Explore & Collect With Alexie Glass-Kantor

Alexie Glass-Kantor is a curator, an advocate for the arts and the Executive Director of Artspace, Gadigal Country/Sydney. Since 2014 she has led the opportunity for co-curated and artist-led projects with peer institutions in 14 countries, including: Jonathan Jones: untitled (transcriptions of country), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2041); UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA, Seoul Museum of Art (2021) and more. Alexie was the curator for artist Marco Fusinato for the Australian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia (2022), and since 2015 has been the curator for Encounters which is the large-scale installation sector for Art Basel Hong Kong.

Melbourne Art Fair spoke to Alexie about her most anticipated artists and galleries coming to the Fair.

Blackartprojects (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth I2
Betty Campbell

Betty Campbell (Pitjantjatjarra / Yankunytjatjara) is an artist and community leader living in Mimili in the APY Lands of South Australia. Betty’s works are absolutely mesmerising, she’s a storyteller who uses her works to share women’s stories that cannot be spoken, which she translates through painting and dancing. Her profoundly beautiful paintings hold layers of accumulative mark-making–indicative of those used for body painting–which suggest scores for movements, time, and connection.

Betty Campbell, Minymaku Tjukurpa (Women’s Story), Our Country (580-23), 2023, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 152cm x 122cm. Courtesy the artist and Blackartprojects.

Sullivan+Strumpf (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne, Singapore), Booth C7
Julia Gutman

Experiences of intimacy, vulnerability and empathy are intrinsically woven through the expanded textile works and installations of Julia Gutman. She is an emerging artist whose works have already drawn recognition, including winning the Archibald Prize in 2022. I first worked with Julia as part of the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace, and over the past four years the conceptual scope of her practice has deepened. As one of Artspace’s current One-Year Studio Artists, Julia is in the studio every day and the works featured at Melbourne Art Fair have been developed in-residence—it will be wonderful to see these ambitious and nuanced works shared with audiences.

Julia Gutman, Maybe there is a beast, maybe it’s only us, 2024, found textiles, embroidery and oil pastel on canvas
200cm x 80cm. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

1301SW/STARKWHITE (Naarm/Melbourne, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Tāhuna/Queenstown), Booth A3
Jelena Telecki

Jelena Telecki’s surreal paintings are evocative and enticing, existing in a strange place of in-between – neither here or there – where there is a quality of compression and a powerful sense of release. Underpinned by performativity, I have long admired how her paintings and installations have a sense of dramaturgy and as the viewer you become complicit, implicated through the act of looking upon someone or something caught in the act. Articulating that fraught space of ambiguity and testing thresholds of representation, are ways in which Jelena teases at the most self-conscious outer limits of relationships and subjectivity.

Jelena Telecki, Mistake, 2021, oil on linen, 154 x 137 cm. Courtesy the artist and 1301SW.

COMA (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth K2
Shan Turner-Carroll

Poetry, symbology, and myth are strewn through the dreamlike mise-en-scènes created by Shan Turner-Carroll in his images, assemblages and installations. Eerily alluring and often confronting, I am interested in how Shan initiates social exchange, and interactions between community and participation, to depict relationships that are non-linear and shapeshifting. Although highly staged, his works are imbued with family ties, memories, elements of nature, and personal attributes, inviting the feeling that what you are encountering is familiar, but yet, so unfamiliar.

Shan Turner-Carroll, Waiting for night to jump, 2024, archival digital ink jet print, 130cm x 87cm. Courtesy the artist and COMA.

OLSEN (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth A4
Jacqui Stockdale

Jacqui Stockdale is an artist I’ve followed for over twenty-five years and her engagement with feminism and the occult have been defining themes. I am drawn to her inimitable curiosity, her flair for the dramatic, and her courage in directly confronting the unfailing complexities and taboos of sex, death, and belief. Jacqui plays expertly with absurdist theatres of desire and teases out latent satirical tensions; indeed, her theatrical works are uncanny, leaning as they do into the shadowy realms of the unconscious and subconscious. For Melbourne Art Fair, I am particularly enamoured by Smoko (2024) and the whimsical, almost comical, nature of the work.

Jacqui Stockdale, Smoko, 2024, oil on linen, 165cm x 195cm. Courtesy the artist and OLSEN.

Melbourne Art Fair takes place 22 – 25 February at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Secure tickets here.