Lure of Memory

Opening launch: Wednesday 13 November, 6–8PM

Andrew Duong
Bella Deary
Ella Rizzi
Felix Oliver
Judy Kong
Raisa Mclean
Rebecca Suares-Jury

Lure of Memory presents works from seven local artists, who individually explore the fluidity and embodiment of kinship, love, loss and intimacy.

The exhibition forms an interconnected tapestry of painting, photography, film and performance revealing personal narratives that explore the delicate balance of absence and presence.

Judy Kong’s Missing Pieces is a poignant video installation that traverses the voids within a displaced family story, evoking a vulnerable yearning for intimacy in the face of isolation. In Crushed (You’re My Favourite Song), Raisa McLean transforms plywood and cloth tape into visual love songs, merging personal memories into a collage that resonates with open-ended storytelling.

Bella Deary’s Dancing with my Dad II captures fluid movements that echo the rhythms of water, rekindling familial bonds during moments of environmental and emotional crisis. Felix Oliver’s photographs delve into the nature of memory, portraying submerged figures that navigate the complexities of connection and loss.

Ella Rizzi and Andrew Duong explore identity through personal archives and familial legacies, while Rebecca Suares-Jury’s Floating Garden blurs the boundaries between ornamentation and abstraction, encouraging reflection on beauty in our everyday lives.

Together, Lure of Memory intertwines personal narratives, intuitive gestures, fragmented imagery and repetitive mark-making, inviting us to consider how we feel, what we remember, and how we reflect on our physical and poetic experiences.

Image Credit: Judy Kong, Sit still, moving image (still), 2023.

View Room Sheet Here

Documentation: Kim Sachs

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Andrew Duong is driven by his perspective as a second-generation Cambodian. His work focuses on paying homage to family and his intergenerational cultural lineage. It is through this process that Andrew creates paintings by piecing together family stories, historical footage, mass media, photographs and text.

Andrew studied Visual Arts (Honours) at Monash University. He is the co-founder of a community-focused arts organisation, Connection Arts Space in Dandenong, Victoria.

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Bella Deary is a Meanjin/Brisbane based visual artist and PhD candidate who champions eco-centric strategies and art-science collaboration. Her practice which is installation-based, predominantly comprising latex sculptures and video projection, is provoked by themes of interspecies entanglement.

Bella is the recipient of an Australian Government RTP Scholarship (2021-ongoing); the 2021 Hilde Chenhall Memorial Scholarship; and the 2020 Milani Family Art Prize. She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and in Finland. She is also the co-director of Nextdoor ARI.

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Ella Rizzi’s work is an intimate recollection and rediscovery of herself, her past, and her heritage. Through oil painting, Ella portrays blurred and fragmented imagery to replicate the impact caused by the loss of memories, generations, and family lineages – portraying an incomplete recollection of the past. Using reference imagery from landmarks in her personal family history, significantly in Northern Italy, Ella’s work reflects the impossibility of piecing together an already-broken past.

Living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Ella has undertaken a Diploma in Visual Arts from RMIT, Melbourne and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts.

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Judy Kong is a multimedia artist, born in Hong Kong and based in Naarm/Melbourne. Driven by an obsession with light and colour, Judy’s spacial practice weaves personal narrative with video, installation, sound and poetry to create an experience that transmits authentic emotions, sentiment and subjective sorrow or lament.

Judy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from RMIT University. Recent exhibitions include: Unpacking, Hong Kong Art Centre, Hong Kong, 2024; Intersection, Testing Grounds, Melbourne, 2024; and The very very very Last Day, First Site Gallery, Melbourne, 2023.

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Centred through loss, memory, and ownership, Felix Oliver examines relations between the constructed nature of ideas, symbols and rules. Through orchestrated photography, Felix considers what occurs when shifts are made; navigating the fluidity of despair, support and release. He captures conversations of gesture between his subjects; embodying the experience of holding on tightly while observing memory shifts both distorting and fleeting.

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Raisa Mclean is an emerging artist working from her home studio in Naarm/Melbourne. Through a process of visual song making, Raisa uses the literary practices of auto-fiction and auto-theory as a conceptual approach to explore landscapes of intimacy, loss, love, and memory. Using wire, embroidery, duct taped etchings and collage, her practice links disparate materials through a repetition of written and visual motifs. This process of concealing and revealing narratives is viewed through a lens of queerness and Raisa’s personal childhood experiences as a first generation Australian with Siberian heritage.

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Rebecca Suares-Jury is a painter, living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Her process led practice presents an imagined space of motif and colour, through intuitive painted gestures. Often referencing textiles and ornamentation from her Indian heritage, her work seeks to create physical and poetic experiences that are difficult to articulate and are enigmatic in nature.

Rebecca completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include Falling Without Weight, Blindside ARI, 2024; and Indoor Yachting she curated at VCA Artspace. She has also exhibited in group shows at TCB Gallery and Footscray Community Arts Centre.