Past exhibitions

Biannual Façade Commission

Borchardt Library on Bundoora Campus
27 Feb to 25 July 2024

View Street Façade
3 Sept 2022 to 12 Mar 2023

Curator: Amelia Wallin

This new public art commission by artist and poet Chunxiao Qu presents four short poems on our building’s façade. Through illumination and upscaling, Qu has transformed her poems from intimate observations recorded on her iPhone Notes app into street signs. Composed in English and then translated into Mandarin, the poems have their origins in Qu’s experience of existing between dual cultures and languages.

Writing in her non-native tongue, Qu approaches the English language as found material. She interrogates English words and phrases and their translations to better understand their meaning. In what she calls her ‘logic poetry’, Qu rearranges the principles and systems of the English language to expose absurdities in our everyday usage. ‘Even when I myself read them, I have to spend some time to figure out if they are right’, she comments.

The visual effect of Qu’s colourful, illuminated lettering recalls the visual language of advertising, especially the luminous signs associated with urban sprawl and late-night entertainment. Qu also references the lineage of text art, specifically the use of glass neon to materialise words and phrases characteristic of 1960s conceptual art. But rather than traditional electrified glass tubes, Qu uses LED neon tube lights to achieve the same effect.

Qu’s quip that ‘genius don’t need to work hard’ echoes conceptualism’s emphasis on ideas over technical skill, while at the same time dismantling the myth of the individual genius that has come to define twentieth-century narratives of art. Like her use of the more accessible and economical LED, Qu democratises conceptual art, taking it from gallery walls to the heart of Bendigo's arts precinct, visible to everyone.

On View Street, Chunxiao Qu’s four poems reflect on art, Western culture, language and translation. For the first time, she has included Chinese translations alongside her English poems. The effect is a bilingual meditation on difference, loneliness and community created by an outsider to Australia’s de facto national language.

Chunxiao Qu (born Qingdao, China, 1993) is an artist and poet who lives and works in Melbourne (Wurundjeri Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung Country). She is the author of two books of poetry and has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne and internationally. An artist doesn’t need a label is her first large-scale public artwork, as well as her first in a public institution.

25 Oct 2022 to 5 Feb 2023

Artists: Anna Daučíková, Luke Fowler, Gail Hastings, Rita Keegan and pieces from the Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection, with exhibition design in collaboration with Maud Vervenne
Guest curator: Isabelle Sully

Citational choices takes La Trobe University’s Etta Hirsh collection of ceramics as its point of departure. The exhibition will combine the Hirsh Collection – amassed between the late 1960s and the 1990s – with artwork by contemporary artists. Like the precious ceramic vessels that Hirsh used in her home and everyday life, Citational choices marries the functional and the formal. The exhibition combines ceramics with archival material, moving image, sculpture, exhibition design and publishing. Together, these elements unravel the biographical stories present within the collection itself – those of Etta Hirsh, of a local art scene, of La Trobe Art Institute and now, in the case of this exhibition, everyone newly involved. Through contemporary works which engage with personal and material archives, the exhibition pays particular attention to the biographical stories – the anecdotal and the informal ones – that don’t often make it onto the record.

Read Isabelle Sully’s curatorial statement below.

"The Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection is an eclectic array of ceramic artworks produced by Australian artists between the early 1960s and late 1990s, donated in avid collector Etta Hirsh’s name to La Trobe University between 2009 and 2011. The collection, in a careful compulsion towards conservation, remains largely in storage. Yet when Etta Hirsh began collecting ceramics in the 1950s, she never intended for them to become static. Instead she used them in her everyday life, maintaining their function while also appreciating them all the more through living with them so intimately. Such a decision leaves intriguing material traces throughout the collection; chips to the ceramic surfaces and other signs of wear convey Hirsh’s insistence that the essence of the artwork is felt when it is touched and engaged with.

The personal nature of the Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection stands as a biography of sorts, though it is an intertwining biography: of an individual, a community in the form of the local art scene that the collection encompasses and of an institution in La Trobe Art Institute (and its predecessors, such as La Trobe University Museum of Art). Citational choices is therefore an attempt to flesh out the footnotes of these intersecting biographical stories, the ones that slip through the cracks of archival and administrative processes, or which simply do not translate, and to ensure that in one way or another, these instances make it on to the record.

To assist in this process and to add another layer of citation, a number of contemporary artists will present work alongside pieces from the Etta Hirsh Collection. These are works which engage with the institutional university setting, with (family) history and its material relics, and with space and its organising principles; much like the different factors that come together to maintain a collection in the first place."

