MINI MUSIC ADVENTURERS

Introduce your little ones to the marvellous world of music in a disco
drumming adventure that is imaginative and hands on, embracing sensory learning elements, movement and play.

Set within John Prince Siddon’s major new solo exhibition at Cement Fondu, Disco Dreamtime Drums, we’re excited to welcome Amelia Murray-Long and Leah Bokey-Grant from Mini Music Adventurers to host a drumming and disco-themed kids workshop on Saturday 13 April from 2-3pm. Expect lots of fun as you adventure into the world of beats and rhythm whilst listening to and playing music, dancing and singing, and getting up close with feature instruments.

Each Mini Music Adventurers Class is designed and written by Amelia and Leah, both mums of little ones and classically trained, tertiary qualified musicians from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Amelia completed her Bachelor of Music (Hons Class 1) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music majoring in oboe performance. She has taught oboe at high schools around Sydney, and has also taught piano privately. As well as her Mini Music Adventurers classes, Amelia currently teaches music classes at a primary school. After her music studies, Amelia went on to obtain a Juris Doctor from Sydney University and become a lawyer. Amelia is also an accredited mediator. Amelia is passionate about providing accessible music education to children of all ages.

Leah completed her Bachelor of Music Studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music majoring in Violin. Leah has taught violin privately and played at numerous private special events as a violinist. Leah went on to complete a Masters in Occupational Therapy and has many years’ experience working in roles as an occupational therapist supporting children and their families in the community. Leah is passionate about bringing the joy of classical music to our next generation of kids and their parents, knowing the formative social, emotional and cognitive benefits that exposure to music has for the developing child.

Free RSVP here.

DISCO DREAMTIME DRUMS | EXHIBITION LAUNCH + ARTIST TALK

Please join us on Saturday 16 March from 5pm for the launch of Disco Dreamtime Drums, the brand new solo exhibition by Walmajarri artist, John Prince Siddon. At 5pm, the program kicks off with an artist talk between Siddon and guest curator Emilia Galatis, followed by a Welcome to Country and launch proceedings.

This is the artist’s first major solo in a public gallery in NSW, and will centre significant new sculptural installation, paintings, wallpaper and lightwork. The new commission works were created during and in response to the disastrous flooding in Fitzroy Crossing in 2023 that affected the artist and his community.

This major new commission at Cement Fondu offers Siddon the opportunity to create his largest ever installation to date, which will feature painted and embellished water barrels, his first foray into light and sound work, and an ambitious expansion of his signature painting style that mixes traditional and unconventional materials.

PERFORMANCE | MAXWELL ‘THVFLOOD’ DOUGLAS

Join us on Saturday 23 March as creator and lead choreographer/composer of Flood Dance and Music, Maxwell ‘ThvFlood’ Douglas presents a new solo dance performance at Cement Fondu in his signature distorted dance style set to Flood beats.

A harsh decade of unsettling factors in Brisbane’s far west has set in motion the blooming of a new style of movement; Flooding. A local dance style originating from Ipswich, QLD Australia as a response to the 2011 Floods and Australian suburban lifestyle.

Flooding embodies distorted and grotesque characteristics that have grown from these experiences. A beautiful response to the trigger of challenging times.

Embark on a journey from the grotesque reality of Ipswich’s floodplains to the elegant possibility of movement in the context of John Prince Siddon’s brand new major solo exhibition, Disco Dreamtime Drums, in which newly commissioned works were created during the climate catastrophe of the Fitzroy Crossing floods.

PROJECT SPACE | THEA ANAMARA PERKINS

For our first Project Space of 2024, we’re excited to present newly commissioned and recent works by Thea Anamara Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist whose practice incorporates portraiture and landscape to  question representations of First Nations peoples and Country.

The striking combination of glowing landscape paintings of Country alongside protest-style posters that reprise the bold and iconic visual language of the 1980s, address heavy questions about what it means to be First Nations in contemporary Australia with a commitment to “strong and  ready communication”.

