic eyes hoping nobody will look further than the facade lest the illusion of effortlessness falters.
Photography by;
Annika Kafcaloudis
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‘Carpe, Babes’
Exhibition
Exhibition
When I think of artist and raconteur James Lemon, I conjure the image of a neo-Wildean gollum. Lemon, like his work, is charming and brash in the best sort of way. He is also layered and complex, bursting with energy and intellect. A walking rolodex of pop culture riffs and quips, his creations and his musings are the provocations of a creative roiling against blissful ignorance and pervasive monoculture, testily exploring the limits and gleefully eroding the edifice.
Asked to describe the central theme of his play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wildeonce remarked “that we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality”. Many consider Earnest a direct satire of institutions and late Victorian conformity, deriding the oblivious pursuit of status and respectability. There is a fun parallel between these dandy’s, each subversive and misunderstood in their own context. Embedded in our evolving contemporary landscape, shuddering with climate catastrophe, moral crises and social injustice on an institutional scale, Lemon’s work as an artist is as much a satire of these conditions as it is an attempt to grapple with them at a personal and existential level. Like Wilde, he is also concerned with the language of aesthetics, in this case “the aesthetics of contemporary end-times” and the “erotics of the end”.
For his latest solo exhibition ‘Carpe, Babes’, Lemon gazes unflinchingly at mortality and conceptualisations of apocalypse, touching on climate dystopia and exploring the effigies and motifs of his Pentecostal religious upbringing. Working with clay, precious metals, glaze and kilnfurniture, this body of work extends his previous explorations of materiality. Clay, with itselemental telluric origins embodies a powerful source material of creation, as well as being the fold to which all will one day return. Lemon’s work posits a defiant jubilance, a denouncement of denial, embracing instead a frenzied awareness of the end that is as much about relishing the here and now at is it is about confronting our inevitable doom. Like the character Thomasin (Anya-Taylor Joy) in the final scenes of The Witch (2015), it is a cackling, yawning cry as we return to the circle and to the earth from which we came. Hysterical, really.
Photography by;
Annika Kafcaloudis
Asked to describe the central theme of his play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wildeonce remarked “that we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality”. Many consider Earnest a direct satire of institutions and late Victorian conformity, deriding the oblivious pursuit of status and respectability. There is a fun parallel between these dandy’s, each subversive and misunderstood in their own context. Embedded in our evolving contemporary landscape, shuddering with climate catastrophe, moral crises and social injustice on an institutional scale, Lemon’s work as an artist is as much a satire of these conditions as it is an attempt to grapple with them at a personal and existential level. Like Wilde, he is also concerned with the language of aesthetics, in this case “the aesthetics of contemporary end-times” and the “erotics of the end”.
For his latest solo exhibition ‘Carpe, Babes’, Lemon gazes unflinchingly at mortality and conceptualisations of apocalypse, touching on climate dystopia and exploring the effigies and motifs of his Pentecostal religious upbringing. Working with clay, precious metals, glaze and kilnfurniture, this body of work extends his previous explorations of materiality. Clay, with itselemental telluric origins embodies a powerful source material of creation, as well as being the fold to which all will one day return. Lemon’s work posits a defiant jubilance, a denouncement of denial, embracing instead a frenzied awareness of the end that is as much about relishing the here and now at is it is about confronting our inevitable doom. Like the character Thomasin (Anya-Taylor Joy) in the final scenes of The Witch (2015), it is a cackling, yawning cry as we return to the circle and to the earth from which we came. Hysterical, really.
Photography by;
Annika Kafcaloudis