– Isabelle Sully, August 2022

Read more about the exhibition and the artists in the exhibition guide [PDF 340KB] and the list of works [PDF 78KB]

8 March to 11 Sept 2022

Artist Dean Cross excavates the forgotten, the misinterpreted and the misremembered. He uncovers the lesser-known histories that challenge broader colonial and cultural narratives. In this public artwork, Cross turns his attention to Greater Bendigo, a region built on the extraction of gold and, later, clay.

Bendigo is the hometown of Francis Gerald (Frank) McEncroe, a boilermaker who is remembered as the creator of the chiko roll. Remaking the East Asian spring roll as a large snack sturdy enough to eat one-handed, McEncroe’s chiko roll has been ubiquitous in Australian fast-food shops and supermarkets since the 1960s. For Cross, the rise of the chiko roll encapsulates the forces of capitalism, cultural appropriation and extraction that have been at play in this country since settler colonisation.

Written in Cross’s own hand, a list of ingredients first reads as an heirloom family recipe. Continue reading, however, and familiar foods are supplemented with additives and emulsifiers. These are the ingredients of the industrialised chiko roll, mass-produced to taste exactly the same, regardless of where it was made.

Nothing lasts forever overlays this text with an image of a native hopping mouse and, faintly, a field of daisies. Indigenous to Australia, these species have been ostracised or misunderstood due to associations with introduced varieties and settler agricultural practices. Cross’s artwork links ‘big ag’ and industrialised food production to the erosion of native food systems and the changing landscape.

The title of the work, like the barely-there daisies pushing through, is quietly optimistic. If nothing lasts forever, if our current systems of industrialised farming give way, what new methods of renewal and reproduction might we imagine?

29 March to 3 July 2022

Artists: Colleen Ahern, Rebecca Baumann, Priyageetha Dia, Eng Kai Er, Lou Hubbard, Michelle Mantsio, Melati Suryodarmo
Guest curator: Amita Kirpalani

Attention seeker explores how visual artists take inspiration from the choreography, artifice and charisma of iconic performances by musicians and actors. Through painting, sculpture and video works by seven international and Australian artists, the exhibition examines performances as planned events that can come unstuck or deviate from the rehearsal. It looks at performers caught in the act or between the lines and reveals unpredictable staging, unruly costumes, slips of the tongue or actual slips.

Throughout the exhibition, the artists are duetting with inanimate objects – a dinosaur costume, a golden curtain, an assembly of chairs, moveable tapestries, sticks of butter – and making them perform. Their work addresses the image of the idealised performer getting it ‘right’ as well as the way the performer connects with an audience through practice, repetition and authenticity. Attention seeker invites us to ask how charisma translates across stage, screen and sound. How does it carry through movement and gesture? And how, as audience members, is our attention demanded? Where does it belong?

This exhibition has been developed to complement Bendigo Art Gallery’s exhibition, Elvis: Direct from Graceland. Where Elvis examines a singular iconic performer, Attention seeker brings together works that unpack the risk, structure and release of a performer standing in front of a real or imagined audience.

Read more about the exhibition and the artists in the exhibition guide [PDF 212KB]

Image: Colleen Ahern, paintings 2016–22 (left) and Rebecca Baumann, Untitled cascade, 2012–22 (right), tinsel curtain, electric fan; La Trobe Art Institute. © Colleen Ahern and Rebecca Baumann. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Leon Schoots

4 October 2021 to  25 April 2022

Every day we walk among residues of the past. Along Bendigo Creek, an observant walker will encounter traces of a time that predates colonisation, mining and urban development. Artists Kylie Banyard and Jessie Boylan spent time visiting Bendigo Creek during winter and early spring 2021. Rising gently about here is the result of their collaborative experiments with historical and contemporary photographs, maps, topographical drawings, oil paint and watercolour.

For thousands of years prior to European colonisation, Bendigo Creek flourished under Djaara custodianship. The oral traditions of the Dja Dja Wurrung People describe a healthy series of interconnected waterholes surrounded by wooded areas and treeless flats.

A map created by miner William Sandbach in 1851 describes the rhythms of the landscape as ‘sloping gently to the creek’ and ‘rising gently about here’. Such records inadvertently reveal the successful management of the creek by Djaara. Looking towards the city centre from the top of View Street we can imagine water pooling in the valley at the bottom of the hill, now paved in bluestone and hidden beneath the Alexandra Fountain.

In Rising gently about here, we see – and hear – a section of the creek north of Bendigo, where the waterway breaks out of the heavily engineered drain that runs through the city into a more naturalised, grassy bank just before the township of Huntly. As visitors on Country, Banyard and Boylan have made a speculative work that evokes the histories of the creek, its current state and its potential future.

2 August to 18 October 2021

Artists: David Attwood, Moorina Bonini, Sam Leach, Marian Tubbs

Curated by Kent Wilson

The works presented in this exhibition consider both the content of flooding data and the context of systems of delivery. They reflect on art’s role in the invention, maintenance and critique of our contemporary circumstances. Algorithms (in the work of Sam Leach), cultural knowledge (in Moorina Bonini’s panoramic printed image) and the excesses of our contemporary economy (in David Attwood’s assemblages and Marian Tubbs’ composite images and videos) invite us to consider how information is generated and distributed, and how our society communicates with itself.

David Attwood uses popular consumer items as iconographic tools, playing poetry with assembled phrasings of products. Through appropriating methods of presentation and display, Attwood’s readymades and sculptural works highlight the ways products are used to signal consumers’ value systems.

During Victoria's long COVID lockdown in 2020, Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri-Woiwurrung woman Moorina Bonini spent time around the fire in her backyard learning how to work with biyula (red gum tree) to make small coolamons. For Bonini, the bark shavings produced as she sat deepening her learning through practice represent the stories passed down from her ancestors.

Marian Tubbs brings kaleidoscopic ‘ecologies’ of data together in hybridised collages of images and objects. An overflow of colour, pattern and form tumble forward in a vibrant escalation, holding a delicate balance as the imminent horizon of entropic collapse rushes to disrupt it.

Sam Leach has supplanted ‘individual’ choice with an artificial intelligence program to determine the imagery in his paintings. Using a combination of his own selected images and custom algorithms that ‘digest’ his entire body of work, the AI software ‘suggests’ the image he is most likely to produce next.

27 April to 18 July 2021

Artists: Bernard Boles, John Brack, Michael Chavez, Michael Cook, Simon Finn, Stephen Haley, Jian Jun Xi, Bea Maddock, Kristin McIver, Narinda Reeders, Naomie Sunner, Rose Wong

All that is solid is an exhibition of paintings, photographs, prints, drawings and sculptures that comment on ideas of institutional power. Spanning six decades, these works invite us to reflect upon the power dynamics embedded in political, social and economic systems.

The exhibition looks at a range of contexts and ways in which expressions of power are manifested. Works by Australian artists Mike Chavez, Narinda Reeders, Naomie Sunner and Bernard Boles investigate educational order, corporate office settings and political iconography respectively. A number of works in the exhibition ask us to consider the ways bodies engage with architecture in the context of an implied or explicit authority, as in Stephen Haley’s Vanishing point, Bea Maddock’s Flag or Jian Jun Xi’s Kiss earth, a smaller than life-size sculpture of a figure lying face down, perhaps depicting an act of submission or subversive resistance.

Some of the works challenge our assumptions or propose new perspectives on institutional contexts. Others offer metaphorical interpretations of loaded or absent forces, as in Simon Finn’s Reveal and Conceal, or Michael Cook’s Through my eyes, which asks how First Nations leadership would change Australia’s political landscape.

Gallery exhibition: 27 January to 18 April 2021

Facade commission:  16 February to 27 June 2021

A major new series of work by Australian photographer Danica Chappell ­titled Far From the Eye is being presented across the spaces of La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo. Drawing from a collaborative dialogue with chemical biologist Dr Donna Whelan from La Trobe University’s Institute of Molecular Science, Chappell presents captivating and innovative artworks.

She describes her work as a collision of light, shadow, form, colour and actions into ‘apparitions of delectation’. Her work responds to the very nature of the papers, chemicals and processes of photographic production, blending traditional methods dating back to the earliest days of the medium with the most contemporary methods incorporating innovative technologies and materials.

Danica Chappell is a visual artist, creating on the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples, in Naarm (Melbourne). Through a darkroom practice, she explores abstraction and addresses the history of photography. Her work is based on shadows activated by the photogram – a process not requiring a camera – taking advantage of the flexibility of photographic processes. Light and shadow, form and colour collide, like apparitions responding to material in the act of becoming fixed into image.

