Footscray Community Arts presents BRIGHT

Footscray Community Arts presents Bright – a joyful art exhibition that ignites the senses, inviting audiences to touch, explore and connect from 10 October to 12 December 2023.

The exhibition’s radical curatorial process brings together five installations without a defined beginning or end, each beckoning the art lover to interact with the work and contribute their own meaning. Aligning with Spring, Bright encourages renewal through sensory, playful and performative experiences.

Bright is an outcome of Footscray Community Art’s Artlife Studio Residency Program for emerging and established artists with disabilities.

“Our ArtLife Studio Residency program is unique in the Australian arts landscape. With hands-on support from the Footscray Community Arts team, this is NDIS enabled program provides contemporary artists with lived experience of disability with the space, resources and networks to set and achieve ambitious artistic projects,” said Daniel Santangeli, Artistic Director and Co-CEO of Footscray Community Arts.

Bright supports Artlife Studio artist and curator, Pamela Debrincat to have a major outcome in line with her artistic goal – to curate art exhibitions that are accessible and make people feel more connected. Drawing on her lived experience of isolation within the mainstream contemporary art industry, Pamela prioritises sensory exploration in her curatorial work to facilitate a greater connection between the audience and the artist.

Providing a flowing, silky textural welcome to the exhibition is artist Darren Aquilina‘s work, which explores emotion through colour and invites the public to touch it as they walk through it.

Megan Hunter‘s work is a large inflatable hammerhead that requests a search for hidden creatures within her vibrant artwork. Emily Floyd‘s sculpture sits in conversation with Megan’s work, drawing our attention to the waterways we depend on and the beings that live there. This work encourages a sense of consciousness of what is around us, even if we cannot always see it.

Where science meets art, Thomas Miller‘s Reflection Portal offers us the opportunity to see ourselves through new and different perspectives as we journey through the expanded line drawing, which merges different patterns of reflecting light.

Portable Quiet Room, by Prue Stevenson, offers a space to process the high sensory aspects of the exhibition. It invites touch and has a softness that evokes safety, warmth and quiet.

“I want the sense of touch to be at the front of my exhibitions. I’ve been at exhibitions where you cannot touch the work. I want to create exhibitions that are easy to connect with through sensory experience. You can create your own end and beginning and visitors decide this… that interaction is their own,” said Pamela Debrincat.