
DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
CURATED BY HEIDI LEFEBVRE, KATY B PLUMMER AND LUKE LETOURNEAU
Inspired by the many versions of Les Misérables, this exhibition encompasses a kaleidoscopic range of artistic approaches to subverting and interpreting personal and historical narratives, via high-drama, excess and passion.
Each work in the exhibition both meditates on the way our culture creates memory and intervenes in how we understand ourselves within those memories. It contains works from 15 artists in various mediums, including sculpture and video.
View the digital catalogue HERE.

History Will Make Wreckage Of Us by Katy B Plummer. Image by Louis Lim.

Do You Hear The People Sing? Image by Louis Lim.

Heraldic Slow Clap by Heidi Lefebvre. Image by Louis Lim.

Works by Zoe Wong. Image by Louis Lim.

Knuckle duster Antler Vessel by Luke O'Connor. Image by Louis Lim.

Do You Hear The People Sing? Image by Louis Lim.

Knuckle Duster Antler Vessel by Luke O'Connor. Image by Louis Lim.

History Will Make Wreckage Of Us by Katy B Plummer. Image by Louis Lim.

Haptic Bowl by Marcia Swaby. Image by Louis Lim.
WHERE
Main Gallery
WHEN
30 January – 16 February 2019
Opening Night: 30 January, 6pm
Curator’s Talk: 30 January, 5:30pm
KEY CREATIVES
Artists: Liam Benson and Cassandra Bird, Dean Cross, Beth Dillon, George Haddad, Heidi Lefebvre, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Luke O’Connor, Katy B Plummer, Em Size, Marcia Swaby, Alexander Tanazefti, Athena Thebus, Amanda Wolf and Zoe Wong.
Curators: Heidi Lefebvre, Katy B Plummer and Luke Létourneau.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Kudos Gallery and Arc @ UNSW Art & design.
This project has been supported by the Kudos Gallery and Arc @ UNSW Art & Design.
THE ARTISTS
Liam Benson
Liam Benson is a performance artist who documents his work through embroidery, photography, video and new media. Benson’s work deconstructs the social perceptions of gender, race, culture, sexuality and identity by cross-referencing art, popular culture and media language. His work serves to celebrate the evolution of these social archetypes and explore the possibilities within the cross influence of socially entrenched identities and cultural and sub-cultural amalgamation. Liam Benson is represented by Arterial Gallery, Sydney.
Cassandra Bird
Cassandra Bird is the Asscociate Director at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Dean Cross
Dean Cross is a First Nations trans-disciplinary artist. He has been formally trained in both Contemporary Dance and Sculpture, and works across the sculptural and pictorial fields. Through this he attempts to re-evaluate and re-construct what it means to be Australian in the 21st Century, and how that fits within our globalised world. Dean was born and raised on Ngunnawal country, however his ancestral roots lie within the Worimi Nation.
Beth Dillon
Beth Dillon is a master of creative pursuits and time management. She’s an artist interested in the comic, the strange and the beautiful. Her work explores expressive ambiguities of the performing body, visual constructions of place and identity, and potential roles of the artist in contemporary society. Beth has travelled the world and uses photography, video, performance and installation to explore her subject matter. In addition to a bourgeoning solo career, Beth is also a founding member of a Sydney-based trio of emerging artists called 110%.
George Haddad
George Haddad is a Sydney based writer who is currently studying a Creative Arts Doctorate at Western Sydney University. His debut novella Populate and Perish was the winner of the 2016 Viva La Novella Prize.
Heidi Lefebvre
Heidi Lefebvre makes drawings, costumes, props and writes short plays. Exploring themes of performance and arts place in history, she cross references literary imagery with popular cultural. The results are installations that look olde worlde and drawings that simmer with narrative. Heidi can often be found spinning straw into gold.
Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Daniel Mudie Cunningham is a Sydney-based artist, curator and cultural critic, active since the mid-1990s. His practice draws upon and remixes the image streams of art history, queer politics, pop culture, performance and music through video and performance.
Luke O’Connor
Luke O’Connor is a Sydney-based artist working in the medium of ceramics. Luke creates works that reference the utilitarian language embedded in the history of ceramics while presenting objects that are formally and functionally ambiguous. In reimagining the traditional ceramic ideology, with its peculiarities and willfulness, the artist both challenges and pays homage to the craft.
Katy B Plummer
Katy B Plummer makes video, sculpture and installations. She looks for the moment that fervent conviction and striving either ascends to glory, or tips into bathos. Basically, she likes high drama with its pants around its ankles. She tells complicated stories about love and revolution and she can often be found pretending to be some kind of animal.
Em Size
Em Size is an experimental non-fiction writer based in Sydney, currently interested in the infrastructures that shape the arts, relationships, sexuality and desire. Their interested in modes of writing that develop in the commons, as part of a feedback loop of reading and writing– most of their writing in some way references the utopian, DIY politico-poetics of fanfiction.
Marcia Swaby
Marcia Swaby is a contemporary jewelry maker working in Sydney. They recently completed a research project which culminated in the exhibition Haptic Tactility, at UNSw Art and Design. The works interpret unknown ancestors, inspired by her interpretation and interaction with ancient Taino statues housed in the British museum.
Alexander Tanazefti
Alexander Tanazefti is a Sydney based artist and designer interested in systems and their functions.
Athena Thebus
Athena Thebus’ practice spans sculpture, drawing, and writing. Her practice is driven by the desire to generate an atmosphere by which queer life is sustainable. Part of figuring that out is to make sculptures and installations that use materials that are connotative of capitalism’s excess, nuanced with past shame and queer hope. Presently, her writing practice involves feeling like a dog and swimming in other people’s waters. She is a Scorpio with a Sagittarius rising and a Capricorn moon.
Amanda Wolf
Amanda Wolf is a contemporary artist who engages with themes related to the body. The foundation of Wolf’s work lies in the process of hand sewing which is used to create large scale soft sculptures, costumes and stop motion animations. Wolf graduated with First Class Honours from the Queensland College of Art in 2013 and holds a Diploma of Fine Art from the Northern Melbourne Institute of Tafe (2005).
Zoe Wong
Zoe Wong’s practice explores her half Chinese, half Australian heritage as well as her queer identity through photographic appropriation and mixed media installations. Her work illustrates the complexities behind the influence that pop culture has on society’s notions of race and identity and how we perceive ourselves through representation in mass media.
Luke Létourneau
Luke Létourneau is a writer and curator working in Sydney. His independent practice has engaged with screens cultures, genre, sweat, queer space and time and technological kurfuffles. In 2017-18 he sits on the management and editorial committee of Runway Australian Experimental Art Journal.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has been supported by the Kudos Gallery and Arc @ UNSW Art & Design.