Sarah Contos is a Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist, working across various modes of collage, sculpture and installation. Her work unpacks notions of popular culture, eroticism and history – whether cultural or personal – utilising formal and referential counterpoints to explore ideas of identity, sensuality and myth. Working with a diverse range of materials – from ceramics, plaster and screenprinted textiles to collected fabrics and discarded objects – Contos forges disjunctions in culture, time and gender to create new mythologies, characters and histories, reflected in fictional objects and forms that float between the familiar and the uncanny. Her work is at once highly personal, intimate and enmeshed in wider taxonomies of art history.

Sarah Contos recently completed a special commission for the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, for exhibition in Streetwise: Contemporary Print Culture (2015) at NGA Contemporary. Earlier this year, Contos’ work featured in 21st Century Heide: The Collection Since 2000 (2015) at The Heide Museum of Modern Art. In 2014, she participated in the group exhibitions Express Yourself: Romance was Born for Kids (collaboration with Romance Was Born) at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) at Artspace, Sydney. This same year Contos’ work was included in Haze at 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art, having been presented for the first time at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, in the group show Never-Never Land (A collaboration with Utopian Slumps). In 2013, Contos held her first institutional solo exhibition titled Ladies and Gentlemen Sarah Contos Presents: The Muses and the Folly at The Heide Museum of Modern Art Project Space (as part of Future Primitive, curated by Linda Michael). Contos was awarded the Artspace Studio Residency from 2012-13, and the 4A Beijing Residency in 2013. Total Control is Sarah Contos’ first solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

Press release courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.