For the full program click here

Exhibitions open this week:

Monash Gallery of Art: 860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill
mga.org.au
9 March – 12 May
Opening Saturday 16 March 1:15pm Floor talk to be followed by official opening at 2:00pm. All welcome.
Free entry

Peter Dombrovskis (1945 – 1996) was one of the world’s foremost wilderness photographers. His powerful, reflective and deeply personal images of the unique Tasmanian landscapes had a lasting impact, changing the way Australians think about their environment by making remote nature accessible through images. Some of Dombrovskis’s photographs have been instrumental in the conservation of various Tasmanian wild places including the prevention of the damming of the Franklin River.

Peter Dombrovskis was born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1945 of Latvian parents. He emigrated to Australia in 1950 with his mother Adele and started taking photographs in the 1960s. He was strongly influenced by Lithuanian-Australian pioneer, conservationist and photographer Olegas Truchanas, who became a father figure to him. He was equally influenced by landscape photographers of mid-century America such as Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston and Eliot Porter.

In February 2003, Peter Dombrovskis was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, now in St Louis Missouri, United States of America. Peter is the first Australian to be accorded this honour, and one of only 58 people to be inducted over the roughly 200 year history of photography.

Presenting a vast sweep of the artist’s images, Dombrovskis: Journeys into the wild was initially developed by the National Library of Australia from their comprehensive collection of Dombrovskis’s work.

Artist: Peter Dombrovskis

Monash Gallery of Art: 860 Ferntree Gully Rd, Wheelers Hill
mga.org.au
9 March – 12 May
Opening Saturday 16 March 1:15pm Floor talk to be followed by official opening at 2:00pm. All welcome.
Free entry

Katrin Koenning’s exhibition Swell, is both beguiling and melancholy.
It sits as a contemporary response to the tradition of the environmental photography of the 1970s and 80s.

Avoiding expected tropes of disaster-imagery, Koenning’s recent work offers new narratives around the environment in order to focus on what is at stake and to decipher how humans and nature impact on each other.

Artist: Katrin Koenning
Curator: Pippa Milne

Bunjil Place Gallery: 2 Patrick Northeast Dve, Narre Warren
bunjilplace.com.au
10 March – 9 June
Opening Sunday 17 March at 3pm. All welcome.
Free entry

A Thousand Tides is a creative exploration of the fauna, flora and terrain of the local coast of Western Port Bay in Victoria, a significant and exhilarating environment of diverse and unique habitats that has long been celebrated by local, national and international enthusiasts, experts and their organisations.

UNESCO has recognised the Western Port Biosphere Reserve. The international RAMSAR Convention lists it as an ecologically important wetland site.

New work brings together observational as well as imaginary materials, resulting in imagery, forms and assemblages that the artist refers to as fictional hybrid biologies. Sequences of large wall drawings, fields of small sculptural objects, banks of works on paper, kinetic elements and sound recordings bring into focus biological features and spatial characteristics of this local bioregion, as well as elusive visual phenomena.

The project promotes the significance of this amazing biosphere, recognising it as a space for creative exploration, and as a realm worthy of everyone’s imagination and protection.

Artist: Vera Möller
Curator: Penny Teale