^{Image credit: Cassie Sullivan, wayi (to hear) 2023 (detail), seven tarlatan monotype prints on frosted acrylic, 170 x 122.0 cm each, Installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2023. Commissioned by ACCA. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis}

Between Waves amplifies concepts related to light, time and vision – and the idea of shining a light on our times – as expressed by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung word ‘Yalingwa’. The exhibition presents the work of ten First Nations artists and collective including Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, this mob, and Cassie Sullivan.

The exhibition presents ten ambitious new commissions that traverse internal and external worlds, embracing the sensory and cyclical rhythms of light and sound, thinking and feeling, listening and seeing, interwoven with ideas of material memory. Through a range of contemporary artforms including video, installation, poetry, projection, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, printmaking, and a digital commission, the invited artists have developed reflective and site-responsive projects which explore and experiment with the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing.

Participating artists embrace the push and pull dynamics that flow beneath the surface, navigating ideas of presence and absence, the known and unknown, transgenerational and collective consciousness. Together the artists prompt reflection on life shifts and cycles and centre notions of remembering, rehabilitation, regeneration and reclamation.

Between Waves stages a call for relational accountability and ethical responsibility, locating individual experience not at the centre of the world, but as an inherent part of its fabric. In doing so, the exhibition reflects on the interrelationship between life, materiality, people and place, and a need to find balance.

While light can stimulate sight and is said to reveal truth, it can also be blinding and obscuring. Equally, while darkness is seemingly used to conceal, it is within the darkness, the in-between places and spaces that no one wants to venture, that truth seemingly lingers; rippling inward and outward, above, below and between the surface.

Between Waves is an exhibition developed by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) touring nationally with NETS Victoria, curated by Jessica Clark.

Artists: Hayley Millar Baker, Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, this mob, Cassie Sullivan

This project has been supported by Creative Victoria through the Yalingwa Visual Arts Initiative and the NETS Victoria Exhibition Development Fund; and the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.

See artworks in the exhibition