MVA Seminars 2008

EXHIBITOR: William Mackinnon
RESPONDENT: Danny Sgro

Experiencing Will Mackinnon’s world is a trip through unchartered territory.
Unchartered in the sense that from one perspective the viewer is presented with a practice that operates from a visual language which uniquely blends European and Australian landscapes, therefore entering into a discourse on history and the history of painting if one is prepared to do so, and more importantly, has the knowledge to embark on such an expedition. However from another more personal perspective the images are codified or encrypted with a language that is about self-reflection, introspection, and observations that come from the artist’s own relationship with - and impressions of - the world around him. What is then most satisfying about the work is that one need not necessarily approach the work academically, theoretically or historically but rather move through and interact with the work at a sensitive (and sensorial) warm and emotional level.

Whilst it is not quite accurate to label Mackinnon’s drawings as operating formally out of a naïve style – in terms of the art movement - there is a certain naivety which is visibly apparent in his observations which makes these perceptual illustrations spooky, eerie and generally disquieting articulations of form and yet simultaneously warm, funny, comical, quirky and oddball depictions of still life. I am referring here specifically to the studies of the electrical adaptor socket and human pelvis. Juggling representations of the innocuous and anatomical, Mackinnon enters into a discussion on form and its relation to semiotics (as referring to signs and signifiers). The implication being that any given object or visual depiction of an object can carry different meanings dependant on the object and its visual representation’s cultural, psychological and historical meaning which varies from culture to culture and individual to individual and moreover once the object is recontextualised and hence reconceptualised this meaning changes once again. Therefore objects can be read as symbols or icons or interpreted as signposts for memories, thoughts and considerations.

Mackinnon uses the pelvis to discuss the head both as a function and a form and as a conceptual possibility. The viewer is asked to consider what ramifications operating a head from the hips or operating the hips from the head may have or hold. When considering the electrical adaptor in relation to this construction of head it appears not as an adaptor but rather as a literal translation of the face - the two socket cavities being eyes, the lower socket cavity a mouth, all imprinted on a white multi-adaptor skull.

Using an abstract representation of the interior of a vehicle to discuss headspace and mood creates a mindscape wherein the mind is not the landscape but rather the vehicle. This is an important distinction because where the first possibility - mindscape as the landscape of the mind – is an obvious manifestation of postmodern abstraction, what Mackinnon proposes is that with the mind being the vehicle the imaginative journey is taking place in real time. Simply put: Mackinnon presents the viewer with a vehicle rather than a location therefore the experience of that location is subjective and infinitely variable dependant on any combination of thoughts, feelings, memories and desires that a person may carry with them.

EXHIBITOR: William Mackinnon
RESPONDENT: Hannah Gatland

A Day In The Life Of Will Mackinnon
(Cave Paintings)

On entering the gallery I am confronted by the personal, intimate and private life of an artist. It is a journal-like exhibition that spreads out over two sides of the gallery. There are notes by the artist to himself and I find myself lost in a room full of dreams, mindscapes and memories. Horizon lines transform into stalactites and then transform again into heartbeats on a heart monitor machine. There is an over whelming sensation by the potency of the image and of the nostalgic colour and line. My mind swirls and I find myself disorientated from the confusing scenery delved from epic dreams and strange studies of anatomy. I am stuck inside the fantastical mind of an artist where colour, paint, history and reality, all cascade down and consumes me.

Slowly, I notice three power points. They’re prints of cave paintings and drawings of unidentified bones. I take note of a catalogue of Mackinnon’s past artworks placed alongside pictures of stalactites. There is a mock-up of a painting, a cave painting. This plan has layers of drawings and thick painted technicoloured stalactites and ancient cave walls. Further along the wall there is another plan for the same painting. It is a collage of all these ingredients on this very wall. A cave with men huddled round the fire, their figures casting shadows against the painted ancient walls. There is a power point on the side of the cave and near it the same unidentifiable bones that are on the gallery wall. A red paint compressor sits off to the side of the cave.

While my eye is drawn around this collage and then around the wall again, slowly digesting all this information, I find it hard not to consider the association of ancient cave paintings and notions of “Primitive” art. As in the paintings by French artist Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), who glorified the barbarity and uncivilised living of primitive cultures in his artworks, Mackinnon’s intentions for these images of cave paintings is in an entirely separate approach to that of Primitivism. He employs images of the cave and cave paintings to suggest that the fundamental essence of painting has not altered in any immense way since the earliest paintings created by humans.

