HAGGER

A curatorial, consultancy and project management platform for contemporary art.

About
Projects
Clients
Artists
Contact
Mailing List
Acknowledgement



WEATHER ACTIONS

James Geurts conceptually driven practice focuses on the way that cultural and natural forces intersect to shape both landscape and perception. Through abstraction, fieldwork, site-actions and studio research, his recent projects explore paradigms of measurement, commodification of water bodies, and investigates concepts of time by merging the primordial, geological and the technological.

Works from numerous series come together under the banner of Weather Actions for a temporary presentation in a private venue at Flemington Race Course. 

Artist: James Geurts
Client: VRC
Location:  Flemington, Australia
Curatorial Direction: Moth Design
Artist Management: David Hagger

Photography: Albert Comper for Moth Design
November 2024


ICE FLOES RESPONSE

Fashioned in response to Monet’s (1893) series Ash Keating’s Ice Floes Response first opened in the gallery At The Above, Melbourne, in parallel with the artist’s exhibition at Museum Langmatt in Switzerland. Ice Floes Response merges the past, present and future in an exploration of the environment, time and form. Transmuting Monet’s signature soft dappling of light into three dimensionality Keating indents a topography of presence. Sanding, brushing, scrubbing, painting and hosing; Keating’s work is a labour of tenacity. A rough terrain of adding and subtracting captures the duration of ice through its dimensionality. What once was whole, glittering against the winter sun is now eroding, flaking off and drifting downstream.

A selection of works this series are exhibited within a temporary presentation in a private venue at Flemington Race Course. 

Artist: Ash Keating
Client: VRC
Location:  Flemington, Australia
Curatorial Direction: Moth Design
Artist Management: David Hagger

Textile works by Emma Davies. Ceramic works by Tantri Mustika

Photography: Albert Comper for Moth Design
November 2024


ASSEMBLED LINES

Within the Geelong Ford factory, amongst an abundance of other equipment, the items that would make up the works in Robbie Rowlands' exhibition Assembled Lines were inconspicuous. They were the foundations for tooling and forging raw materials into production parts for vehicles. They served a purpose, nothing more. Removing them from the factory and positioning them in the studio, the equipment became the raw material itself, charging them with immediate singularity.

Artist: Robbie Rowlands
Location: Platform Arts, Djilang/Geelong, Australia
Artist Management: David Hagger

This project has been supported by a City of Greater Geelong Community Grant. 

Photography: Robbie Rowlands
October 2024


RESURGENT

James Geurts Resurgent is a force work, giving shape to an historic flood, when the long-entombed brick-lined Williams Creek tunnel burst in the overwhelming surge, reclaiming its original trajectory along the low lying catchment of Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.

Suspended in a moment of high-pressure flux and diversion, Resurgent evokes the tumultuous intersection of forces of nature and culture, conjuring the many invisible histories, archaeologies and contemporary functioning of these timeworn waterways. Comprising layered neon tubes, a singular archival photograph, and a digital photograph of the Upper Yarra Reservoir, which was uploaded onto a USB then soaked in the Birrarung (Yarra River) causing a digital abstraction, the work expands on the cultural and environmental implications of our acts of intervention, forming a wider treatise about the mythology of the flood and the fallacies of environmental colonialism.

Artist: James Geurts
Location: Void_Melbourne, Australia
Artist Management: David Hagger

Presented as part of the group exhibition Denouement held at Void_Melbourne.

Photography: James Geurts
May 2024


FROM WHERE I STAND I CAN’T SEE THE ROAD

Robbie Rowlands' latest exhibition celebrates a practice that employs site, community and industry responsive modes of working and engaging. Rowlands develops strategies to research and create within diverse locations that build rewarding relationships and creative outcomes by expanding the way we experience our direct environment. From where I stand I can’t see the road is presented within an old bank vault in Melbourne’s CBD.

Artist: Robbie Rowlands
Location: Void_Melbourne, Australia
Curator: David Hagger

Exhibition produced in conjunction with Blackartprojects and Void_Melbourne.

Photography: Robbie Rowlands
December 2023


REMEMBER US

Reko Rennie‘s Remember Us references the marble monuments and inscriptions of ancient Rome, drawing on the weight and gravitas of the stone to highlight the abuse of power within the Australian policing system. Through the reclamation of a Eurocentric medium by a First Nations artist, Rennie seeks to elevate the magnitude of a pressing national issue to an international platform, imploring wider acknowledgement, discourse and action.

Artist: Reko Rennie
Client: Museum of Contemporary Art
Location: Gadigal Land/Sydney, Australia
Project Management: David Hagger
Fabricator: Urban Art Projects

Remember Us, 2023
marble, steel, enamel

Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia with generous support from Lead Patrons Ginny and Leslie Green, 2023; courtesy of the artist. 

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Reko Rennie: Remember Us, 2023, single channel video, 1:24, video courtesy Reko Rennie and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, © Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Photography: Anna Kučera
October 2023


FLOODLINE

James Geurts Floodline is a conceptual site-specific work comprising three oversized water-level sculptures positioned in a line that place the audience underneath the water of a great historic flood. Arranged eight metres apart an invisible horizon of the flood level runs through the sculptures, generating an abstracted mirror of the gauges on the illusory surface. Floodline materialises a phenomenon caused by refraction, where an underwater viewer sees everything above the surface of the water as a distorted reflection. The ripples through the sculptures intensify as they reach the ancient wetlands of Stamford Park.

Artist: James Geurts
Client: City of Knox
Location: Stamford Park, Rowville, Victoria
Project Management: David Hagger

Floodline, 2023
marine grade aluminium
400 x 70 x 30 cm each, 8m apart

Commissioned by Knox City Council for the Stamford Park Public Art and Heritage Project.

Photography: James Geurts and Jesse Thompson
October 2023


AEOLIAN

David Ball’s Aeolian, meaning 'arising from the action of the wind', draws on its surroundings to create a focal point in the landscape. The large-scale artwork forms part of a series that explores the theme of universality of life. Aeolian speaks of nature, geology, architecture and our human landscape. It represents a geological fragment of the earth’s crust that one could imagine to have been forged in situ or deposited on the coastal winds from afar. Its faceted sections create elegant angles and curves that sit lightly in the landscape and embrace the sky.

Artist: David Ball
Client: City of Knox
Location: Stamford Park, Rowville, Victoria
Project Management: David Hagger

Aeolian, 2023
corten steel
450 x 580 x 150 cm

Commissioned by Knox City Council for the Stamford Park Public Art and Heritage Project.

Photography: Jesse Thompson for Knox City Council
October 2023


WHERE EELS LIE DOWN

Reko Rennie‘s Where eels lie down celebrates Aboriginal culture and identity of the Burramattagal waterway (known as Parramatta River). In it the simplified forms of two eels rise through the ground. Their bodies are entwined as they play together. These two eels symbolise the great migration of peoples that have occurred, both recently and historically, in the Parramatta region and speak directly to ‘Burramatta’, which loosely translates as ‘the place where eels lie down’. Much like it was over thousands of years, these eels will again make the site a place for gathering; where people, local and afar, come to share stories, knowledge and time. 

Artist: Reko Rennie
Client: City of Parramatta
Location: Parramatta, Sydney, Australia
Curator & Project Management: David Hagger
Fabrication & Installation: Urban Art Projects

Where Eels Lie Down, 2023
granite, aluminium, steel, lighting

Commissioned by the City of Parramatta commissioned as one of two artworks for the $2.7 billion Parramatta Square precinct.

Photography: Document Photography
July 2023