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INNOVATORS 2 EXHIBITIONStrange Beauty27 April - 27 May 2006 Strange Beauty Images of an exquisitely rendered bat in ill-fitting super hero costume, a bear rambling through an Eden-like field of flowers, a curiously green volcano and a video evoking everyone's worst makeover nightmares are some of the artworks included in a new exhibition at Linden - Centre for Contemporary Arts. Titled Strange Beauty the exhibition explores the dark and enigmatic dimensions of beauty in the work of seven leading artists; Del Kathryn Barton, Sarah crowEST, Colin Duncan, Viv Miller, Jennifer Mills, James Morrison, and Charles Robb. Featuring a diverse range of media, Strange Beauty celebrates the disquieting undercurrents of contemporary beauty - ethereal, fantastic, dream-like imagery often commingled with the sensual or the abject. Highlights include: Del Kathryn Barton's opulent, complex, dazzlingly detailed paintings and soft sculpture. Sarah crowEST's richly ironic video work The joy of beauty in which a series of cartoon-like characters subject themselves to extreme beauty treatments where paper eyelids and lips are peeled and scratched away and flabby body parts erupt at the point of a needle. Colin Duncan's mysterious and inscrutable Lolly Pop Forest - an installation that fills an entire gallery wall with shifting hallucinatory fields of signs and shadows. Viv Miller's paintings that mingle sublime landscapes and intimate still lives with computer inspired graphics and cartoon-like flatness. James Morrison's jewel-like paintings of new worlds bursting with vivid detail and iridescent colour Jennifer Mills' delicately rendered bats in batman suits and goats in racing snoods combine creatures from the natural world with the costumes, cartoons and narratives of childhood. Charles Robb's eerie and marvellous grotesquely 'sliced' sculptural self-portraits. According to exhibition curator Melissa Keys the exhibition artists are: "united by an interest in fantastic or ethereal imagery, each creating dream-like imaginary worlds populated by strange uncanny animals, contorted bodies and constructed landscapes.Strange Beauty links each of the artists' unique visions, and takes via a shared aesthetic that has mesmeric, unsettling and enticing undercurrents." Linden Director Giacomina Pradolin says Strange Beauty, which is the second exhibition in Linden's Innovators Program, "provides opportunities for artists and curators to explore and test ideas and to exhibit new and recent work. Melissa Keys has brought together a group of thought provoking artists from across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to add to current debates about beauty in contemporary visual culture." For further information or images please contact
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