HAGGER
A curatorial, consultancy and project management platform for contemporary art.
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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 GeurtsMay 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 RowlandsDecember 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 KučeraOctober 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 GeurtsOctober 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: David HaggerOctober 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 PhotographyJuly 2023
FURTHER
Robbie Rowlands’ sculptural interventions examine and resource our built environment, bringing to light objects and materials that serve a function, but are often overlooked. The work in Rowlands’ exhibition Further utilises recovered concrete formwork panels, assembled and scored with a series of cut tapered lines, bringing new focus to his site-based interventions. Treated as one, the Assembly Point vitrines form a horizon with distinct vanishing points. Rowlands’ intention is to lead you to consider not just what is within these spaces but what exists beyond.
“I'm interested in the relationship between the form and the formwork. Each of these panels, reveal traces – staining, scarring and swelling – from their role in forming (concrete). In their retirement, resting layered, stacked and stored, additional traces of dust, map edges and points of connection. In their randomness, they piece together like a patchwork blanket, telling a story of shared experience. I'm not wanting to be trapped purely by the textural quality of the surfaces. I'm interested in the remnant, the forgotten, and what exists further than the surface.”
Artist: Robbie Rowlands
Location: Assembly Point, Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria
Artist Management: David Hagger
Photography: Robbie RowlandsJune 2023
IWARA
Iwara (Pitjantjatjara for ‘tracks’) is a survey exhibition
spanning a decade from the prodigious and prolific artist, Robert Fielding. It extracts
works from his oeuvre that illustrate the breadth of his capacity as
creator and narrator, giving light to the reason Fielding has exhibited
widely in state, national and international galleries and institutions.
The triumph in his practice stretches far beyond the success of the
works we see in Iwara, be that in print, painting, sculpture,
photograph or video. The triumph is Fielding as a leader, teaching us
that tjukurpa is the unbreakable beating heart of this country, despite
the ongoing effects of white intervention.
Artist: Robert Fielding
Location: Wyndham Art Gallery, Werribee, Victoria
Curator: David Hagger
Artist Representation: Mimili Maku Arts
View exhibition walk through here.
Photography: Jorge de Araujo for Wyndham Art GalleryJune 2023
ELEVATION
Elevation is a solo exhibition of paintings by Melbourne-based artist Ash Keating. Collectively titled Elevated Horizon Response, this
interconnected series of large-scale panoramic paintings are inspired
by Keating’s memory and photographic documentation of the landscape,
horizons, and weather patterns observed from an elevated viewpoint on
Yorta Yorta Country / the Goulburn Valley.
Keating has a
distinctive approach for creating artworks of atmospheric compositions.
Since 2015, his most recognisable investigations of pure abstract and
spontaneous gestures have developed as a style referred to as Gravity System Response paintings. For Elevation,
Keating has challenged this style and expanded his practice by drawing
from his own experiences, memories, and photographs of being surrounded
by nature. Edging towards abstraction, yet with the visibility of a
continuous horizon line, this series is the closest his work has felt to
resembling the landscape of a place.
Artist: Ash Keating
Location: Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria
Curator: Jessica O’Farrell
Artist Management: David Hagger
Photography: Leon Schoots, courtesy of Shepparton Art MuseumMarch - June 2023