The Digital Gallery: Objects

The Learning Space is proud to present the new work Objects by Melbourne-based artist collective, Tangere.

Working under the collective Tangere (to elicit emotion through touch), this collaboration comprises Rhys Cousins and Lucy Maddox. Working between art, design and architecture, the artists explore the convergence and intersection of their respective practices for new artistic and creative outcomes. 

Objects is a series of generative art videos created using images of Rhodes and the City of Canada Bay to bring a new perspective to the local area. Generative art is an emerging digital art form in which artists create work with the help of autonomous, algorithmic decisions made by computer programs. This process allows for the exploration of ideas, colours, forms, shapes, and patterns in a way that challenges traditional representational art.  

The videos are generated from photographs, both modern and historical, of the City of Canada Bay area. Through a series of programmed algorithms, they are transformed into textural, abstract digital 'objects' that seem to take up space and move within the screens themselves. The work aims to bring a colourful intensity to familiar spaces, and viewers can pause to consider these vivid new objects as reinterpretations of their local community.  

Rhys Cousins is a creative practitioner working across design, art, and landscape architecture, exploring new possibilities of experience as informed by materiality, space and light in traditional and non-traditional media in public/civic space.

Lucy Maddox is a visual artist working in a variety of modern and traditional mediums, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, and digital art. Her practice investigates the connection between contemporary and conventional concepts and methods, as well as the emotional associations made through touch. Both artists are exploring the possibilities of the emerging art movement of Generative Art to influence and develop their artistic outcomes and practice.

Objects runs from 17 May – 30 June 2021.

Image: production still Objects. Courtesy Tangere, 2021.