Linden New Art’s Winter Exhibitions

Domain House is the unassuming venue that is surrounded by lush green lawn, mere metres from the Tan running track and beyond that, the picturesque Royal Botanic Gardens. It is now the temporary home to Linden New Art and their latest contemporary art installations, Avian Interplanetary by Sam Leach and The Opposite of Wild by Kylie Stillman. Milk Bar Mag checked out the two stunning exhibitions, which are open to the public till Sunday, 6 August. 

Sam Leach’s Avian Interplanetary combines art history, science and philosophy rhetoric in his journey to decipher the relationship between humans and animals, and envisioning the future. His solo exhibition proposes what a future habitat may look like, taking into account the needs of non-humans and humans alike. And what would a galaxy-spanning civilisation actually look like? Serving as the backdrop of a possible world is a grey, cratered landscape, which is taken from detailed images of asteroid surfaces. Beginning on the floor, it spans half the room before finally ascending ‘into space’. Filling the asteroid plain is Leach’s Polyphemus, a bright-pink sculpture made from oil on steel, laser-cut aluminium and parabolic plexiglass mirrors. 

Leach’s foray into astro-art is nothing new – he featured in Time Space Existence in 2015, and recently attained a PhD focusing on the genre of science imagery in visual art in both historical and contemporary contexts. The 2010 Archibald Prize Winner explains that Avian Interplanetary is a ‘visual representation’ of what space could look like if habited by humans and captures the silence in living in space. 

Kylie Stillman’s The Opposite of Wild is in-tune with worldly possessions, creating one of her largest book sculptures to date. Consisting of hundreds of unwanted paperback books, cheap reads, and airport fiction titles, Stillman’s three sculptures are treated as different canvases where she experiments with alternate mediums and plays with pigmentation without using ink or paint. Local Branch is undoubtedly her most impressive piece, comprising three saw horses and a plank of timber. Upon that timber rests a stack of books which have been put together en masse; each page is carved with a scalpel, allowing Stillman to work with the unique qualities of each book. 

The two exhibitions provide a response to our fascination with space and our need to understand the world around us. Just a short walk from Jardin Tan, Linden New Art’s Domain House is definitely worth checking out. 

Linden New Art  
Domain House, Dallas Brooke Drive, South Yarra
Open Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 4pm, Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 5pm
lindenarts.org