NEW15

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Melbourne

14 March – 17 May, 2015

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The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) opened its 2015 season with the 13th instalment of its emerging/mid-career artist survey, ‘NEW’. As in past years, selected artists were allocated a grant to create a new work specifically for NEW, and were given no prescribed conceptual premise or theme. This year’s iteration, however, did break with past instalments in the decision to invite a previous NEW artist to co-curate NEW15. Melbourne-based sculptor Matt Hinkley curated the selection of eight Australian and New Zealand artists―George Egerton-Warburton, Richard Frater, Jessie Bullivant, Kate Newby, Ash Kilmartin, Paul Bai, Alex Vivian and Adelle Mills. As the exhibition’s education kit puts it, the artists selected for ‘NEW15’ each embody some quality of Hinkley’s own practice of intricately detailed small-scale sculptural pieces. Irrespective of what may be thought about this as a motivation for his selection, ACCA’s decision to co-curate ‘NEW15’ with Hinkley was the right one. His desire to create something different within the institution was fulfilled, not through one particular curatorial directive, but through the unprecedented freedom each artist was granted to realise their commission. Consequently NEW15’s success is located within the ambition each artist brought to the project, and the interplay between the works that resulted from such open-ended conditions. This is despite Hinkley’s odd decision to structurally re-arrange ACCA’s main gallery into a more open-plan Kunsthalle, a presentation which is usually employed for the viewing of spectacular, polished, large-scale works. Although the modest conceptual pieces on display appeared slightly incongruous with this art-event layout, the works adequately filled the space as they were well conceptualised and thoughtful in approach.

For some artists, utilising this freedom has meant extracting their works from the bounds

Kate Newby, And they kicked her out of New York City (George, Richard, Jessie, Kate, Ash, Paul, Alex and Adelle), 2015. Cast silver and bronze, ceramics. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland. Photograph Andrew Curtis.

Jessie Bullivant, Inside Job, 2015. Shrug performed by invigilators, 8 stock images used as advertising for NEW15, including JCDecaux posters. Images courtesy of Getty Images. Courtesy the artist.