Non-profit art space Utopian Slumps is hosting  ‘Grow Wild’, and exhibition curated by Sleep Club (Dell Stewart and Adam Cruickshank). From the  Sleep Club website:

It’s easy to forget the pleasure of the wild and the primal, especially given the place in the distant future we sometimes seem to have arrived at. The truly metamorphosing moments in life where we’re confronted with wonder and sadness and need and desire are the times when the wild reappears in all its elemental glory. In Grow Wild, Sleep Club will celebrate this transformative wildness, this irrepressible tenaciousness of growth, the insistence of life and all its apparently unstoppable self-replicating systems.

Grow Wild, will present the work of eight contemporary Australian artists and one American. Nine artists working in completely different mediums and with wildly varying approaches, Grow Wild, is an exhibition that revels in the growing and the grown, an enveloping and welcoming space, a campsite in a gallery in the middle of a city, a mushrooming of the outside, inside.

Work ranges through photography, sculpture, installation, animation, printmaking, painting and textiles, creating a unique environment, rich with possibilities, cross-pollinating in a frenzy of life. More specifically; a huge photographic window into an ancient wilderness, a furry life-size child, raised by wolves, patches of delicate papery grass emerging from cracks and corners and a place in the woods to listen and ponder morphing and growing fungus, flickering fire and ever-growing wild, woolly hair.

Artists: Michelle Arcila, Adam Cruickshank, Penelope Durston, Natasha Frisch, Nathan Gray, David Keating, Simon MacEwan, Niels Oeltjen, Dell Stewart.

Opens December 5
Runs 6-21 December 2008
Utopian Slumps
5/25 Easey Street, Collingwood
Open Thurs-Sat, 12-6PM