urban to rural,
and everything in between: Scattered Grounds
📅 20-30 August 2026
📍Palangi Gallery
Level 1/59 Flinders St, Surry Hills NSW 2010
🥂 Thu. 20 August 6-8PM
Living in the digital age of rapid advancement, urbaness around the world now possess a universal demeanor engulfed with screens, glass, and steel. Where infinite geometrical duplicates are puzzled in congestion, it constantly pendulates us between estrangement and belonging, as if a fish is out of water. Seeking a sense of belonging, a fade of topographical identity inspires individuals to find existential values in enduring personal and earthly memories. Such liminal spaces that possess minute moments, stimulations that may occur of a sudden but last everlastingly—allow one to engross oneself in a flash of sheltered embrace.
We present Scattered Grounds—holding the initiative of growth, exchange, and discourse. This exhibition brings together emerging artists affiliated with Sydney College of Arts (SCA, USYD), University of New South Wales (UNSW), and Parsons School of Design New York (TNS, NYC). Gathered across a transnational scope, these responses explore the complex interlock of land and memory, channeling themes of home, natural sublime, nostalgia, and more. Whether the bustling metropolis, the underground, the outdoors, or the indoors, tightly packed or loose, artworks enact as retrospective scaffolds, a self-portrait paving a sense of self. From distinct minds and regions, audiences are invited to step inside each of their 'memoryscapes,' to be strayed in the moment, and to inhale the stillness among the hurtles that alters the hollow gaze of ‘where we are’ into a passionate one—that might lead us to seek character in them.
Tracing familiarity among the estranged, this exhibition provokes a gradual pull to ask one:
Where is home?
Where do I belong?
Where am I?
Where should I be?
…and to constantly pendulate between estrangement and belonging. Answers are never fully given; they simply break the uniformed silence to polyphonic reminiscences.
Artists
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson
Annabelle Demarino
Emilia B. Levin
Emily Beattie
Felixe Rives
Gemma Anderson
Kim Anh Ngo Bui
Lana Ryles
Lige Qiao
Olive Burgess
Xanthe Kibble
Curators
Bomi Park
Judy (Yigu) Pan
*Refer to the catalogue to explore more about the project & to view the full list of works*
For all enquiries, please contact:
Bomi Park E. audrey030321@gmail.com | M. +61 494 412 414
Judy Pan E. panxiaoyi9@gmail.com | M. +61 451 457 016
Acknowledgement of Country
We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet today, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.