Chloe Mandryk

Differing Perspectives

A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Dean Butters and Natalie Mather are exploring identity by creating work removed from themselves and each other. They have a cinematic appreciation of the world around them, and by that I don’t mean the beauty of a wide shot or scene, but the trickery and unreality of it all. This article started out as an exploration of the push and pull of collaboration. It was interesting to learn that as a result of working between two cities the pair began to respond to the ‘idea’ of one another.

DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES is an exhibition which presents two artists who explore shifting formats, uneasy liminal space and pop culture references. Both artists present fantasy and utopia in their works. Warhol and Russian science fiction inspired the artists because perception is key.

I found their interest in each other, but maybe not full understanding, very poignant. In the way that you know a person is magnetic but you’re not sure why, or you come in halfway through a film and it clicks. Looking at their works, I experienced a similar feeling – a sense of a story underway.

The pieces have a strong sense of purpose. In film, intent is sometimes created through a device called a ‘MacGuffin’. This is a place, something or someone that motivates a person (or character) to act. Perhaps you observe this mysterious motivation in people around you. It can be sincere or an affect. I like the idea that directors encourage an actor to engage with an imaginary MacGuffin; it relates so readily to art and life.

Natalie’s images represent the breakthrough moment on the way to a better path through the destruction of accepted ways of thinking or communication – well-articulated with titles such as Where Do You Think You’re Going and The Tip. Dean’s images of sexualised girls, classical works of art and pop icons (Warhol’s Skull, 1977) are doubled up like a kind of visual static to create a tension where you sense something is happening but you’re not sure exactly what.

To be confronted with a familiar image, machine-processed but obviously toyed with by the artist, is very intimate. Dean considers how we see his subject, the relationship between him and the girl modelling and our connection to iconography of the past. This is particularly clear in Fading Into Forgetting and At Times I Sit and Imagine Conversations I Never Had. Dean explained, ‘To define this relationship as exploitative is not to say that it is always, or even often, a malicious exploitation, just that the photographer always uses the model for their own ends. The subject is the objectified other, and there is an intrinsic unkindness in that.’

Natalie’s works are made up of geometric explosions, or implosions, of shards of light and colour. Is this combustion the end goal, or the beginning? Why does she engage in fantasy? Is it a road to articulating something real? She developed her aesthetic during some studio time in Berlin where she investigated impact in terms of literal collisions, grand apocalyptic blasts and crashes in space on a large scale. She constructs these images to appear as if ‘to be moving at high speeds through a hyper colour space…the blinding detritus of a neon apocalypse.’ Like Dean’s work, there is a high sense of drama. However, her tension and reason to be, or MacGuffin, comes from a different place.

So how do Dean and Natalie question what is real and at the same time seem so anchored in the present? They both use repetition, which implies control; another manmade marker is the level-appropriated imagery, challenging gaze of the subject and also Natalie’s plasticine colours. We are set up to enjoy an unrealistic image, but are pulled into the fantasy of it – like a zoetrope. Maybe looking at his and her works you unearth a half-truth, which is what is enticing about them. As Warhol said, ‘It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.’

Bury Me with my Back to the Sun shows Dean’s focus on repetition. He elaborated, ‘Repetition is an ongoing concern within my printmaking, and it was with this idea of the line – of a repeated stripe running across a work – that I stood in the darkroom and looked at the slithers of test strips pinned up against the wall, one after the other. These works became about the essence of an image, about how much you can take away and still have that image be about the same thing, and how that is then influenced by repetition.’

Before creating this body of work for Differing Perspectives, the two artists spoke about points of commonality. Of the collaboration, Dean posed, ‘I found myself collaborating with the past, with works of hers that I knew, rather than these imagined works that were yet to be. There was solidity there, and a start point. A set of finely constructed rules that I had to work within.’

Differing Perspectives is on show at ANCA Gallery Wed-Sun June 5-23. Officially opening at 5pm, Wednesday June 5. Entry is free. More information at: anca.net.au. 

Roman Stachurski

Artist ROMAN STACHURSKI will open two exhibitions of kinetic still and sound sculptures inspired by man’s footprint. And yet his titles Second Nature and Second Future are impossible facts. We can experience something as innate because it is learned, and can easily imagine a second future – because it hasn’t happened yet.

Sound like science fiction? It kind of is.

Roman’s key material in this installation is 50 litres of ash. The ash will cover a variety of objects that indicate the presence and demise of humanity and technology. Interestingly, Roman explained, ‘sand is the first example from which I came to an understanding of the concept of entropy, which remains a constant footnote in my art and developing works… I choose to use natural materials as they give me comfort on a very primal level. Refined “unnatural” materials fill me with unease and I can never be truly at peace around them.’

These site-specific artworks encourage contemplation or meditation but their format promotes a sense of doom, or unwelcome omnipotence.

Roman’s works are not dissimilar to the evocative mindscapes conjured by authors like Philip K Dick or Frank Herbert. Both novelists have used sand dunes to imply isolation, mysticism and the enigma of technology meeting human life. Roman explores natural and alien patterns and movements in nature, in his words, to address ‘the moot topic of mankind's relentless consumerist culture and its ultimate undoing of life and earth.’

He introduces infinity into the gallery space with his choice of material. And yet each speck of ash is part of a broader whole and you get a sense of boundlessness as well as isolation and disconnection. A similar affect might be experienced when faced with Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, the hyper neon pigment overload of Pip & Pop, or Anish Kapoor’s manipulation of audience perception with mirrors.

Roman is conscious of the experience of the viewer and uses subjective materials to provoke a response. He explained, ‘I like to reward curiosity with my artwork and I think that the curious will benefit from their inquisitiveness in these instances… Art is a valuable tool for communication and cultural enlightenment as it allows us to share dreams, imaginations and visions.’

As for the sculpture you can expect, the artist uses found objects that are re-worked and reapplied – computer mouse balls, cut up measuring tapes, Venetian blinds and terracotta pots, for example. The pieces covered in ash may be emblematic of the demise of technology but the moving parts in this ‘kinetic’ exhibition are powered by motors – an interesting juxtaposition.

By matching the synthetic and organic Roman shows that his work is about human concerns: ‘the ultimate theme of my artwork at this current time is loss, death, decay, and the entropic process of the universe.’

Roman Stachurski’s exhibitions Second Nature and Second Future are at CCAS Manuka, Wed-Tue May 8-14 and Wed-Sun May 15-19 respectively. Entry is free.

Fluidity

THE FORMAT OF FLUIDS

FLUIDITY is an exhibition of new works by Canberra artist Julia Boyd. Julia is an emerging artist who works in photo media. She was a student at the Slade School of Art, London, and was awarded a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Australian National University in 2009. The Canberra Contemporary Art Space resident’s photo media pieces will be on display at the Manuka satellite gallery. Julia is also launching a self-published ‘artist’s book’ that explores her collected works from 2008 through 2013.

Julia tackles new terrain in her first solo show, using her material in unusual ways. Not only does she capture the image of found objects, she incorporates lost or forgotten pieces of urban decay such as old books or weathered ply sheets.

This technique is one part of the artfulness of her art. Julia explained, ‘The liquid emulsion prints have been developed throughout the year. Also, I have printed images onto surfaces such as window blinds, records, books and table tops; each object is a unique challenge and always gives unexpected results… Art helps people respond to the world around them, challenges them, allows them to express themselves and create new things.’

In the past Julia has explored the medium of photography as a means to depict a scene but also as a work in and of itself. Photography transcends the 2D format in her work and by doing so she plays with inverse relationships. For example, reality and memory, subject and object, mass-produced print material and photographs.

‘Photos often appear on paper, canvas and in picture frames,’ elaborated Julia. ‘Photos also surround us in our everyday lives – in magazines, online, in the media or as family mementos. My work is inspired by this saturation of images and I use the humble two-dimensional photograph as my starting point for a three-dimensional artwork. The photograph becomes a fluid form that can be painted and manipulated in lots of unusual ways.’

For the artist the photograph is a starting point for further creation. Go along to the opening at the end of March and see her work with images in the same way she approaches life in general – what’s on show are pieces that bring out the quirkiness, banality or uniqueness of the places she photographs.

Fluidity will be on display at CCAS Manuka,19 Furneaux St, Forrest, from Thursday March 8 to Sunday April 7. 11am-5pm, Wed-Sun. The gallery will be open over Easter Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Free.

Rise Exist Demise (RED)

(RED)IFINING COLOUR

On Friday March 15 at 8pm the lights are set to dim in a giant warehouse space in the centre of Canberra. Suddenly a spotlight will drop on Kieran Bryant performing a series of rituals in the nude with milk, red rocks and glass jars.

Kieran is one of 17 artists who are creating exciting new artworks for the opening of RISE EXIST DEMISE (RED), a contemporary Australian art exhibition. The artists investigate the colour red, a colour that is synonymous with oppositional ideas such as love and hate, health and disease, birth and death, pride and commercialism or the perfectly pious and those bloody pagans.

Sabrina Baker is creating a new textile installation. This meticulous piece will cascade from the ceiling and complement A Stitch in Time. The two works will explore social, visual and ritualistic cycles. Or, as Sabrina elaborated, how ‘the use of embroidery connects me to a long history of women’s practice, a practice that’s repetition and precise action is a ritual in itself passed down through hundreds of years as a form of communication, education and expression.’

EARS is an artist from Sydney who has exhibited from LA to Korea to Amsterdam and has recently shown with the National Gallery of Victoria, the contemporary collective Art Pharmacy and two underground artist run spaces, Kind Of gallery and Soldiers Rd. EARS will be showing pieces that make reference to colour, but that’s just the beginning. Most pronounced is his investigation of cycles of representation – from photograph, to sketch, to sound recording, to image. EARS said of the work, ‘I have a fascination and obsession with the analogue realm and distortion/abstraction as a way of opening up the mind to various possible interpretations of the same thing. Leaving gaps in the information, making the image or sound unclear or distorted, and removing parts of the story or information allows the imagination to fill in the blanks. I am appropriating from imagery and sounds of my own truth, my own world.’

Adam Veikkanen’s work, which began with links to Boris Groys’ little red book, ‘a communist postscript’, uses red as a core motif for political and social interaction. The artist displays sports fields and paraphernalia as ‘an altered way of thinking’. Adam is known for his thoughtful approach to material, concept and presentation. In 2012 he completed an Artist Residency at JACA, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

With exhibiting artists from Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, including Sabrina Baker, Hannah Beasley, Rowena Boyd, Alexander Boynes, Bill Brown and Caryn Griffin, Kieran Bryant, Shannon Cranko, EARS, Alexandra Frasersmith, Sacha Jeffrey and more, RED is promising.

Rise Exist Demise (RED) shows at Nishi Gallery, NewActon, from Fri Mar 15-Fri Mar 29. Free. 

Introduction

AN INTRODUCTION TO INFINITY

Infinity – some might consider it ‘new age’, however the history of art is puckered by moments where artists try to look beyond what is calculable, speak around rhetoric or transmit the indescribable.

INTRODUCTION is a series of collaborative paintings by Clare Thackway and Gregory Hodge at FirstDraft, Sydney. The title of the exhibition aligns with the sensation you feel moving through the show, it is a sequence of beginnings – from the first spray of colour, a newborn and a community of wide eyes that look out and over at some cataclysm. In each work there is an immediate feeling that whatever occurred here doesn’t end here.

But how do you begin to express what is incommunicable without a subtext or by referring to cultural conceits? It is this binary that I found most interesting about their exhibition. The couple aims to fling us into infinite space but have to keep their feet on the ground to do that.

So, what are they standing on? Thackway and Hodge refer to the Romantic concept of the ‘Sublime’ with a side of post-modernism. The Romantics tried to paint the inimitable elements of landscape – the brilliance of a whiff of cloud, the sensation of being dwarfed by a mountain range or feeling coddled by a dopey orange sunset. As a result, the pair said ‘each painting alludes to a sense of wonder, the moment before or after an undefined event.’

Joining forces has distilled each artist’s visual language. Thackway concentrates on a moody camouflage palette that is great paired with figures that inhabit another dimension. Hodge’s neons trick the eye – all in keeping with their goal to subvert our perspective. The pair both studied painting at the Canberra School of Art and have exhibited widely in the nation’s capital.

Captivating works such as Ocean, Falling and Toi Toi Toi contemplate the metaphysical and physical world and the themes that inhabit but also extend beyond it – for example belief, mortality, the environment, colour, individuality, myth and hallucination. You can’t help but feel slightly paranoid in front of Toi Toi Toi (the title hints at the action of spitting out the bad energy of a hex or spell) with its group of figures who stand together but gaze out of the canvas like Children of the Corn. Eerily, in Weft the figures stare as they anchor themselves, linking arms, knees buckled. You also might find joy but also a touch of pathos in Falling – as pretty psychedelic orbs rain down on a group that will only catch a portion of the prize.

Is it necessary to consider Clare and Gregory’s philosophical engagement with a philosophy to fully grasp how they connect with reality? Probably not, and that is what is insightful about the show, it’s yours for the taking.

Introduction from Clare Thackway and Gregory Hodge displayed at FirstDraft Gallery, Sydney.  

Merryn Sommerville

MERRYN SOMMERVILLE received the inaugural Canberra Museum and Gallery Showcase Exhibition award after graduating from the ANU School of Art last year. As an artist whose work is habitually described as unsettling, I took the chance to speak to her about her intentions in creating her otherwise captivating images that pair conflicting connotations we subscribe to childhood: opalescence and grime; innocence and insight. Nothing scary about that, right?

Merryn believes, ‘Art can be very effective in communicating with people in a very primal and emotional way. It is a combination of culturally specific cues that tell us to react in a certain way and, for an artist that understands this, it can provoke a lot of thought and a lot of feeling.’ In many ways, children have been painted and observed for years with projected meaning; their perceived innocence or precocious air. Children in art history have been seen as symbols for greater society, for intangible ideas and, most commonly, tied to religion in the form of the Christ child. Ultimately, children are not autonomous in art. Merryn’s images play off this idea.

Merryn’s pastel treatment on black paper plays very affectively with light, reminiscent of the benign but intriguing face awash with soft light in Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665). This infamous painting was made using a jumble of browns, greys and mute colours – a style termed ‘dead colouring’. In Merryn’s works, she has left segments of the pastel incomplete on the black paper, so the fleshy kids appear to have literally a chip off their shoulder – an empty belly or a black eye. These parts don’t seem ‘missing’ or ‘unfinished’ but as though they have rotted away or were born deficient. Yet, the children are dressed in their ‘Sunday best’. This parallel suggests a relationship between our expectations of children and how we read an image.

Merryn’s manipulation of light, choice of subject and acts of permission and restriction over the audience’s gaze sit her somewhere near a Bill Henson approach. Merryn reflects more on the adult viewer than the child. Chinese contemporary artist Tang Zhigang and his verbose politicised children are another contemporary example of putting children in adult guises to hold a mirror to the adult world.

Merryn seems fascinated with the push and pull between the adult world, childrens’ world and the imagined space in between. She recounts, ‘Morton Bartlet was an orphan who spent his life alone. He made himself a family of dolls. He’d make clothes for them, draw them, and photograph them in domestic situations. Then, one day, he put them away and never looked at them again. They weren’t discovered until after his death. I hope that when people look at my work they recognise ideas or feelings within themselves that they are unable to put into words.’

Merryn Somerville is exhibiting her works from now until Sunday January 6 within the ramp showcase space at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra City. Open Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat-Sun 12pm-4pm. Entry is free.

She Likes Yellow

Emma Beer’s SHE LIKES YELLOW is an online exhibition of 17 new abstract paintings for the Jas Hugonnet Gallery. When artworks shift from being viewed in the flesh to a computer or phone screen we have a new interaction with the piece and in this case it has coloured the artist’s approach – two changes that are not necessarily adverse.

In a show following the Torres Travelling Art Scholarship awarded by the Embassy of Spain in 2010, Emma presented a darker collection of work, echoing the clotted purples and ruddied reds of Goya or Velázquez in their compositions of angst, rebellion and, importantly, visual ascendency. Now, she maintains the power of colour but has taken leave from the old masters and embraced her own relationship to paint. This collection of work feels as though the artist has opened up to elemental impulses.

A signature, and an effective one at that, are her successions of zig-zag marks that alternately change direction, from east to west, across the painting in a meditative fashion – see October Rain, Some Kind of Voice of the Heart and Simultaneous Me. Emma has said that her practice is ‘a routine of rituals from my psyche. I guess you can call it intuition.’ Her lines give the surface area a kind of caged movement and also a three-dimensional quality.

Across other works you will find a new attention to neon brights and pearly lilac blocks, visually bold in their colour but also in their role of obscuring other elements of the image. What you notice is that colour becomes a physical gesture, an idea which Emma allies with the act of painting. ‘It’s like wrestling with your brother. It’s physical, challenging, fast and gentle; considerate and extreme all at the same time.’ In Giving Me Your Hand and Captain Crazy, the intersecting yellow hard-edge lines and triangles appear like manmade roadblocks that bring to mind a relationship to the urban world, similar to a Jeffrey Smart painting. A core and persisting combination in these works are the geometric shapes which give the illusion of space, as if you are looking up to a painted ceiling or down into a shadowy corner.

In conversation about the online format, Emma said, ‘I think practically about the ways in which the works will be represented in the [photographic] reproduction. My attitude is almost as if the photograph is the artwork’. As a consequence, the work in Emma’s gallery has found a new focus on brighter colour and more obvious distinctions between lines.

Emma Beer has opened a new window from which she hopes people will see ‘that I’m happy, I’m thinking, I’m asking questions and creating new challenges for myself.’

She Likes Yellow is now showing online at the online Jas Hugonnet Gallery: hugonnet.com.au.

Charlie White

EMBODYING SUBJECTIVITY

CHARLIE WHITE has created 80 black and white photographic portraits, which will be on show for one night only at a house on the north side of Canberra. The idea that our minds have an affect on our body is an interesting element of portraiture, which comes through strongly in these images.

With Charlie’s controlled composition of a person set against a black background you can focus on the nuances of their shape. The pose of the sitter gives clues to, but also conceals, their inner world. This traditional portrait style – otherwise known as embodied subjectivity – has pulled an audience for some time, from Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of artists and friends to Jacqueline Mitelman’s contemporary work.

Charlie uses a Hasselblad camera to solicit a reaction from the people he photographs, explaining, ‘It is a beautiful and unusual-looking camera. It commands more respect than if I’m just shooting with some black plastic DSLR. People seem to sit up straighter and be more serious.’ The act of creating the image is key, as Charlie adds, ‘You hold the camera at the waist and look down into the viewfinder, so I could make eye contact with people and talk to them while I was taking the photo. It makes the portrait process more personal.’

It’s interesting to look at the people in these images as a medium. You can imagine them cajoled like a daub of paint, bent by the sculptor, but still holding their base properties. In that sense, the sitter is used just as light or form to create an aesthetic – an aesthetic of emotional intimacy unique to each person. Charlie’s images, like photographer Ella Dreyfus’, question the insanity of a contemporary culture where to look similar is to be beautiful.

All the portraits were shot on film and are silver-gelatin prints. As a result, the image is made of small pieces of silver burnt by light. The printing process uses Selenium toning in which the artist places the prints in a bath of Selenium, turning the silver in the paper to a compound of Silver-Selenide and blacks into deep purples. ‘It’s the little things that count,’ Charlie says, ‘Doing it this way rather than making digital prints gives the portraits a tonal range like they’re carved out of stone.’

‘I want people to feel like the work is theirs. Whenever I see someone’s artwork that really touches me, it feels like it’s mine. I’ll know I didn’t make the artwork, but the glow it gives makes me feel that I belong to it. I’d be over the moon if people felt that about my portraits. Even if they hate my pictures, it’s important they have a fun night too… I’m excited to be using a living room as an exhibition space instead of a gallery. I made these portraits to show the dignified beauty in people I know personally. It seems right that the show should be more like a party with portraits than a stiff-upper-lip gallery opening.’

80 will be exhibited at 13 Blackbutt St, O’Connor, from 7:30pm on Friday October 12. There will be performances by Runaway, Skyline and E A V E S. Free entry. Free beer and wine.

Model Citizens

CITIZENS’ REVOLT

MODEL CITIZENS is a show of contemporary art set in two apartments on Kendall Lane during the Art, Not Apart festival. An apartment may seem like a strange place for an art exhibition, but it lends itself well to the idea that the things a person has at home – posters, chairs, rugs, pets or works of art – might give you a clue to who that person is (or thinks they are). The chance to occupy empty apartments provokes thought about this person: the citizen.

A citizen is not a tangible thing, but an idea of where you belong, what you subscribe to and, importantly, why you believe that either of those things were your choice in the first place. Spaces such as the museum or gallery, as well as ideas, objects and politics, shape us outside of our control. And so, artists who take back control by using materials in unexpected ways to carry unexpected messages have been chosen to exhibit as new ‘Model Citizens’. This show is a chance to celebrate descent, outsiders and rule-breakers. Some artists do this in their subject, others in their material. They rebel by avoiding the foundations of how we think about art – oil paint on a canvas, prints on paper, a still life in a 2D format. The same goes for ideas; portraits and landscapes are art, but is a giant blow-up mattress or a puppy made out of feathers?

Artists that share strong and unique ideas on representation will showcase their ideas. The group is comprised of Julia Boyd, Rowena Boyd, Alexander Boynes, Rachel Bowak, Byrd, Tiffany Cole, Nicola Dickson, Daniel Edwards, Shellaine Godbold, Holly Granville-Edge, Gregory Hodge, Helani Laisk, Jemima Parker, Emily Valentine, Adam Veikkanen, Fiona Veikkanen and Jonathan Webster.

Through the act of painting, Gregory Hodge and Jonathan Webster pose a thoughtful dialogue on ‘representation,’ what is ‘real’ and how we fit into the world – the impetus of the exhibition. Gregory’s practice involves working across abstraction via painting and works on paper. His recent methods involve the construction of abstract compositions using painted motifs, drafting film, paper and masking tape before rendering these collages in paint. Using ‘trompe l’oeil’ effects and a manipulation of the paints transparency and opacity, he transforms the ephemeral and volatile nature of these collages into an explicitly fixed painted state. Jonathan explained, ‘the type of art I make is my experienced landscape… walking to, from and around my house is the purest form of art making I know.’

This exhibition brings together works that at face value may look very different, but are united by extraordinary materials, a sense of self and reinvention, promoting diverse ways of being rather than one model. Profiles and images for the artists participating will be posted in the lead up to the exhibition at the Art on Show website.  

Model Citizens will be open on Saturday October 27, 1-7pm and Sunday October 28, 10-4pm at Apartment G09/G10, Kendall Lane, NewActon. Entry is free. Check artonshow.org for more details.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

A SAVAGE GARDEN OF IDEAS

James Lieutenant took some time to share some insight into his upcoming solo show TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY, opening this week at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in Manuka. As the exhibition title implies, the artist’s attitude is pointed and intense. He explained, ‘I don’t find making art a particularly enjoyable process. The enjoyment comes through thinking of ideas. If I had a more peaceful personality I don’t think I’d be making art.’

The painting and drawing in this exhibition has been formed in admiration of some of the markers of ‘60s French New Wave imagery and style. The films of this period tried to break conceits of representation; Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) particularly influenced this show. Some films in the ‘60s were made more realistic with jumpy camera work, long takes and fragmented or unfinished ideas – a way of seeing which seems normal today. You can see how this might be an invaluable idea for a contemporary artist who is concerned with the ephemera of life, such as fleeting images, poetry and graphics.

As part of his process, James has been reading Michel Houllebecq, a writer who (in addition to being critiqued for cynicism, nihilism and misogyny) confronts the strictures society puts on itself, such as traditional relationships, economics and religion. Similarly obsessed by the shock value of sex, drugs and peoples’ emotional defects is Will Self, an author James cites as important background noise in his art practice. It would appear that James is inspired by Self’s self-confessed prerogative: ‘What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable.’

Institutions have a curious place in the creation and reception of art and are an essential tool to teach us how to think of the world and ourselves. A uniting topic for many artists is their experience at Art School and, more often than not, they admit that the best lesson they learnt was to ignore the opinions of others. James seemed to concur. ‘I learnt that the easiest way for people to interpret artwork is by placing it into a comprehensible context. It’s much easier for people to understand what you’re attempting if the context or material process is very clear. It’s easier to say, “It’s about an engagement with art history” or “material” than it is to try and attempt something that entertains or makes people think.’

It will certainly be interesting to see how James Lieutenant’s philosophical inspirations look on paper.

Truly, Madly, Deeply is on show at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in Manuka from Thursday October 11-Sunday October 21. Open Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. Free.

Go Figure!

Saving Faces

The National Portrait Gallery, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and Swiss collector Dr Uli Sigg have collaborated on a wonderful new exhibition, GO FIGURE! The works, collected and created over almost 40 years, showcase the designs of Chinese artists who have excelled in remodeling, breaking and inventing key concepts in art.

In the late ‘70s, the ‘Gang of Four’ events of Tiananmen Square and Cultural Revolution were openly criticised and the arts experienced a massive jolt. Suddenly, without prescriptive ideas about how they should see the world, artists dived head first into experimentation – a creative impulse that lay dormant.

As you enter the space, a triptych of Wang Qingsong’s photographs sets up an interesting polemic, replicating the past to imagine a new future. The images contain groups of men and women staged in gold, silver and marble (mimicking the monument outside the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing). Each group on its pedestal represents an archetype that exists, but that we are encouraged to question; an industrialised economy, military China and a naïve aspirational image. A former painter, the artist once said, ‘There were so many changes taking place across China. You couldn’t paint anything to match this reality.’

Political jargon and conceits from Western art flavour some of the works on show. The advent of the ‘open-door’ policy allowed access to canons of visual representation such as Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and advertising.

Zeng Fanzhi’s Untitled painting reflects on the affectivity of psychological visual cues using the background from Munch’s The Scream, the expressive hands of a Beckmann painting and a painted mask which may satirise the Chinese contemporary obsession with face. Over-zealous expressions that imply frustration and homogeny were part of the Cynical Realism movement, marked by satire. Tragicomic art is explored in this show; originally banned, then popularised and now, perhaps, even a little passé.

Another important theme is the body, or Shenti, traditionally defined by the unity of mind and body both. Early Chinese art placed little emphasis on representations of the corporeal body and when you visit this show you will see the great departure contemporary art takes from this. In the past 40 years, the body has become a locus for artistic representation and activity – personified by an infamous photograph by Lü Nan (in which artists lay atop one another to ‘add one metre to an anonymous mountain’). In essence, the body in art is a way to express images of the self in a rapidly changing social environment. It comes as little surprise that many of the works in this show are not a direct portrait, or even a likeness of the sitter. Instead they explore the spiritual, psychological and political skins we wear. The show is an exploration of the complexity of Chinese identity as well as the many faces of portraiture.

Go Figure! is showing at the The National Portrait Gallery until Sunday February 17 2013. Open 10am-5pm daily. Entry is $10/$8. Children under 12 free.

Future Beast 1

Imminent Creatures

Six Canberra street artists are on show as a collective in an experimental exhibition called FUTURE BEAST 1 that opens Saturday September 22 at Platform72 on Oxford Street, one of the official open house venues of Sydney’s Art & About festival. George Rose, Sancho, Knees Slap, Swerfk, Lisa T and Byrd are coming together with Sydney street artists. Platform72 will be transformed to play host to the artists’ creative process with work not only exhibited but also created live.

The day features two DJ sets and an art performance by Sarah Howell, who works in the window of Platform72 on a suspended pre-printed canvas that is 4x6 metres. Howell applies collage and painting onto the canvas to show the audience a textured artwork in progress. Also in store, Sydney street artist The Dirt will take over the back wall of the gallery creating a large-scale interactive mural in response to the sounds of DJs D*Phy and Jnr, aka Zach Bush.

George Rose is an artist from Canberra whose beginnings in graphic design led her to study fine art at the Canberra School of Art and ultimately landed her a contemporary interdisciplinary approach. This is most obvious in her box constructions that are not shy of bold colour, slogans and a graff aesthetic. Since 2009, Sancho has made predominantly heavy black and white line-work digital illustrations and designs that carry influences rooted in graffiti, tattoo art, a passion for comic illustrations and skate culture. Byrd produces small objects and large, ephemeral site-specific interventions and has been doing commercial murals with commissions from Canberra City, the ACT government, local developers and architects. His work stems from a longstanding interest in the Australian natural environment, its fragility and its (mis)management.

Lisa T is a name synonymous with murals around Canberra and in 2012 she had solo exhibitions of her painting and clothing at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka and Honkytonks in the city. Her style is whimsical and this translates across all of her media. Swerfk is a street artist and printmaker. He engages with a fantasy world that is marked by hyper-comic creatures and urban landscapes. Knees Slap is a man obsessed – with cars, snow mobiles and their opaque neon colours, joins, and self-containment as a visual motif.

The day will end with a showcase of the finished works and streamed video of the performances. It’s a great chance to show off the strength and creativity of Canberra street artists who excel in a multi-disciplinary approach. Their distinctive styles put the audience to task to understand that there is not a static definition of street art.

Future Beast 1 opens Saturday September 22 from 11am-2pm and runs until Wednesday September 26. Located at 72 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst in Sydney. Details at: platform72.com.au

Future Beast 1

Six Canberra street artists are on show as a collective in an experimental exhibition called FUTURE BEAST 1 that opens Saturday September 22 at Platform72 on Oxford Street, one of the official open house venues of Sydney’s Art & About festival. George Rose, Sancho, Knees Slap, Swerfk, Lisa T and Byrd are coming together with Sydney street artists. Platform72 will be transformed to play host to the artists’ creative process with work not only exhibited but also created live.

The day features two DJ sets and an art performance by Sarah Howell, who works in the window of Platform72 on a suspended pre-printed canvas that is 4x6 metres. Howell applies collage and painting onto the canvas to show the audience a textured artwork in progress. Also in store, Sydney street artist The Dirt will take over the back wall of the gallery creating a large-scale interactive mural in response to the sounds of DJs D*Phy and Jnr, aka Zach Bush.

George Rose is an artist from Canberra whose beginnings in graphic design led her to study fine art at the Canberra School of Art and ultimately landed her a contemporary interdisciplinary approach. This is most obvious in her box constructions that are not shy of bold colour, slogans and a graff aesthetic. Since 2009, Sancho has made predominantly heavy black and white line-work digital illustrations and designs that carry influences rooted in graffiti, tattoo art, a passion for comic illustrations and skate culture. Byrd produces small objects and large, ephemeral site-specific interventions and has been doing commercial murals with commissions from Canberra City, the ACT government, local developers and architects. His work stems from a longstanding interest in the Australian natural environment, its fragility and its (mis)management.

Lisa T is a name synonymous with murals around Canberra and in 2012 she had solo exhibitions of her painting and clothing at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Manuka and Honkytonks in the city. Her style is whimsical and this translates across all of her media. Swerfk is a street artist and printmaker. He engages with a fantasy world that is marked by hyper-comic creatures and urban landscapes. Knees Slap is a man obsessed – with cars, snow mobiles and their opaque neon colours, joins, and self-containment as a visual motif.

The day will end with a showcase of the finished works and streamed video of the performances. It’s a great chance to show off the strength and creativity of Canberra street artists who excel in a multi-disciplinary approach. Their distinctive styles put the audience to task to understand that there is not a static definition of street art.

Future Beast 1 opens Saturday September 22 from 11am-2pm and runs until Wednesday September 26. Located at 72 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst in Sydney. Details at: platform72.com.au.

The Weight of Shadows Exhibition

Heavy Lies The Shadow

THE WEIGHT OF SHADOWS offers a view from the top end. I spoke to Alexander Boynes before his solo-show opened at the ANU Photospace Gallery. The multimedia works echo Boynes’ experience of the contemporary and bygone mystique he felt on a recent trip to the Tanami desert. Which is fitting when you consider that his practice is set in motion in a similar way. Boynes explained, ‘I don’t have a set formula as such. Every work is unique and requires a different approach; it’s mostly the work that tells me what it needs.’

Formerly a student of gold and silversmithing, the artist encourages alchemy between representing life as it is, as it is felt and ways that we can reproduce it. However there is a constant in his work: the importance of the figure.

Boynes’ pieces aim to pull the audience in to reflect on how we see ourselves and our perception of this country’s shared past. This intent became clear after he visited Paruku, an Indigenous Protected Area (also known as Lake Gregory), and Mulan, a small community. ‘While I was there I wanted to contribute something to the community, so I participated in a culture session at the school and some afterschool activities with the local kids, who happily joined me in the making of my new works.’

In Mulan he also helped to put together a shadow dancing night. This was the perfect setting to be inspired by the shapes a figure can cut – especially at a party with R&B on blast and a smoke machine. The faceless figures that move with a very individual spirit in Mulan Shadows are inspired by the ‘present-day human condition and imagination, and attempt to address contemporary youth culture and its fears and challenges. I hope that people come out of it feeling optimistic about the positive future ahead of Australia,’ Boynes said.

The technique used in these works has developed over many years and continues to adjust. Boynes starts by taking photographs and digitally manipulating them, then, depending on the type of work he is making, etches and scratches into sheets of acrylic – an approach used in earlier light-based projects. Boynes then paints and pours pigments onto sheets of aluminium, which are then printed onto. Without doubt it is a complex and thoughtful process, and yet, he said, ‘the challenge of trying to make a better work than the previous one is enticing; it pushes me to experiment with new techniques and materials.’

Add The Weight of Shadows to your list of things to do before it closes. As Boynes said, ‘artists don’t have to be European and dead to warrant a trip out of the house, do they?’

The Weight of Shadows is on at ANU Photospace Gallery until Sunday September 16. Open Mon-Sat, 10:30am-5pm. Free.

Joel Gailer

One In A One

JOEL GAILER has covered the ground of a small exhibition room with neat rows of Art Monthly Australia at CCAS Gorman House. Each magazine is left open at the same pages printed with a white ‘1/1’ graphic set against a black background. The title of the work, Unique State, refers to the idea that each work in each magazine is an original, one of one. The title is tongue in cheek as there are 200 copies at our feet that are offset prints, a red flag of mass production.

A print is a transfer made from a plate, block or object to a surface, with the ability to be repeated over and over. In an offset print the image you end up with has been moved only once from its initial plate and all the other copies stem from the secondary surface, the print. This is a technique used commercially for ads and magazines.

Before the 15^th century, images and text were created by hand, every mark an original that would escape replication. Now, in the 21^st century, most images we see are reproductions, are machine-made and live in perpetuity whether that is online, as a saved file, a printing plate or rubber stamp.

Overlooking the magazines is a plinth with a stamp that reads ‘The Truth is a Copy’. You are invited to stamp a piece of paper to take away. The stamp is personalised but has been formed by technology that depersonalises the maker’s mark – laser engraving. Gailer suggests that in our industrialised world the origin of consumer luxury items such as cars being branded with makes, models and editions is a classification system borrowed from the print. And drawing this idea to the surface is a concept relevant to a medium that has lived so many lives over six centuries. The artist explained, ‘Printmakers either love me or hate me… A lot of printmakers that are only engaged with traditional art think my work is the end of printmaking.’

Over time prints have empowered people to disseminate knowledge, such as religious or scientific texts, as well as turn our trust and understanding of the medium on its head – Warhol, anyone? Prints can be thrown away or not even noticed. A print is almost inextricable from the modern world – think of receipts, branding on every which, what, billboards, tickets, label and this issue of BMA. But is it art? ‘Art, to me, is about existing in the present and being as relevant to now as I possibly can,’ said Gailer in conversation with Dark Horse Experiment, a research and commercial space in Melbourne (extended interview on Vimeo).

There are many questions this room brings up, which is what makes it good. For example, does it cease to exist outside the gallery? Did the work of art start with Gailer’s idea and finish in the printing press? By challenging the relationship between the art from the object, he does something strange. A mass-produced work of art is denied the ability to be a part of mass consumption. Printed material is everywhere but Gailer draws our attention to something not as common – art and ideas.

1/1 is on show at CCAS Gorman House until Saturday September 29. See ccas.com.au for more info. Entry is free.

The Weight of Shadows

THE WEIGHT OF SHADOWS offers a view from the top end. I spoke to Alexander Boynes before his solo-show opened at the ANU Photospace Gallery. The multimedia works echo Boynes’ experience of the contemporary and bygone mystique he felt on a recent trip to the Tanami desert. Which is fitting when you consider that his practice is set in motion in a similar way. Boynes explained, ‘I don’t have a set formula as such. Every work is unique and requires a different approach; it’s mostly the work that tells me what it needs.’

Formerly a student of gold and silversmithing, the artist encourages alchemy between representing life as it is, as it is felt and ways that we can reproduce it. However there is a constant in his work: the importance of the figure.

Boynes’ pieces aim to pull the audience in to reflect on how we see ourselves and our perception of this country’s shared past. This intent became clear after he visited Paruku, an Indigenous Protected Area (also known as Lake Gregory), and Mulan, a small community. ‘While I was there I wanted to contribute something to the community, so I participated in a culture session at the school and some afterschool activities with the local kids, who happily joined me in the making of my new works.’

In Mulan he also helped to put together a shadow dancing night. This was the perfect setting to be inspired by the shapes a figure can cut – especially at a party with R&B on blast and a smoke machine. The faceless figures that move with a very individual spirit in Mulan Shadows are inspired by the ‘present-day human condition and imagination, and attempt to address contemporary youth culture and its fears and challenges. I hope that people come out of it feeling optimistic about the positive future ahead of Australia,’ Boynes said.

The technique used in these works has developed over many years and continues to adjust. Boynes starts by taking photographs and digitally manipulating them, then, depending on the type of work he is making, etches and scratches into sheets of acrylic – an approach used in earlier light-based projects. Boynes then paints and pours pigments onto sheets of aluminium, which are then printed onto. Without doubt it is a complex and thoughtful process, and yet, he said, ‘the challenge of trying to make a better work than the previous one is enticing; it pushes me to experiment with new techniques and materials.’ 

Add The Weight of Shadows to your list of things to do before it closes. As Boynes said, ‘artists don’t have to be European and dead to warrant a trip out of the house, do they?’

The Weight of Shadows is on at ANU Photospace Gallery until Sunday September 16. Open Mon-Sat, 10:30am-5pm. Free.

The Loaded Ground

A Loaded Landscape

THE LOADED GROUND is an exhibition of individual and collaborative paintings by two leading contemporary artists. Michael Nelson Jagamara’s works are expressive and transfer time-honoured symbols that connect with ancient values and a contemporary audience. Imants Tillers puts down luminous colour on a large scale that is incised with text to cut through a categorical understanding of culture.

Jagamara’s Five Stories (1984) was appropriated without permission by Tillers for his work The Nine Shots (1985). By chance, the works were reproduced side by side in a catalogue for the Sydney Biennale in 1986, stirring a debate that took root in all directions outside the art world and was the catalyst for this exhibition 26 years later. One stream led straight to ideas of dispossession; another wound up in the Western Desert, where only under the auspice of Warlpiri Law may artists appropriate the iconography of ancestral beings. However, at the time, Tillers argued that borrowing symbols (from Jagamara and Georg Baselitz) was a way to swim upstream against an ethnographic appreciation of Indigenous art. He has since said that the appropriation was naïve, but that he sees the creation of all art as an experiment.

I had a chance to preview the gallery space before the opening night and spoke to Tillers about the works on show. One of the first pieces in front of which we stood has three jagged lines; one black, white and brown. They radiate across the painting, From Afar, by Jagamara and Tillers and could come to represent the different ideologies people adopt when thinking about their artistic relationship.

In From Afar, Tillers has painted a big T-shaped signpost in the centre of the canvas, but this is overlaid with the markings of the ‘possum dreaming,’ a layered effect which is carried through the show. The repeated symbol for this dreaming looks like a capital ‘E’ and is a signature of Jagamara’s work. The personal and political collide here, with the artists literally leaving their mark over one another. You get the sense this is a contested map with words like ‘Empathy’ and ‘I take but I surrender’ marked out on the canvas. Instead of using formal elements such as colour, line or form, the text spells out the emotional topography of this imagined Australian landscape.

This collaboration sparked about ten years ago. The pair reconnected and decided to collaborate with the help of Michael Eather. They worked with Tillers’ format of multi-panel canvasses where background, text and imagery are juggled across the boards like a very sophisticated jigsaw puzzle. Each artist takes and concedes ground on the work in different ways.

This is especially powerful in two of the mega structures of the show, Hymn to the Night and Fatherland. Fatherland depicts the five dreamings and the scene of the redemption as one. Tillers explained that the process of collaboration is at its core an exchange of empathy, and that the irreparable damage to Indigenous people and culture is not forgotten or neglected in this show. The huge final works are hung to look over The Loaded Ground, a painting made up of Tillers’ tiles that are covered by Jagamara in desert sand. The piece sits on a plinth at ankle height and evokes the landscape from which Jagamara’s iconography emerged.

The dreaming can be understood as Indigenous people’s signposts in their own land. Some signposts are above ground and fixed, whereas others are embedded in the land. Jagamara’s Big Rain and Lightning is a work of seven panels in black and white. The painting from 2002 shows how Jagamara’s experimentation has led him to focus on his symbols, elevating their presence from indicative powerful marks within a canvas to monumental characters of their own. It appears he has mixed sand into the paint. You could imagine this as earth combusted by a lightning bolt, disintegrated by rain, or perhaps demonstrates the Papunya Tula way of working, with a board on the ground.

Lightning Men At Mirawarri is powerful in a way you have to see to understand. Opaque paint is trowelled rhythmically across the canvas, and the combination of two large crescent shapes, which represent men meeting, with the alien colour in the background makes the painting hum with a special energy.

Tillers’ room contains four paintings. Each contains appropriation that is revealed and concealed by carefully composed text. The canvasses come to feel like a flickering newsreel with what may seem like disjointed grabs of time. No wonder Tillers’ work has been described as creating and inhabiting a third space. After Civilization (for Geoff Bardon) (1986) is an early work using a composition inspired by Giorgio de Chirico as well as the design of the Forecourt mosaic, Parliament House, inspired by Jagamara’s Possum and Wallaby Dreaming painting. The two works take the sinewy line of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s yam dreaming paintings. One of these, Surrender, uses text from Australian playwright Janis Balodis, who, like Tillers, has a post-WWII Latvian heritage. Black lines creep across this painting and are tangled with the text ‘wave after wave after wave.’ This juxtaposition clearly communicates universal feelings of transience, dispossession and oppression.

This exhibition is bookended by two rooms; one with Jagamara’s lyrical paintings of possum and lightning dreamings from his early years to now, where his iconography has become bolder and his experimentation with paint has a quiet confidence. Tillers’ room has an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ appeal, as you walk into the space and are suddenly dwarfed by the scale of the paintings and ideas with their complex references to art history and the heavy footprint of colonisation. The collaboration strives for a middle ground and it is a pleasure to view, whether or not you know the loaded history.

The Loaded Ground is currently showing at The Drill Hall Gallery until Sunday September 23. The gallery is open Wed-Sun, 12pm-5pm. Free.

Salute

An Artists' Salute

The ANU School of Art’s PhotoSpace Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of works from the 2012 Canberra Contemporary Art Space residents. SALUTE is an initiative by artist and curator Julia Boyd, who explains: “These mediums directly reflect the dynamic experience of studying at the School of Art, where all the current [Canberra Contemporary Art Space] residents did their studies. It facilitates artists being able to connect with each other after school and encourages conversations between all the artists involved in the show. It’s created a certain energy that is essential to artists continuing to create new and engaging work.”

Ruby Green’s imposing velvet panels serve as a fantastically textural background to a vibrant Australian landscape dotted with wanderers and wildlife. Hannah Bath’s candied watercolours depict familiar landscapes and counter the earthy and rusted colours found in other works. Holly Granville-Edge presents us with large photographs of domestic items ‘lost in space’, which hover artfully with a Bosch accent.

Another artist who experiments with space is Roman Stachurski, whose piece is inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape. Roman’s tower, which makes excellent use of the gallery’s high ceiling, is capped off with a beam of light reaching down to the floor. In his words, he was inspired by “German Stalags which operated in Europe throughout the duration of the war. In particular, the words told to POWs as they entered the camps: ‘Vas du das Krieg est uber’ (‘For you the War is over’). “I took the theme Salute literally and introduced military themes into my work. There is so much beauty in manmade objects outside of their designated purpose.”

Julia Boyd’s photographs capture the ephemeral nature of the urban environments we inhabit. Julia’s technique and imagery is selected to alter the way the audience interacts with a photograph. “I aim to slow down the process of photography by working with old cameras and really appreciating the subject matter. Though the spaces I photograph are often void of any initial 'thrill factor', I aim for my work to slowly reveal itself to my viewer and for my audience to spend a bit more time looking at my pictures than they would photography that’s online or in the media.”

Patrick Larmour’s etchings seek to displace our understanding of the relationship between subject and object in art. He rewrites the function of real world objects by painting them true to life, such as his crumpled pill packet.

If art is an archive of time and place, the works in this show display this collective’s appreciation of accessible mediums and subjects close to home, encouraging us to pause and reflect. As Julia says, “The ordinary becomes really interesting – cars on the street and clothes people wear. I'm thankful someone was there to capture that.”

Salute is currently showing at the ANU Photospace Gallery until Sunday July 29. The gallery is open Mon-Fri, 10am-4pm. Free.

Self Portrait

The View From Inside

Sacha Jeffrey’s exhibition SELF PORTRAIT is the latest instalment in Honkytonks’ artsy home brew and it goes down well. The fortnightly exhibitions at the bar reinvent the space, lending it a growing reputation as a spot for a fresh crop of Canberrans. 2012 has seen a pop-up fashion show, the collective effort of Canberra Art School students and graphic-design-come-street-art on t-shirts, board and typography. Sacha agrees, “It’s nice to see more spaces dedicated to giving younger artists a leg up and fostering the art community… It is really important for young artists, and old, to keep exploring other work.”

Self Portrait is a collection of paintings, vignette drawings, collage and two anthropomorphic wall panels inspired by the idea that a work of art holds a mirror to the artist. What emerges is an acknowledgement of the power of art to develop artifice but express introspection. The large paintings in the show are the most successful of the group, using bold colour and snippets of appropriation to develop this conversation that – while we are included – he is ultimately having with himself.

Some recurring symbols run through the exhibition: namely, a nightmarish or exotic meeting of the male figure with an animal body, disembodied hands and bones, sharp lines and a sense of entrapment. Massive slaps of bright solid colour lend a sunny tone to their melancholic outlook. In addition to this, Sacha refers to two canons of art history, Pop and Abstraction, by appropriating some key symbols of two male artists who pushed through the status quo with their rebel aesthetic.

Sacha’s nod to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso is apparent in images of golden crowns, a truncated horse and text embedded into the images titled Exile, Temptation, Where Are We Going? and Coronation. Of these large paintings Sacha says, “I try not to overthink or plan. I like to work fairly impulsively and gouache and ink suits this immediate approach. There might be a few hits and misses but my process is one that relies heavily on my own set of symbols and motifs translated into allegorical narrative.”

Sacha explains that his works draws out the idiosyncrasies of a masculine personality – his own in particular. He draws and paints the experience of vanity, doubt, temptation, ambition, rage and reactions. With work that is concerned with impulse, it comes as little surprise when the artist admits, “I only realised that the exhibition was going to be about a kind of introspective, exploratory self-portraiture after I had completed most of the works.”

Self Portrait is showing until Wednesday July 25 at Honkytonks, Garema Place, as part of the fortnightly Wednesdays Off The Wall exhibitions. Free.

Word Of Mouth: Encounters With Abstract Art

Encounters Of The Absurd Kind

WORD OF MOUTH: ENCOUNTERS WITH ABSTRACT ART is an exhibition of nineteen emerging and established artists, working in glass, painting, sculpture and paper, with ties to Canberra through the Australian National University’s School of Art. As abstract art has always been fundamentally about reality, it makes perfect sense that as our reality changes so does the art form itself.

Mark Bayly, curator, highlights the artists’ appreciation of our ever-evolving understanding of science, technology and emerging complexities in communication. “I've been struck by the fact that so many artists continue to work with abstraction as a visual 'language' across a range of media. This isn't a local phenomenon. There is a considerable amount of work being produced internationally that continues to engage with abstraction and this continues to stimulate and provoke audiences. Some of the work is quiet and possesses a sober elegance, while there is also work that is exuberant and lively in appearance. There is a diversity of artistic voices engaged in the dialogue that is Word Of Mouth.”

Abstraction is and was a movement in art that has been fraught with debate on how to distil the style to a unique voice. In contemporary culture we might continue this discussion by word of mouth, in the classrooms, cafés, literature or through social media. The exhibition proposes that abstraction’s nuances are a consequence of this accrued knowledge and engagement about how to define it, but also encourages us to see that the ways we communicate embed new colour, materials and concepts into the next wave of abstract art.

Vibrancy and gestural marks belie the thought and considered approach to the composition and shape of a number of works. Gregory Hodge’s Magazine Mystics is made up of sixty sheets criss-crossed with blasts of excited colour. There is no direct representation in these works; instead the actors are the shapes and the contrasting cool and hot pigments which together create a rhythm across the large installation. It is like looking up into a kinetic sculpture, humming and reverberating against a wall.

Emma Beer’s I Ain’t Gonna Lose My Skin has a similar energy and draws strength from an unusual use of line and inverted colour; these visual cues hint at an urban landscape rather than depict it directly.

Despite working with different mediums – wood and glass – Richard Blackwell and Mel Douglas are united by their appreciation of the natural world through geometry. Like others, however, they could also be seen to communicate the ‘physics of the ineffable’. This idea also applies to Nadège Desgenétez’s petal-shaped balloons of glass fixed as though floating across the gallery wall. The pastel coloured pieces have a metallic finish, which might prompt us to see them as a product of a simultaneously friendly yet fiercely efficient world – and gives us pause for thought when you learn that the works, titled Here and Now, are inspired by the Canberra landscape.

Liz Coats’ Organica paintings are impressive: each work measures about one metre in diameter and look like a cross between a brilliant crystal and a giant petri dish. Liz has created an unusual effect with acrylic paint. The undulating surface of these works was achieved by allowing small daubs of wet pigment to dry, building up a surface of hundreds of specks of unexpected colour, from lavenders to electric dashes of lime. The collection of small lines and markings could be seen as symbolic of the gestation of ideas; tidbits of information that eventually come together to give weight to a way of thinking or personal ethos.

Julie Brooke creates fragmented images informed by her biochemistry background that could be seen as molecular structures or even grand plans for an architectural feat. Liz and Julie are not alone in this vision of the world. Mark explains, “When I saw artists' work exhibited elsewhere or in their studios over the last couple of years, the common application of these types of forms really struck me as a pattern. Occasionally, these have the appearance of cellular structure or crystalline formations. The closer I examined the various artists' practices, these ideas became more apparent. The overlapping of these visual influences resulted in the crystallisation of the key theme underpinning the exhibition.”

There is a wealth of ingenuity in this show and many of the artists take to bold experimentation with their medium. Other works, with a more pared back approach are also standouts. For example Jonathan Webster’s sequence of drawings of concentric but imperfect circles that bleed over the boundaries of the paper show a considered restraint. A meditation on mortality and the subtext of abstraction is explored in the sweeping monochromatic surface of Peter Maloney’s work The Tuesday Years. These works are a well of introspection for the artist and, importantly, the audience.

This is an extraordinary show that proves – if ever in question – that there are some great talents nurtured by the Canberra art scene. Mark says, “From a personal perspective, I've really enjoyed the privilege of speaking closely with the artists about the ideas underpinning the exhibition and it's been inspiring to find how many times we were ‘speaking the same language’.”

Word Of Mouth: Encounters With Abstract Art is currently showing at the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, Civic Square. The exhibition runs until Sunday August 19 and is open weekdays 10am-5pm & weekends 10am-4pm. Entry is free.

Reside

Rest, Reside, Survive

Rachel Bowak’s exhibition RESIDE walks the line between installation, sculpture and assemblage art. Rachel’s sculptures are made from stainless steel and look like drawings from a steady hand. Despite creating images of the tools we use in DIY jobs like ladders, rollers, brushes and paints, these objects are “objects that replicate the illusion of perspectival drawing… What appear to be drawings of functional objects turn out to be non-functional objects that look like drawings,” explains Rachel. Trained as a silver and goldsmith, it comes as little surprise that her steel mirrors the line your pencil would take.

The artist pairs real world objects with her cutouts. Next to a bag of cement a wheelbarrow takes shape in Abide, the skeleton made from stainless steel. By doing so she creates an absurd relationship between the two objects. Obviously this wheelbarrow couldn’t cart cement – being hollow, two-dimensional and hammered into an art gallery wall. Rachel delights in these impracticalities and sees the dysfunctional object as a metaphor for social dysfunction in contemporary life. She has said that the works should act out the “experiences that underlie our actions – striving, destroying, consolidating, envisioning, ending, retreat, control, freedom and creation.”

Rachel found the tools we use to tinker with our homes (as if it would have an impact on our lives) in a Bunnings catalogue, inspired by their simple line drawings. A lot about this show stems from reality but Rachel also indulges in fantasy. Take for example Control Again, which features a stainless steel domestic broom leaning against the gallery wall, as if exhausted from collecting lolly pink fluff heaped like autumn leaves.

Reside is unique because it mimics reality without representing it directly. The sense of playfulness you might notice in Rachel’s work finds a counterpart in the approach of Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg’s sculptures appropriated objects we use in everyday life, such as a rubber stamp, a bathtub, a clothes pin or a hamburger. He recreated them at a monster scale and in materials you would never associate the original with. For example, a fabric hamburger sewn together the size of your head. Like Rachel’s these pieces forced the viewer to look back on the relationship we have with the object in the first place and consider its function.

Another of her wall pieces, a larger than life gas cylinder, is carefully formed using stainless steel to appear like a tracing of the real-life object. Oomph bites its tail in the discussion of where does art begin and end in installation. On the gallery wall above are burn marks and bubbling paint. Rachel came in and used a gas cylinder to set the wall alight. In other parts of the show you will find a wall hammered through, the inside of the hole is laced with glitter the colour of a Christmas beetle. These, as well as all of the other pieces in the show, are testament to the artist’s ability to find splendour in the ordinary.

Reside runs at Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Gorman House, until Saturday June 23. Tue-Fri, 11am-5pm, and Sat, 10am-4pm. Entry is free.

Antarctica

Polar Pictures

ANTARCTICA is a collaborative exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery that presents seven unique views of the icy landscape captured since the ‘60s in a range of mediums. Sidney Nolan, Chris Drury (UK), Bea Maddock, Anne Noble (NZ), Jan Senbergs, Philip Hughes (UK) and Jörg Schmeisser all capture the disquiet, beauty, vastness and fragile ecosystems that make up Antarctica as they have experienced it.

In a room tucked away from the main gallery space, Bea Maddock’s Forty Pages From Antarctica lies in wait. The work is a collection of individually framed prints, which flank the better part of two walls, creating an effect similar to the never-ending horizon you might see in Antarctica. From print to print a diluted brown line peaks and falls marking out the landscape. The beautiful and quiet work was created in 1988 using a combination of processes: photo etching, intaglio and relief printing on zinc plates.

Jan Senberg’s work Antarctic Night shares Maddock’s personal connection to the landscape but comparisons end there. Senberg’s large scale canvas, painted and collage, towers over the audience. The image is an aerial, almost voyeuristic view of the inside of a cabin encroached by snow. The composition is eerie, like a screenshot from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cabin’s fleshy tones are built up even more by the artist’s collage of female bodies in erotic and pornographic poses. This could suggest the loneliness experienced in an isolated landscape, or perhaps how basic urges are enacted in warmer climates.

Anne Noble’s series of photographs White Noise No. 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7 are black and white images of snow in flight. The snow has been kicked up by a large tractor, only evident in one of the photos where the packed grooves it has left on the ground hint at the human impact on the land.

The core mutations of the landscape from ice to snow to water are explored in Chris Drury’s video installation. Seated in a dark room the sounds of crackling ice, gushing water and wind tunnels surround you. Across three walls we see short black and white videos which zoom in on the three states of H²O. The installation is calming and sparks ideas about the environment as well as the complexity of a landscape.

This exhibition complements the timing of the 2012 International Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes' Conference on Humanities and Climate Change.

Antarctica will run until Sunday July 1 at the Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, from Wed-Sun, 12pm-5pm. Entry is free.

The National Indigenous Art Triennial, unDisclosed

unDISCLOSED

The second NATIONAL INDIGENOUS ART TRIENNIAL is about to open at the National Gallery of Australia and welcomes a host of 20 visual artists from across Australia until Sunday July 22. Carly Lane, an independent Indigenous curator, has shaped the show. In the fury of installation of UNDISCLOSED (some art works reach 3m high by almost 8m wide) I spoke with Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the NGA, Franchesca Cubillo about what we can expect this time around. She explained that the installation saw works from Naata Nungurrayi, Bob Burruwal, Lena Yarinkura and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori hung. “It's very exciting to see the artwork in the gallery. The works vary across media – synthetic polymer paint on canvas, fibreglass oversized masks, bark paintings, video installations, works on paper and illuminated fluorescent lighting.”

One of the preconceptions about Indigenous visual art is that the canvases are primed and sculptures woven with personal histories, lore and knowledge about the land. That is an excellent starting point but only represents a fraction of the inspiration in contemporary Indigenous art. In 2012 unDisclosed explores broader themes and loops in and out of Indigenous and universal concerns. The works in the show have been created independent of one another but collectively consider rival ideas such as fact and fictions, self and country, success and failure and living the history versus remembering it. As Carly Lane has explained, “layers of public and restricted information may co-exist in a single work. unDisclosed is an attempt to bring elements of the known and unknown equally to the fore.”

Jonathan Jone’s installation Lean To uses MDF wood, tarpaulin and fluorescent lights to create a glowing structure made up of two chunky panels propped up by one another. Jonathan uses everyday materials but refers to lofty ideas; the piece could be linked to minimalism, a canon of art history. It also may debate colonial and current attempts at the homogenisation or assimilation of Indigenous peoples, particularly in reference to housing or shelter. You can’t approach this space to live or sign a lease. But of his ideas more generally Jonathan has said, “throughout our history there have been moments between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, meetings based on great insight, humility and understanding. These encounters often challenge the stereotypical relations… People like William Barak, Vincent Lingiari and Charles Perkins became pillars of support – a position and form re-created in Lean To.” The outer shell of the panels sees fluorescent tubes placed in sequential lines. This look could find a modern counterpart in white-hot highway markings, the luminescence of an overpopulated city or the swinging sign of a tattoo parlour, but actually refers to Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri cultural line work.

I asked if the works in this exhibition had surprised Franchesca, as they largely deal with ideas of what goes undisclosed. “I am continually surprised by the changing face of contemporary Indigenous art. New artists, new work in various media and new concepts emerge on a regular basis. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art history of Australia is currently unfolding before us and it is the role of curators to present the changing face of this exciting new art practice.”

Fiona Foley presents a series of 34 photographs within a mixed media work made up of three opium pipes, a sketch book, a stool and 34 brass poppy sculptures titled Let a hundred flowers bloom. This work, created in 2010, was pre-empted by Fiona’s position as an Adjunct Professor with the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. Fiona’s presentation of a beautiful field of flowers with a very sinister undercurrent is pitch perfect. Fiona learned that in Queensland, opium was provided for and used by Indigenous and Chinese workers. It is a little known part of the state's history that affected the health and lives of many. The event in itself was compounded by the introduction of a ‘protection act’ which removed and dispersed Aboriginal people. Missions such as Palm Island and Yarrabah were set up, and “this history is not taught in schools,” said Fiona.

Christian Thompson is back again for the Triennial (a coup for other artists such as Tony Albert Vernon Ah Kee, Julie Gough and Lorraine Connelly-Northey) with a majestic video titled Heat. Running for 5.52 minutes it depicts three bare-chested but not exposed young women from the Queensland outback. The women (Charles Perkin’s granddaughters) are still as their hair is whipped up by hot air you can only imagine. Set against a soft rust background the film conveys heat moving slow and with their steely gaze you feel they are tied to the land but also possess the insight of teenagers. The artist has said, “I love the mysticism and the seductive cruelty of the desert, my home, and how it can be so elusive and alluring and potentially life threatening.” Christian’s work is similar to the themes of Jonathan and Fiona because it brings up binary ideas of performance and reality and the irony of communicating earth, wind and fire in a near empty room indoors.

unDisclosed will be a sight for sore eyes because aside from the NGA’s new exhibition space, our exposure to contemporary Indigenous art in Canberra is not as far reaching as other cities, Franchesca added. “I do think that Indigenous art is well represented in Canberra, however it would be great to see more local contemporary art by young Indigenous artists in the community.”

The National Indigenous Art Triennial, unDisclosed, opens at the National Gallery of Australia Friday May 11 and runs to Sunday July 22. The exhibition is open 10am-5pm every day. Free.

David Frazer

Rather Be Homesick Than Home

DAVID FRAZER’s work is at its core about the human condition. Although his scenery is typically Australian the story is universal. Homesick is an exhibition of paintings, works on paper and sculpture on now at Beaver Galleries. The title of the show speaks volumes about work that is nostalgic for the way things were. David is inspired by artists who transferred their sense of rural disquiet to modern life, such as Stanley Spencer and American realist Edward Hopper, who was known for periods of ‘unconquerable inertia’.

After studying painting and printmaking in Melbourne in the late 1980s, it was Frazer’s experience outside of art school that gave shape to the story he wanted to tell. “I didn't know what my subject was until I pursued a tragically hopeless career in showbiz… that subject being the misfit loser dreaming for fame and fortune and failing miserably. I've developed this over the years to a more general theme of hopelessness. It's sort of sad but yet so damn funny!” In 2007 David was a major prizewinner at the International Print Biennial in Guanlan, China and a featured Australian artist on the ABC’s documentary series Artist at Work.

David’s prints and paintings address a generation of men whose role in society has undergone major shifts. “I think it also finds its humour in the fact that we are never happy, wishing for a better place and reminiscing about something that wasn't much good in the first place. Unfortunately, though, being happy and optimistic all the time isn't very funny or tragic and wouldn't make for very interesting art.” Visually this translates as male figures in large empty landscapes, usually alone, sometimes sitting on the roof of their house or in the park. A caravan home recurs so much that it could be one of David’s characters. Maybe the mobile home represents being near and far from civilisation, technology, idle time, exploration, tuning in or dropping out. David explains, “I like the isolation and the loneliness of country towns and farms. A misfit can stand out more in such an environment. I grew up in a small town and I can still picture the melancholy of the deserted empty main street on a Saturday arvo.”

His characters don’t show their hand; at once they appear thoughtful, bored, content or plotting to leave. And this draws us in. Who is going back to the weatherboard house or the tin van? Are they visiting from the city, or did these men never leave their hometown? By no means is he a pessimist, saying, “It's vaguely biographical in a fictional way… Often the men in my pictures look like me but it's not really me, it's just a bloke.” In short, David Frazer makes sense of it all with an accent that is uniquely Australian – mate. 

David Frazer’s Homesick is on now at Beaver Galleries, Deakin, until Tuesday May 22. The exhibition is open Tue-Fri, 10am-5pm, and Sat-Sun, 9am-5pm. Free.

Brenden Scott French

Heart Of Glass

Futures Pass Remains is an exhibition by eminent glass artist BRENDEN SCOTT FRENCH on show at Beaver Galleries. I spoke with Brenden before the opening and he explained why careful consideration of medium and technique is characteristic of his work. His process of layering colour and shape leads to unique patterns that reflect and parody industrialisation, the urban jungle and the gentle giant also known as our ecosystem. These kinds of dualities carry through the show.

The sculptures are constructed from glass blocks that are kilnformed (a process that prepares glass to be halfway between solid and melting) and fused together. When the glass is cool he uses a cutting lathe to incise. As opposed to its luminescent qualities, it was the strong hues, opacity and density of colour that attracted Brenden to the medium of glass and he enjoys working with its immediate and spontaneous nature. Because of its colour and format (many of the pieces are wall panels) some have aligned his work to painting, particularly abstraction or colour field. But the artist says, ‘”Mine is a labour of assemblage…a work will start from individual pieces of coloured glass sheets and through this process of mosaic come together to form an object.”

It is interesting to hear that Brenden sees himself working with assemblage in mind. Assemblage entered the debate of representation with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and later Joseph Cornell and Rosalie Gascoigne who used found objects like newspaper, old toys or spare parts, to paint a different picture. Brenden doesn’t use commonplace objects, he depicts them and allows his blocks of colour to form relationships with one another to decide his composition.

You could argue that Brenden uses the idea of a ‘collective consciousness’, initiated by the Dada movement and Surrealists, where symbols, colours or shapes that most people would recognise (intentionally or subliminally) prompt a reaction. “Most important to me was not gender but what we do with aggression and destructiveness,” said Brenden, “because universal symbols such as the handgun and the vehicle… are very familiar and nostalgic works that connect with people's own personal experience… It is not how we got to be in this place or who we are that is my main interest, it’s what we are doing or are about to do.”

Brenden has trained extensively in glass practice, undertaking residencies at the Canberra Glassworks and the Northlands Creative Glass Centre in Scotland. Even with such accomplishments Brenden says, “Perhaps when the dust settles I will have a clearer perspective. Though I do find it interesting that any hint of subtlety has found its way towards me when the sense of urgency in nearly everything that surrounds me is palpable.”

Catch Futures Pass Remains at Beaver Galleries, Deakin, until Tuesday May 22. The exhibition is open Tue-Fri, 10am-5pm, and Sat-Sun, 9am-5pm. Free.

In My Eyes, Exhibition

Canberra Lens Itself To Art

IN MY EYES is an exhibition of photography on show now at the Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre. Six entrants are from the Canberra School of Art, helping make up a group of 25 drawn from the Australian National University across the disciplines of Science, Humanities, Asian and Pacific studies and Business. It’s a collection of images that explores how ephemera and familiar sites consolidate our connection to this city.

The exhibition was conceived as a community project to bring international students of ANU and domestic students into conversation and if nothing else you might find that individuals from a diverse background share a sentimental journey. Ruo Yan presents a 360-degree panoramic landscape taken at dusk from Black Mountain Tower because, “the first time that I fell in love with Canberra was when I saw the city from afar, with an outsider’s perspective. I’m from Sydney and when I first came here by myself to study I felt I should still be in Sydney. But now I feel a sense of belonging. Canberra’s my home.”

Joseph Ting’s photograph is of the ubiquitous ducks of the ANU campus, which he hopes will transmit a sense of happiness and nostalgia. Joseph explains, “I find it especially enjoyable when I see a story unfold through a still image, the way it invokes all the other senses although it relies on sight alone.” He continues, “All these images are contrary to the common belief that Canberra is a boring, lifeless city that came into existence as a result of a discord between its two closest cities. My piece shows the way that nature weaves itself into the lives of people in Canberra, which is also expressed through other pieces, amongst other ideas… I hope people will feel a sense of belonging because they are one of the 400,000 out of the 7 billion in the world who understand what these works mean, just because of Canberra.”

Jessica Hioe’s entry is of the poster board outside the Copland Building on the ANU Campus. Uniquely her image is inspired by the campus at night. She explains, “although it has been stated to be 'unsafe', I must admit that ANU at night is the best time to walk around. It's the only time when it looks completely beautiful with its ‘orangey’ lights around and the way the lights glow and cast funny dim shadows on the trees. It gives off an eerie feeling but no matter how peculiar the atmosphere becomes because of the lighting there is definitely something satisfying about it.”

Jessica concludes, “a fragmented depiction of Canberra, the nation's capital, is produced, but this fragmented perception of Canberra by various students is tied together through a common theme and purpose.”

Visit the Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre before Wednesday May 16 to catch the In My Eyes exhibition. It is open daily Mon-Fri, 8.30am-6pm, and admission is free.

Sister Wives

The Things They Left Behind

WHEN WISHING STILL WORKED is a new exhibition of painting, sculpture and installation by Helen Braund, Tiffany Cole and Shellaine Godbold. Witches, shut-ins, wives, virgins and whores are absent from the exhibition. Instead it is dotted with the items this host of characters might have left behind: painted doilies, a Wiccan crystalised flower, lurid chocolate cake, crow pie, gold stitching and moody matriarchal portraits. As a whole, the works bring to mind Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, but these objects are drawn from an imagined history.

The food we could not eat by Helen Braund is a feast fit for no one with jelly, cake and pie made from plastics and clay. While looking delectable we can imagine what decay over time will do to it. Helen likes that we can pause and witness “a freezing of time like a scene from a storybook, memorialising a moment.” We are all in on the joke; this sculpture is intended to suggest rot but is inedible. This is the same sticking point when we read a fairy tale; we know it’s a story but we still buy into the idea or the moral.

Tiffany Cole’s larger-than-life paintings of two swans hint at someone’s collection of porcelain figurines. Tiffany says, “conceptually, I am interested in the way that, when you come from a suburban upbringing, your ideas about the natural world can be heavily informed by the books, and objects that reside in the domestic sphere.” With oil painting, a venerated technique, she can elevate the meaning of the common objects she depicts. “I use the labour-intensive method of oil painting to invest a sense of value into the subjects I paint.”

Shellaine Godbold creates a chandelier of paper cut-out profiles of women strung up by their hair. The light shines through the paper making two complete shadows of the work on the facing walls. This kind of portraiture is an old technique and it is argued that to draw from a shadow is the genesis of art itself. The commercial application of having your silhouette constructed boomed in 18th and 19th century Europe and America and with the advent of photography it waned. It has experienced resurgence in contemporary art, particularly because it communicates nostalgia. The work brings to mind Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s portrait of Isabella Blow at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Like Blow, Noble and Webster, Shellaine says she is “trying to make sense of the world and how I fit into it. I think it has to do with getting older and not fitting the role that is sometimes expected from society or the role we think we should be playing.”

The pieces inhabit a forest of pine trees installed at CCAS, Gorman House Arts Centre until Saturday May 12. The exhibition is open Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm and Saturday 10am-4pm. Entry is free.

Karl Wiebke: 1994-2012

Caution: Art Installation Unstable

Paint might seem like a means to an end in art but in KARL WIEBKE: 1994-2012 paint is the protagonist. It’s interesting to see Wiebke’s work (spanning almost 20 years) collected, not only because the relationship between the artist and paint itself is crystalised, but because his commitment to his process is commendable.

Some works like Untitled J/04, enamel on wood, are made up of dripped paint that has been lacing the surface progressively for a number of years, gradually building waves of stippled paint. The picture is three-dimensional and wonderfully the heavy synthetic paint looks organic, like neat rows of moss or fungi on a tree log, and not dissimilar to the ripples of a sand dune.

He paints on objects, in this case tall wooden sticks that lean in succession against a long wall. In Sticks he suggests a painting can be composed of space without being a sculpture, the empty space between the sticks and behind the sticks could be foreground or background, it’s up to you. By leaning a stick against a wall the artist also invites the audience’s caution. You don’t expect a painting to fall off its hooks but you definitely could unbalance this five-metre row of plywood sticks. So our idea of a painting as “safe” or “lasting” is endangered.

This goes for Pirates too, which are paintings done on hoops that tower over the audience. These works lean against the wall and are painted with lashings of bright opaque colour. It feels like they could roll away, suggesting that painting can be kinetic. With these hoops the space of where the work exists is curious. Is the artwork only on the hoop proper, or is the empty space in the centre part of the work? How would this change if the hoop was somewhere else? And if it was hanging or flat on the floor how does the composition change?

31-04 blue on white, acrylic on enamel on linen uses line to create depth, the surface of this painting looks like fine gauze that has fallen gently into folds. Another work that uses line to create an impression of a real-world object is A/6, a slab of horizontal lines which have been applied to the surface to appear blurred and end up looking like a ream of felt. Paint here is fat, molten, moving, bright and you want to touch it. As Wiebke has said, “I am a painter reducing my means to the ground, the paint and the instrument.”

Karl Wiebke: 1994-2012 is on now at The Drill Hall Gallery, running until Friday May 20. The exhibition is open Wednesday-Sunday 12pm-5pm. Entry is free.

Picture Perfect

The 2012 NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE was awarded to Rod McNicol for his enigmatic image of indigenous elder and actor Jack Charles.

The winning work is set against a textured denim-blue backdrop. Jack stands in a pressed and polished outfit but delivers a piercing, streetwise gaze with a wry smile. There are no props, staged action or laboured symbols. As a consequence the composition might seem simple or accidental but it carries great significance for the artist. Photographer Rod McNicol favours images of artists, vagabonds and even himself where his subject stares out. This stare indicates that he (or she) is conscious of the fact that a photo is being taken, that an audience will see it and that they hold the key to present themselves however they’d like to be seen – almost like a mug shot or commissioned portrait.

Jack’s steady gaze is embellished with his wonderful head of hair, a luminescent white ‘fro. The crisp white vest Jack wears is like a spotlight in the centre of the canvas. The proliferation of white leads us to think of cleanliness, spiritualism and as NPG Director Louise Doyle noted, a sense of optimism. Perhaps these elements were emphasised through a long exposure, which is a technique Rod has used in the past as it pays respect to ‘time’ as a character in the scene. Rod has said that “a slow exposure time dictates stillness, and for me stillness is a blessing. Although stillness virtually eradicates spontaneity, it does heighten engagement.

Rod has been quoted as saying that his photographs, as a body of work, mirror a “genesis of a particular genre of portraiture which dates from the very beginning of photography itself… That self conscious stare into the camera [common] in early 19^th century photography, was no doubt intensified by the very slow exposure times required back then.” To Rod the exposure time and pose prompts us, and in this case perhaps Jack, to question ideas of mortality.

If you were to look back on this particular image in 100 years the gumption, cheek and liveliness in Jack (our living subject) would be charged with something totally different, the photograph would then function as a momento mori (a reminder of mortality). In art, and especially photography of the 1970s, a genre, or field of interest sometimes known as the ‘death awareness movement’ began. It was explored in a 2007 exhibition called Reveries held at The National Portrait Gallery, in which Rod participated.

Jack was part of the Stolen Generation and met Rod in the 1970s at The Pram Factory, Melbourne, when Jack was establishing ‘Nindethana’, an indigenous theatre group. However Jack has taken on other roles in life – notably his drug addiction and crimes that supported the habit. He has weathered the rise from “infamy to fame” and is the first to talk about his “colourful life”. A former series of photographs by Rod focused on the duality and change inevitable in life. Titled A portrait revisited series 1986–2006 two images of a single sitter were hung together, one photograph was taken in the 1980s and another 20 years later. Jack was one of the subjects and this work was acquired by The NGV.

The 46 works in this year’s National Photographic Portrait Prize strike an interesting balance between race, gender, age, personal narrative and historical tides. What stands out are the majestic, sunken and crinkled images of older men whose life lessons, treasured tall stories and tangible links to arts and culture can be appreciated at face value. See; Edmond Capon AM OBE by Gary Grealy, John Bell by Daniel Boud, Richard Neville by Graham McCarter, Dr Hassan Rahimby by Andrew Campbell, Tom Keneally by James Brickwood, Jeffrey Smart by David Tacon, and Trevor Murphy by Alex Frayne. And we continue down a nostalgic road with works of the supreme matriarchs of Oz, such as Margaret Olley by John McRae, Tami Jakobson by Peter West, Sasha Trajik-Mole by David Kelly, Narayani Palmer by Dale Neill, Alamelu Ganesan by Sandra Ramacher, and Patricia Harry by Mark Tedeschi.

As for the prize-taking work, because Rod has known Jack in the best and worst of times, the image is all the more engaging and honest. About Jack, Rod has said to the press “'He’s never hidden the fact that he’s had a very troubled life… Jack has blossomed. This portrait, to my mind, is a quiet celebration of that late blossoming. That strong engagement with the viewer is the nature of the way I work.” Rod McNicol is a Melbourne-based artist and his works are in the collections of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, National Library, Canberra and Bibliotheque Nationale, France among others.

The 46 finalists of The National Photographic Portrait Prize can be viewed from Tuesday March 20 to Sunday May 20 at The National Portrait Gallery.

Helani Laisk

Body Art

HELANI LAISK has just closed Mammal, an exhibition of sculpture and works on paper tied to the Canberra Contemporary Art Space residency program. She is now exhibiting with a You Are Here festival project called Petite Public Art as well as in Fine Lines at the ANU Foyer Gallery. Helani weaves, knots and dapples colour and texture to manufacture the most familiar object of all, our bodies.

At face value her sculptures don’t look like the human body. But first impressions can be deceiving and if you look a little closer, you might notice nipples, nodules, clumps of hair, armpits, your naughty bits, and even text book representations of the structures that lie beneath such as cells, flesh, blood and follicles. These doll parts are blown out of scale and reworked in domestic materials such as wool, fabric and thread. Helani disproves the idea that sculpture is an inert object. There can be dripping, a kinetic buzz or, in this case, mutant limbs which kick out into the audience.

This idea has been hyped again and again in works that make up the history of art, see: Joseph Beuys, Meret Oppenheim or Annette Messager. And like those artists, particularly Messager, Helani explores the ideas we prescribe to objects of the modern world and considers how we form and break apart ideas concerning our inner worlds. She circles some “superficial” items out as important – the things we find comfort in or shelter with, such as blankets (a stacked installation of folded blankets reaches the ceiling in Mammal). Helani’s work could also be about encounters; she indicates that the existential ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti were a major inspiration.

The artist deliberately uses colours that refer to skin or organs, her craft tests her coordination and physicality and the product is left to our imagination. Helani explains, “I’m interested in the shape of the clothing; how it pulls, drapes, puckers, bulges, as well as the shape of the hollows and holes, the joins and stitches, the openings that remain open and those that also close. I’m interested in the tangibility and the skin-like qualities of these materials, and the roles that these materials play in everyday life. How they relate to the body, their proximity and their function in relation to a body.”

To Helani “drawing is a way of thinking, drawing out a thought, a tangible extension of an abstract concept.” As mammals we create, destroy and improve our tools. The most potent tool is our body and with it you can do anything, like make art.

Helani Laisk’s work is featured in the Petite Public Art program of the You Are Here festival. It can be viewed around the CBD from Thursday-Sunday March 8-18.

Graeme Drendel

BEHIND THEIR EYES

GRAEME DRENDEL can spend hours or days alone in the studio with the same characters in various reincarnations. I spoke with the artist before Outsiders opened at Beaver Galleries for some insight into his preoccupation with relationships and how the “vagueries of the human condition” affect his practice.

In contemporary art composition is not always centre stage, but for Drendel it underscores one important thing. “I paint connections and disconnection between characters and often disconnection can have as much or more meaning. We are conscious of ourselves, our gesture, our stance, but it’s also something other people notice. I see it on the tram, in first encounters.” With cinematic flair two cropped paintings of the faces of the male and female characters in another painting, The Thin Air of Desire, oil on canvas, offer insight into the inner worlds of his “cast”. Drendel explains: “I am trying to get into their heads… to get behind their eyes. I’m curious, what are they thinking about… or seeing?”

Drendel’s actors hold feathers, walk a pair of ferrets, carry buckets, hover in space, nurse farm animals, shotguns or tug at long Soviet-era braided hair. However, symbols, in short, are our own creation. “We all have events, glances, ideas that keep recurring throughout life, you catch these same feelings or moments,” poses Drendel. Do we notice these things because of something within us or just because it happens? Drendel tempts reality and fiction against the backdrop of Ouyen, country Victoria, where he was raised. Like in a still life it can be a relief not to have to think about the background Drendel explains, mainly because he thinks of his characters “as alone in this group setting anyhow, you know the feeling – you’re always locked within your own thoughts, even in a crowd.”

Early in his 20s Drendel visited galleries, read art books and developed a palette for art. He admired the Renaissance artists for their fidelity to the figure and ability to spin a narrative. Later he noticed that a lot of contemporary art he’d observed years before had faded out of fashion, so “I resolved in my early 30s that I would only paint what I wanted.” Balthus galvinised him, famed for his resistance of the tyranny of labels, histories, or biographies.

Morandi also inspired Drendel. Painting the same things sometimes can be frustrating but it presents a challenge to stay satisfied. You work harder, refine the ideas. Drendel says the most excruciating moment is calling something finished. “When I think I have finished a painting I come back into the room and I stand in front of it and I look each character in the eye.”

Outsiders runs from Thursday-Tuesday March 1-20 at Beaver Galleries, 81 Denison Street in Deakin. The gallery’s opening hours are 10am-5pm Tuesday-Friday and 9am-5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Blaze 6

ART ALL ABLAZE

BLAZE 6 is a show about local emerging art; this year the work of eight contemporary artists brimming with potential but who haven’t had wide exposure is on show. I spoke with co-curators Alexander Boynes and Annika Harding on the topic of the 2011 residents set to exhibit. Dean Butters, Bettina Hill, Helani Laisk, Jonathan Webster and Fiona Veikkanen were residents awarded space, curatorial advice and an opportunity to ferment ideas in a gallery and studio context. Emerging artists Kate Barker, Dan Lorrimer and Ishak Masukor complete the collective.

You might have seen Jonathan’s painted tree collars around the city. He notices the intimate relationships with the everyday, or frequented, spaces in our lives. He explains that having a relatable subject is paramount: “if you can’t have an initial entry point to a work… they can’t feel anything towards the work, and then what’s the point?”

In other works Jonathan arranges sculpted text outdoors and then photographs them; he paints over some parts of these photos snapped in the wilds of Canberra. There are two reasons for this: “painting reflects in some way a lot of the movements we do in the everyday” but also because “painting directly onto the surface of a photograph draws direct attention to the fact that you are looking at an object… something hanging on the wall.” The act of painting is core to his practice, being “what I call the event of the studio, this repetitive and meditative movement,” he says. A clear push and pull emerges between the gallery space, installation, fabrication of the object and duplication of its image.

In keeping with the theme of perception versus reality, Kate Barker, graduate from The Canberra School of Art in Painting, uses old photographs as a source for her nostalgic scenes dissected by shards of exposed board. Annika says Kate “is looking at photographs as a sort of false memory, when your memory isn’t a complete picture either… she plays on that.”

Neither Helani nor Fiona is shy of the word ‘craft’. Helani, graduate of Print Media and Drawing, Canberra School of Art, has been using crochet to investigate growth, layers and natural formations echoing the abrasions, wetness and blush hues of our bodies. A new take on anatomy and sexual organs is “quite refreshing after I’ve seen a lot of Ron Mueck or Sam Jinks or Patricia Piccinini,” applauds Alex. Her shapes are interesting, a distended phallus and a pert orifice imply a sort of “faux-sexual undertone… it’s great,” Alex finishes.

Dean, of Photo Media, Canberra School of Art, has begun to branch into other mediums using silkscreen printing on board for his large-scale paintings. With video and photography he creates what Alex describes as a “punchy Andy Warhol-esque” aesthetic, adding that “he is in an interesting place in his career… dealing with this idea of teenage nostalgia, of a young man. Girls, cars and rock music… but at the same time there is a dark undercurrent, which can make you unsure of what exactly is going on.”

Also possessing a controlled but elusive message, Fiona uses pre-fabricated items and deconstructs them to dismantle the ‘art aura’ that is inevitable sometimes. Domestic ‘survival’ tools have inspired her, but these also are a point of departure in her body of work. It’s not hard to imagine character in Fiona’s objects. They appear slumped, twisted or agile. Fiona explains, “I’m obsessed with the half deflated form.” After taking photos of a hot air balloon she made an unexpected discovery: “was it inflating or deflating? There’s this movement and you’re not sure which way it’s going, it’s alive, breathing… there is such potential for movement.” And whimsy.

Bettina’s work in Blaze 6 builds upon negative space. We will see a fireplace that was assembled to exaggerate the joins, corners and depths of the common domestic form. Bettina graduated from Print Media and Drawing, she explored installation, found materials, print and drawing. She uncovers the factory floor origins of a domestic interior. Re-emphasising how we use familiar and banal objects means that the artists must engage with familiar, crafty and utilitarian materials. This is a tactic which stands out to Alex as “they aren’t outsourcing things to industry. It is all very hands on, and there is a beauty in that.” 

Dan, who has previously exhibited at CCAS, contorts metal into wisps and chunks. With particular attention to the robust material, but also to the hollows of the sculpture the pieces will inspire a sense of fragility. Teasing to move at random the work will feed off the similar energy in Ishak’s canvasses, both “like a pane of glass about to shatter,” says Alex.

Ishak graduated from The Canberra School of Art in Painting. Expect to gauge an all or nothing attitude with a picture plane that whirrs to blast apart. Annika suggests Ishak is a painter’s painter occupied with depth, a perspective that leads you deep into the painting as well as colour, texture and brushstroke united in a secured chaos. Virtual space is suggested with geometric accents such as grids, mapping and fragments. Annika poses that with “infinite ideas about space there is always going to be a bit of destruction.”

Keep an eye out for the upcoming solo shows at CCAS Manuka where the residents will carve out another space entirely. Blaze 6 gathers many interpretations of space, whether it is internal or external to the body or even a moment in time. 

Blaze 6 is on display at The Canberra Contemporary Art Space (Gorman House, 55 Ainslie Avenue, Braddon) from Friday February 17 to Saturday March 24. CCAS is open from Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm.

The Photography Room

A room of one's own

THE PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM in Queanbeyan is a newly established commercial gallery space, studio and point of call for artists and students. It has a loft-like appeal, boasting natural light and a new paint job. As the brainchild of Sean Davey, artist, TPR’s Director and co-curator, it was originally intended to be a room of his own, a slice of tranquility within a larger studio space of ceramicists, musicians and painters who together inhabit The Artists’ Shed.

Sean saw he could have it both ways. “I will spend time working away in my studio, which is within the gallery so I want to be moved and stimulated every time I look at the walls and am in the space.” The Artists’ Shed “has a really honest atmosphere and all the people there have a strong integrity about what they are doing, which I find really motivating.”

We spoke on the opening night of their current show, Pictures of Life. I asked how the gallery came to be, and what it aspires to be. Sean’s first impression was the scale of the task ahead: “On the first day I saw the space I stayed in it for over an hour, just thinking, umming and erring about whether I would have a crack at giving it a go.” He concedes that setting up any business has its perils, mainly financial, but that the ephemeral knowledge you pick up while working in “the arts”, like in a gallery, a shop or taking freelance work, is invaluable.

The gallery encourages a documentary style but stress that this is no limit on what we can expect to see there. In lieu of promoting a ‘house style’ they will respond to artists who are willing to investigate their own time and place. “I like video work, audio work, all sorts of work that examines the world as it is.” In late February 2012 there will be a group show called Multiples, followed by the work of Woulter Van de Voorde which promises to throw light on a sinister side of Canberra, and later a suite of large format colour photographs (over) exposing friends and lovers by Sydney-based artist and curator Spiro Miralis. 

TPR aspires to act as a bit of a satellite state, Sean explains. “It’s hard for photographers to get exhibitions in galleries, everyone knows that and I wanted to create a space that can host work that I believe to be of value, not only to the photographer, but also to photography and the arts community.”

Pictures of Life runs from Monday January 23 to Sunday February 19 in The Photography Room at The Artists’ Shed, located at 14 Foster Street, Queanbeyan. Opening hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12pm – 6pm.

Renaissance 15th & 16th Century Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

A GLANCE AT THE RENAISSANCE

In a few days the National Gallery of Australia will pull back the curtain on Renaissance 15th & 16th Century Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, an exhibition of over 70 works of art created more than 500 years ago picturing the early to high Renaissance of northern and central Italy. The paintings and altarpieces have never travelled outside Europe and resurrect an epoch of rapid social, intellectual and artistic growth. From 1400 to 1600 artists symbiotically depicted culture, religion and hierarchy with a turn of hand which was unprecedented.

The golden age of creativity was inspired by esoteric knowledge but managed to combine, with flair, philosophy, science, whimsy and succulent imagery. This accounts for why the visual arts became a cross-pollinating field where artists were not shy of perspective, colour or symbolism. All of the above is found in Birth of Mary c.1502-1504, oil on canvas by Vittore Carpaccio – take note of the checked floor drawing our eye back to other rooms, receding ceiling beams, shelving, internal steps and a wealth of shadowy folds in their costume. A host of characters, including a pair of rabbits, retell the narrative. Other hallmark elements of the period come together in Sandro Botticelli’s The story of Virginia the Roman c.1500, tempera and gold on wood panel. Aesthetically cast as an ode to the classical period the drama within the work floats the idea that art was political and politics was artful.

I spoke with Simeran Maxwell, of Exhibitions, who assisted in bringing the show together. “It’s not a complex story we are trying to tell,” she says. “It’s beautiful work from a collection which is so far away.” What impact does she feel the show might have on a techno-savvy, secular or younger audience? Simeran answers, “We now have iPads and that may be what goes down in history as the groundbreaking contribution of the 21^st century (I hope not, but maybe) and in these beautiful works viewers can trace a series of important artistic and technological changes. We are not necessarily looking for reverence… there is a special experience that you have with these works.”

The Renaissance emerged from the Gothic era. With the benefit of hindsight, shifts in ways of thinking run with changes in art itself. First to go was the excess of the “glitz and glamour of Gothic gold and flat colour – but it was not entirely lost,” says Simeran. Neroccio de’ Landi’s Madonna and Child c.1470-1475 is saturated in gold and can also be a starting point to think about the changing face of the Christ child and Madonna, changes of Benjamin Button proportions!

Closer to the Gothic period, Christ’s face has the qualities of adult and child. He is held at an objective distance, foreboding his fate of death and resurrection. Titian’s Madonna and Child in a landscape c.1507, oil on wood panel, is a move towards the high Renaissance. We find Christ represented as fresh, sweet and blissfully unaware of what is to come as he plays with his mother. This was a consequence of Humanism. Humanism combines a religious rhetoric with the attitude that Roman and Greek antiquity was a style that, although inimitable, should be the foundation for the progress of art.

Early Renaissance works did not commonly depict the lives of your average person despite being promised to impact upon them. Move along from 15^th to 16^th century works and you will notice that citizens are included in the later images, for example Moroni’s Portrait of a child of the house of Redetti c.1570, oil on canvas, Melone’s Portrait of a Gentleman and Cavazzola’s Portrait of a lady. Cavazzola and Melone’s work highlight how the ideas of the Renaissance also became a language of representation.

Cavazzola realistically paints the fall of fabric, depth of field and places the lady’s hands over a ledge, a gesture of space. In the gentleman’s portrait we see a detailed landscape that includes a sub-scene of smaller figures, a hilltop home, and trees swaying in what appears to be an encroaching storm.

In these portraits the artist was able to encode a thin biography of a patron or even put forward an authorial comment. “Symbolism was huge in the Renaissance; an apple was never just an apple,” Simeran explains. This is uniquely echoed in Carlo Crivelli’s Madonna and Child c.1482-1483, tempera and gold on wood panel. Ripe and healthful fruits surround the pair, as well as a cucumber that was a common signifier of the Resurrection.

It goes without saying that Christianity was a cultural driving force. Religious images were intended to be instructive tools for worship, encouraging contemplation. Although sometimes didactic, the images were not designed for passive consumption (unlike our pop icons of today). Hinting at their demise is the tender but solemn expression shared in Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child (Alzano Madonna) c.1488, oil on wood panel. And in Saint Sebastian c.1501-1502, oil and gold on wood panel by Raphael, the Saint is painted holding the arrow used in his torture.

The ascendancy of the Renaissance was the focus on human concerns and value of man as an agent for change. While there is no carbon copy of the world they created, the Italian stratified, self-conscious and politically diverse culture can mirror the way we revere 21^st century global icons and entangle religion, wealth and power.

The Renaissance exhibition runs at the National Gallery of Australia from Friday December 9 to Monday April 9. Tickets are available through Ticketek.

Impressions: Painting Light and Life

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

IMPRESSIONS: PAINTING LIGHT AND LIFE, portraits from 1885 to 1915, is on now at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition captures a distinct mood in Australian art history where reality and imagination intersected. A conversation with Dr Sarah Engledow, curator of the show and historian at the NPG, began by mulling over contemporary artist Ben Quilty’s remarks on the opening night. “Not so long ago he would have thought that a show like this was very uncool,” Sarah says. “It was a shock to him to realise how much you miss out on by dividing the world into cool and uncool.”

As Quilty complimented the work of artists such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, George Lambert and Dorothy Sutherland, who were contemporaries of their day, just like he is of today, Sarah adds, what we should look for in anyone’s work is the “humanity of the exchange between sitter, portrait artist and viewer”.

I have to agree. The show abides by the idea that by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes for all time and of all places, originally proposed by painter Tom Roberts. Timelessness is especially evoked in Reflections, 1898, pastel on paper, by A. Henry Fullwood. Years apart, the viewer and artist have observed this figure marching over a glossy wet street, finding splendour in the ordinary. The simplicity of the subject in The sisters, 1904, by Hugh Ramsay, oil on canvas on hardboard, is effective. The sisters seem to stare out bored with our attention. Not far from this work is a portrait of a woman; light blankets her in Sunlight effect, c.1889, by E. Phillips Fox, oil on canvas.

Striving for sincerity the works that take pleasure in their execution over a laboured narrative, such as A summer morning tiff, 1886, by Roberts, oil on canvas, offer an immediately jarring but honest depiction of ‘a sunburnt country’. Swept up in a dusty wind Girolamo Nerli’s subject whirrs static through the canvas, presenting a fleeting but sensual pause for thought in Portrait, c.1890, oil on canvas.

Seemingly random events, rather than a tightly controlled scene, piece together as a tableau of modern life. Engledow explains, “I guess, for me, one of the nice things about this show is its interconnectedness. It doesn’t set out to present any curatorial or art trajectory or commonality except a commonality of experience. The most moving thing to me is just how important they thought modes of representation were.”

Even though Impressions may seem like a soft touch, the rebellion needed to paint in such a breakaway style is an approach that finds parallels through to contemporary art. It has a lasting impression, you could say.

Impressions: Painting light and life is on show from Friday November 25 to Sunday March 4 at The National Portrait Gallery.

Natural Instincts

Natural Instincts, on now at M16 Artspace, elicits our shared memories, facts and flaws. Julie Bradley, Tiffany Cole, Nicola Dickson, Patsy Hely, Cherry Hood, John Pratt and Julie Ryder are exhibited as a collective inspired by the relationship between nature and humanity.

Holding court as you enter the gallery are prints by John Pratt, a well established Canberra artist and lecturer in Printmedia and Drawing at the ANU. His unsexed and otherworldly figures appear to float, fall and crumble through space. Pratt presents us with a complex but highly relatable image – that of man vs ‘nature’. Nature is undefined; imagine a seascape, community pool, or the wells within us. By using strong unflinching colours he unites the image. I suggest you pause for thought at Incline III, woodcut, an emulsion of quiet control and passion. More of John Pratt’s work can be found in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Australian National University, State Library of NSW and the Sanbao Print Collection in China.

Tiffany Cole suggests that our imaginings of nature, as near perfect or indispensible, are propped up by material culture. In Domestic Wildlife, oil on plywood, she installs cut-out models of a deer and swan that stare out, doe-eyed and Disney-esque. Much like 16th century Dutch masters who painted perfection to suggest mortality Cole’s obvious unreality highlights our complicated relationship with nature.

Nicola Dickson’s work has been hatched with a distinct voice that has not gone unnoticed since she was awarded a PhD from the Australian National University in 2010. Four works from the series Wedgwood Blue, gouache and pencil, explore a title fight between cultures. Inspired by medallion drawings of the 1780 voyage, the portraits of James Cook and Joseph Banks, a laureled naturalist, are steadily eaten up by native plant life. These are cleverly placed beside images of two “white-washed” profiles of the couple Truganini and Woorrady. Pastel blue gouache masks them, although a colour synonymous with the British Empire it cannot disguise their profile as leaders who fought against violent repression.

These works on paper and Dickson’s paintings marry a sense of something alien with symbols of “nationhood”. Gould’s Australian Chintz II and III, oil and acrylic on canvas, morph creatures native to Australia with decoration, embellishment and hybridisation. The artist draws into question colonial manipulation of the Indigenous (and human) right to remain true to nature.

Much of Natural Instincts finds a direct link with empirical depictions of what surrounds us from untouched to man-made landscapes but has obviously found its genesis in what lies beneath. Strangely and pleasingly what we see is familiar and earthy but also fluorescent, subversive and cute, bordering on science fiction.

Natural Instincts is showing at M16 (21 Blaxland Crescent, Griffith) from Thursday October 27 through till Sunday November 13. For more details, check out www.m16artspace.com.au .

Robert Boynes

STREET WISE

Beaver Galleries has just opened a show of paintings by Canberra artist ROBERT BOYNES entitled In the light of day. Formerly Head of Painting at the Canberra School of Art for 27 years, Boynes is highly regarded and is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all Australian State Galleries, Parliament House, Artbank and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

In the light of day could refer to one of many aspects of his practice – the light essential to photography, the public and exposed locations where he takes his imagery or the act of seeing itself. The attitude that there is something persistent and common to the human experience resonates in this show. Acrylic, velvet and wood splice canvasses are utilised to explore the sounds, sensations and movement found in our urban spaces and streetscapes. He uses fractured images and shards of light to reinforce the transience of memory and complexity of sight. Boynes explains, in reference to all art, that “it’s the mad material with no surface logic that persists in the nicest way.”

Boynes cites Goya, Manet, El Greco and the practice of seminal figures within modernism as influences. As they skillfully drew together and contrasted the “message” and the “delivery” of a work of art. He is also captivated by less literal depictions of the world, like colour field painting, minimalism or even the soundscapes of John Cage and Philip Glass. He explains:

“I make paintings by transiting through photography and screen-printing. I would call it a multi-media mode of delivery. There is a reason that I have formed a unique language. It is the only way to express and reflect on my particular history of the day.”

In 1959, alongside the like-minded Barbara Hanrahan, Alun Leach-Jones, Udo Sellbach and Peter Haynes, Boynes juggled teaching and his scholarship at the South Australian School of Art. It was an extremely intense but formative period. As any student knows living and creating at once is a precarious balance. The nights he didn’t work were spent in Kym Bonython’s jazz cellar, a tiny place for coffee and cigarettes in Union Street, Adelaide.

Early on in Boynes’ career, Robert Lindsay advised that to find out what you do best and decide to keep doing it will be your greatest move. He has found this space yet concedes that there are peaks and troughs. A duality that also applies to conceiving the work itself, he says:

“What do I plan to do in the future? It’s always the same, to make better artworks. The next picture is always the most exciting, and the last picture is always your best. In there lies an untruth and self-deception. Then again, unless you have an art-ego you don’t go on to make more.”

The In the light of day exhibition is being held at Beaver Galleries (81 Denison Street, Deakin) from Thursday October 20 until Sunday November 13. The gallery is open between Tuesday and Friday from 10am-5pm and on Saturday and Sunday between 9am-5pm. You can also view the works online at beavergalleries.com.au .

A NEW HORIZON

A NEW HORIZON contains more than 70 highly conceived works that reflect how major shifts in Chinese culture were felt and reinterpreted by two generations of artists working from the origin of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present day.

This exhibition highlights the importance of work from over 50 years ago, instead of the current trend for the latest and loudest works from China. It teases out the skill, sincere philosophy and great innovation of Chinese artists. Underscoring the changes in style in the show are changes in time. It is interesting to note the shift of work created for the benefit of society and state to work created for the individual and the market place.

Zhou Shuqiao’s Spring Breeze and Willow (1974) oil on canvas, paints a group of radiant young people about to participate in the Cultural Revolution re-education program. The social realist scene uses bright colours and a tight composition confirming unity and happiness. Some equally enamored Tibetan youths in Pan Shixun’s Walking on the Road (1964) oil on canvas, are pictured paving their own roads, literally and figuratively, suggesting their freedom under China.

Shang Yang’s Dong Qichang Project-27 (2009) mixed media, references the poeticism of Chinese 16th century painting and artfully incorporates digital images hinting at evolving modes of communication. Contemporary ideas are also captured without using modern technology. For example Chen Ping’s Dreaming of the Mountain from my hometown (1998) ink and wash, holds true to the classical way of rendering a landscape.

Avant-garde art of the ‘80s took its punkish inspiration from outside China. This is evident in the chiseled imagery in Wang Yingchun and Yang Lizhou’s political scene, Taihangshan Steel Wall (1984), ink and wash. At first it looks like a carved rock-face, representing strength. But it shares Picasso's abstracted approach to movement in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and touches on German Expressionism.

As an exchange Australia sent NAMOC an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous work that was admired for its ability to transcend cultural paradigms because of its uniqueness or otherness. The idea that art can speak to universal truths, like pain, anonymity or survival fills the contemporary wing of this exhibition.

In a way the National Museum of Australia and the National Art Museum of China are showing both art works and also artifacts. The breadth and craft of the work in the show is wide, as is the story that the works tell as a whole about the development of Chinese society and culture.

A New Horizon: Contemporary Chinese Art from the National Art Museum of China will be on show at the National Museum of Australia until Sunday January 29, 2012.

HANY ARMONIOUS

HANY ARMONIOUS is the sole artist in the Australian Pavilion for the 54^th Venice Biennale, showing until Sunday November 27. Regarded as a playground of the very wealthy, Venice’s public contemporary art exhibition democratically shares shocking ideas, political comment and artistic experimentation. Armanious was born in 1962 in Egypt but has lived and worked in Sydney for his adult life. His work is infused with his diasporic existence, living between two cultures and inhabiting a third, the art world.

Perhaps Armanious’s 11 sculptures were chosen for his thoughtful re-formatting of ordinary objects to satirical ancient relics – a unique achievement. Armanious is long established in contemporary Australian art and his work is an essential component of the development of Australian art history proper.

Armanious’ message is universal and subliminal. He is interested in things; the things we see, remember, like, dislike and eventually file away as part of our collective consciousness. By remodeling recognisable objects, images and even historical and commercial imagery, Armanious converts what we once thought of as immaterial to something tangible.

For example what takes the shape of a throwaway Burger King crown is actually a casting of the consumer item embellished with semi-precious stones. It sits on the bottom rung of a leaning tower of bronze desks. The work, Adzeena Persius, 2010, contains gold plated silver, tourmaline, rubelite, blue topaz, garnets and citrine. By choosing materials from all over the world and selecting gems with various values, Armanious gives a critique of high and low art.

His sculptures are ‘process based’ and as a result take on complex metaphorical meaning. They can be thought of as ‘assemblage’ art, putting one object in the context of another. Armanious also applies this to reassembling ideas. Take Effigy of an Effigy with Mirage, 2010. The iconic imagery of Picasso is echoed in the sculpture cast in fibreglass and pewter with pigment. Not only does Armanious displace the function of the original object but by doing so ‘assembles’ a totally foreign object.

Previously Armanious has toyed with our perception of solids; his objects look like they have crawled out of primordial ooze. His Biennale contribution, 17 years since the creation of Snake Oil, 1994, NGA, shows that his early ideas have evolved to look deeper into cultural difference and the modes of production of cultural materials, such as art. These works express the transnational and global identity that is the norm in Australia today; an idea that ought to resonate with the 33,000 international guests coming through the Palazzo.

Hany Armanious has exhibited widely in Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Europe. His work can be found in The National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Roslyn Oxley9 gallery and most recently at The Drill Hall gallery, Canberra.

Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia

13 August – 6 November 2011

Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia embraces the fact that confusion, conformity and confidence are transnational experiences. NPG Director Louise Doyle has congratulated the efforts of curator Christine Clark who has brought together artists from across South East Asia for the first time as a collective.

Atul Bhalla’s photography distills identity as a reflection of how we care for others. In Submerged again, 2005, he thumbs the idea of water as a commodity, as wasted or polluted. Consumption and environment seem to be a hot topic in the first room. A tangle of pipes used to provide heat climb the wall to form S Teddy D’s self portrait, the medium is a metaphor for the distribution of resources and ultimately, power.

Chinese-Indonesian artist FX Harsono literally tears himself apart, in the print Open your mouth, 2002. The image shows the artist’s face excluding his eye cavities, nostrils and mouth. Combined with an image of a lotus the work’s angst is balanced as the flower represents the osmosis of life, death and regeneration.

Alwin Reamilo, an artist from the Philippines explores the dangers of building a national identity in Reliquary by Arnulfo Tikb-ang, 2011. The artist uses the image of José Rizal as well as a larger than life matchbox to show how the leader sparked a revolution of thought and action, while at the same time inspiring a cult of personality. Nationalism undoubtedly changes a population; the building of a national identity demands we forgo a little of our own.

Silent Sound, 2009, made up of white fiberglass body parts that melt into the white walls of the gallery suggests that the absence of identity goes a way to understanding it. The work by Alwar Balasubramaniam has been described as being between the thresholds of two worlds, a feeling not uncommon to most people.

A major mural of Rivera proportions by Augus Suwage, from Indonesia, tackles similar themes of disenfranchisement that the Mexican heavyweight addressed. Man of the year #4, 2011 is ornamented with skulls and imagery of decay, yet the central face is grinning maniacally. This is intended to highlight the lack of sincerity in the burgeoning contemporary art world, which can view creativity as disposable.

Mrs. Sujatha Singh, the High Commissioner of India opened the show saying she was moved by the ability of the works to demonstrate how the body can be considered ephemeral once we come to see the soul as permanent. The individuality of South East Asia is strong in the exhibition. Many of the exhibitors use the past to make sense of themselves in the present because, as Rizal famously said, “why independence, if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?”

INNER WORLDS – PORTRAITS AND PSYCHOLOGY

The National Portrait Gallery

Friday May 6 – Sunday July 24

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Inner Worlds: Portraits and Psychology is comprised of works which show the many facets and faces of one person, as well as portraits of pioneers in the medical field and anonymous works by patients undergoing mental health treatment. The images we see are vigorous; they share a sense of immediacy, appearing as confessionals, fables and memories.

The aftermath of WWII was not only the wreckage of modern warfare but also a dismal attitude towards modern life. Artists, world over, drew, painted and sculpted with a new moral code; honesty is ugly and ugly is good.

Sidney Nolan’s work, Head of a Soldier, 1942, took the front cover of psychiatrist Reginald Ellery’s study Psychiatric Aspects of Modern Warfare, where the text and Nolan’s image clearly refer to the inextricable link between war and damaged psychology. Nolan has used segments of flat colour and deliberately warped the dimensions of the sitter’s face.

Eyes as a symbol are plentiful in the exhibition, perhaps because they convey the double meaning of watching and of being observed. So, if the eyes are the window to the soul then artists such as Nolan, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester inhabit a world not unlike the shape-shifting landscapes of C.S Lewis. These three artists use searching eyes as a visual cue for feelings of convalescence and trauma.

Two paintings in the final room dwarf the viewer, with their size and emotional energy. Dale Frank’s Self Portrait, 1983, has been termed a psychological self portrait, where a mental state is captured rather than the sitter. The paint is layered thickly forming one large whirlpool, its darkness broken by shards of yellow and green. The work echoes the spiraling sky of Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, 1889.

The works demonstrate that memory and a sense of self can be fractured. Importantly Inner Worlds shows that there is no such thing as a static human condition.

The Gift of Ann Lewis

Almanac: The Gift of Ann Lewis AO
The Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University
Showing Thursday February 17 – Sunday April 3, curated by Glenn Barkley MCA, Sydney

The pieces are coming together at Almanac in the Drill Hall Gallery. Beyond reproach the works of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Sally Gabori stand guard.

During 1964-83 Ann Lewis oversaw and collected works that encouraged the artists of Gallery Ain Sydney to abandon depictive art and look to European modernism. As a result, the thrust of Lewis’s collection was marked by experimentation and ‘futuristic’ ideas. Paint became the subject of art.

The black background of Kngwarreye’s The body painting series, 1996, is disturbed by large sweeping strokes of white applied with the speed and sureness of an intuitive hand. Echoing the ceremonial body paint worn by indigenous women, the work is a vehicle for cultural expression and demonstrates that paint alone can suggest the human body, flesh and its movement.

Although largely an exhibition without figures, the body is front and centre in Rosella Namok’s work. As if talking with her hands, she scratches, digs and drips paint onto the surface of Para Way, other way, 2001. The static medium of paint communicates the history of a people, laying the land, so to speak.

The next room sees the genesis of this kind of storytelling. Playing with oil for oil’s sake; with its thickness, flat pallor and hidden properties Ralph Balson’s Constructive No. 24,1953, comes alive. Balson saw a link between rigidly applied paint and our impulses.

Similarly Callum Innes thins the oil of his canvases with turpentine. He toys with the properties of paint to illustrate that its application takes precedent over a narrative or subject.

As almanacs are used to understand diverse phenomena it is no surprise that the show contains a breadth of themes. Thoughts on the environment versus man-made objects are found in the work of Rosalie Gascoigne and Janet Dawson. Ricky Swallow paints a picturesque impression of emerging technology. Themes of ceremony and chance are embedded in the work of Curley Barduguba and Robert Rauschenberg.

This outstanding private collection has been generously donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it will return as a potent reminder of Sydney’s foray into abstraction and willingness to experiment.

The National Photographic Portrait Prize , 2011, The National Portrait Gallery

Framed not with a bang but with a pared back approach, the 55 finalists of The National Photographic Portrait Prize, 2011, delivered a nuanced view of their subject, which left a lasting impression on the judging panel – consisting of curator Dr Sarah Engledow, Dr Christopher Chapman, NPG Director Louise Doyle and Dr Domenico de Clario, Director of Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation.

In its fourth year the prize is unified by the value of being caught in the moment. This is most apparent in Jacqueline Mitelman’s winning piece, Miss Alesandra , 2010, where the subject’s unwavering gaze spills over into the viewer’s space.

Mitelman, the first female winner in the history of the competition, echoes the dusty tones and clotted red splashes of the Dutch masters, yet entirely escapes seventeenth century archetypes of the image of woman. The subject is not inert, but statuesque with a shrewd gaze.

Skillfully the works escape the didactic feeling of previous years; at their best the images hold back what they want us to know. Consider Charles McKean’s Blind Harriet , 2010 – Harriet lies in ecstasy, mouth ajar, limbs reaching, held static in the artist’s frame. Synapses at full blaze she experiences joy and sensory delight, tickled pink in the wet green grass, ‘seeing’ beyond colour.

The finalists were not those that chose shocking imagery or blasted issues of identity, but those who showed that if “truth is not relative [then] being is no construct”, said Engledow.

In Sean Fennessy’s work Father and Son , 2010, Ken and Andrew Hodges splice the opaque blue water of a swimming pool. Their mint skin adds a delicacy to the tender scene. Andrew is buoyed by his father, recalling the religious narratives of long forgotten altars. After a brain injury at 15 Andrew’s exercise routine is an important and nurturing act that his parents perform.

This year’s Portrait Prize is a teasing yet highly enjoyable courtship. Get face to face with the show before it leaves Canberra and The National Portrait Gallery for a regional tour on Tuesday April 26. It may help you get to know the strangers in the room, not only those on the walls.