Artist Biography

Mariana Jandova was born in Czechoslovakia, completed her Fine Art degree at the Victorian College of the Arts, Australia and recently also a postgraduate degree in Social Work at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her practice stems from her ongoing interest in the psycho-social dimension of human life, the intricacies of human perception and the way we create and structure the world around us. She has exhibited her work in many of the independent contemporary art spaces around Melbourne, including Seventh gallery (2012 & 2014), Blindside (2013) and Kings ARI (2012) among others, and received an Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant for her residency at the NARS studios.

She has been working collaboratively with Tony Cran as well as doing her own practice for the past several years. Having first started their collaborative practice in 2011, Mariana Jandova and Tony Cran find themselves drawn to the investigation of the merging space within their individual practices and their mutual love of working across a whole range of diverse media. They have collaboratively exhibited at Platform gallery (2011), Incinerator gallery (2012), C3 gallery (2013) in Melbourne and during residency at NARS in 2014.

Tony Cran grew up in the deep north of Australia and spent many years hitchhiking before finding himself with a Fine Art degree from the Victorian College of the Arts. His work is formed via personal experience, reflection and curiosity. The shaping forces currently appearing in the work are an interest in religious/philosophical systems in relation to theoretical physics as well as environmental rationalism.