Some thoughts on NotFair 2016 from the curator, Kirsten Rann -

Being invited to curate this year’s NotFair was a wonderful opportunity for me to focus on the really fresh and exciting talent that exists across Australia in both the emerging and independent artist sectors.

This is the fertile ground in which I often find myself, so I know it well. And many working in these sectors are grateful that NotFair’s founders – Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd and Ashley Crawford – worked so hard to establish and build this interesting and challenging platform as a satellite to the Melbourne Art Fair, which has benefited a number of careers, galleries and art collections!

My approach to this year’s exhibition was to show works that I see as being ‘Right Now’ – as expressing a ‘Sign Of Our Times’ in the way the artists are informed by history and the present as much as they are pushing their ideas, techniques and materials to new realms.

Two exceptionally talented and socially aware artists the world has lost in 2016 – Prince and David Bowie – worked like this. The global impact they had on music, video and drawing attention to social issues – from global warming, war and the ‘space race’ to racism, marginalization, identity politics, poverty and death, questioning government and social responsibility in the mix – cannot be underestimated. In acknowledgement, I decided to draw a curatorial parallel to the content of Prince’s Sign O’ the Times as it directly or indirectly relates to the ideas being expressed by a number of the artists whose studios I visited in my research, and hence the (borrowed) title of the 2016 NotFair exhibition.