BEYOND 2024 - Melbourne Art Fair (2024)

Filling Melbourne Art Fair’s bustling Piazza, BEYOND presents a lively ensemble of large-scale works by Sanné Mestrom, Dane Mitchell & Keiji Haino, Jazz Money and Louise Paramor that court and reward curiosity – inviting us to explore, play, listen and ponder. In an increasingly fractious world, the assembled works reminds us of art’s ability to bring us together. Drawing on diverse artistic lineages and vocabularies, these works are unified in their exploration of the intimacy, joy and wonder of connection. In turn, playful and poetic, searching and enigmatic, they lead us from our earthly plane out into the cosmos, celebrating the power and strength of our bonds with each other and the world around us.

In 2024, BEYOND is curated by Shelley McSpedden, Senior Curator, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).

The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Her Parts presents the figure of an abstracted female form, reclined in a state of semi-repose. This space offered by the curved edges of its forms, is at once a place of refuge and site of potential activation. The sculpture builds on the artist’s long-term engagement with female representation in the Western art historical canon, specifically modernism. More personally, the work is also informed by Mestrom’s physical transformation through motherhood – where a body becomes a space of shared utility, beauty and discovery in response to the needs of a child.

Experimenting with notions of monumentality, permanence and precision, and based in Sanné Mestrom’s broader investigation into art, play and risk, this work fashions abstracted bodily forms to advocate for playable sculpture in the public sphere. Sculpture that invites opportunities for self-directed engagement and interaction, as well as open-ended play for children is of particular interest to the artist.

Artist Biography

In the realm of practice-led research, Sanné Mestrom explores the integration, inclusivity, and interactivity of art in public spaces and urban design. The focus is on merging sculpture and the body to scrutinize art’s role in shaping contemporary interpretations of ‘play’ in physical, experiential, and sociological contexts of ‘place.’

Represented by Sullivan+Strumpf (Gadigal Country/Sydney, Naarm/Melbourne), Booth C7.

Future Eclipse (transmission), 2023
Brass, plated aluminium, Perspex, electronics, radio transmitter, coaxial cable

Future Eclipse (broadcast), 2023
Brass, surface transducer, stereo, radio receiver

In Dane Mitchell’s Future Eclipse (transmission), a large brass discone antenna suspended above the Piazza functions as an FM radio station, producing a field of transmission that stretches beyond the visible — entering the FM ‘narrowcasting’ bandwidth as a transmitted radio signal. Spreading itself thin and wide across the airwaves, the transmission can be heard through an accompanying pair of brass sculptural discs, which function as a receiver.

The 6-hour broadcast was produced by Dane Mitchell in collaboration with seminal Japanese composer and musician Keiji Haino. The composition is devised from one list among the hundreds built by Mitchell for his ongoing project Post hoc, which is made up of unfathomably long spoken word lists which call up vanishings, extinctions and disappearances. The list broadcast here, titled Future Solar Eclipses, reads the dates and times when the Sun will be eclipsed over the next 3000 years.

Keiji Haino’s percussive accompaniment is performed on a Polygonola, a ‘two dimensional’ instrument which enfolds and at times subsumes the reading of the list. Throughout the composition, his summoning of vibrations — in theory and practice — seek to both incapacitate and complicate the logic of list making, whilst ratcheting up the anxiety eclipses once caused.

Artist Biographies

Dane Mitchell (1976) was Aotearoa New Zealand’s representative at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. He has presented solo exhibitions at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Institut D’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France; Te Papa, Wellington, New Zealand; Auckland Art Gallery, Aotearoa/New Zealand; amongst many others.

He has participated in a number of biennales, including Venice Biennale; Biennale of Sydney; Liverpool Biennial; Bangkok Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; Singapore Biennale; Thailand Biennale; Ljubljana Biennale, and more.

Dane Mitchell is lecturer at VCA, University of Melbourne and is represented by The Renshaws (AUS) & Christopher Grimes (US). 

Keiji Haino (1952)is a Japanese musician whose work has included free improvisation, noise, percussion, psychedelic, minimalism and drone music. He has been active since the 1970s and is regarded as one of the most seminal experimental musicians of Japan, if not his generation. He has released over twenty-two solo studio albums and collaborated with countless musicians and composers, including Tony Conrad, Toru Takemitsu, John Zorn, Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow and Faust. 

Represented by The Renshaws’ (Meanjin/Brisbane), Booth E4.

“Three Pieces of Light is a poetic intervention of neon text spread, scattered in a manner to invite audiences on a journey through fragmented lines of poetry.

Poetry attunes us to the small spectacle moments of life and teaches us to pay close attention to what can be learnt by observing how light gets in to any given moment.

Three Pieces of Light is comprised of three short lines of text that can be read and reread in different formations to give different meanings. Each line asks us to consider the very small and the very large, across images of dawn, stars, song and ‘small spectacular moments’ the words invite their own interpretation for each visitor to understand in their own manner.” —Jazz Money

Artist Biography

Jazz Money (b. 1992, Wiradjuri) is an artist, poet and filmmaker. Their cross-disciplinary practice speaks to language, narrative and First Nations’ legacies of place. Via agile poetics and moving images Money’s work is an energetic vessel for the oral tradition of story-telling of First Nations cultures which over millennia has been the living instrument of care on and for this continent.

Money is exhibiting in the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum curated by José Da Silva at the Art Gallery of South Australia opening 1 March 2024. Their first feature film, WINHANGANHA, premiered in 2023 and was commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. It is touring nationally and internationally in 2024.

Represented by The Commercial (Gadigal Country/Sydney), Booth C1.

Louise Paramor’s grouping of exuberant and irreverent sculptural figures, taken from her ongoing High Society (2020) and Palace of the Republic (2017) series, greet us as we enter the Melbourne Art Fair. In this lively cluster of works, a monumental paper form is encircled by a throng of more human scaled sculptures, which take on distinctly anthropomorphic qualities.

Here, Louise Paramor’s keen sense of play and ongoing experimentation with colour, volume and scale is on full display. Combining the honeycomb paper technique, which the artist has refined over the last two decades, with her signature use of found objects and the urban detritus, she presents colourful hybrid forms that appear at once robust and fragile. Paramor’s employment of luscious primary hues and her distinct formal language transforms these everyday materials into an arresting sculptural assemblage which engages seriously with modernist traditions while suggesting the fun and frivolity of social gatherings.

Artist Biography

Louise Paramor graduated from the Western Australian Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting (1985) and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts (1988).

Paramor has regularly exhibited her work nationally and internationally since 1988, and has been awarded several grants and international residencies including an Australia Council Fellowship at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin,1999-2000 and an Australia Council Studio Residency, Greene Street, New York in 2011. In 2010 she won the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award with her piece Top Shelf.

She is well known for her monumental public art commissions, which often combine formal concerns with a pop-inspired sensibility. Large-scale commissions include Panorama Station, Peninsula Link Freeway, Melbourne (2012), and more recently Transformer, Moreland Train Station, Melbourne (2021) and Soul Train, Great Victorian Railway Trail, Highlands, Victoria (2022).

Represented by VOID_Melbourne (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth H8.