Swing

Play and architecture collide in Lydia Wegner’s second solo show at ARC ONE Gallery, Swing. Opening drinks will be held on Thursday 16 March, 6-8pm.
Lydia Wegner’s latest photographic experiments in the studio reveal a joyful manipulation of everyday materials and light. Stepping away from her earlier photographs of recognisable objects poised before the camera, in Swing Wegner positions her props under tinted flashlights and refocuses our gaze on vibrant geometric shapes, shadows, sheens and textures, with striking tonal effects. Highly composed yet transitory, her sculptural studies gently balance between abstraction and reality, now hanging as lively photographs in their bespoke frames.
Swing combines the artist’s intuitive approach to assembling her delicate constructions with physical sites of play, such as community playgrounds. Taking inspiration from shiny slippery dips, angular seesaws and undulating swings, Wegner echoes these functional and cheerful forms with jagged steps of colour, rippling papers and ricocheting light.
With the introduction of pastel-toned park benches in the gallery, she emulates public architecture and further evokes a sense of recreational space and activity, welcoming visitors to sit and interact within her own space of diversion. Continually bouncing between sculptural and photographic practices in an exploration of the abstract and the known, in Swing Wegner activates fields of energy and colour in a celebration of the pleasure of play.
Lydia Wegner graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Honours, from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Silver Shadow, Bus Projects, 2016; Assemble Colour, ARC ONE Gallery, 2014; and Folded Colour, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2013. Group exhibitions include: In the White Square, ARC ONE Gallery, 2016; Is/Is Not, Westspace, 2016; Genteel Notions, LON Gallery, 2016; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013- 14; Das Boot, Next Wave, 2014; Fundraiser Exhibition, Centre of Contemporary Photography, 2013; Low Relief, Seventh Gallery, 2012; FotoFreo (Fremantle Festival of Photography), FutureGen12, Fremantle, 2012; and Art of the Ordinary, ARC ONE Gallery, 2011. She was a Finalist in the 2016 & 2015 Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award, and was a Finalist in the 2015 churchie national emerging art prize. In 2010, she was a Finalist in the Wallara Travelling Scholarship Prize, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, and in 2013 she was a Finalist in the Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Scholarship Prize. Wegner was also awarded a Hill End Artist Residency through Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2013. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and Artbank.