The Portrait Series: Grant Stevens

With deep reverence to the arts, we are honoured to announce our partnership with Melbourne Art Fair, a seminal fixture on the Australasian cultural calendar.

This year's theme is centred around Djeembana––a word of the Boon Wurrung––described as a lacuna in language, where direct translation fails. Loosely alluding to ‘place’, Djeembana is more broadly a meeting point for community, ideas, ritual, and knowledge.

Paying homage to this year’s theme, The Portrait Series profiles four of the region’s most respected artists, whose works are forever woven into the fabric of contemporary art in Australia.

Working predominantly with computer graphics, moving image, and photography, Stevens' practice explores the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds and social realities. Stevens’ digital dreamscapes are deliberately imbedded with tension. The worlds he creates are romanticised renders of the real one we stand in, an arena dressed in symbols. Without pinning them to a linear binary, Stevens’ work is an exploration that exists between the digital world and the natural one and the nebulous space the two co-occupy in the era of modernity.