Reverie Projects, in association with the Villa Alba Museum, is devoted to establishing a dialogue between the historic house in Melbourne’s Kew and contemporary art practitioners. This dialogue takes the form of a series of exhibitions in which the house acts as subject and muse.
Artist Profile no. 9: Tobias Richardson
Artist Statement
The potential of houses to be spaces for the perception and conception of visual arts is very tangible and useful.
I do not know the space, Villa Alba, it is site-unseen … while perhaps it would be more common to know spaces before working in them processes can none-the-less evolve from afar in inverted manners. The artist is a problem solver, the artist resolves spaces and the artist embraces challenges as creative pathways.
My practice primarily involves the broad interpretation of built environments and physical spaces. Spaces on which to lay biographical and fictional content set against the physical and formal qualities of buildings and their history. These spaces, as Sarah states in the Villa Alba project’s title, are narrative spaces.
For Narrative Space I have selected different past works to travel to Melbourne. Sheets as ghost, tin paintings of ideal buildings, universal power points and black like drawings, all these speak to my distant knowledge of Villa Alba.
Biography
Tobias RICHARDSON born 1968, Sydney, New South Wales; currently lives in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales
Tobias Richardson built a career as a young artist in Sydney during the 1990s before moving to the Northern Territory in 1997 to take up a teaching post in Utopia in the Central Desert. He went on to teach in Maningrida, Arnhem Land, before moving to Darwin in 2006 where he lectured in studio practice at Charles Darwin University and worked at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory whilst maintaining an active professional practice. He recently returned to New South Wales, where is currently making art full time.
Richardson holds a Diploma of Art, East Sydney Technical College (1987), Bachelor of Fine Arts, San Francisco Art Institute (1991), Diploma of Education, University of Sydney (1993), Certificate IV Conservation Lands Management, Charles Darwin University (2003) and Masters by Research, Charles Darwin University (2011). He has been the recipient of several residencies including the Asia Link residency at Galeri Petronas in Kuala Lumpur (2007) and the Cite Internationale des Arts residency in Paris (2008, 2010). Richardson has exhibited regularly in Australia since graduating from art school in the late 80s and his work has been included in group shows internationally in Indonesia, Malaysia, Germany and the USA. In 2007 his work was selected for Cross Currents: Focus on Australian Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art and most recently in early 2012, a substantial survey of his sculpture, painting and drawing were shown at RAFT Artspace, Alice Springs. Richardson’s work is represented in public collections nationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria and Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
