Jacky Winter is pleased to present our first show for the year – Residential Development.

For the past few weeks, JWHQ has been home to four emerging artists — Antra Švarcs, Janelle Barone, Oliver Page-Dutton and Sarah
Hartley. Taking part in our second ever Lamington Drive Residency (LDR), their efforts have culminated in a new group show aptly titled Residential
Development.

LDR has been a space for the residents to create new work, interact with the public and each other, and work towards the common end goal of an exhibition — all in a traditional gallery environment.

Physically, the gallery has been set up like a makeshift open studio. Four desks, power, Wi-Fi and works in progress gradually filling up the white spaces of our walls as the artists go. Their respective materials and tools add another layer of studio detritus, granting access to an aspect not always seen by the public or followers of their work.

Antra Švarcs is a Melbourne-based illustrator who recently graduated from Monash University with Honours in Visual Communication, during which she explored the relationship between adventurousness and creativity. Her name is Latvian; in English it’s pronounced ‘un-tra.’ Her love for travel and the outdoors is reflected in her bold and colourful work, which includes a range of hand-rendered and digital techniques such as paper collage, animation and hand-painted imagery. During her residency at Lamington Drive, Antra has focused on the theme of the Australian Alpine National Park.

Janelle Barone is an illustrator and digital artist. Her work often stems from an ability to observe the world around her, noticing something otherwise mundane and constructing a subtle visual narrative around it. Stylistically Janelle’s work draws inspiration from comic book art, Japanese woodblock prints and documentary photography. Her preoccupation with storytelling has led her to apply her skills to a range of mediums, including visual programming, animation and graphic design. Janelle recently graduated with Honours in Visual Communication and now does contract work for Andrew Archer and Kelly Thompson at their creative studio, UNA. During her time with LD, Janelle has been working tirelessly on her trusty Wacom, working up her pieces that take form as intricately layered PSD files.

Oliver Page-Dutton is an illustrator and artist from Melbourne. He works with a variety of mediums, ranging from sculpture, to painting, to digital illustration. Oliver’s interest in exploration, daydreaming and imagination are the main themes circulating in his body of work. Select group exhibitions include: ‘UNCOVERED’, House Of Bricks gallery, Melbourne (2015); ‘Postcards 4 Change — R U OK?’, Western Glow, Melbourne (2015); ‘Visions of the Ether’, Ambush Gallery, Sydney (2014); ‘Super’, Curve Gallery, Newcastle (2013). During LDR, Oliver has been producing a range of cyborgs and robo creatures in his digital pieces (which will be used for giclee and riso prints), large-scale paintings and vases.

Sarah Hartley is a Queensland-born, Melbourne-based illustrator and graphic designer. Before studying design at Monash University she worked as a diversional therapist, dental assistant and for a short time played musical accompaniment for a family circus. Her practice encompasses both traditional and digital illustration. Sarah is a self-proclaimed semi-pro people-observer and her current body of work, Stranger Studiers, documents some of her favourite subjects. During LDR she’s focused on developing the Stranger Studiers pieces, which began life with long-range-lens photos of various crowds — a Brunswick Swordcraft event, an MSO outdoor concert and a recent Climate Action protest — working them from hand-drawn sketches into large-scale original watercolours.