‘If I Had the World to Give’ brings together the work of Lilly Kaiser, Woody Mellor, Andrew and David Wood. For this exhibition of new work, each artist has been working in response to an artwork they made as children. Really, the group wanted to put on a sort of absurd museum retrospective, one they’ll never have.
The group initially set one another this simple, sentimental task as a timely antidote. However, it equally stood as an invitation to re-evaluate how they contextualise their work, how it’s shown, and for whom they make it. Will their audiences forever be the usual suspects found wandering an independent gallery? Or, if only in their imagination, could they be the diverse and differently discerning visitors of an art museum— families, school groups, tourists, art professionals and even the self- professed novice—and if so, how might they approach things differently?
By not getting too hung up on the ideas that often underpin their exhibitions, the artists are using this as an opportunity to have some fun and reconsider the function of the exhibition itself, gallery education and the culture that surrounds contemporary art.
Focusing on the interdisciplinary use of drawing, painting, and audience participation, Lilly Kaiser considers the fluidity of boundaries, playing on relationships found within our everyday life. Drawing from this, Kaiser is particularly interested in the ideas of intimacy, tension, play and the use of non-verbal language as a device for communication and representation of information. Lilly Kaiser lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.
Woody Mellor is a multidisciplinary artist who currently lives and works in Perth, Australia. In 2012, Woody graduated with honours from Curtin School of Fine Art, and in 2016 he completed a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. Drawing explicitly from a wide range of influences — stage traditions, Australian folklore, literature, opera and popular film — Woody connects seemingly unrelated events and coincidences, as he weaves pop-references and personal histories into an elaborate web of new and known.
Living between Melbourne and London, the Wood brothers (Andrew and David Wood) are multidisciplinary artists and have worked together for the past ten years. With a non-linear thought process guiding their practice, they work across a variety of mediums. Watercolour paintings & charcoal drawings lead to computer run simulations, while complex inflatable structures are developed in response to epic poems and NASA ‘re-entry systems’. Their work continues to grow somewhere between the disciplines of art and architecture, pursuing concepts of memory and the fragile balance between preservation and loss, fiction and history.