Yarra Arts
Yarra Arts is the collaboration between the City of Yarra, Arts Victoria, Midsumma, local galleries and artists from the queer community.
In 2009 this exhibition series featured a premier event from T.J. Bateson, a group show, TransMasculinities, which explored aspects of gender, as well as a range of work at the artist run gallery initiative 69 Smith Street on the street of the same name, in Melbourne's Fitzroy. T.J.Bateson’s new body of work, Veiled In Plain Sight, was created specifically for Midsumma celebrating the relaunch of Tacit Contemporary Art in Abbotsford. It was off the back of the exhibition series, Transmen Translated in 2008, that artist and curator Jesslyn Moss brought together TransMasculinities, a Midsumma group show featuring photography, painting, drawing and video by eight Female to Male artists from Australia, the UK and the United States. This exhibition explored new ideas of masculinity and offered a rare insight into the physical and psychological aspects of transgender butch, gender queer and transmasculine experiences, and was shown at Red Gallery. 69 Smith Street featured work from Benja, Mark Bareald, Gary Campbell, J. Kristensen, Piepke, Mel Simpson and Rat Simpson and explored concepts ranging from identity, relationship and material assumptions through photography, and even playful work which portraying women’s relationships with each other and the open road. The 2009 Yarra Arts Exhibition was launched on Wednesday 20 January at 69 Smith Street Gallery.
In 2012, Ross Watson presented his 25th Anniversary exhibition series entitle Cycles & Sequences which eploried cycles of life, notions of time and enduringness, change and transition in today's disposable society. Cycles & Sequences included the first ever paitings of the iconic Bel Ami stars, Lukas Ridgeston, Kris Evan and Dolph Lambert. Celebrating positive gay role models in his art has been an important aspect of Watson's work, and this exhibition featured Lanc Corporal James Wharton II who appeared on the front cover of the U.K.'s Armed Forces magazine in 2009, as a soldier who is openly gay. Of the exhibition Professor Martin Comte OAM, PhD said 'In his latest series of works, Ross Watson displays a maturity that clearly stamps him as on of Australia's outstanding artists.'
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Famous quotes containing the word arts:
“What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such—of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)