Skip to content

Closed: Opens 11am Monday

Four abstract geometric paintings hang on a white wall, each featuring bold, colourful shapes and patterns, including stripes, rectangles, and one solid orange square on the far right.

Liminal Encounters

When

This exhibition has now ended.

Location

Buxton Contemporary Corner Southbank Boulevard & Dodds Street, Southbank. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne

An exhibition by the next generation of curators in response to the Michael Buxton Collection.

Liminal Encounters was the outcome of Curating Art in Practice, a graduate subject in the Master of Art Curatorship program at the University of Melbourne. 

Students worked in teams to curate four distinct displays – Hard Liquid, The Fleeting Dream, Luminance and All the Clocks Have Stopped – that brought new perspectives to the Michael Buxton Collection. Each project follows its own enquiry, yet all are threaded by the theme of liminality – a state of transition, ambiguity and the in-between. 

Through their curatorial lens, the students revealed tensions that flicker between opposites: shadows and luminescence, intimacy and distance, dreams and nightmares, presence and absence. 

The Curating Art in Practice subject is run in collaboration between the University of Melbourne’s Museums and Collections department and the Faculty of Arts.

Gallery

A gallery wall displays four artworks: a large painting of a woman with crows, a smaller portrait of a woman with a covered face, and two small landscape photographs, plus museum labels with descriptions.
A modern art gallery with white walls displays paintings, photographs, and a video screen. The floor is polished concrete, and the space is brightly lit with overhead lights. No people are present.
An art gallery wall displays framed photos, a large mixed-media painting of two figures in front of a mural, a wall text panel, and a monitor with headphones showing video art. The gallery floor is polished gray concrete.

Student essays

All the Clocks Have Stopped

Reflecting on time, memory and loss through works by six leading Australian artists.

Hard Liquid: Transparency, visibility, and the mesmerising obscured

Examining material transformation that blur boundaries between solid and fluid form.

The Fleeting Dream

Reflecting on how dreams shape perception, emotion and lived experience.

Luminance

Exploring light, perception and contrast to reflect on uncertainty and shifting visual experience.

Access

Download exhibition essaysPDF (79 KB)

  1. Banner Image:

    Installation view of Liminal Encounters, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne. Featuring John Nixon, Project for a Theatre Set IV Colour group E (Random), 2008; John Nixon, Colour – Rhythm, Film Composition 4, 3, 5, 2006. Michael Buxton Collection, the University of Melbourne Art Collection. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Janet Buxton, 2018. Photography by James Henry.