In 1991 Bob Hawke was Prime Minister of Australia, The Simpsons debuted on Channel 10, Boris Becker beat Ivan Lendl in the Australian Open Tennis Championship, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the web browser, Nirvana released Nevermind, and Stills Gallery opened its doors at 16 Elizabeth Street, Paddington. At the time Founder and Co-Director, Kathy Freedman announced “There’s a lot of very important and exciting work being done at present using photographic images. Stills will …

Group Exhibition Narelle Autio » Pat Brassington » Danica Chappell »

In Machinized, Kawita Vatanajyankur is a tool, a moving part in the machine. She transforms herself into food production equipment in performance videos that restage processes such as boxing eggs and weighing leafy greens. Like her previously celebrated works, this new series is graphic and glorious, sharing the same eye-catching allure that enamours us to ads. The confronting nature of her endurance performances, however, interrupts this seductive surface. The repetitive and …

‘Freshness’ has shifted from an organic state to an abstract, cultural sign. It’s become fluid and slippery: infusing feelings and atmosphere, products, architecture and design. Ever Fresh reflects on this global currency of ‘freshness’ through installations, videos, objects and images. It will temporarily transform the gallery into a futuristic, commercial utopia—resembling those that surround us with plastic plants, sparkling surfaces and …

In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills is proud to present one of the most exciting new contributors to Asian-Pacific video art, Thai-Australian Kawita Vatanajyankur, and her arresting new series Work (2015). Endurance art has rarely been so pretty. Alluring luminous yellows, citrus greens and bubblegum pinks are distinctive of the artist’s aesthetic—a visual language of consumption and desire that speaks to a world of instant gratification and flattened compl…

Each December Stills Gallery features a show of selected Stills artists. The theme for Season 2014 is continuity and divergence. There are twelve artists with a highly diverse range of practices that reflect both the history (of the gallery and of photography itself) and the diversity with which photography has developed in unprecedented ways over the last twenty years. Steven Lojewski’s series Populace was one of the first exhibitions at Stills when it began in 1991. The…

Back in 2010, The New York Times, critic David Colman wrote that the smart phone ‘self-snap’ was “so common that it is changing photography itself”. The artists in Totally Looks Like expand this idea, working with performance, objects, photo and video to consider the changing relationship between medium and maker. Jaimie Warren remakes images that she finds on popular Internet sites as self-portraits. In her series Totally Looks Like (wh…