For this first major solo exhibition at Vessel, Boorloo/Perth-born and now Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Gian Manik will collaborate with students from eight local primary schools to create a suite of large-scale paintings reflecting on ideas of place. Created in collaboration with over 250 children from eight primary schools in and near the Walyalup/Fremantle area, the work is a reflection upon ideas of environment and place, encompassing deep time thinking, contemporary contexts and speculative visions for the future.
This living, breathing time capsule is a generous, experimental conversation between the artist and local community.
Focusing on intergenerational skill-sharing and exchange as well as audience and community development; Manik’s exhibition is a pertinent and poetic response to environmental issues and experimental approach to painting, both in practice and presentation.
Gian Manik is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, who was born and raised in Boorloo/Perth. His dextrous approach to image-making is characterised by an irreverence for genre and driven by a compulsion to paint. Interested in undermining the colonial properties arming the buttresses of historical painting, Manik complicates tradition through the representation of symbolically multivalent and tangential subjects.
Gian’s major exhibition at Vessel mirrors many of the values and principles of the organisation, including a commitment to collaboration, platforming diverse perspectives, embracing experimentation, and a belief in the critical importance of lifelong development and learning.
Gian Manik is represented by Sutton Gallery.
