Cherry Stones | Aaron Perkins + Sam Dixon

8 - 18 December 2021

A.A. Milne's Cherry Stones is a children's poem that wonders about what life will bring. The child asks whether they will be a tinker, tailor, soldier or a sailor; whether they will be rich or poor, virtuous or corrupt; and whether they'll turn rabbits out of their pockets or travel through space on rockets. They wonder at the seemingly inexhaustible possibilities of life and liken this to the abundance of cherries growing upon the little cherry tree in their garden. Yet the poem's title, Cherry Stones, reflects a diminished view from adulthood: that with each choice our possibilities successively narrow until all that remains are the consequences - the pits or stones - of these choices. 

Artist Aaron Perkins and screenwriter/director Sam Dixon's Cherry Stones takes inspiration from children's games of make-believe that model these choices. Perkins and Dixon's paintings and writings converse across media to similarly invite make-believe and to offer an imaginative escape from the game of life carried on just outside the pockmarked and graffitied walls of The Old Lock Up. 

Film Screening + Artist Talk with Llewellyn-Millhouse | 18 December

AARON PERKINS
www.rnprkns.com/about | IG: @ey.ey.ar.oh.en

Aaron Perkins is an Australian word nerd who does the cryptic crossword each day, collects typographic errors in texts, and who is running out of walls to line with bookcases. His conceptual practice is based in painting and playfully engages a skepticism of language to explore the relationship between text and image. He has been a finalist in the Redland Art Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, the Moreton Bay Region Art Prize and the Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize in Landscape Painting, has exhibited throughout south-east Queensland, and has written for In Residence and STABLE ARIs. Perkins recently received a Doctorate of Philosophy from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, for his research into the potential for a philosophically defined and criterial notion of fiction to function within the medium of painting. He is represented in Brisbane by Jan Manton Gallery, with whom he has held four solo exhibitions: Chronicle, At the still point, there the dance is, Pronounced á-nem-oy, and If I were taller.

SAM DIXON
vimeo.com/samdixonfilmmaker | IG: @dickos_variety_hour

Sam Dixon is a screenwriter/director hailing from the mountain village of Maleny in South-East Queensland whose short films that have screened at festivals throughout Australia and internationally. He participated in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Accelerator Program with his short, Old Mate (2013); was selected to pitch a feature-length script of Our Mother The Mountain (2015) to the Independent Film Project in New York; his Screen Queensland-funded short horror film No Friend In The Forest (2018) premiered at ScreamFest in Los Angeles; and he recently appeared on screen in Perfect Park (2021), which premiered at the Brisbane International Film Festival. Dixon holds a Masters in Screenwriting from the Victorian College of the Arts and is currently shooting his debut feature film.