Paul Ramírez Jonas, b. 1965 in Pomona California, Raised in Pegucigalpa, Honduras. Lives and works in New York. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 1987-1989, Master in Fine Arts, Painting, Brown University, Providence, RI 1983-1987, Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art, Honors. Solo exhibitions include: Alexander Gray Associates, NY, New York (2009); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); ABRACADABRA: I create as I Speak, The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2007).

Sarah CrowEST

…is currently a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University and has previously investigated the function of the alter-ego in contemporary art practice at the South Australian School of Art.

Mikala Dwyer with Sam Hughes and Natural Selection Theory

Mikala Dwyer is a Sydney-based artist. Recent solo exhibitions include: Outland (useless architectures floating grounds), 2010, Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Outfield, 2009, Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney. In 2008: Swamp Geometry, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Mono Clinic, Hamish McKay Gallery, Melbourne; Costumes and Empty Sculptures, IMA, Brisbane. Selected group exhibitions include De Overkant/ Down Under: The Hague Sculpture 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2007; Mystic Truths, Auckland City Gallery, Auckland, NZ, 2007. In 2010: Before and After Science Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia; Sydney Biennale, The Beauty Of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age.

Natural Selection Theory is a collaboration in experimental winemaking between James Erskine, Sam Hughes, Tom Shobbrook and Anton Van Klopper. With collective experience in Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and the United States, Natural Selection Theory was formed in 2010 with its first project being Runway 3 – a natural wine project utilising music, art and performance in the winemaking process. Subsequent projects, such as Voice of the People highlight the ever complex, variable personality of live natural wine.

Bonita Ely

… had her first exhibition in London in 1972; recognition of her artwork in Australia effectively started at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial of 1975, where she exhibited a close and complex examination of Mount Feathertop, a location in the Victorian Alpine region that tested the tensions between observation and interpretation in visual representation. Her current work, The Murray’s Edge: a River in Drought, is a series of photographs of the Murray River documented from the headwaters in the Mount Kosciusko National Park to the Coorong in South Australia. The narrative sequence refers back to earlier works creating a comparative study of the Murray River from 70s and 80s to the present. Bonita Ely has a diverse practice, her methodology based on the premise that a particular idea requires the deployment of particular mediums, contexts and technologies. Her artwork of the 70s was a warning of environmental issues that now are in full focus, and continue as the focus of her practice as one of Australia’s important artists concerned with environmental, socio-political issues.

Bonita Ely is Head of the Sculpture, Performance and Installation Department of the College of Fine Arts (COFA), the University of New South Wales, Sydney where she is a founding member of the Environmental Research Institute for Art (ERIA).

Ardi Gunawan

… completed a MFA at Monash University in 2009. His research practice focuses on the material encounter with processes of art production explored through sculpture, object-based intervention (or installation), performance, and collaboration. Recent projects include: gone in no time (gone in no time, 2009, Australian Experimental Art Foundation; Sculptural Relations: embodiment, event, forces, and material performance, 2009, Monash University Postgraduate Gallery; Influence(s), collaboration with Nikos Pantazis, 2009, Light Projects; The West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial, collaboration with Susan Jacobs, 2009, Anstey and Ashton & 135 Union Street, West Brunswick. Curators: Open Spatial Workshop; Reconfiguring still: proposals for the super light, 2008, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.

Raquel Ormella’s

… practice is grounded in exploring the various relationships between humans and the natural environment, with a particular focus on urban expansion, forest activism and bird watching. Her practice covers a diverse range of activities including video, installations, prints, drawings, and zines. Ormella has been exhibiting regularly in national and international exhibitions for over a decade. Recent solo exhibitions include She went that way, curated by Reuben Keehan, Artspace, Sydney, 2009; Walking through clearfells, Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, 2010. Group exhibitions in 2010 include The 1st Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan and In the balance, MCA, Sydney.

George Popperwell

… is a key figure in the South Australian visual art community, much admired as an artist of weight and consequence. He arrived in Adelaide from the UK in 1977 and until 2001 was a highly influential educator at the South Australian School of Art. He has exhibited at EAF in 1996, and with Anton Hart in The Cloak Room, 2001. The two collaborated again most recently in Temperature at South Australian School of Art Gallery in 2010. His first solo show was in London in 1960, his most recent was Delayed Voyage, 2008 at Contemporary Art Centre South Australia. A collection of commissioned essays of the same title was published by CACSA in 2009. A self-described ‘recluse’ George Popperwell has a penchant for working with difficult and irreconcileable matters with a material and spatial vocabulary entirely his own. Ian North writes “What price the work of a lone artist against these weighty considerations? … I do not for a moment believe that art is required to address big themes or to manifest great complexity, but Popperwell nonetheless does both.” His work is held in AGSA, NGA, and private collections in Australia, UK, Italy, France, USA, Canada.

