IN | ARI’s 2024 Cellmate artists, Karina Seljak and Samuel Markovic, in their end-of-residency exhibition. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY is a sensuous installation that contemplates vessels as a transcendent form. Karina’s pastel visions and Samuel’s soundscaping come together in conversation in a blurring of both earthly and unearthly terrains.

Through a series of restricted access points, visitors can experience Karina’s finger-blended, fine gradient pastel works and Sam’s experimental drone, sonic landscapes. Both artists’ spatial approach to sound and colour invite visitors through a spectrum of recognisable forms to the transcendentally uncontainable.

By activating rooms once used to contain bodies, The Old Lock Up itself becomes a resonant vessel, reflecting ways of transforming sensuous media – or indeed complete emptiness – into imagined realities.

KARINA SELJAK

Karina Seljak is an emerging drawing and textiles artist based on Gubbi Gubbi / Kabi Kabi Country whose colour-drenched soft pastel drawings are an investigation of temporality and transcendence. Finger-blending loose pigments into hyper-real objects allows Karina to bring form to unseen but felt energies of the earth.

SAMUEL MARKOVIC

Samuel Markovic is a Gubbi Gubbi / Kabi Kabi land-based violinist exploring noise/drone, lullaby and dirge. Samuel employs a range of electro-acoustic techniques such as feedback, ring modulation and oscillation to produce sound environments relating familiar and alien sounds in an effort to explore the relationship between those states. Samuel’s visual practice is less established but explores themes of otherness, voyeurism, and obscured meaning