SOFT EDGES

SOFT EDGES is a multimodal exhibition that reimagines road signs and streetscapes. It explores how objects that assert order and authority can be made tender, and transformed to tell different narratives from queer and femme perspectives. Rigid structures are softened, directions are complicated, frequencies are bent, and notions of friendship, gender and orientation are explored.

The exhibition combines the work of George Goodnow, Carla Zimbler, Aphir and DANDROGYNY, working across sculpture, video, sound and performance. They come together in a hi-vis, audio visual installation which promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and the importance of making space for nuance, emotion, cooperation and the uncomfortable within predominantly male dominated fields.

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George Goodnow is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Their practice incorporates painting, sculpture and the use salvaged materials to produce site-specific installations. By fabricating fictional architectures and objects, or adjusting existing architectures, George considers how spaces reflect, orientate and hold bodies. Recent work explores feelings of disorientation, binaries and queerness within suburban and urban landscapes. George has exhibited and produced public art installations around Australia and overseas, and has collaborated on projects with the Melbourne Fringe Festival, Art Not Apart, SIGNAL Arts, Juddy Roller and the Abbotsford Convent. They were the curator of Intermission Project at the Collingwood Yards in 2018, and are a curatorial advisor for Science Gallery Melbourne. Aphir is the electronic choral project of Becki Whitton, an engineer, songwriter and producer working out of Melbourne’s Rolling Stock Recording Rooms. Her approach in the studio balances focus and ease, and centres on a thirst to find the most powerful expression of a song’s emotional core. Her workflow translates across a range of genres from pop and hip hop (Allday, Memphis LK) to ambient and experimental music (Brambles, Rainbow Chan). Becki has received ARIA and AWMA nominations for her sound work, and has managed sound for Girls Rock! Camp ACT since the first Australian camp was launched in 2016. As Aphir, Becki has been hailed as part of ‘Australia’s new wave of female electronic innovators’ and has performed around Australia and internationally including performances at Music Tech Fest (Berlin), Denmark Arts (WA), and Falls Festival.

As a video artist, Carla Zimbler manipulates 3D animation to blur boundaries and distort fragments of the natural world to alter mood and trigger emotional response. Working between physical/digital environments, audiences are coaxed inside immersive spaces where sound-responsive visuals expand, contract and melt into darkness. Carla is interested in the growth and decay of visual noise and the digitalextrusion of organic material, in her live performances she bends and projection maps distorted manifestations and otherworldly environments across architectural curves and site-specific sculpture. Fixated on how bodies adapt and respond to spatial characteristics, Carla soaks and saturates space with colour and light to elevate the mundane. Carla has operated visuals for Dour Festival (Belgium), Distortion Festival (Denmark), LungA (Iceland), Field Day, Beyond The Valley, Festival X, VIVID and Sydney Opera House. Carla co-curated PACT Salon: SLURP!, launched ‘A Nice Warm Bath’ A/V Festival for Melbourne Music Week and co-founded Studio Tszuj where she has designed installations for ACMI, Mixcloud's Future Rising, Boiler Room Sydney, Red Bull Music Festival, Inner Varnika, Something Unlimited, Art Not Apart and Hybrid Festival.

Daniel Newell is dancer, maker, performance artist and graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. Cat-walking the fine-eyeliner of the pop cultural and political, Daniel’s work can be defined as creatively chaotic and cathartic, often outing itself as homo-erratic. Having performed in over twenty countries, highlights include working with ABC’s ‘You Can’t Ask That’, Melbourne Festival, Dance Massive, Arts House, Sydney Opera House, Bollywood Film, Strange Fruit Productions, Shelley Lasica, Deanne Butterworth, Rafael Bonachela and Kylie Minogue. Through dance and experimental performance art, Daniel has created solid prominence within so-called australia’s queer ecology with character DANDROGYNY.

sound and video credits

Sound - Aphir 
Track Names:
01 - emotional earner
02 - jelly gun 
03 - tropic of virgo 
04 - softie
05 - drone 
06 - light polluted her 
07 - melting cups 
08 - louveciennes 
09 - done perceiving 

Video - Carla Zimbler
Back wall - ‘M1’, video 
Street Sign - ‘M2’, video