Artist Talk, The View From Everywhere, 2025. Photo: Jeremy Weihrauch
The Cad Factory is celebrating our 20 year anniversary with an exhibition at Murray Art Museum Albury. We have brought together artworks from our extensive archive, alongside artworks that look forward, towards the future.
From our raggedy and riotous beginnings amongst the inner-city DIY warehouses of Sydney, to the last 15 years of building an artist-led organisation with an internationally recognised practice from our studio and home in Sandigo, The View from Everywhere traces the journey of how we have been and continue to reimagine the world through contemporary art practices.
Artists
Alex Wisser
Alex Wisser is an artist and creative producer based in mid-western New South Wales. In 2013 Alex co-founded the Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival and took up permanent residence in the township of Kandos with his family. Since then, his practice has continued to focus on the challenges and opportunities of making art in a regional context. His current practice has included large scale, long term projects like Cementa Festival and Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, which seek to embed art into a local, regional cultural context.
Daniel O'Brien
Daniel O'Brien is a photographer from Melbourne, Victoria.
Darrin Baker
Darrin Baker remembers the sound of a bird, just before dawn, when he went fishing with his father as a child. That sound moved him deeply, for reasons unknown, even to this day. Somewhere buried deep inside him, mixed in with the bone and blood and other mysterious parts he will never really see, are the reasons why he continues to make things and show them to other people.
Dave Nicholls
David Nicholls enjoys painting and creating imaginary and realistic worlds. Currently exploring his identity through painting images of places visited. Dave expresses himself in colours and likes to see complex and layered he can make his work. ‘I always believe that good painting comes from good colours’.
Harriet Body
Harriet Body's art practice is centred around care, slowness, and community. In her studio she works with media that broadly cross textiles, ceramics, and installation. Her creative process is slow and meditative. Through the repetition of mark-making or form-shaping, her work is all about watching something grow and then end. Harriet's socially engaged practice involves supporting communities to explore these concepts of slowness and mark-making to tell their story and exert their power.
Jordan Bryon
Jordan Bryon is a BAFTA and Emmy-winning filmmaker from Australia, known for capturing raw, intimate stories from some of the world’s most difficult-to-access communities—including Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, settlers in the West Bank, former ISIS members in Bosnia, and imprisoned sex offenders in Australia.
His cinematography - often undertaken in high-risk, volatile environments - is marked by a uniquely intimate and deeply human approach.
Julie Montgarrett
Julie Montgarrett is a textile artist, curator and former University lecturer who has been exhibiting since the late 1970s. She has lived on Wiradjuri country (Wagga Wagga NSW) for almost three decades. Her practice has included solo and group exhibitions, site-specific installations, public art commissions and ground-breaking community-based arts projects in Australia and internationally. Her works are included in major Australian Collections.
Kirsten Wehner
Kirsten Wehner is an Australian curator, artist, writer and creative producer. Her practice explores people's relationships with the more-than-human world, with a focus on how creative collaboration between artists and communities can build ecological understanding, cross-species empathy, and flourishing multi-species places. Kirsten was the inaugural James O Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment at the National Museum of Australia and was formerly Director of PhotoAccess, the ACT and region’s centre for photographic arts and culture.
Layla Bacayo
Layla Bacayo is an illustrator, painter and digital artist from Narrandera NSW. Her work focuses on contemporary culture, luxury cars, new media channels such as YouTube, and CT Scanners. Layla’s exhibitions include; Nothing Is Useless (2015) and The Art Factory (2016) at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. Layla wrote the script for the production The Dance Crash Mobs (2016) at Narrandera CRC Theatre. In October 2017, she held her first solo exhibition Fast Car Girl at Riverina Community College. Since 2016 Layla has been a member of the Art Factory supported studio.
Lindy Allen
Lindy Allen has worked in the arts since the mid-1970s, as a performer and musician (The Whittle Family, Olympic Sideburns, Dust on the Bible), festival General Manager and Artistic Director (Mallacoota and Mildura), Sponsorship Manager for Melbourne Theatre Company and CEO of both Regional Arts Victoria (2004-2012) and Regional Arts Australia.
