AMBIANCE COLLECTIVE

Ambiance Collective Exhibiting Artists

Saud Alsaleh

Martina Cavanna

Sofia Menta

Phuong Nguyen Le

Jinyoung Park

Jiaxin (La La) Shi

Ruby Walker

Sharon (Xin) Xu

We're thrilled to announce our upcoming group show 'Crawl Space' will welcome its visitors starting Tuesday, 30 May!! And don't forget to join us on our opening celebration on Wednesday June 7th from 5-7pm. We can't wait to see you there!

Ambiance Collective acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which First Site resides on, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. Always was, always will be indigenous land.

Crawl Space features works from 8 emerging artists from Ambiance Collective, a collective formed through the Forms for Encounter and Exchange studio program led by Dr Marnie Badham and Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith. Composed of members from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, the collective examines what it means ‘to be here’, within the shared experience of sparking human connection through exploration of one’s root and rhizomes.

A crawl space is a dark, unoccupied, narrow space between the ground and first floors of a building, where there is typically only enough room to crawl rather than stand. Functioning as an access point to repairs and serving a protective buffer for toxic gas concentrations, Crawl Space captures this thematic of unearthing, holding space for each other's cultural and existential experiences to form an ambitious project that examines our collective generational histories. These take the forms of illuminating hidden or unsaid aspects of family heritage, encapsulating the currency of disconnection or in-flux personas, and re-examining the past in relation to tradition and contemporality.

Ultimately, the works presented in Crawl Space are linked with an impression of “belonging” within the ever-fluctuating internet age, attempting to capture and transcend both limitations of tradition and expectations of future. Elements of transience, cultural identity, and home are unravelled and then weaved together through the motif of light and transparency.

Phuong Le’s personal work ‘Thanh Phim’ (The Product), backgrounds the exhibition’s main space with an exploration of intergenerational heritage and queer bodies through an unexpected family reunion.

Analogously, Sofia Menta's photographic series utilises experimental analogue techniques to explore how photography can be a powerful tool to encapsulate family dynamics.

This metaphor of distortion is then extended in Martina Cavanna's installation ‘you, me, disrupted’, which describes a nameless and genderless interrupted persona distorted through the narrative of fabric, landscapes, and objects.

Similarly, Ruby Walker's film explores the liminal space between connection and disconnection, referencing the dislocation of one’s memories within the search for solace and belonging.

Lala Shi’s fragile sculptural installation encapsulate the ephemerality and loss of memories, displaying hidden connections into material neural links and pathways.

Then, Saud Alsaleh’s moving image installation ‘Metaphysics’ explores traditions of mapping, combining distorted animations to form an alternative image of the physical world map, while Jinyoung Park's framed projection utilises collective data from the past to examine its ambiguous boundaries with the future.

Finally, Sharon Xu’s ‘Culture Table’ immortalises the cultural and personal significances of the dinner table, affirming the significance of collaboration and sharing stories as a method of understanding and reclaiming blurred or unrecorded personal histories.

Composite X Centre for Projection Art

Collingwood Yards - 2022

Ambiance Collective participated in the community event, "The Social Exchange", held at Collingwood Yards, with an exhibition opening of a collection of works titled "To Be Here"; conceptualisations of Identity and Diversity. Ambiance Collective self published a manifesto to compliment the exhibition, which included the collective's mission statement:

Todos somos un poco uno y un poco el otro

We all are a little bit of one and a little bit of the other