Co-curated with Olivia Koh from recess – a Melbourne-based online platform showcasing contemporary moving-image works – this series will comprise daily screenings in Community Hall. Featuring all Melbourne-based filmmakers, the films highlight the city’s breadth of talent in art-filmmaking – an expanding arena of creative practice with a bright future.

Diego Ramírez is an artist, writer and facilitator who creates humorous objects in different mediums that evoke the Christian concept of the ‘Fall’ and its melancholic, adversarial and supernatural relations. This interest extends to various romantic archetypes, such as the vampire, which he reconfigures to address issues of language and representation.

The Perfect Ever, 2021–23, carefully re-edits scenes from the 1960 Mexican film Las Rosas del Milagro (The Miracle Roses) to hijack the image of the Virgin Guadalupe (Mary in the form of an apparition to St Juan Diego in 1531) with an eerie void. The work explores the notion that characters in sciencefiction films exceed the reality of the set. This is especially true of filmic adaptations of cartoons or video games, which bring icons and heroes into a photorealistic plane in a similar way to how religious icons begin their life: as two-dimensional renderings that become three-dimensional through miracu – lous tales. Ramírez eliminates the dialogue in the source material to isolate the expressions of ‘awe’ performed by the actors. The result is what the artist describes as ‘an ambiguous and sinister mirage that points to the palpable yet comical darkness of a divinity briefly visiting Earth’.

Ramírez’s work has been shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Westspace, and Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne; Human Resources Los Angeles; and Deslave, Tijuana. He has written for the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art + Australia, NECSUS, MeMO and un Projects. Ramírez completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University and an honours degree in Fine Arts at Monash University. As a facilitator, he is the Director at SEVENTH Gallery and sits on panels for Creative Victoria and the City of Melbourne, and is a peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts. He is represented by MARS Gallery.