The image of a dreamlike view from a distorted car is repeated numerous times within this exhibition. The repetition of this nostalgic image speaks to me of personal journeys. It sings of Mackinnon’s travels through a private process and a personal struggle of art making. The folder on the plinth reveals dream like scene after dream like scene. There is a strong sense of the eternal search for an image, or of a time, or a place, or a feeling.

Mackinnon has an ability to transform the mundane and the every day to become part of his search and a part of a fantasy world. His keen sense of colour is playfully displayed with the optical prints installed on the right hand side of the gallery. These optical images are reminiscent of seventies wood grain pattern and this colourful grain is printed onto pieces of wood and paper. The retro colours and lines ripple down the wall and my eye enjoys the playful leap it takes to the pulsating psychedelic painting with flickering glitter splashed across the glossy surface. Here Mackinnon employs a hedonistic essence of painting where colour and technique combine to create a painting dripping with intense imagery. I become immersed in the paint. My mind is taken to the man on the edge of the cliff in this mystical land.

As I approach the long white canvas my mind jumps back to the cave paintings on the opposite wall. I see modern day cave drawings. I come across distorted faces. Studies of a human pelvis, of male’s sexual organs and an image of a human brain jump out at me. I begin to wonder if there were such things as a modern cave man, would these be his drawings? Is the modern day gallery just a glorified cave for human beings to display our cave paintings? It is hard not to contemplate these underlying questions after experiencing a moment within Mackinnon’s art and headspace.

Mackinnon’s artworks playfully question notions of art and painting while engaging the viewer in a personal journey though life and art making. He utilises his personal journal-like drawings and notes to draw the audience into an intimate process of searching and questioning. It is hard not to be captivated by the paint, colour and images he employs in this exhibition, for his pleasure to create is immensely expressed and captured within it. On leaving the gallery I own a strange sensation. It is like I have just experienced a moment in the life of a modern cave man. Or, was it just a day in the life of Will Mackinnon?

EXHIBITOR: Gaye Roberts
RESPONDENT: Danny Sgro

Upon entering Gaye Roberts’ space one is quite lost for breath (an appropriate choice of words as the work can be literally translated as an abstract representation of suffocation, exhaustion and breathlessness) at the intricacy and mastery that has gone into encasing her soft sculpture forms into floating totems composed beautifully and elegantly throughout the gallery. Technical ability and craftsmanship aside, it is Robert’s ability to use a sophisticated visual language that is subtle, sophisticated and eloquent in its presentation of the disquieting, disturbing and deranged which is most impressive. Robert’s work is steeped in allegory, yet to subject the work here to any number of differing and irreconcilable allegorical variants seems to be an exercise in futility as I can only offer my own personal allegorical responses which may not be correct in so far as they are not desirable to the artist and may be contrary to her own intentions for the work.

However, I feel the work is so engaging and intelligent that it requires one to respond, engage and interact on both an intellectual and emotional level no matter how inadequately or incorrectly. Therefore treading lightly I will offer a response which whilst not necessarily being allied to Robert’s personal politics is legitimate in as much as it is addressing the intellectual and the emotional aspects of the work as it affects one personally.

Metalinguistically – using a language to speak about a language – the work critiques gallery space, as I can’t conceivably consider the works existing out of a gallery space. This is simply because the visual logic of the work and its meaning I feel is best contained in a museum or gallery ‘white cube’ space. No matter how cocoon-like the lung forms are contained in, the cling wrap acts as a vitrine, an enclosure, a space for observation, consideration and study, and is quite formal in its presentation.

There is a level of tension inherent in Gaye’s work - lungs being choked by apparatus, works being strung up, gravity being defied – yet for all which is present what is most satisfying about the work is all that is absent. I am referring here specifically to the feather totem – a vitrine that encases an eggbeater congested with feathers some centimetres above a plinth with a mysterious puddle of white liquid. One can only surmise that the allegory presented here is one about the nature of livestock and produce and the cruelty which is permissible in order that the masses be fed.
If my surmisal is correct, then of all the totems, this feather totem can be marked as containing the most linear narrative.

The other works working individually and cooperatively speak quietly of death (and near death) hence it is the very stillness and lifelessness of the objects presented that causes one to reflect on both the fragility and nature of existence.

