Melbourne Art Library is delighted to welcome Vittoria De Stefano to lead our next Artists' Syllabus at Blindside Gallery. 

In this event, participants use the artist’s current exhibition at Blindside as a starting point to create an expanded sculptural assemblage using objects brought from home and inspired by ‘The Force of Things’, Chapter 1 of Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things by Jane Bennett.

Artists’ Syllabus invites local artists and designers to select and share a text that has been influential to their practice. By sharing selected passages, the artist will give unique insight into the significance of the text from their perspective. Through this exploration we will seek to discover the direct, tangential or unexpected ways the text has had an impact on the artists’ chosen discipline/s, creative process, and approach to presenting completed works. In group discussion, we will untangle the themes explored in the text and bring attention to those formative passages which sparked an ‘ah-ha moment’ or cemented in the mind. More broadly, we will get together to exchange our ideas (and our reading lists).

Support by City of Melbourne Arts Grants.

Image: Vittoria Di Stefano, Studio tests, 2023.


Vittoria Di Stefano’s sculptural practice employs a methodology of generative material experimentation to explore themes around liminality, transformation and desire, with a particular emphasis on domestic space and intimate materiality. Through the employment of a diverse material palette, and often using modernist art, design or film as points of departure, the artist employs a feminist critique to investigate and challenge historical power structures and notions of value.  The psychological and affective impacts of the material encounter are explored through a range of experiments in a variety of display contexts, offering new ways of contemplating and experiencing material realities.  She has taken part in solo and group exhibitions nationally and lectures in Art History & Theory and Sculptural Practice at RMIT University, Melbourne.

About the exhibition
The Dusking Room posits the domestic space as an enigmatic site of contradiction, in which multiplicities of realities coalesce to produce liminal states of flux and ambiguity. The installation takes the form of a fragmented interior, in which elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar engage in a shifting dialogue. Drawing on the legacy of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, the artist examines the complex conditions of the domestic space and its relationship to the body and memory. Symbols of nostalgia collide with formless matter to propose a reading of the domestic space as uncanny and unstable. This work considers the implications of our intimate spaces as poetic, precarious and fluid containers of narrative and identity.