Shelter in Place exhibition examines relationship between humans and architecture

Shelter in Place is a new major exhibition coming to the City of Boroondara’s Town Hall Gallery on Saturday 10 July – Saturday 25 September. This group exhibition examines the relationship between humans and architecture, focusing on the ways our built environment is used to foster ideas of home, shelter and belonging.

Exploring the emotional importance we place on our physical spaces, Shelter in Place invites community members to reflect upon their own lived experiences, as well as societal interactions with built environments.

Featured artists include: Eugenia Lim, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Kevin Chin, Mason Kimber, Shannon Lyons and Polly Stanton.

Through the mediums of painting, film, sculpture and installation, the exhibiting artists explore themes such as materiality and memory, ownership and the ‘Australian Dream’, dispossession and displacement. Through lived experiences, the evolution of society and the passing of time, private and public spaces such as houses, apartments, workplaces, community buildings and places of worship become repositories of histories and memories.

Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation to explore how national identities cut, divide and bond our globalised world. Based on unceded lands in the Kulin Nation, Lim has exhibited, screened or performed at the Tate Modern, LOOP Barcelona, FIVA (Buenos Aires), Recontemporary (Turin), Kassel Dokfest, Museum of Contemporary Art (Syd), ACCA, and more. Since 2019, Lim is co-director of APHIDS.

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan are partners in both art and life. Exploring themes of migration, family and cultural displacement, the Filipino-born artists create mixed media works out of collected and reassembled materials, which often involve public participation to produce work that evokes communal experiences.

Kevin Chin has exhibited widely around Australia, as well as solo exhibitions in the United States (Teton Artlab, Jackson 2017), Japan (Youkobo Artspace, Tokyo 2014), and Singapore (Art Stage Singapore, 2014). For Shelter in Place, he aims to reframe landscape conventions, interrogating the constant contestation of land rights and belonging. His two featured paintings merge natural land formations with built structures, exploring who builds, owns, and has right to land.

Mason Kimber is a Sydney-based visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculptural reliefs, collage and installation. His work engages with the social dimension of architecture, in particular its relationship to memory. By reworking images and casts of architectural fragments into new compositions, Kimber explores the way physical façades and interiors become triggers – and also vessels – for feelings and recollections.

Shannon Lyons is a Melbourne-based artist, originally from Perth. She has exhibited at the likes of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bus Projects, LaTrobe Art Institute and many more. For this exhibition, Lyons unpacks the complex relationships that exists between artistic content and context in her multidisciplinary practice. She continually adapts, draws from and responds to specifically-located built environments, producing works which directly reference the site where they were made or are eventually exhibited.

Polly Stanton is an artist and filmmaker who focuses on contested sites, presenting landscape as a politically-charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital. For this exhibition, Stanton presents an audio-visual work Three Rooms, documenting the interior remnants of an abandoned farmhouse in the remote sub-arctic region of Iceland’s Westfjords. Three Rooms confronts the autonomous nature of the abandoned space, and considers the silent force of dispossession and the erosion of community and place.

Town Hall Gallery features a diverse range of contemporary public programs, curated exhibitions and exhibitions drawn from the Town Hall Gallery Collection, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the City of Boroondara. A member of the Public Galleries Association of Victoria, Town Hall Gallery supports local, national and international artists at varying stages of their careers and offers a space for local artists and community groups to exhibit professionally in a gallery environment. Town Hall Gallery is now open to the public with a COVIDSafe Plan in place. For the latest information and opening hours, visit boroondara.vic.gov.au/arts.

Shelter in Place
Saturday 10 July – Saturday 25 September 2021
Town Hall Gallery, 360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn