Annika Harding

Hot Press

Print is everywhere – books, newspapers, magazines (like this fine one you’re reading), posters, stamps, fingerprints, shoe-prints. Three artists exhibiting at CCAS Gorman House this summer prove how exciting and experimental print can be when they exploit its everyday, pop culture pervasion.

Alison Alder uses screen-printing to make large-scale video projections about nuclear activity in Australia, pushing print into another dimension. Alder is the Artistic Director and CEO of Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, an organisation that really puts Canberra on the map as a print powerhouse. She has been making political posters since the 1980s, but her work in Dirty Water also references vintage magazines and postcards, and old films. As well as the video projections, this exhibition includes a series of poster-sized prints based on old magazine covers, with the titles Fall Out and Half Life.

Rather than using print to develop his work, Clem Baker-Finch uses found print as a starting point. For Self Titled he takes clippings from covers of trashy magazines and uses a computer program he devised to weave text into the image. The results are undeniably humorous, but also a little unsettling. Baker-Finch’s large digital prints boldly point out our trust in photography and print journalism, even of the tabloid variety. They also illustrate the extremely tragic nature of celebrity, writ large with text from the articles the cover image refers to, and also more highbrow tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

U.K. Frederick engages with print differently again, printing directly from found objects: old vinyl records. In the tiny concentric grooves of the record, white paper between the black lines, we can see where the music has been stamped into the vinyl. We can also see all the scratches and irregularities that have occurred over the life of the record, proof that someone has bought, played and loved it. In Frederick’s exhibition Lament, you will be able to not only see the prints of the records, but also hear music digitised from the same records. In the small Cube space, it is a complete experience that may take you to a different time and place, via powerfully moving rock songs from artists who were taken from the world too soon.

The different ways these three artists engage with print makes their work very fascinating and very contemporary. Print lends itself to work that has a strong sense of process and experimentation, leading to surprising results. Interesting things also happen when media collides, and print works brilliantly with video, photography and the found object in these three exhibitions. Print may be everywhere, but these big, bold exhibitions will take it and you somewhere else.

View the three abovementioned exhibitions at CCAS Gorman House. Opening 6pm Friday December 9, continuing until Saturday February 11. Annika Harding is the Gallery Administrator at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, and a freelance writer.

CHRIS FORTESCUE, STARLIE GEIKIE

WHAT: EXHIBITIONS, PART OF VIVID PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
WHERE: CCAS, GORMAN HOUSE
WHEN: ‘TIL AUG 23

Forget music festivals, art festivals are so hot right now. The Sydney Biennale is a must see, but don’t miss VIVID, a photography festival that is on in your own backyard. Perhaps not literally, but it is all over Canberra. So put on your jacket, tie your laces, and head to CCAS now: this is your LAST CHANCE to see two cutting-edge VIVID exhibitions. Chris Fortescue’s Resonant Sites and Starlie Geikie’s Low and Lone will amaze, and cost nothing to see. Fortescue’s sound work seems to make viewers either anxious or calm… how will it affect you? The pervasive sound provides a filter for the experience of the gallery space, Fortescue’s photographic work, and the whole VIVID festival, because it reminds you of the unique resonances that affect your experiences. Geikie’s patterned images of horror-movie characters, and her dazzling leather poncho are also worth a good look. And if you’re after more festival fun, new VIVID exhibitions open at CCAS on the 29th of August at 6pm, with the customary free wine and cheap beer kicking off great exhibitions, and hopefully a great night.

ERICA SECCOMBE

WHAT: NANOPLASTICA EXHIBITION
WHERE: CCAS, GORMAN HOUSE
WHEN: ‘TIL JULY 5

Nanoplastica is a mesmerising cocktail in which art meets science, the mundane becomes the sublime, and high-tech scientific equipment is seamlessly incorporated into the artistic process. The results are intoxicating. The massive crowd who rocked up for the opening on Friday May 23 would no doubt agree that this is an exciting and refreshingly different exhibition. People of all ages and varied interests and professions have been equally entranced in front of Seccombe’s large projections, featuring the humblest of subjects: the small plastic toys that one finds in the hollow centre of a Yowie chocolate. These simple Australian animal toys feature in moving X-rays presented as floor-to-ceiling video projections. The X-ray videos were created with technology developed at the ANU Super Computer Facility. A high resolution, 3D volume rendering program allows the viewer to see inside the toys at cross-sections and travel through their interior spaces. If you like art, science, cutting-edge technology or just pretty colours, then this exhibition is for you.

BERNIE SLATER

WHAT: CONQUER IN COMFORT EXHIBITION
WHERE: CCAS, GORMAN HOUSE
WHEN: ‘TIL MAY 17

In the wake of his involvement in a couple of group exhibitions at CCAS, Bernie Slater explodes his own brand of cultural critique into the Gorman House gallery with a casual panache that strikes the heart of the conqueror in all of us. From consumer culture and home decorating to advertisements for the army, Slater tackles the ironic and taken-for-granted aspects of Australian culture. He shows us how politics that we may not agree with stealthily infiltrate our way of life, commando-crawling into just about everything we do or see, camouflaged and under our field of vision. Uncle Bernie wants YOU! to step inside two of his works, large drawings with holes for your face which then allow you to see yourself as part of each drawing through a camera and TV… with chilling implications. Thought-provoking but humorous enough to make viewers laugh out loud, Conquer in Comfort is an exhibition not to be missed.