Opening Friday 26 May | 6:30pm | Free | Exhibitions Run Saturday 27 May – Sunday 16 July

Art lovers will be generously rewarded at Fremantle Arts Centre’s winter exhibitions which span elegant painting by revered Fremantle realist Marcus Beilby; otherworldly fleshy figures by internationally acclaimed artist Jess Johnson; the in-your-face, street-inspired style of local duo Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty; and a diverse showcase of contemporary Australian video art.

FAC partners with the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, one of Australia’s best independent cinema festivals, for the first time to present Warp, a selection of video works by eight leading and emerging artists from Western Australia and Victoria. The videos in Warp reflect on the tension between life experienced online and life led in the real world. For some individuals it is the real world that becomes alien after huge hours in front of a screen absorbed in the digital world. An eerie lack of tangibility in the online domain permeates and entangles ‘real world’ activities, as both arenas feed on each other in continually expanding, provocative and warped ways.

Curated by Amy Majoram (VIC), Warp artists Tom Blake (WA), Ellen Broadhurst (WA), Dale Buckley (WA), Lou Hubbard (VIC), Georgie Mattingley (VIC), Michael Meneghetti (VIC), Georgie Roxby Smith (VIC) and Andrew Varano (WA) have been selected for their unconventional use of the medium.

FAC Director Jim Cathcart said: “One of FAC’s priorities is to provide a platform for artists and foster conversations about how we make art in WA, and nationally. Revelation has an unmatched reputation for presenting fascinating works that are thrillingly inventive and subversive. They’re constantly expanding the potential of what screen-based media can do and we’re excited to be partnering with them.”

Claire Robertson, Far From Here (detail), 2016, still from video. Image courtesy of the artist

As a counterpoint Claire Robertson’s (VIC) stunning cinematic video Far From Here, vast in scale and scope but rooted in place and memory, portrays her return to the remains of the temporary Pilbara mining camp her family called home in the 1980s. Elegantly shot with a haunting sound design by acclaimed WA composer Tilman Robinson, Far From Here examines a colonialist relationship to the WA landscape and asks what it means to really “inhabit place”. Far From Here was originally developed for Next Wave Festival 2016, Melbourne.

Currently showing at Carriageworks as part Sydney’s landmark The National: New Australian Art, New York-based artist Jess Johnson (NZ/US) brings her gorgeously drawn world to FAC in her first WA show.

For Hex Nemesis, Johnson will transform FAC’s gallery with a floor-to-ceiling installation, rich with impossible architecture and an abundance of humanoid figures. The exhibition also features the artist’s video work and a suite of drawings as she invites audiences into her mind-bending alternative reality.

Internationally collected and exhibited and scheduled to show at Dark Mofo 2017, Hobart, Johnson is an exciting force in the global art world.

Jess Johnson, Municipal Wurm and Sapir-Whorf, 2015, gouache, pen, fibre-tipped markers on paper, 43.8 x 33.8cm. Private collection, Melbourne. Images courtesy and copyright of the artist

We celebrate a career spanning four decades in Marcus Beilby’s Sightings. The highly regarded Fremantle realist painter portrays intimate moments of ordinary people in the familiar settings of the local shop, railway station and pub. Sightings offers a particular representation of Fremantle life and architecture from the late 1970s to now, articulated through Beilby’s ironic gaze. Sightings is curated by City of Fremantle Art Collection Curator André Lipscombe.

Finally, One street from happiness sees WA urban artists Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty continue to explore the culture of Perth’s northern suburbs and the collision of graffiti culture and contemporary art. Featuring experimental prints and paintings with raw, aggressive and sometimes sad symbols, the works reflect on Bly and Doherty’s time as graffiti artists in Craigie, as they look back on a history that is fast being sanitised.

FAC’s winter 2017 exhibitions will be opened by Jack Sargeant, Program Director, Revelation Perth International Film Festival.

For media enquiries contact Communications Assistant Sam Leung  at [email protected] or 08 9432 9565.