Feast your eyes on the visual arts

From abstract to multi-media and photography, Melbourne Fringe invades high culture with an abundance of visual art on offer. Setting up shop across the city, festival-goers will have the chance to see some of the most original and exciting pieces of contemporary art with themes focusing on death, nature, everyday space and even climate change, to name a few.

We give you the low down on the shows ArtsHub will be seeing.

Aqueous
Talented abstract artist Richard Valeros takes his work to new heights with his highly anticipated of one of nature’s elements - Aqueous. Drawing inspiration from the raw beauty of nature, Valeros inflicts his abstract vision on the canvas to conjure a sense of isolation and depth.

Climate Cycles
From the canvas to the computer, see how differently nature can be imagined in Climate Cycles, a computer generated animation to be installed at two different venues for the festival, Friends of the Earth Food Co-op (Collingwood) and Rue de Fleurus Bar (Fitzroy). The project interprets a historical climate database by using scientific and visual arts techniques.

Pixelated, retro graphics are generated using a computer code and mathematical geometry to create visual sequences that represent warm or cool climatic periods over the ages. Interspersed between these sequences is a visual portrait of the data locations across the planet that shows the spatial variation in climate for each year of data. Generated using 4000 years of data, this animation gives a unique visual rhythm both spatially and temporally to the history of the Earth’s condition.

Good Mourning
Dying is the most inevitable thing in life, and Good Mourning explores grief, aging and our relation to expiration in humans and animals. Images of deceased pets combined with found objects generate installations displayed with photography and funeral music. In tandem with this morbid exhibition, artist Alicia Bee will be launching ‘The Book of The Dead and Wounded’, a collection of poems, on Sunday 2 October.

Lost in transit
The young people of Castlemaine, Hobsons Bay, and St Albans have banded together to create a multi-media installation. Working with experienced media artists they have translated themes of transition into photography, animation, video, text and sound. Themes of travel, change, losing, finding, are on display in an installation at the amazing Substation, Newport.

Two Minute Affair(s)
The virtual space that we consume and exist in everyday (you’re doing it now), transforms and evolves who we are pixel by pixel and bit by byte. Identities become confused when the intricacies of our lives are only one click away on the Internet. 'Two-Minute Affair(s)' are a series of performative videos by Melbourne-based photo-media artist Nikki Lam that explore the self in the digital age. From the streets of Melbourne to the trains in Hong Kong, Lam’s anonymous character communicates through electronic devices, pushing the boundaries of the ownership of 'space', both virtually and realistically.

Showing at the Melbourne Propaganda Window as night falls from 27th September to 15th October, Two-Minute Affair(s) will be projected onto the large outdoor windows of Michael Koro Galleries in Melbourne CBD.

For a full schedule of visual arts offering at Melbourne Fringe check out their website.

Head to our Melbourne Fringe mini-site for profile and review updates during the festival.

Yarra Sculpture Gallery will host Mixed Media Scultpure from 3 Exciting New Artists as part of Melbourne Fringe 2011– check out a tour of the gallery below