BEYOND 2025
BEYOND 2025 is curated by Anna Briers, Curator, Len Lye & Contemporary Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (Aotearoa).
Artists include Paul Yore presented by STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney) and Hugo Michell (Tarntanya/Adelaide), Jahnne Pasco-White presented by STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney), and Kim Ah Sam (Kuku Yalanji, Kalkadoon) presented by Vivien Anderson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne).
Paul Yore
Fuck Me Dead, 2022
Mixed media assemblage comprising funeral hearse, found objects, glass, shells, LED lights, acrylic paint and plastic flooring.
dimensions 592.5cm x 379cm x 149cm
Paul Yore’s irreverent approach gleans from the material excess and consumer churn of late capitalism, the wasteland of the Anthropocene. Melding political critique with a joyous celebration of queerness, his works are imbued with the festive energy of a Mardi Gras parade at the end of the world.
Entombed within this mosaic sculpture and forming its armature is an upcycled hearse, itself modified from an iconic Australian car, the ‘70s Ford Fairlane, a luxury emblem of masculine productivity and petro-capitalism. The automobile was produced at the height of the oil crisis, a time when limits to economic growth were acknowledged through a recognition of the planet’s finite resources. The artwork’s title, Fuck Me Dead, refers to the car’s former funerary role, signifying the hopeful decay of fossil fuelled transportation and unchecked capitalist expansion.
Yore’s practice transmutes waste and detritus into something charged and talismanic through a kind of queer alchemy. Drawing on rainbow-coloured cacophony of mass-produced consumer trinkets, kitsch Australiana, mature content, and found slogans, artistic methods such as collage, quilting and assemblage all enable a ‘camp détournement,’ a subversive intervention which hijacks existing images and their meanings. Fuck Me Dead belongs within Yore’s arsenal of queer world building as death, too, can symbolically augur change. With its shimmering mosaic surfaces, phallic fertility symbols and blinging LED party lights, outmoded motifs and dead ideas are reborn anew.
Represented by STATION (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne), Booth K5 and Hugo Michell (Kaurna Country/Adelaide) Booth B3.
Jahnne Pasco-White
Embodied watery entanglements II, 2025
Thyme, mint, turmeric, parsley, lemon verbena, broad bean leaves, brassica leaves, peppermint geranium, magnolia, lavender, calendula, marigold flowers and seeds, peach skins, apricot. Natural dyes (acacia, eucalyptus, passion fruit skins, avocado skins, onions skins, turmeric, blackberry, hibiscus, madder root, walnut, beetroot, carrot, indigo) sand, pen, pencil, beeswax crayon, plant-based crayon, acrylic paint, oil stick, recycled and reclaimed oil paint, hemp, bamboo, linen, silk, cotton, recycled clothes, paper, plastic, cotton canvas, corn starch paper
dimensions variable
Jahnne Pasco-White is known for her expanded painting practice and ecocritical approach, which resists the static confines of the pictorial frame. In Embodied watery entanglements II, multi-hued panels of unstretched canvas disperse across the Atrium in a sensorial installation, a pathway for viewers to journey through. As ever-evolving artworks, material fragments are often cut up, resewn and reconfigured into future exhibitions as part of their lifecycle.
Pasco-White’s abstract surfaces bloom with vibrant stains, gestural marks, and the fluid residue of lived experience. Artistic materials such as aromatic and medicinal herbs, flowers and native plants, are foraged from the garden and transmuted into natural dyes through solar energy. Kitchen ingredients such as spirulina and turmeric are repurposed as pigments, while leftover vegetables such as beetroot are employed as drawing implements. These organic material flows change with the seasons, co-mingling with synthetic pre-loved clothing, reclaimed oil paint, and baby wipes—revealing the porosity between her studio practice and caring duties as a mother in all its messy, cross-contaminating glory.
Pasco-White’s work attunes with our entangled ecological condition, the interconnected web of relations between humans and non-humans. After theorist Donna Haraway, she acknowledges kinship circles beyond the nuclear family, from the networks of plants and animals within interdependent ecosystems, to the microbial companions in our own bodies — a symbiotic relationship which sustains us. Embodied watery entanglements II embraces the notion that we are not individual entities but made of multitudes within a web of relations, decentring the idea of human exceptionalism in this epoch of climate crisis.
Represented by STATION (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne), Booth K5.
Kim Ah Sam
Before & Beyond, Our Journey 2024/2025
bamboo, wire, raffia, emu feathers
various dimensions: 13 x 13 x 40cm, 26 x 30 x 52cm, 47 x 40 x 77cm, 52 x 45 x 106cm
Kim Ah Sam is a Kuku Yalanji and Kalkadoon woman raised in Meanjin Brisbane. For Melbourne Art Fair she has produced Before & Beyond, Our Journey, a constellation of levitating sculptures which gently hover and spin, possessing a kinetic quality. Ah Sam’s self-taught weaving process is intuitive and improvisational, with no preordained pattern. Repurposed materials such as raffia are sourced from zero waste outlets, while emu feathers gesture towards the territorial boundary markings of her Kalkadoon ancestors who have maintained culture since time immemorial.
The woven surfaces of Before & Beyond, Our Journey braid together connection to Country and embodied knowledges. Tracing journeys both physical and biographical, they resemble aerial cartographies and bodily systems such as skin, veins, and arteries. Ah Sam’s conical forms recall termite mounds in Cloncurry and the topographical landmark of Mount Isa in north-western Queensland, a mining region on Kalkadoon lands and the site of violent settler-colonial frontier wars in the late 1800s.
Ah Sam’s production process is therapeutic, imbued with her experience as a postnatal councillor for new Indigenous mothers, providing care and support despite trying circumstances. The negative voids and hollows in Before & Beyond, Our Journey become analogous with the ruts and black holes in life, lost knowledges and cultural estrangement, while entwined fibres allude to social bonds and the ties that bind communities together.
Represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth F1.
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