Neon Parc acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung as the Traditional Owners and sovereign custodians of the Country on which we operate. We pay our deepest respects to their Elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Neon Parc is delighted to commence our 2026 program with Taree Mackenzie’s major solo exhibition, ‘Wave Works’, opening on Friday 30 January in Brunswick, 6–8pm.
‘Wave Works’ brings together five kinetic light-based installations that consider how perception is shaped through colour, movement and surface. Across the exhibition, light is treated not as an immaterial projection but as a material force—one that bends, ripples and reorients itself in relation to the surfaces it encounters.
The exhibition developed from Mackenzie’s long-standing interest in cast shadows and the ways their forms are altered by the surfaces onto which they fall. Rather than working with shadow directly, ‘Wave Works’ extends this enquiry into light itself. Movement is introduced not through a changing image, but through light projected onto slowly rotating sculptural surfaces, allowing fixed patterns of light to become unstable and continually reconfigured. In this way, the works invert the logic of cinema: the image remains still while the screen moves.
A recurring wave form sits at the centre of the exhibition, interrupting and distorting projected stripes of light. Several works are organised around a dominant hue—red, green or blue—that conditions how colour is perceived across the field of vision.
Colour is rarely singular or pure; it emerges through overlap and interference, slipping into secondary tones as one hue melds into another. Elsewhere, colour expands into a full spectrum before dissolving again, while a monochromatic work pares back to pure light, movement and surface. Together, the works present colour as contingent and relational—a phenomenon that comes into being through viewing rather than as a fixed or autonomous quality.
Situated across the gallery, the works establish a rhythm between object, image, surface and projection. Live projections extend the movement of the sculptural forms, framing perception as temporal and embodied. ‘Wave Works’ invites viewers into a slowed encounter with light and colour—one that unfolds over time and foregrounds perception as continually in flux.
Taree Mackenzie’s recent solo exhibitions include ‘Taree Mackenzie’, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2018); ‘Hairdryer Works’, TBC art Inc., Melbourne (2016); and ‘Line Shadows’, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2014).
Her work has been featured in major museum exhibitions across Australia, including ‘Light Source’, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2025); ‘Colour Working/ Working Colour’, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne (2025); ‘Arriving Slowly: Exploring the Abstract’, Ipswich Art Gallery (2024-25); ‘Living Patterns: Contemporary Australian Abstration’, QAGOMA (2024); ‘Electric Dreams’, Yarrila Art and Museum (2024); ‘Light Sensitive’ Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne (2023); ‘Melbourne Now’, National Gallery of Victoria (2023); ‘one (&) another’, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2020); ‘Let there be light’, Justin House Museum, Melbourne (2019); ‘Prime Movers’, Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne (2017); Redlands- Konica Minolta Art Prize, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2017); ‘Set in Motion’, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2016); ‘Dancing Umbrellas’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2016); ‘Kaleidorama’, Stills Gallery, Sydney (2015), and ‘NEW14’, Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014).
Taree Mackenzie’s work in held in public and private collections nationally and internationally including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; QAGOMA, Brisbane; ACMI, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne, and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand.