Containment Field

Andrew Browne & Travis John Ficarra Containment Field Void_Melbourne 28 January - 25 February 2023 As a term ‘containment field’ implies a tension between incarceration & control and an expansive planar site of play. The field - art historic shorthand for a specific approach to image and ground - more generally suggests a place where boundaries are demarcated only at some distance. In particular gaming / Sci-Fi contexts the containment field is also a zone for neutralizing threat through capture, but to extend any slippery metaphor, we might also understand it as a place where episodic image and aspect, extracted from the real or else cunningly contrived to appear as such, is held in stasis via archaic or contemporary technologies. ___________________________________________________________________________ Andrew Browne is a Melbourne based artist, born 1960. Since the 1980’s he has developed a visual language drawn from both the natural and man-made environment - often through a formal collision of styles - with a specific interest in the phenomena of illumination, the nocturne and happenchance encounters with the everyday, and '...a landscape alienated from the picturesque'. His work has been variously described as romantic and cool, as eclectic yet persuasive pastiche, and as eerie and spectral, emblematic and odd in its embrace of realism whilst co-opting the multifarious languages of abstraction. He has shown Australia-wide at both dealer and public galleries, and his work is held in numerous institutional collections including the MCA Sydney, National Gallery of Art - Canberra, and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2016 he was the winner of the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing, and in 2018 the winner of the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. Andrew is represented by Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne & Jan Manton Gallery, Brisbane Travis Ficarra is an artist and composer based in Melbourne, Australia. In 2021 he graduated with first class honours from a Master of Fine Art from the VCA. Prior to this he completed a Master of Contemporary Arts in 2015 also at VCA. Travis has been included in exhibitions and performances around Australia, including spaces and events such as Lindberg Galleries, Stockroom Kyneton, Daine Singer, West Space, Fort Delta, C3 gallery, Blindside Gallery, SuccessArts Perth, Brunswick Mechanics Institute, Trades Hall, the Arts Centre, Liquid Architecture, Overground Festival, the MCA Sydney, the NGV, and the White Night Festival. Travis has been awarded a variety of research scholarships at VCA, the Sustaining Creative Workers grant from Creative Victoria, the Mary and Lou Senini Art Award at McClelland Gallery, a NAVA Australian Artists Grant, the Australia Council New Work Grant and an NGV Women’s Association Award, and has also been shortlisted for the Darebin Art Prize. Travis is represented by Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne.