3 x 3: Ruth Howard, Miles Howard-Wilks & Amani Tia at Arts Project Australia
3 x 3 presents three solo shows by Arts Project Australia studio artists Ruth Howard, Miles Howard-Wilks and Amani Tia. Ruth Howard will display a collection of her recent works on paper and ceramics, depicting wild animals and organic matter in abstract form, and conjuring a unique elegance and beauty. Meanwhile, Miles Howard-Wilks will pursue his ongoing fascination of oceanic scenes and landscapes, gesturing towards a totalising perception of the dominant sites that contain our existence: earth and water.
Finally, for his second solo show, Amani Tia will present a series of portraits created from 2014 – 2017, combining a sense of homage combined with a desire to depict life in a realist, yet fluid, style. These will be accompanied by an ephemeral wall painting performance piece that Tia will draw and paint in the gallery on opening day, capturing fleeting moments as the visitors move through the space.
Opening: Saturday 15 September, 3-5pm
Opened by: Claire Watson, Senior Curator, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre
Dates: 15 September – 20 October
about the artists
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Ruth Howard
Ruth Howard is a multi-disciplinary artist working in small scale in the mediums of painting and ceramics. Her minimalist paintings often portray a single object on a flat plane, while her sculptures depict wild animals or organic matter in abstract form – from amphibians to insects and birds. Her dedication to this theme has enabled her to refine her idiosyncratic, bold style to quirky levels of elegance and beauty. Her ceramic creatures and sculptures appear as if newly formed directly from the earth or sea. Ruth Howard has worked in the Arts Project studio since 1998, and held her first solo show at Arts Project Australia in 2015. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Spring 1883, The Establishment, Sydney; Turning the Page, Gallery 101, Ontario, Canada; Hybrid Making – new work from Australia, Canada and Scotland, Project Ability Gallery, Scotland; and Face-Up, Idiom Studio, Wellington, New Zealand.
Miles Howard-Wilks
Miles Howard-Wilks is a multi disciplinary-artist, specialising in painting, ceramics, photography and digital art. Thematically his practice is distinctly Australian, featuring landscapes and seascapes with recurring motifs of iconic animals, landmarks and transport. While the imagery in 2D work often combines several themes in one complex vision, Howard-Wilks is singular in his focus, creating detailed compositions featuring trams, magpies and reptiles and their eggs and bones with character and elegance. Miles Howard-Wilks has worked in the studio at Arts Project Australia since 2000. Solo exhibitions include Sharks and Everything, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2004; and My solo with a magpie in it, West Space, Melbourne, 2015. His work is held in collection at National Gallery of Australia (NGA), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), City of Melbourne, as well as in private collections throughout Australia.
Amani Tia
Amani has made a craft out of looking, and it’s his eyes that ultimately reach out toward the viewer through his portraits: through the eyes of each subject we sense the artist’s humility. Framed by this rare sincerity, his works are endowed with both a fragility and a strength. After a catastrophic moment in Amani’s life, and short-term memory loss, Amani lives in the moment, and his practice invests everything in capturing the immediacy and significance of the private and public moments of his subjects. He enjoyed early success in the appropriation of iconic paintings by some of the great masters, including Manet, Gauguin and Picasso. Tia was selected for the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2014, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, and the Belle Arti, Chapman and Bailey Gallery, Melbourne (2013) and has exhibited at Richmond Town Hall (2018), Yarra Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne (2014). In 2017 Tia undertook the Bundoora Nebula Residency at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre.
Image Below | Ruth Howard, Not titled, 2017, ceramic, earthenware, 15.5 x 15.5 x 2.
