Art

The rise of artistic excellence: Inside the Syrup Contemporary Gallery

The second brainchild of co-directors Carolyn Craig and Damian Dillon, Syrup is a commercial gallery and art space representing a stable of artists from Australia and South East Asia. The duo’s inaugural gallery, Schmick Contemporary, was a studio-sized room in a dilapidated three-storey boarding house in the grungiest part of Sydney’s Chinatown district. Schmick was founded as an artist-run initiative to create spaces for emerging talents to exhibit their work in response to the significant number of gallery closures across Sydney during the pandemic.

Both Craig and Dillon have strong and dedicated careers as practising artists, and wanted to support the emerging art community in the face of complex social and financial conditions. Schmick quickly found acclaim for presenting an edgy and progressive art practice, and the need for a bigger and bolder space became apparent.

Whence the conception of Syrup, which opened its doors in the warehouse-lined streets of Marrickville in April 2024.

Drawings 151-156, 187-192 and 193-198, 2022-2024, pencil on paper, by Emily Ferretti.

It is an unusual circumstance for gallery directors to be practising artists, in tandem. The level of artistic acumen and the excellence of the gallery stable are in part the result of incredible tenacity, but also due to the long artistic careers of the directors themselves.

Craig works across various media including print, video, drawing and performance, examining the coded construction of subjectivity. Her work investigates inscriptive performance as an active site for the maintenance and enforcement of types of cultural normativity, with a particular focus on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’. Craig has won numerous high-profile art prizes, and is the head of print media at the National Art School in Sydney.

Left: Three Puddles, 2024, oil on linen, by Emily Ferretti. Right: Syrup gallery co-directors Carolyn Craig and Damian Dillon.

Damian Dillon’s photomedia practice deconstructs digital and analogue processes to consider how representational practices over the landscape inform a postcolonial comprehension of place. He has a Bachelor’s degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and a Master’s degree from the College of Fine Arts NSW. He has been a recipient of grants and prizes including the COFA Postgraduate Award, Australia Council New Work Grant, NAVA and Pat Corrigan Grant, Sydney Myer Fellowship and City of Sydney Cultural Grant. He has won the Blacktown Art Prize and his work is in the collection of Artbank.

Considering the stature of the Directors, their proximity to the pulse of contemporary practice burgeoning in art schools, and acute awareness of artistic excellence from both sides of the fence, it is no surprise the stable of artists they represent are as conceptually robust as they are technically astute. SYRUP delivers for the refined artistic palate that appreciates conceptual robustness with discipline, structure and form.

The summer exhibition features the work of Melbourne based painting and drawing artist, Emily Ferretti. Ferretti makes images of selected still-life objects and scenes that are reflective and symbolic. Rendered with part representational, part abstracted elements, her paintings and drawings use form and colour to evoke nostalgia and highlight feelings of recollection. Her practice heralds incredible technical form reminiscent of the Netherlandish painting styles associated with the early renaissance period and onset of the art market in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, re-mixed with techniques synonymous with early 20^th century abstraction and psychologically drive artistic practice reflective of Freudian and Jungian social theory. Feretti and has undertaken studio residencies at Gertrude Contemporary, the Australian Tapestry Workshop and the Cite des Arts Internationale in Paris. With her star still very much on the rise her work is already held in major collections including at Artbank, Monash University Museum of Art and the Macquarie Group Collection, as well as in private collections in Australia and the UK.

Syrup is a gallery on the rise and one to watch as it continues to find its feet and move into a vibrant 2025 program.

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