13 January to 8 February 2020

A selection of artworks made using a simple algorithm rather than made by human choice and considerations of beauty, significance, concept, content or medium. Data criteria based on record keeping, such as alphabetical order of artist and date of acquisition into the Collections, has been used to select the works for display. Most items have come from long-term storage, some from campus display and one work cannot be exhibited as it is on long-term loan to another museum. Eliminating human subjectivity in choice allows for the aesthetic quality of the Collections as a system in its own right to emerge.

17 February to 28 March 2020

They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories from Detention is an exhibition of personal stories from people who have sought asylum in Australia and have been detained by the Australian government under its mandatory detention policy.

Through personal perspectives, explore one of the most complex issues of our time. The people you will meet in the exhibition are diverse and individual, their experiences are unique and often surprising.

You will hear about the reasons people flee their homes, their perilous journeys in search of safety, the banality of daily life in detention, and the afterlives - both lived and hoped for - of people resettling in Australia.

Stories from Detention was originally developed by Behind the Wire and a volunteer reference committee of individuals with lived experience of seeking asylum, in collaboration with Melbourne’s Immigration Museum. The regional tour of Stories from Detention is being co-presented by Behind the Wire and Road to Refuge.

Behind the Wire is an award-winning oral history project documenting stories from detention. Road to Refuge is a not-for-profit organisation that has been providing platforms for refugee voices in their words and on their terms since 2012. They aim to change the conversation on seeking refuge and asylum in Australia, by centring the art and stories of people with lived experience, and sharing them with broad audiences.

February 2020

Jacqueline Aust, Julie Barratt, AI Bell, Pauline Bellamy, Kathy Boyle, Glennys Briggs & Jenny Sanzaro-Nishimura, Diana Orinda Burns, Loris Button, Veronica Calarco, Blair Coffey, Carolyn Craig, Paul Croft, Stuart Evans, David Ferry, Robyn Gibson Mark Graver, Christopher Hagen, Toni Hartill, Wuon Gean Ho, Domenica Hoare, Mary Lloyd Jones, Kim Lowe, Anne Langdon, Kir Larwill, Alison Lochhead, Prue MacDougall, Jude Macklin, Tim Mosely, The NightLadder collective, (John Doyle, Angela Gardner, Maren Götzmann, Lisa Pullen & Gwenn Tasker), James Pasakos, Jan Palethorpe, Penny Peckham, Ian Phillips, Catherine Pilgrim, Melissa Proposch, Jude Roberts, Jenny Rock, Jennifer Stuerzl, Lynn Taylor, Gini Wade.

The exhibition was curated by Jude Macklin as part of the Australian Research Council project, ‘Rivers of Gold: the legacy of historical gold mining for Victoria’s rivers 2017–2020’, led by Professor Susan Lawrence (La Trobe University) and Mark Macklin (University of Lincoln).

The exhibition featured the work of forty artists from Australia, New Zealand and the UK, who took part in an international print exchange where they created a print that reflected on the legacies of gold mining in their respective regions.

July 27 to September 4 2020

Re-emerging from lockdown to engage with audiences and assert LAI’s dynamic participation in the cultural life of its communities, Tomorrow Never Knows presents a suite of works from the University Collections that evoke thoughts and feelings about the future. Challenging audiences to reconsider expectations about what the future holds, Tomorrow Never Knows explores ways in which art looks ahead in time to imagine where society and the environment made be headed, or reflects on how our hopes and fears from the past have played out.

Posters from La Trobe University's Stuart Fraser Poster Collection, graphic design, public health and activism.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah + Anna Louise Richardson, Cameron Robbins, Cyrus Tang, Dale Cox, Damien Shen + Robert Hague, Eliza Jane Gilchrist, Fayen d'Evie, Hayley Millar-Baker + James Tylor, Hayley West, James Carey, Jazoo Yang, Jemila MacEwan, Justin Andrews, Kay Abude, Kylie Stillman, Lyndell Brown + Charles Green, La Trobe University Art School - Jessica Murtagh, Paul Northam, Emidio Puglielli, Pie Rankine, Sue Ronco, Genevieve Thornton, Melinda Harper, Michael Graeve, Michael Wolfe, Sara Morawetz, Sisters Akousmatica, Susie Elliot + Helen Martin, Taichi Nakamura, Woven Dialogue

Image 1: Justin Andrews, Lissajous, 2019, exterior water-based paint on wall, 561.5 x 766.7cm. Courtesy of the artist and Blockprojects Gallery, Melbourne. Castlemaine State Festival 2019. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 2: Hayley Millar Baker and James Tylor,Dark Country installation view, Castlemaine State Festival 2019. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 3: Cameron Robbins delivering artist talk, Castlemaine State Festival 2019.

Image 4: Fayen d’Evie, From Dust to Dustinstallation view, Castlemaine State Festival 2019. Photo: Ian Hill.

6 May – 22 June 2019 

Curated by Glenn Iseger-Pilkington and Travis Curtin

Artists:
Damien Shen, Dean Cross, Gunybi Ganambarr, Illiam Nargoodah, James Tylor, John Prince Siddon, Ngarralja Tommy May, Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Nyurpaya Kaika Burton, Patrina Munuŋgurr, Sharyn  Egan, Sonia Kurarra, Wukun Wanambi.

unbranded presents work by Indigenous contemporary artists whose practices undermine and subvert the notion of a singular Indigenous ‘brand’ or ‘aesthetic’. Their work unpicks preconceptions of what Indigenous creative practice is or, should be, rejecting binary assumptions around ‘traditional/non-traditional’, or ‘urban/remote’ practices and other applied, and often arbitrary categorisations. unbranded as a curatorial enterprise questions these reductive and divisive modes of representation and interpretation, while affirming the diversity of contemporary Indigenous experience, both live and inherited. unbranded reflects the multiplicity, complexity and sometimes-conflicting experiences of culture and identity in contemporary Australia.

Image 1: unbranded installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork (left to right): Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Wukun Wanambi, John Prince Siddon, Illiam Nargoodah, Gunybi Ganambarr. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 2: unbranded installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: James Tylor. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 3: unbranded installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork (left to right): Illiam Nargoodah, Gunybi Ganambarr. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 4: unbranded installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Dean Cross. Photo: Ian Hill.

8 July –  24 August 2019

Artists: Brendan Van Hek, Rebecca Bauman, Ross Manning

Autoluminescent presents artwork by three Australian contemporary artists who work across a variety of media, yet all embrace luminescent materiality in aspects of their work, to explore the nature of visual perception, light-induced sensory experience, temporality, transformation and interplay between minimalism and monumentalism.

Autoluminescence refers to ‘the luminescence of a substance due to energy originating within itself’ and as such, the exhibition presents a range of luminescent works that generate light or draw on available ambient light, transforming it through processes of reflection, refraction and absorption, harnessing the power of light to produce ephemeral sensory works of art to be experienced in-place.

Image 1: Autoluminescent installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Rebecca Baumann. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 2: Autoluminescent installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Ross Manning. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 3: Autoluminescent installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Rebecca Baumann. Photo: Ian Hill.

Image 4: Autoluminescent installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Brendan Van Hek. Photo: Ian Hill.

9 September – 22 October 2019

Presented by the La Trobe Art Institute and Multicultural Arts Victoria, Bendigo Emerge Cultural Hub, Interwoven is a cross-cultural and trans-generational weaving collaboration. Part workspace, part exhibition, Interwoven brings people from diverse backgrounds together through the process of weaving. The project celebrates the work of the artist in the context of an overarching thematic framework that draws from research into the creative practices of the weavers included in the project.

The idea of Interwoven is as much about the techniques, knowledge and materials of weaving, as it is about encouraging people to pick up and weave threads of conversation, exchanging ideas between cultures and generations.

Master weavers: Aunty Marilyne Nicholls, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Ilka White, Bendigo Emerge Cultural Hub

Image 1: Interwoven, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019.

Image 2: Interwoven, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Detail Artwork Regina Pilawuk Wilson. Photo: Ian Hill

Image 3: Interwoven, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Regina Pilawuk Wilson.Photo: Ian Hill

Image 4: Interwoven, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019.

Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.

_{Installation images by Ian Hill, 2019}

11 November - 22 December 2019 

Janet Bromley, David Keating, Judith Warnest

Release and Clutch introduces three artists' simultaneous letting go and refined control through their own unique material approaches to shared gestural, poetic and improvised artistic activity. This exhibition builds connections between seemingly disparate practices to investigate aesthetic and conceptual relationships through a series of buoyant gestural approaches. Architecture and design inform elements of these artist's works as they make moves to guide yet free human experience.

All artists in this exhibition are currently undertaking Masters research in visual arts at La Trobe University.

Install view 1: Release and Clutch installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Janet Bromley. Photo: Ian Hill.

Install view 2: Release and Clutch installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Judith Warnest. Photo: Ian Hill.

Install view 3: Release and Clutch installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: David Keating. Photo: Ian Hill.

Install view 4: Release and Clutch installation view, La Trobe Art Institute, 2019. Artwork: Janet Bromley. Photo: Ian Hill.