Perkins’ Project Space installation has been curated in conversation with the themes of the main gallery exhibition, Disco Dreamtime Drums by Walmajarri artist John Prince Siddon, which invokes the sombre reality and ongoing impacts of catastrophic flooding in his hometown of Fitzroy Crossing, WA, in 2023. Perkins’ series of screenprinted posters were made in collaboration with Town Camp artists in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) – the artist’s ancestral home – reflecting the community’s concerns relating to impending climate change, as well as fracking and mismanagement of precious water resources. These shared urgent concerns expose hard truths and an unwavering dedication to see greater collective care for Country and First Nations peoples.

Featuring a new Cement Fondu commissioned painting in conversation with the artist’s 2022 Wynne Prize finalist painting, Home, landscape paintings in the installation reflect Perkins’ ongoing excavation of her  family’s photographic archive, which provides consistent source material for her gestural and saturated depictions of Country. Represented in compositions that deliberately hone in on the essence of place, the works evoke feelings of comfort, glimmering with the familiar landscapes of Mparntwe across time.

Raised and based in Sydney, Perkins has family ties to the Redfern  community and has worked in a broad range of community projects. She was the recipient of the 2023 La Prairie Art Award, administered by The Art Gallery of NSW, and won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2021, and the Alice Prize & Dreaming Award in 2020.

PROJECT SPACE | MEAGAN PELHAM & STUDIO A

Since our launch in 2018, Cement Fondu has proudly partnered annually with Studio A, supporting their artists to create newly commissioned installations. In 2024, we’re thrilled to present Studio A artist Meagan Pelham in our Project Space alongside main gallery exhibition, TMI (Too Much Information).

Meagan is a multidisciplinary artist practicing in painting, poetry, drawing and performance. She was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Archibald Prize with her watercolour portrait Romance is LOVE, depicting friend and collaborator Anna Plunkett of the Australian fashion label Romance was Born.

Her handwritten poetry practice is expressive and intimate, a prophecy of beautiful things and moments manifested on paper. Her verses recount spellbinding reveries of dinner dates, romantic getaways and dancing with a loved one. Pelham’s love poetry was featured at Cementa Festival 2022.

PROJECT SPACE | JAYANTO TAN

Jayanto Tan will be presenting an exciting new commission installation in our Project Space alongside our 6th annual pairing exhibition, Rainbow Chan X Sin Wai Kin.
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Jayanto Tan is a Gadigal/Wangal-based visual artist who was born and raised in a small town in North Sumatra, Indonesia. His practice draws on his family history and diasporic background, blending Eastern and Western mythologies with the contemporary world and current events. Using ceramic sculptures, found objects, authentic food, performance and installation, his work often investigates how hybrid cultures can create new identities of possibility and hope.⁠
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JOHN PRINCE SIDDON | DISCO DREAMTIME DRUMS

In partnership with Mangkaja Arts Resource Centre, Disco Dreamtime
Drums is a new exhibition by Walmajarri artist John Prince Siddon,
featuring a suite of Cement Fondu commissioned artworks, including
a central drum installation, grid of 14 paintings, wallpaper and
lightworks. Guest-curated by Siddon’s long term collaborator,
Emilia Galatis, this is the artist’s first major solo exhibition in
New South Wales.

The majority of the artworks presented in Disco Dreamtime Drums
were created in 2023 during and in response to the disastrous
flooding in the artist’s home of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley
region of far north Western Australia. The flooding resulted in the
collapse of the town’s vital bridge along with the destruction of
numerous homes, gravely affecting the artist, his community and
wildlife in the area.