EXHIBITOR: Gaye Roberts
RESPONDENT: Nicola Page

Bizarre harvest

The work of Gaye Roberts possesses an uncanny-ness and subtlety that gently alludes to aspects of modernity that tends to make us uneasy. She appeals to a discomfort in us, stemming from the knowledge of the relative ease of living we have created in the developed world. The Knowing that the true cost of our modern comforts and efficiencies are too often credited to the natural world. Roberts’s work articulates a reality so rarely confronted by the average consumer, it has become imagined. Here, through a dialogue between objects born of our accommodated lives, she relates a realm between places. A realm that is consciously known of and subconsciously experienced.

The gallery becomes an incubator in itself. Here we find unrecognisable objects housed and preserved. Several solitary forms separated, placed sparsely around the dimly lit room. The works are immediately intriguing, somehow alien to us and possibly alien to each other. They do not seem to interact rather they are self-contained. On closer inspection the sculptural forms act like cocoons, nesting an ambiguous life force within. The structures outer, architectural shells juxtapose their internal inhabitants softer, vulnerable forms. The relationship is like that of a house or apartment block, solid and defined, to its tenants, organic and mutable. Clearly separate organisms but related. Perhaps body like? A heart, lungs and internal organs maintaining the outer flesh and skin, while being protected in a symbiotic relationship. The interaction is not defined but clearly they are two parts of a whole. The forms hang in suspended animation, monolithic and heavy they are silently sleeping, paused, awaiting the first gasp of air and slowing suffocating. One of the objects sits anchored to the floor and lit from above. This subtle disruption in format is enough to instigate narrative. Is there a process taking place, perhaps there are several stages of development being monitored and accommodated here?

The works are constructed, creating imagined forms made of objects found in the world they reference and critique. There is a system in place here. The objects function as extensions of the world that conceived them, so the system is one of implication and belonging, objects that are ‘of’ their home, while being displaced from it. Duchampian found objects all produced on mass, forms created solely to accommodate humans.

We, humans, are the dominant factor in the work. These objects are the debris of modern living, our abandoned prosthesis and 21st century lifestyle support. Are they Signs of our over indulged existences or just failed biomechatronics? The objects huddle together to form bizarre hybrids of the domestic and the industrial creating the genetically modified, farmed for mass consumption and sealed in plastic for our convenience. Together these objects are seeking new life or a foreign identity. They can be found attempting to breach their individual limitations, each becoming more than the sum of its parts.

Thickly painted wooden chairs, dense toxic skin, industrial hooks, chains, metallic legs, kitchen implements, aggressive metal tools and plastic. Plastic wrap, plastic skin, plastic parameters, plastic containment, plastic preservation. Plastic that is hygienic, sterile, smotheringly protective, and above all one material that personifies artificiality and dehumanisation. The inhabitants are bizarre hybrids of latex, rubber inflated balloon type vessels with machinery, tubes, hardware tools and sharp metals. They are the disregarded debris emerging from the sublimity of urban decay.

These disassociated orphans, desperately in need of liberation, unnamed and displaced creatures unknowing of themselves and their inherent nature, kept perpetually waiting. They are certainly being interfered with in may ways, hooked up to machines and gages, pumping air in, sucking blood out, excessively monitored for their own good or for ours we can’t be sure. Are these forms damaged and in desperate need of life support, or are they the victims of another’s need to own them? Oppression: possibly through fear, through power, through exploitation. Really it is all the same to our pods, they are partially comatose, kept hearts beating, lungs breathing, and blood pumping for hopeful relatives, friends and family waiting on the other side of their encased existence. Whatever their circumstance it’s clear they are not well, anaesthetized and maintained, showing all the signs of a severe deficiency in nurturance, a commodity less easily prescribed.

EXHIBITOR: Paul Williams
RESPONDENT: Ben McKeown

Paul Williams is an artist who imbues himself within his work practice. His paintings are immersed with a sense of energy and vitality that is not only felt but also visible to the viewer. With each stroke of his brush Williams leaves behind a mark that is distinctive to the artists’ hand.

The paintings are often of a small scale, each one is executed in a confident manner with the artist’s keen observation for detail and realism evident, there is also depth in the subject, and the scale of the works evokes an intimacy between the viewer and object.

In reality, the high rise apartments and multiplexes are overcrowded with cramped living spaces built on land that is overdeveloped for its use to house and keep secure the city’s ever growing population. An intimacy felt only for those who inhabit them.

That is one of the pleasures experienced when viewing Williams’ works. They are able to place viewers in situations that with the busy fast paced modern lifestyles one might not take time to observe in their immediate surroundings in such a way.

