The weight of shape is a delicate balance of ideas borrowing from science, architecture and mythology. The sculpture challenges the audience to navigate the interior of the mind, and physically negotiate and rearrange the distinct departments of thinking.

The carefully suspended objects created from a range of materials – acrylic, fibreglass, copper, ceramic, bronze, brass, stainless steel and rope – are representations of fragments from the productive zone of consciousness.

Dwyer’s practice over the last three decades has been notorious for challenging the limits of sculptural practice, incorporating installation, performance, video and photography. Seen as all-inclusive sculpture, Dwyer’s work requires the audience to participate and find their own meaning within the magic, memory, history and sexuality she evokes.

The Weight of Shape was funded by the Melbourne Art Foundation in 2014 and gifted to the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

One of Australia’s most exciting international exports Ian Burns created Clouds for the 2012 Melbourne Art Foundation Commission. 

Against the cultural backdrop of the increasingly virtual nature of the screen-based image, Ian Burns presented a sculptural work that links the technological screen with embodied experience. An imposing sculptural form, Clouds presents the viewer with a pseudo-cinematic series of scenes that suggest a narrative but without end. Generated within the sculpture itself, the scenes are based on images of motion, specifically flight: ladders, toys, tables, lights, salad bowls and other everyday items are repurposed towards the live re-creation of imagery of the clichéd cinematic sublimity of air travel.

Displaying images alongside the process of their very production, Burns builds a diorama of our contemporary visual world. By the inventive nature of the construction, and the use of commonplace objects to create believable live video renditions of apparently real footage, Burns’ work encourages a playful spirit of investigation.

His new work for Melbourne Art Fair 2012, Clouds, was created in the months preceding the Fair at acclaimed Yarra Valley winery Domaine Chandon where Ian Burns was Artist in Residence.

Ian Burns is an Australian artist based in New York. Named recently in the ‘Future Greats’ edition of Art Review Magazine (UK), he is an artist on the move, with a forthcoming solo exhibition and commission at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne and an exhibition at mother’s tankstation, Dublin along with the Melbourne Art Fair Commission. Ian Burns is a current recipient of a Queensland College of Art, Griffith University Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. Burns creates what are best described as kinetic assemblages, combining an amalgam of found objects from two dollar shops and department stores like Ikea, with digital technologies, flat screens, tiny closed-circuit spy cameras and cannibalised bits of everyday household ‘stuff’.

Clouds was commissioned by the Melbourne Art Foundation for the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 and was donated to the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

As one of Australia’s most exciting contemporary artists, Jon Campbell created Stacks On, a massive assemblage of light boxes and banners, adorned with sewn and painted elements leading us from the northern entrance to the majestic dome of the Royal Exhibition Building.

Taking materials from the everyday and assembling them to match his personal sensibilities, Campbell has been called an Australian ‘pop painter’.

Paintings, cut-outs, banners, neons and placards demonstrate his love of suburbia and its vernacular, popular music and its attendant culture, printing, design and advertising, sport and youth culture. His works define not only the look of the world in which Campbell lives, but the accent and humour of its language and how signs can articulate its culture and history. These signs contain text that are sometimes loud and boisterous but never offensively so. They have a beauty about them that encourages belief.

With his use of words and phrases as imagery, Campbell captures aspects of his culture that are both lived and observed, that are local, national and international, and – can be spoken, written, sung and read. Campbell’s masterfully realised signs, cut-outs, banners and placards demonstrate his love of the vernacular and popular music and its attendant culture – printing, design and advertising, sport and youth culture. His works define not only the look of the world in which he lives, but the accent and humour of language and how signs can articulate culture and history.

Light boxes: Twelve light boxes presented in three stacks. Aluminium, two pac enamel spray paint, acrylic and vinyl faces
Each stack approximately 400 cm (h)
Each light box between 60 x 40 x 20 cm and 200 x 100 x 90 cm
Banners: Twelve screen-printed and hand stitched banners
Water based printing ink, cotton, linen, damask and towelling
Each banner from 350 x 100 cm to 220 x 120 cm

Stacks On was commissioned by the Melbourne Art Foundation for the Melbourne Art Fair 2010 and donated to the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

My Humvee (inversion therapy) is a full sized, highly detailed rendition of a M1025 HMMWV, more commonly known as a Humvee. The object, the contemporary version of the military jeep, is balanced on its nose and rendered in black painted plywood.

At first glance, the object’s blunt proportions and monochromatic surface lend it a sense of mournful monumentality. Looming almost 6 metres in height, its nature is obscured by its dark exterior, lending it a deceptively minimal elegance. However on closer inspection its vehicular features become more obvious, and the towering block resolves into an upturned jeep. The work is detailed, very accurate and actual size but produced using processes and materials that ‘perform’ the object rather than reproduce it.

Peter Hennessey is an artist whose experimental work is largely based on model making and revolves around an investigation into ‘objects that we all know well but only virtually, through media and can never have an actual physical experience of..’

My Humvee (inversion therapy) was commissioned by the Melbourne Art Foundation for Melbourne Art Fair 2008 and was donated to the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Michael Parekōwhai’s Cosmo McMurtry is caught in the headlights or perhaps he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun. Either way, he’s running scared. He seems to be the underdog, but don’t be fooled by his cute exterior.

Rabbits are perennially popular as cartoon characters (Bugs, Roger, Bunnikins etc.) but they are also a highly problematic presence in rural Australia and New Zealand where escalating populations have made them a noxious pest. They’re a monumental problem for local fauna and flora. The title of this sculpture is based upon New Zealand actor Jim Cosmo, best known for his portrayal of the archetypal ‘man of the land’. Cosmo McMurtry stands for the individual and the masses, hero and villain, hunter and hunted. It’s hard to know whether he’s a good guy or not.

Parekōwhai also made a brother for Cosmo McMurtry called Jim McMurtry, an inflatable rabbit of the same scale, this time playing dead. Jim was first exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea in 2004.

Parekōwhai’s practice visually shifts quite radically and each work typically accommodates a number of interpretations, each distinct from the other. His sculptures and photographs operate within the languages of Minimalism and Pop Art. He takes basic abstract concepts such as colour, scale, number and surface quality and maps them in complex ways onto stories of art history, popular culture, cultural identity, politics and autobiography.

Cosmo McMurtry was funded by the Melbourne Art Foundation and former Board members, Christopher Hodges, Leo Christie OAM, Richard Frolich, Jan Minchin, Martin Beaver and Roslyn Oxley, the Myer Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria and Michael Lett.