Bianca Hester
Bianca Hester
Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning
6 August – 26 September 2010
A major new work by Bianca Hester will see this influential Melbourne-based conceptual artist use ACCA’s main gallery as a sculptural prop – and a venue for her experimental, spatial playfulness.
Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning, will reinforce Hester’s ongoing interest in the way we negotiate architecture and space. The project will stage a series of encounters between spaces, materials, objects, forms and people.
However, nothing in Hester’s work is ever fixed, and she will also stage a series of actions, improvisations and what she calls ‘disruptions’ within the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. People will kick balls and camp out on the ACCA floor, cars will be wheeled in and out and a live horse will make its way through the space at regular intervals.
Working across installation, collaboration, writing, performance and video, Bianca Hester plays an important role in Melbourne’s art scene, not only with her conceptual arts practice but as an instrumental member of various artist-run spaces and communities.
As Co-ordinating Curator Charlotte Day says, “Outcomes from Bianca’s works are never settled in advance, but emerge through a series of encounters between the objects, materials, people and space. Her installations often change over the duration of the exhibition, accommodating additions and alterations, different spatial perspectives and events.”
For this exhibition, a major new work commissioned by ACCA, Hester will bring together several disparate elements – monumental, diminutive, structural and organic, light and heavy, built and found, human and non-human.
Bianca Hester has a PhD from RMIT, Melbourne and has a significant exhibition history both in Australia and internationally including at the CCP, Melbourne (2009), the Narrows, Melbourne (2009), Artspace, Sydney (2009), Showroom, London (2008), Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2007), and RMIT Project Space (2006).
She was one of the founding members of CLUBSproject Inc and is a current member of the collaborative group OSW with Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell. She is a Lecturer in Sculpture and Spatial Practice at Victorian College of the Arts
Bianca Hester is the sixth recipient of the Helen Macpherson Smith Commission, one of the most significant and generous commissions in Australia. The partnership between ACCA and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust offers Victorian artists the opportunity to create an ambitious new work of art, accompanied by an exhibition in ACCA’s exhibition hall.
Bianca Hester: Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning
6 August – 26 September 2010.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10am–5pm. Weekends 11am-6pm. Mondays by appointment. Tel: 03 9697 9999. Admission: Free. www.accaonline.org.au
For further media information: Katrina Hall on 03 9697 9999,
mobile 0421 153 046 or email khall@accaonline.org.au
