Exhibition Opening: VIEW2025:
Cailyn Forrest, Adam Hsieh, Fiona Lee, Aia Solis, and Emma Lyn Winkler

A long exposure photograph at night with a group of people milling about a fire
photo by Maria Kolouris

Join us for our first exhibition of 2025!

6 pm Thursday, 23 January

VIEW2025 brings together the work of Cailyn Forrest, Adam Hsieh, Fiona Lee, Aia Solis, and Emma Lyn Winkler. This annual exhibition spotlights regional emerging artists—the future leaders of Australian photo media practice—and is accompanied by a publication offering insights into current photographic trends across analogue, digital, and experimental forms.

In ‘Darkroom Viscera’, Cailyn Forrest transforms the act of photography into a bodily ritual, intertwining artist and material. Adam Hsieh’s ‘I Didn’t Come Here for Love’ juxtaposes wide-angle views of Hobart’s kunanyi/Mount Wellington with intimate Grindr encounters, exploring how social currents shape our experience of place.

Fiona Lee’s ‘Future Critical’ confronts ecological loss and political inertia, informed by her displacement during the 2019–2020 bushfires. In ‘Taranta Muna’, Aia Solis merges past memories and present realities, revealing a delicate balance between control and disorder. Emma Lyn Winkler’s ‘Shadow Puppets’ fuses painting, photography, and animation into textured narratives infused with humour and existential absurdity.

Exhibiting Artists

Cailyn Forrest, Adam Hsieh, Fiona Lee, Aia Solis, and Emma Lyn Winkler

Where and When

This suite of exhibitions will be formally launched at 6pm Thursday 23 January, 2025 in the gardens at the Manuka Arts Centre, 30 Manuka Circle, Griffith ACT 2603.

Event artists

Cailyn Forrest

Cailyn Forrest lives and works on unceded Gadigal land and is a Doctoral candidate in her final year at the National Art School, Sydney. Her research and practice focus on analogue and alternative photographic processes. She examines these traditions through a feminist lens to explore the relationship between her body and the material labour of image production. She looks to the darkroom as a site of introspection and performativity and the image as a trace of this performance.

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Adam Hsieh

Adam Hsieh is a digital artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Lutruwita/ Tasmania. Guided by his experience as a queer Chinese migrant, Hsieh’s art practice explores the dynamic tension between places and place-makers within entangled physical and virtual realms. He unpacks the complexity and fluidity of natural-cultural phenomena through a series of multi-sensory interventions, manipulating systems of light, sound, moving images, code, and AI. By examining the blurred boundaries between spaces and their inhabitants, Hsieh speculates on alternative approaches to understanding the shifting agency of humans and more-than-humans within networks of uncertainty and ambiguity.

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Fiona Lee

Fiona Lee is an artist based in Elands, NSW, on Biripi Country, working across installation, photo media, and sculpture. Her practice engages with critical social issues, focusing on climate change and the post-natural world. Through her work, Lee highlights the profound environmental transformations caused by human activity, including the impacts of native forest logging and coal extraction. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) with First-Class Honours from the University of Newcastle and an Advanced Diploma in Photography from Newcastle Art School TAFE.

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Aia Solis

Aia Solis is a Filipino artist based in Australia. Her photographic practice explores themes of learning, unlearning, and relearning through an experiential approach. Engaging with the complexities of human existence, her work examines emotional tension and the introspective journey of navigating personal and cultural transitions.

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Emma Winkler

Emma Lyn Winkler’s practice navigates the intersections of collage, painting, and animation to explore the relationship between anxiety and death. Using a personal yet playful approach, her intricate paintings layer networks of imagery, while her slapstick animations combine visceral textures with chaotic conclusions. Through these works, Emma invites viewers to laugh in the face of death—or at least start a conversation about it.

Since completing her Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2022, Emma has exhibited across Australia, with solo shows at Platform Arts, Brimbank Gallery, and Sauerbier House. She was selected for the 2024 SIGNAL Screen Commissions and has upcoming exhibitions at Town Hall Gallery and NRCG.

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Related events

Site/Sight-Seeing with Adam Hsieh

Join VIEW2025 artist Adam Hsieh in this artist talk/workshop exploring his multi-sensory practice and relationships with physical surroundings through image-making

Upcoming events