What's TOM been up to?
All our latest news, insights and special projects.
All our latest news, insights and special projects.
TOM – Total Outdoor Media
88 High Street,
Windsor VIC 3181
Ben Aitken brings a unique blend of playfulness and gravitas to his artistic endeavors, with a meticulously strategic approach that weaves inner tensions into overarching cohesion. His art is a tapestry of personal experiences, ranging from moments of violence and loss to whimsical expressions of comedic relief. This duality of light and dark, realism and abstraction, text and image, underscores the depth and complexity of his creative exploration.
Hailing from Melbourne, Jack’s vibrant and chromatic landscape paintings provide fresh perspectives on the natural world. Jack has showcased his work nationally and internationally at prestigious galleries like James Makin Gallery, Anna Pappas Gallery, Linden New Art, and Kunstraum Tapir (Berlin). His accolades include the Hawkesbury Art Prize Highly Commended Award in 2015, and shortlisted for prestigious prizes like Bayside Aquisitive Art Prize, Albany Art Prize, and Substation Art Prize.
Daniel Andersons photographs, which typically examine the relationship between celestial space, nature and loneliness, are characterized by their scale, large or small. Regardless of the photographic medium, their invocation of the traditions of painters such as Edward Hopper, these anonymous figures and geometric shapes within photographic snapshots compose a sense of loneliness that is impossible to avoid. We are voyeurs with Anderson’s work, a glimpse into a private moment that may be more private than we know, forcing us to be alienated from the identity in his work, is it a reflection of the artist? Who are these figures?
As a proud Wadawrurrung woman, Kait’s work explores her identity as an Australian with both Anglo and Indigenous heritage, her work asks questions relating to identity, perception, and our knowledge of Australia’s Indigenous communities.
Utilising punch needling techniques, she embroiders kitsch found materials, such as souvenir tea towels, that reference colonial settlements and histories, and subverts them with indigenous imagery and familiar references.
Through the use of humour and vivid colours, Kait addresses the way white western culture has dominated Australia’s history, and her personal reflections on her indigenous heritage.
Hayley is a Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung lens-based visual artist born and based in south-west Melbourne, Australia.
Hayley works across photography, collage, video, and film to interrogate and abstract autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity – drawing on and centering the power and strength of spirituality, indigeneity, womanhood, motherhood, and the psyche. Hayley’s oblique storytelling methods and methodologies encourage us to embrace the fact that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed.
Peter Atkins is a leading Australian contemporary artist and has been described variously as ‘a cultural nomad’, ‘a hyper-caffeinated bowerbird’ and ‘a visual terrorist’. His practice centres around the appropriation and deconstruction of abstract forms harvested from various sources including the urban environment, social media and internet news feeds, often working in real time as various stories break locally and across the globe. This collected, readymade material, becomes the direct reference source for his work, providing tangible evidence to the viewer of his relationship and experience within the real world.
For INTOMISSION Peter has constructed a new digital work which will be seen throughout regional Victoria during July 2023. Amongst other formats, a 19-meter-wide billboard that celebrates the humble signage often seen at roadside fruit and vegetable stands which are ubiquitous throughout the highways and back roads of regional areas of Australia. The work will change continuously over time as the coloured signs are rearranged into new formats, reflecting the changes that occur day by day at these wonderful, roadside phenomena.
Sam Leach’s works are informed by art history, science, and philosophy. he combines the poles of the metaphorical and the empirical, the analogous and the objective, in an ongoing investigation of the relationship between humans and animals. with a distanced, scientific approach, the artist draws connections between data visualisation techniques, semiotics, and formalist abstraction that results in a kind of reductive aesthetics.
While the delicate interplay between formalist figuration and modernist abstraction in his paintings operates on one level to distance the viewer – to encourage them to look objectively at the subjects – on another level each animal depicted has a symbolic currency that resonates with the audience on a personal level. the paintings extend their focus from animal life to the spectrum of all life itself, encouraging the viewer to contemplate their role as living creatures on this shared earth.
In 2010, Sam Leach joined august company, becoming only the third artist after William Dobell and Brett Whitely to win the Archibald portrait prize and the Wynne landscape prize in the same year.
Sam has a show at Sullivan+Strumpf on 9 September, 2023.
Paintings by Hayley Arjona combine psychological self-portraits, sacred sites, and archetypal symbolism. Arjona draws forth these concoctions from significant moments in waking life, altered states and the subconscious. Some works read like psychedelic souvenirs, collected on route from Arjona’s recent travels in southern India. There are, depictions of Mount Arunachala, the flame lit upon its peak in celebration of ‘Shiva Shakti.’ Other ritual symbols are remembered and reconstructed with a self-portrait, decapitated motif. These visceral and surreal scenes conjure complex narratives, curiosity, and questioning around the nature of existence and the search for meaning. The mix of realism, cartoon, and fluorescent saturation lifts Arjona’s compositions to the point of crescendo, an exuberant display of anxious tension and hysterical exaltation. With over 20 years of professional creative practice, Arjona is now based in rural Victoria.
Her work is included in many private and public collections including The Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Bank. Arjona’s most recent exhibitions include; “A-holeistic Approach” 2015 at Blank Space Gallery, Surry Hills NSW “Already Dead” 2015, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Redneck” 2014 at CASPA in Castlemaine Victoria and “Caged in Flesh” 2019 at C3 Gallery Abbotsford, Melbourne.
Jon Cattapan’s detailed and atmospheric works deal primarily with ways of representing urban landscapes and narratives. His practice is based in the traditional mediums of painting and drawing, with much of his work being underpinned by explorations of how the human form can be visualised through different stylistic means, simultaneously keeping abstraction and figuration in play. Within his colour-saturated layered vistas and close figurative groupings we see allusions to contemporary global culture and recent history, that range from science fiction and film, through to the representations of conflict and urban social interactions.
Cattapan is one of Australia’s most established and highly-respected artists, having been awarded some of the country’s top accolades for achievements in visual art.
Jon Cattapan is represented in Victoria by STATION, Melbourne.
Born in Vietnam. Resides and works in Melbourne, Australia.
Simon Strong is a visual artist, photographer and independent digital/graphic designer. He has a bachelor of Graphic Design from the National School of Design. Strong has been included in numerous group shows including “Snap Freeze: Still Life Now”, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2007 and “Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund” at the National Gallery of Victoria 2006-07. Most recently, he was one of five photographers to be included in the exhibition “Phantasia” at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, which then toured around Australia and was also shown at the Gallery of the Australian Embassy as part of “Photoquai”, Paris at the end of 2009.
Since 2009 Simon has worked collaboratively with artist Robert Doble as ‘Doble & Strong’.