Ti Parks

Time to Stop Sitting on y

The number gives the number of the cut-out. The colour of the number gives the colour of the pen.

At twenty thousand they were di. Composed of battalions with sables and bayonets, they obeyed the rabble, a confused mass with pikes and sticks. (from Ti Parks’ 10,000 Collages, no. 3875)

Guillaume Apollinaire - La Mandoline, l’oeillet et le bambou. c. 1915-1917. Ink on three pieces of paper.

Joan Mirror (sic) Untitled, November 24, 1924; pencil, gouache and feather. Gift of Louis and Michel Leiris.

Joan Mirror (sic), cat. no. 13. Etoile Nichons Escargot Soleil Comete Palpitation de la Chair. Picasso, Figure of a Woman, 1943. Acquired in 1956. The patch of blue to the left of her head only.

Jamila Groth writes right-handed, plays golf left-handed and kicks a ball with both feet. ‘I can play any shot you want’ says the startling ambidextrous Australian.

Ti Parks was born in Kent near London in March 1939. He was christened Theodore but became known as Ti (short for Tightbuttons). His childhood was spent roaming the roads and woods near his home collecting shrapnel, insects, small animal bones from owl pellets, match-box labels and cigarette packets. At school in the 1950s, he discovered Picasso and Kurt Schwitters, ‘collage’ and ‘matter’ painting and the writings of Samuel Beckett. He studied painting and printmaking at the Slade School in London. In 1964 he emigrated to Australia. In 1975 he returned to Kent. He now lives in London.

Paul Ramirez Jonas

(b. 1965) in Pomona California; raised in Pegucigalpa, Honduras. Lives and works in New York. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 1987-1989, Master in Fine Arts, Painting, Brown University, Providence, RI 1983-1987, Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art, Honors. Solo exhibitions include: Alexander Gray Associates, NY, New York (2009); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); ABRACADABRA: I create as I Speak, The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2007).

Sandra Selig

… lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland. Selected Solo Exhibitions include: in 2009 waves depend on us (light from Tokyo), Milani Gallery, Brisbane; in 2008 invisible surround, Milani Gallery, Brisbane; and surface of change, 2007, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Selected Group Exhibitions: 2010 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Before and After Science, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; in 2008 In the Space of Elsewhere, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London; new 08, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Handle with Care: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and, Abstraction, Architecture, Space, RMIT Project Space + Spare Room, Melbourne.

Johannes S Sistermanns

… (b.1955, lives Bornheim/Cologne, Germany) stages his composition as multi channel electroacoustics, soundplastic, radiophonic soundart, new music theatre and soundimage cityspace. From 1976-84 he studied at the Musikhochschule Köln subjects as ‘Piano’, ‘Rhythmik’ and ‘New Music Theatre’ with Mauricio Kagel. Performances, exhibitions, lectures and fellowships took him to Japan, VR China, Australia and the USA. Sistermanns has been performed at many venues and international festivals, including Knitting Factory 1995, Melbourne Festival 1997, Worldexhibition EXPO 2000 Hannover, Adelaide Festival 2000, Germany in Japan Festival 2005, Donaueschinger Musiktage 1996/1999/2005, ISCM World New Music Days Stuttgart 2006 / Sydney 2010, Electroacoustic Festival Shanghai 2006. 2004/2006 he was lecturer at the ‘International Summercourses’ in Darmstadt, Germany. www.sistermanns.eu

Jason Sweeney

… continues to search for ways of working/living as an artist in Australia – finding cross-art approaches to making/creating. He looks for a peculiarity in the world and hones in on it, something which defines the practice: it is unnameable; it is a queer thing; it refuses to be held down; it is a shape-shifter; it embraces cultural diversity; it is not about a specific language but rather about a language unknown, a language to be found through code, random sonic transmissions, chasing the signal, gestural signs, a simple embrace. Driven by filmic and audible fragments, various spaces are entered; despite fear. Some discourse, some off-course. At a time when art-making in Australia is necessarily responsive to political unrest or uncertainty. At a time when art and activism possibly blur. At a time when time is running out. Jason Sweeney is a sound artist, musician, composer, filmmaker, web nerd + performance wrangler. He records music under the guise Panoptique Electrical. His electronic music duo, Pretty Boy Crossover has been releasing albums since 1998. In 2009 he undertook a major sound commission for the work with Belgian dance company, SOIT, which premiered in Europe in 2009. He was artist in residence at Nadine (Brussels) in September 2009. He has an ongoing creative collaboration with writer/researcher, Fiona Sprott – currently developing the dark comedy web series ‘Download The Dead’ – www.downloadthedead.net. His unreasonable films/videos are at www.unreasonablefilms.com and ubiquitous sounds at www.soundslikesweeney.com.