Reflecting on this time, the artist’s “darkest day”, this exhibition
marks a discernible shift in the tenor of his practice, which can
be observed between new works produced amidst these profoundly
challenging circumstances and his previous, more bombastic approach
that is evident in five earlier large-scale paintings encompassing
the space. Siddon’s new paintings – found both on canvases and
tin drums – primarily utilise an earthier palette and propose an
alternative, animistic hierarchy. While the artist’s celebrated
signature wit remains evident in incisive cultural observations
and a playful mix of the traditional and contemporary, his recent
departure reflects a deliberate invocation of a more somber reality
in which the impacts of natural disaster find his community in an
ongoing state of recovery.

A cornerstone of the exhibition, the painted fuel drums offer historical reference to the art ‘ready-made’ and to Siddon’s personal creative origins whereby he would paint on any material he could find, including boab nuts, skulls, boards, satellite dishes, coolamons and foraged wood pieces. Siddon’s incorporation of disused objects and relics from the Kimberley region formally echoes his celebrated ‘mixed up’ aesthetic, which converges past and present by diffusing Narrangkani iconography across pop culture references and imagery of the natural world.

Siddon’s ‘past life’ participating in rodeos is also commemorated
in this immersive installation of drums and mirror ball lighting,
evoking the travelling rodeos and accompanying discos that played
a key role in the social and cultural life of outback Australia when he was a young man. An ode to a wilder time and simultaneous nod to the dark side of colonial cattle stations that devastated Aboriginal communities, this work is indicative of the artist’s wry sense of humour and masterful capacity to collide and converge complexities and contradictions; mixing up the traditional and unconventional, personal and social, playful and political.

TMI (TOO MUCH INFORMATION)

Featuring seminal international artworks alongside five new Australian commissions, TMI [Too Much Information] explores how technologies shape and share our emotional lives, repeatedly re-drawing public and private boundaries. The exhibition celebrates art’s unique and urgent role in continuously examining our emotional and technological entanglements, critically reflecting the messy implications of mediating our innermost thoughts and feelings, identities and personal information.

From archival video work to new digital activations, the presented works explore how the cathartic and confessional possibilities of (over)sharing has evolved with technology to lure us more powerfully and trouble us profoundly.

Drawing on the tropes of love, romance and desire, and utilising the language and aesthetics of digital culture, the artists interweave real life and fiction, transforming intimate revelations into subject matter and artistic material. Centring digital confessions of their own, imagined avatars and other people, the works evoke the connective and distributive capabilities of new technologies, promising relief from disconnection and loneliness while inciting angst, ennui and emptiness.

Beyond humour and tenderness, the works offer critical reflections on the complex entanglement of our digitised public-private worlds, acknowledging new forms of communication, self- expression and -determination. They also warn that the mediation and datafication of emotional life raises urgent evolving concerns, particularly where our fantasies and failures are rendered subject to public scrutiny, the agendas of marketing, politics and capital and systemic biases of race and gender.

RAINBOW CHAN X SIN WAI KIN

For our 3rd exhibition of 2024 we’re proud to announce our 6th annual exhibition pairing of an early-career local artist with a celebrated international artist  – presenting Rainbow Chan X Sin Wai Kin. 

Together the artists will combine their passions for universe-building and speculative fiction transforming the Cement Fondu gallery with major new commissioned work by Chan and artworks by Sin Wai Kin previously not seen in Australia. Additionally, the two artists will devise a new and collaborative performance, developed across the UK and Australia, which will be performed live for Sydney audiences and made available for digital viewing.

A 2022 FINALIST in the Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) and Artist of the Year in the FBI SMAC awards, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is an interdisciplinary artist of Hong Kong-Chinese descent working across music production, performance and visual arts. Her practice engages with mistranslation, diaspora and the effects of globalisation on modern Chinese society with a current focus on traditional bridal laments through her ancestral ties to Weitou people, the first settlers of Hong Kong.

Sin Wai Kin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022 and their performances and works have been shown in major institutions, recently including Para Site, Hong Kong, Somerset House, London, ICA, Los Angeles, Guggenheim, New York, British Museum, ICA, London, Tank Museum, Shanghai, MOCA, Toronto, Hayward Gallery, London, 58th Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Serpentine Galleries, London.