Mark Moore Fine Art
Sydney Contemporary 2015

Sydney Contemporary, Australasia's International Art Fair, returns in 2015 from September 10-13 (Opening Night on September 10th) with over 70 leading galleries from around the Pacific Rim and beyond. For the first time, the gallery will participate in a video-focused section of the fair with available works by Josh Azzarella and Allison Schulnik.

Housed once again in Carriageworks, Sydney's striking contemporary arts precinct, the Fair has an expanded footprint with seven exhibition spaces offering visitors access to cutting-edge art from some of the world's most respected established artists as well as the opportunity to discover new emerging artists. Azzarella and Schulnik will be showcased in the video section of the fair, and were also the only two video artists from America to be featured in the 62nd Sydney Film Festival. Artists from around the globe had their works displayed in the free-access Festival Hub, giving guests a close look at many different perspectives from artists at the forefront of their field.

Josh Azzarella (b. 1978, Ohio) creates videos and photographs that explore the power of context in the authorship of memory, oftentimes utilizing seminal moments in pop culture and news media to create accessible confrontations with historiography. By illuminating the individual encounter with communal experiences, Azzarella evaluates the perception of realness – which can ultimately be rooted in both the fantastic as much as the pragmatic.

Azzarella was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and related solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT). He has previously shown at the California Museum of Photography (CA), University Art Museum, Long Beach (CA), Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), Kavi Gupta Gallery (IL), Academie der Kunste (Berlin), Sean Kelly Gallery (NY), Catharine Clark Gallery (CA), Mississippi State University (MS), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA) and DCKT Gallery (NY). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX), the San Diego Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Margulies Collection (FL), Western Bridge (WA) and JP Morgan Chase (NY). He lives and works in Easton, PA.

Allison Schulnik choreographs her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre, a Shakespearian comedy/tragedy of love, death and farce. The subjects often stare back at the audience and study them as they are in turn studied, aware of their ancestors from the Grand Theme works of the past, the genre paintings that inform them. Although a haunting sense of foreboding, discomfort and unease is palpable, a sense of understanding, compassion and hopefulness for her cast of characters is still evident in the heavy impasto paintings. Her sculptural use of oil paint references her clay-animation background, as a motion-like sensibility affords her paintings unparalleled depth and energy.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had solo exhibitions at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OK), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Rokeby Gallery (London), Unosunove Arte Contemporanea (Rome), Division Gallery (Montreal), and ZieherSmith Gallery (NY), in addition to her inclusion in film festivals around the world. Her work has also been shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Hammer Museum (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), and Hangar-7 (Salzburg), among many others. Allison Schulnik's work is in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), Farnsworth Art Museum (ME), Laguna Art Museum (CA), Montreal Contemporary Art Museum (Canada), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (CT), and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Fair previews will be available after September 1st, by request. For additional information about special events, fair access, day passes, and featured artists, please email info@markmooregallery.com.