On display here today are five paintings: all but one are of views that could be positioned in any city in the world, but recognisable for Melbourne viewers as snapshots of the Docklands precinct - a popular new entity all of its own, built on reclaimed and re-used land south of Melbourne.

The artist takes us on a journey that seems to be a personal one as he makes his way meandering through this space… a space that is uninviting to those who do not live there or, for those who don’t dare enter.

The paintings are a mixture of light and colour represented by rich luscious amounts of paint that have been applied with the confidence I spoke of before, but is it a confidence of the mark or a confidence of the mark maker?

Let’s ponder.

The depth hinted at earlier is seen within the sky or revealed when studying the building’s reflections upon the water’s surface where the light seems to be dancing with each gentle ripple on the water’s surface.

The play of light again is used in this painting: the buildings and building equipment such as the crane are illuminated and defined while the background is dark, it’s possible that it’s the night sky or perhaps a void… counterbalancing the reflection on the water, something that is visible and familiar as to the unknowing of what lies just beyond one’s immediate vicinity… Is the artist making commentary about society and its comfort levels?

There seems to be a theme in this body of work, that of light and darkness, the visible and unseen in the figure of a man - all you can see is his head and right hand. The rest again in darkness and this is an effective way to highlight the ginger tones in the beard and hair.

What is interesting in this work in particular is that the light seems to emanating from nowhere and gives an almost halo effect. And with this in mind one could read into this work the use of the right hand being visible as apposed to the left. I’m possibly opening a can or religious worms… but could this be a metaphor for the son of god?

Moving on…

The painting of the streetscape with the car is at first another observation of everyday existence: power lines and a parked car can be seen. But again what can be read into this image is no, not the son of god, but an opportunity to peer through that void and look beyond what it is that is visible only within our immediate sight. The artist seeks to capture what is through the void perhaps.


These paintings are small in stature but large in gesture.

EXHIBITOR: Paul Williams
RESPONDENT: Lani Pinnington.

Building a painting

One might be forgiven for walking past paintings by Paul Williams with little interest. At first glance they appear as ‘same old’ urban landscapes that might be found in an office building or hotel room. They are quiet images, unobtrusive, often pretty and for many people they would be a delightful decoration to a room, selected for their ability to match carpet, curtains or furnishings. However, if you were to walk past without a second glance you would have denied yourself a great pleasure and failed to recognise a remarkable talent. This ignorance is unforgivable. If you own one of his pieces bought for its complimentary colour scheme you have entirely missed the point though at least in this circumstance you have the enviable position of discovering its qualities over time.

The second glance effect is the super power of an artist. But what is it exactly that makes one glance again and then finally look to see? In the case of Williams’ paintings it comes as a sneaking suspicion that something has been missed. When returning for a closer look the viewer is trapped fly in web style struggling against the obvious visual image and an urge to discover more; to look further into the scenes, to detect what is missing. One of the most outstanding and consistent qualities of Paul Williams’ work is that the more you look the less you see and the more you’ll find.

From across a room the paintings show the city, the streetscape, the landscape, the figure etc. There are buildings, roads and trees and people but standing close and in front of each piece is an almost uncomfortable place to be. The familiar objects that were identified at a distance dissolve into pools and rivers of opaque oil, piled on top of each other like clay slabs. The paintwork is thick and sturdy. Like a sculpture the paint builds up the scene and the brush strokes appear to carve into it. The talent becomes apparent - rather than simply painting a building Paul Williams is building a painting.

Each mark extends away from the picture plane towards the viewer in a way that inspires in its audience the urge to look behind the laden brushstrokes in anticipation of rediscovering the details that were easily locatable from across the room. The strokes (in bold rapid gestures) are so tactile that they provoke a compulsion to pick the paint off. It is as if the outside of his city buildings could be peeled back to reveal the inner workings of the offices behind. The viewer can imagine miniscule people-blobs, busy behind the painted façade. Or picking away at a shrub to reveal a nest of paint dot-birds.

Being up close and personal with the work though somewhat uncomfortable, is not unpleasant. The loss of the image detail affords a new perspective that is in some ways more interesting than what is identified from across the room. The abstraction of the built up paint has at close range the ability to signify a range of subject matter that extends past the mundane. Skyscrapers can become biological cells full of genetic information. Cities can be tiny rocks; a man’s hand and head are planets revolving in a starless galaxy.

Adding to Williams’ construction aesthetic is that fact that his paintings are executed on wooden board rather than the canvas traditionally chosen by landscape and portrait painters alike. The boards give a sturdier quality to the often architectural scenes that demand a stronger surface than canvas can provide. The structure of the wood becomes a sympathetic necessity to the building of a painting, able to hold strong shapes and the weight of oil rivers where a flimsy canvas might soften the masculine effect.

The suspicion of having missed something in the images is intensified by what is not painted. Williams’ earlier work from 2008 predominantly featured buildings, that are obviously the intended subject matter, but don’t fit on the picture plane. They appear cropped and unfocused, captured almost accidentally as though by a child with a cheap disposable camera.

His later work of the same year is creating an opposite illusion that intensifies the abstraction noticed up close and reveals it to the viewer from across the room. The scenes have become too small for their surface and are surrounded, enveloped and hidden by shadows so deep that at a distance they can promote the highlighted areas as light at the end of deep tunnels or radiation pulsating in dark matter.

If you were one of the persons that walked right on past the paintings by Paul Williams without a second glance I pity you. A myriad of possibilities and food for the imagination has passed you by. If you looked again and only saw a landscape or a portrait then your imagination must be overweight. If you own one for its colour scheme you may find yourself in the future to be not just housing a painting but housing a building in a building. A landscape or a portrait undoubtedly, but also a building of a spaceship, an embryonic life form or a solar system.

EXHIBITOR: Van Than Rudd
RESPONDENT: Amber Wallis

Van Than Rudd has two works that sit across two walls and share a space with Gaye Roberts, this is hard not to notice, her hanging works slyly creep into view like ghosts or hanging bodies, which is somehow fitting.

Rudd’s work is instantaneously recognisable as being steeped in the political. Like tea, I feel his work has been brewing for some time and we may be glimpsing what I suspect will be the beginning of a new direction in his art practice.

His first work, the currently Untitled yet proclaimed finished painting sits, directs and talks to you from a pink orange background, its content thick with political imagery. This imagery is at first glance made up of a number of components:
Rifle in the mouth of man (yet the rifle is not held, it floats)
Flags from Australia, USA, UK and Israel adorning the rifle
The man is blindfolded and possibly bound
He is quite possibility about to face imminent death
An advertising slogan of ‘new’
Bullets lined up with the promise that they will equal carbon credits

These components are thrown together like a code, I instantly think of a thought bubble that may read something like this:

Pencil lines are visible, touched up spots do not match the original tint yet the quality of painting is not what this art is about. The message and ideas are the most important thing.

I think Rudd asks the question, if we can trade cash for carbon credits to offset our environmental footprint then what else is tradable in the global economy? If so then do the bullets imply that lives are being traded for military power, the rule of a country, for oil or money? Are the countries displayed on the flags practicing in some kind of illegal trading and is this trading scheme as simple as buying a carbon credit?

Rudd is proposing questions that I do not think he knows the answer to.

I feel Rudd is grappling with a common trait of the artist – how to wrangle the inner voices and workings of one’s thoughts and experiences and views. I see this work as a type of coding of personal political thought, influenced by the media and one’s own political views which are then put together visually to present Rudd’s ideas and political notions, which are not necessarily steeped in fact.

This work is endeavouring to communicate and question an audience but I feel like it is trapped and cannot find the audience of the advert, billboard or banner which it visually mirrors. This confuses me greatly, I don’t know if the goal is to communicate his ideas or just to expel them? Which is why I so enjoy the second Untitled piece in cardboard.

It is good to see the cardboard work. This work interests me; it harks of a new method, which may suit Rudd better. It seems more ghetto, more tied to the perils of his subject, more civilian, more political. In its step away from painting it portrays a connection to the masses in its ‘aura’, cardboard becomes potent because of its original identity and it thrives with the history it brings with it. It has a more potent sense of anarchy than the painting which seems stifled under the weight of the history of painting. Anarchy is after all an absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any given sphere.

The reclamation of the cardboard is just that a reclamation, it is found, free, cardboard packaging product to house consumer products transformed into a bed for the homeless, a stencil template, a tool for mass graffiti, a new flag. Metal staples with holes around the horizontal edges, framing it somehow.

The transformation of the cardboard into something other endows it with a sense of celebration and change. I cannot see the spray paint but I can see the potential of it, to spread the message beyond the walls of the gallery and communicate in a different way, as a flag would. It does not mean the artist should or would stencil the streets, but the implication of could is there.

Like the first piece I immediately identify with the symbolism and sprout a train of thought like this:

What is Rudd proposing this time? Is it a question? Is it food for thought? A flag for consumerism and an addiction to brands? Is it about youth affiliation to a capitalist structure that is mind numbing and addictive? Is the flag, positioned high on the wall, a reference to communism in its lack of individual freedom? All these questions and more are raised.

His technical skills seem stronger in this piece despite the simple crudeness of it. It represents a stronger synthesis of ideas and concerns, which are more succinctly portrayed, and I think speaks to his subjects more successfully.

The cardboard cut is read like a drawn line, the potent inspirational initial source, the line in the sand, the picket line, direct and immediate. There is a strong feeling of action in this piece, rooted in left politics. The aesthetic and influence of punk rock and its collage is channelled creating a new flag, I cannot help but think of Black Flag and so many activists participating in protests of various types around the world, using cardboard and flags as protest banners. A cheap and easy way for the passer-by or viewer on TV to understand what one is protesting.

I think that the true facts of history and politics are generally impenetrable. Today we get the glossies, news bites, sound bites, quick visual images and an overview of political events, which may be highly biased. I cannot help but feel these works are similar, quick snippets of the political concerns of Rudd’s mind and what he deems important in a global economy/community/conversation. The art mirrors media for the masses, emblems, billboards, flags, universal symbols of identity and advertising.

On first glance my issue with Rudd’s work was just this, the broad political assumptive quality, but I think this perceived weakness may actually be his strong point. His reaction to politics is guttural and not weighed down by fact. Challenging the viewer to think outside the box.

I know it may be pertinent that Rudd’s uncle is The Hon Kevin Rudd MP Prime Minister of Australia, but I feel that Rudd’s interest in political art spans broader than Australian politics and maybe it is not that he is influenced or challenged by his Uncle’s position but more that politics may be in the Rudd genes and they are both interested in politics because of their shared genetics, which is another conversation entirely.

EXHIBITOR: Van Thanh Rudd
RESPONDENT: Dianne Dickson

Painting on one wall green assault
In my face American aggression
Gun the America phallus
Forced into the mouth of blind folded enemy victim
Like a male forcing women to suck his cock
I look away too much penetration and blatant shock value

I turn and look at the image on the other wall
This is alive it breathes, it pluses images
Thought my brain
It is poetic it is frightening
I feel its anxiety and sadness

The cardboard could be flesh, soft, warm fragile stretched taut
Like an animal skin, or Hitler’s human tattooed skins
Made into lamp shades
Faceless victims come in and out of focus
Their cries muted by pain

The cut out symbolic of so much
First glance missile directed at humans about
To be burnt mutilated, destroyed past and present images
Flash through my brain the recent conflict in Georgia
The cut out could be the hammer and sickle

Nike symbol of western culture, materialism
Youth, exploitation
The syringe injecting the western ideology into
Every being on earth piercing their minds and bodies

Now the cardboard becomes the earth
Our life force
Decimated, barren, total destruction
The apocalypse
The syringe the chemical weapons injected into the earth and humanity

Contrast of the soft cardboard
The Nike and syringe symbolic of cut out flesh
Stating ownership like branding cattle
Americas claim on the world

This is how I read these works; the artist’s intention is political, while
allowing the viewer to immerse in the materials and their application.
The imagery has a sensibility which allows the viewer to experience on a
deeper level the human condition in relation to war, politics, global
warming, illness, ageing, dying, abuse. Medical intervention, isolation, nature versus human intervention. I like this work very much for its simplicity and complexity.

Van you’re the man.

EXHIBITOR: Paul Kalemba
RESPONDENT: Linda Tegg

Paul Kalemba’s installation is perhaps intended to set the audience up for a fall. Cardboard sculpted into harmless billboards, leaves one with a towering power in the knowledge that through carelessness alone one could flatten the flimsy monument to the ground. The word desire in corrugated cardboard is rising up from the ground, so tempting to tread on. Fear pops up near the corner of the room, behind it more cardboard fashioned into a propaganda poster. It’s constructed into a state of decay, burnt broken and askew in a manner that you might imagine a wanted poster from Frontierland.

While the aesthetic of these cardboard constructions may be reminiscent of the happiest place on earth, where a feeling of safety and manic joy permeate every queue and gift shop, one may feel somewhat concerned for these cardboard wanabees. If you were to slip, these helpless constructions would be crushed under your weight, they are vulnerable, perhaps dying. They’re so non-threatening that one may not be compelled to investigate what lies below the surface.

