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 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
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: David Hagger
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


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 Rowlands
June 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 Gallery
June 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 Museum
March - June 2023