Thinking outside the white box
Hannah Foley, Reece Nicoloau, Elise Romaszko and Maggie Jeffries question and consider different formats and approaches to exhibiting art — sharing their experiences on ways that white box gallery norms can be challenged, subverted or completely removed. Hannah Foley is a Nipaluna-based artist and researcher. Her practice spans performance, installation, and participatory frameworks, often creating conditions for encounters rather than discrete objects. Hannah’s work is shaped by long-term, site-responsive engagements that treat place as an active collaborator — materially, socially, and more-than-human. Alongside her independent practice, Hannah works as a curator and arts worker, presenting projects across diverse sites. She worked with offsite artist run initiative Constance ARI for six years, most recently serving as Co-Chair of the board. Reece Aaron Nicolaou (b.1997) is an artist working across sculpture, digital media, objects and text to engage with and critique the aesthetics, behaviours and emotions of contemporary online culture. Drawn to the beautifully disgusting ways we exist across digital and physical space simultaneously, his work interrogates the platforms and systems of power designed to lock us in — while also holding space for the connectivity, love and humour that exist within them. Elise Romaszko is a Nipaluna/Hobart-based artist, performer, poet and emerging director whose multidisciplinary practice moves effortlessly between movement, sound, text and visual form. A long-time collaborator with Second Echo Ensemble, Elise’s work is lyrical, bold, and grounded in embodied storytelling. She has appeared in and directed numerous SEE works and is now charting a new creative horizon with What the Stars Remember, a project born of curiosity, invitation and radical listening. A core artist with Second Echo Ensemble since 2006, Elise has performed in works including; If I Jumped I’d Fly, This Much of Me, The Company I Keep, Rite of Spring, Contested Land, Let Me Dry Your Eyes, and On Display Global. She directed The BEAUTY Project, a community-engaged work commissioned by Ten Days on the Island, an international arts festival. Elise’s practice foregrounds listening as an artistic method and values lived experience as creative authority. Elise recently took part in the curation of [Let The] Art Speak, an anonymous exhibition by Second Echo Ensemble. This experiment challenged gallery expectations and promoted radical equity in the arts by removing all labels. Maggie Jeffries is an emerging artist from Lutruwita/Tasmania, based in Nipaluna/Hobart. Inspired by a sense of childhood wonder, her botanical oil paintings explore the nature of remembering by layering plants, shadows and light. Central to her creative practice is a fascination with the detail found in our natural world. Maggie’s paintings are intended to become documentations of her experience, reminiscent of the ways she would explore as a child. Maggie has exhibited her work in Lutruwita /Tasmania at Despard Gallery, and works closely with Second Echo Ensemble as both an independent artist and collaborator. Artist residencies include California, United States, Paris, France and locally on King Island, Queenstown and Glover Country. Maggie's practice moves between independent painting and working in collaboration with other artists in performance, installation, sculpture and wearable art design. Maggie recently took part in the curation of [Let The] Art Speak, an anonymous exhibition by Second Echo Ensemble. This experiment challenged gallery expectations and promoted radical equity in the arts, by removing all labels.