Cardboard and wood carefully compiled to represent a chest height billboard turned away towards the wall, its shameful posture obscuring the Hummer advertisement drawn on the peeling face of it. It stands there decrepit and exposed like an enemy defeated. Are fear and desire so bad after all? Is anyone concerned with propaganda and advertising anymore? The billboard evokes sympathy.

In the furthest corner of the gallery is an assemblage, a packing pallet on its side supporting a makeshift shelf with seedlings growing in a collection of takeaway food containers and converted plastic Coke bottles, the word FREEDOM resting against the wall in cardboard letters. Amongst this assemblage I feel returned to a truth, aware of my situation, a human that eats. Deflated I stand there by the seedlings and spring onions, hit with the under whelming dependence of it all.

The installation is in three parts, the burnt representation of a propaganda poster leans over a Coopers Sparkling beer bottle complete with rag as if it were the sort of molotov cocktail you see people throwing at the cops on the news. The text on the poster is German VERDUNKELN – a darkness and the word FEAR popping up from the ground in cardboard lettering. DESIRE in the same format next to the wall then the billboard and the plant shelf with the word FREEDOM.

How do these cardboard words relate? How does one negotiate these words without reconciling them into an oversimplified message? What is the intention? Is it to make art, or is it to put forward a political viewpoint and call it art? Is this work coming to terms with systems of power, or is it struggling with the impossibility making art itself when one has an overriding political agenda? How does an artist free themselves of the power structures and systems they detest yet remain engaged enough to alter them?

Kalemba’s work directly addresses social and environmental issues, it is critical of advertising and consumerism, it actively pushes itself free of the mechanics of capitalism, with the use of found objects and materials discarded by industry. The materials are meaningful as Kalemba lets them speak for themselves; a discarded cardboard box elegantly crafted into a baby billboard, a Coke bottle now cultivates a small seedling. The works’ connection to society is not monetary, rather it strives to bring Kalemba’s social concerns to the consciousness of its audience. It is considered and poignant in the current socio-political climate.

Perhaps this work is a post apocalyptic projection, an optimistic vision of the future. The billboard is now a shy relic of consumerism, while freedom is found in the romantic return to the land often seen at the conclusion of science fiction films. Kalemba has taken the space to re-organise social structures. The effectiveness of the installation is that it constructs a set of relationships in which the viewer is compelled to consider their own physicality, ego and power.

This is an honest artwork, which reflects it’s time, place and the struggle of living within one’s own ideals.

EXHIBITOR: Paul Kalemba
RESPONDENT: William Mackinnon

After an initial visit to the gallery I thought I would call the artist for an interview to go deeper into the work, as well as ask for the translation for the German text. Then I thought I should persist and “read” the text as a whole set of visual signs and see what it communicates on its own terms now the artist has set it free from the studio.

Fear

The work starting left to right first of all speaks to me in a language of violence. Impending violence; a molotov cocktail, and past violence that has been inflicted in the desecration of this “painting/ billboard/sign”. The incomprehensible German still carries an authoritarian Germanic tone. The skull has Hummer teeth. This sets a tone for how we register the remaining imagery. The warm glow of the McMansion takes on a sinister tone, it is not a Kinkade-like American rural fantasy but something darker. This house combines with the car and garden to represent the contemporary Australian suburban dream. I read the house as something more insidious than the vehicle for modern happiness. It has become the enemy within. A big greedy hungry house where we are consuming ourselves (in the greater ecological sense) with our insatiable appetite for comfort. Our desires.

Desire

It is spelled out on the floor below. The desire is constructed from individual cardboard letters that inflect the meaning we elicit. It is a constructed desire, a cardboard cut-out desire. A material we associate with mass marketing, political campaigns, big business and advertising and commerce. The letters are propped up by steel, something more solid and industrial. These are all highly conscious choices, nothing is left to happenstance. The work in this middle section becomes pure sign that has also been subjected to the same neglect as “Fear”. The sheen of the billboard has long faded, the gloss bleached by the sun and it comes loose from its armature. The Hummer in this brave new world once symbolic of wealth and power now smacks of ostentation and inefficiency. It is also the brother of the Hum V, seen in almost every report of Iraq, a symbol of an unjust War, where big business and big oil have had much to gain. Chrysler, one of America’s top four companies has had to start building smaller more fuel efficient cars so to compete with what people want. Bigger is no longer better. The motorcar was for so many years the symbol of American opulence, aspiration, movement and mobility, the American dream.

