Never keep both feet on the ground : Andrea Eckersley, Aylsa McHugh, Veronica Kent, Elena Misso, Ezz Monem, Mardi Nowak, Jake Preval, Sally Smart, David Hugh Thomas

Never keep both feet on the ground brings together nine Melbourne-based artists whose works engage with expanded collage and assemblage. The exhibition is titled after a work by the German Dada artist Hannah Höch; best known as a pioneer of photomontage and one of the first artists to engage with and understand the potency of images in the printed mass media. Höch's role working for the German publishing house Ullstein Verlag provided her with unfettered access to magazines and newspapers, which she cut up and reassembled, drawing on her understanding of cinematic techniques, to both comment on and critique contemporary events and the social construction of gender roles. 

While a number of the artists featured in Never keep both feet on the ground engage explicitly with the assemblage techniques favoured by Höch – including her interest in reassembling bodies to unsettling affect – others use strategies of erasure, folding, and layering in their construction of works that celebrate how an image loosened from its original moorings and set adrift can reveal new truths.   

Ezz Monem appears courtesy of THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne

David H Thomas appears courtesy of William Mora Galleries, Melbourne