Horsham gallery the place to be
Horsham Town Hall and Horsham Regional Art Gallery have announced a 2019 school holiday program full of performing and creative arts opportunities for children.
The town hall’s Handbury Education Centre will host a range of workshops covering everything from mono printing to dot render drawing, cooking to theatrical lighting.
The programs are aimed at children aged seven to 17.
The sessions will be between January 15 and 25, and cost $12 or $10 for Horsham Town Hall members.
The gallery has also opened a trio of new exhibitions ahead of the summer holidays.
A launch for the exhibitions, attended by about 60 people, was at the gallery on Friday night.
Gallery curator Michelle Mountain said the exhibitions – Interference Pattern, On a Tangent, and a collection of the gallery’s recent acquisitions – presented a unique variety of works by Australian artists.
“Interference Pattern is by a pair of artists called Vivian Cooper Smith and Rebecca Najdowski,” she said.
“They’ve created a massive installation of landscape photography where they play with the landscapes. Rebecca uses analog photography and pokes holes with pens through the negatives, or burns them, or cuts up the prints afterwards to disrupt our understanding of the landscape.
“Vivian uses digital photography and long exposures and multiple exposures to do the same. They’re coming from different points of view, but doing the same thing.”
On a Tangent features the works of seven artists – Catherine Bell, Minna Gilligan, Laresa Kosloff, Jesse Marlow, Alasdair Mcluckie, Michael GF Prior and Cathy Staughton.
“The exhibition is about how most creative works and creative practices benefit from going off on a tangent,” Ms Mountain said.
“It looks at the tangential forces on the work of different artists.
“Alasdair Mcluckie was doing a lot of beading at one stage, but at night he was going home and sketching a lot of biro pen drawings as a creative release.
“He never intended those to become artworks, but they have formed their own body of work.”
Ms Mountain said the gallery’s recent acquisitions exhibition contained many photographs by indigenous artists.
“Indigenous photography is part of the collection we’re very proud of and try to keep growing,” she said.
Smith and Najdowski gave a talk titled ‘Getting loose with landscape’ on Saturday, explaining how they created their artworks.
Ms Mountain said the talk was well received by attendees.
She said the gallery would run a folio starter course for Victorian Certificate of Education students from January 14 to 18.
The free course, which will be hosted by artist Minna Gilligan, will help 2019 VCE art students begin to create a folio.
At the conclusion of the course Ms Gilligan will host an art party, where students can make collages.
The three new exhibitions will continue until February 24.
People wanting more information on the exhibitions or the gallery’s summer program can visit website www.horshamtownhall.com.au/ horsham-regional-art-gallery or call 5382 9575.
People wanting to sign up for school holiday program workshops can visit website www.horshamtownhall. com.au/hthevent/school-holiday-program-2019.