Lorraine O'Hara
Lorraine O'Hara is an artist based in Temora, a rural township in the Riverina. She creates huge multi-coloured images inspired by the everyday. O'Hara has exhibited in 5 Years (2021) and 8 More (2022-3) at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, End of Year Exhibition (2019) at HR Gallop Gallery and Yield (2019) at Griffith Regional Gallery. Lorraine presented her first solo exhibition Colourful Wonderful (2021) at the E3 Art Space in Wagga Wagga and a banner of her work Vegetable Patches was featured from December 2021- February 2022 in the Civic Centre precinct, Wagga Wagga.
Lorraine Tye
Lorraine Tye is a Wiradjuri Elder and artist with disability who has artworks in major Australian collections and sits on various boards and advisory groups. Her artworks speak of Wiradjuri women’s stories, incorporating installation, video or intricate weavings across a variety of scales, from miniature to large and immersive. Lorraine’s artworks act as a cultural bridge between divided and contested histories by allowing an entry point into important and ancient understandings of place.
Martin Fox
Martin Fox has a four decade career span as a video artist, professional editor, sound recordist and director, mostly for film and documentaries as well as for a number of dance productions. Martin has been video artist for De Quincey Co’s Metadata and Linda Luke’s solo Still Point Turning, and edited video for several dance works, including Margie Medlin's dance film Morphing Physiology.
Mayu Kanamori
Mayu Kanamori is a photo journalist, writer, performer and photo media artist based in Sydney. She has received a commendation for United Nations Media Peace Award, recipient of the Broome NAIDOC Non Indigenous Reconciliation Award, finalist 2004 Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism, The Harries National Digital Awards, 2005 Olive Cotton National Photographic Portrait Awards and 2005 Conrad Jupiter's National Art Prize.
Sarah McEwan
Sarah McEwan has been working and volunteering at the Cad Factory since 2006. Sarah is an artist, musician, artist‑curator and Creative Producer who lives and works between Sandigo, within the Wiradjuri Nation, and in Sydney, within the Eora Nation. She likes to time‑travel through the past in order to learn from what has happened before and to understand, navigate and create the world she wants and needs in the present and the future. In the spirit of ethically engaged practices, she values community, collaboration, gentleness and embracing differences.
Vic McEwan
Vic McEwan is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, video, installation and performance with a particular interest in site-specific work. He is interested in creating new dynamics by working with diverse partners and exploring difficult themes within lived experience. Vic aims to use his work to contribute to and enrich broader conversations about the role that the arts sector can play within our communities.
Artist Talk
Murray Art Museum Albury
Saturday 7 June 2025
2pm - 3pm
In this performative artist talk, Sarah and Vic McEwan journey through The Cad Factory's evolution. From its early beginnings in the Sydney underground warehouse scene through its move to Regional NSW, Sarah and Vic discuss their 20 years of socially engaged art practice.
Portrait Sittings
Murray Art Museum Albury
Saturday 7 June and Sunday 8 June 2025
11:30am - 1:30pm
Sarah McEwan will be collaborating with artists Layla Bacayo and Dave Nicholls to create portraits of Museum visitors, each using their own unique approach. Sarah will talk with sitters to create ‘affective portraits’ that aim to capture a feeling rather than likeness of the person; Layla will draw the sitter’s quirky and humourous alter-ego; and Dave will create a more traditional portrait both Layla and Dave work at the Art Factory, a supported studio at Riverina Community College in Wagga Wagga.
These portraits will be hung in the gallery space for the remainder of the weekend with participants able to collect their work afterwards. Please note this is a drop-in, non-ticketed activity with varying duration.
Artist Walks
Murray Art Museum Albury
Sunday 8 June 2025
10am - 11am
12pm - 1pm
2pm - 3pm
A program for artists and creatives, whether aspiring or established. Take a one-hour walk around Albury with Vic McEwan or Sarah McEwan of The Cad Factory. Discuss your creative practice, an idea you have, a problem, an ethical artistic dilemma, an artistic dream, or a new strategy. These sessions aim to offer a constructive space with Sarah or Vic who will follow your lead, listen and respond.
Registration required.
Public Programs
This project is supported by Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury City Council, and the NSW Government through Create NSW.