Kalemba is using existing iconography with a post-pop sensibility. It does not have the allure of Western Pop that integrated the strategies and techniques of the contemporary commercial culture stylistically: Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Warhol, Koons, but continues from the more cynical social realists of the former Eastern block like Polke and Richter. They denied the banner of pop all together.

Freedom

The final chapter of this trilogy is the least resolved, but then again this is commensurate with our future. The choice of materials are those salvaged from this consumer driven hyper capitalist world. Cardboard, Coke bottles and palettes, re-fashioned to act as a DIY home garden. They are invested with another function, stripped of their original signification. Is this a corollary to capitalism, a move towards a more ecological capitalism? The palette may signify the modernist grid, representing rationality, function and purity. It now looks tired and can barely prop things up.

There is hope here, albeit precarious and cobbled together. Perhaps this is a post apocalyptic world? But where are the plants getting water? These plants must be short of light in a gallery space? Is the gallery the right space for questioning such immediate concerns? Or perhaps the artist believes: how can we make art when this is going on? The artist is certainly careful not to contribute to the problem. This work is purposely not for commercial consumption. It is a critique of capitalism. Perhaps the spring onions and radicchio are there to offset the carbon exhumed in the previous burning? Regardless, it is a significant work that is not neutral on possible readings.

EXHIBITOR: Ron Rydz
RESPONDENT: Van Rudd

Ron Rydz’s Triptych

It’s 11.30pm and I’ve just come back from losing a game of indoor soccer. Our team did actually do quite well, and once again one goes into a bout of self-doubt and reflection upon what went wrong and who should be blamed. The referee was biased, no doubt, against us!! I think constantly about the moves I did and if I was a major cause behind our loss.

I am then welcomed in the lounge room of my rental property to a final session of “So You Think You Can Dance”. I’ve always thought that dancing on this show, good or bad, was easier to measure than say, Australian Idol, where singing lends itself to a more vague area of entertainment and commentary via no body movement. (Not that these competitions allow for any comprehensive cross-section of competitors of course).

What interests me here is the nature of competition, loss and self-reflection. My soccer match and the aforementioned entertainment programs leave at the margins the zone of the horror of contemplation and self-criticism – each contestant looks inward with the greatest of intensity to find an answer but undoubtedly cannot produce one. It is probably best to almost shut down and feel their way through. As Bruce Lee said, “Don’t think…Feel”. This zone could be a black infinity – the black, rectangular monument in Kubrick’s 2001. Its horror as it faces humanity and their ancestral primates, comes from its stillness and heavy, heavy weight of questions and its one BLOODY BIG answer which is: “YOU’LL NEVER KNOW”.

But wait, is there a little hope emerging through all this? It has taken the form of a few, delicately placed, linear marks. The lucidity of the colour electrifies the canvas like an electric shock or the after-effects of a defibrillator – sending signals to a thought process. But this thought process is still in recession – DID SOMEBODY SAY RECESSION!!??? – Can I refer to the one that the Australian economy currently welcomes? Don’t think so. The stare of the eyes are no doubt weary – that’s the recession I’m talking about. This face has almost given up. But I sense that this face is of the person who painted the very carefully placed, square, black canvases. The creator immensely enjoyed making the canvas a warm black – the canvases could have so easily been much colder, like a gloss enamel. But the creator has chosen to not allow a reflection in the blackness. That would be a little too indulgent – a bit like the majority of singers on Australian Idol. So there IS integrity and a love of the works by it’s creator. So is this the answer? Beauty?

This is probably the same blackness that artists such as Francis Bacon (UK), Godwin Bradbeer(AUS), Kasimir Malevich (RUS) and Bernhard Sachs (AUS) would probably use to great effect to dramatize a scene on Air Crash Investigations (7 network) - that horror of knowing and not knowing colliding in one moment at break-neck speed.

As artists, many would argue of the inherent beauty in that. That’s arguably why I’m addicted to that program. The team of psychologists working in the marketing department of the program would surely know this. But why would anyone leave it to the marketing department? As the above artists demonstrate(d), there is so much room for it in art. So much so that it allows the creators of this art to go ballistic within this nothingness. Does this mean that life has become nothing? Or will it become nothing? Or will it go in cycles of nothingness? It can obviously become very exhausting thinking philosophically about this – and it doesn’t really get anyone anywhere.

It is only when things have to change, I believe, when nothing becomes something. You could call this something “reality”. Is the urge to accept the reality that the 747 passenger plane is crashing due to stress from too many flights to cover demand during summer holidays - the mechanical failures are due to maintenance being outsourced to cheaper, overseas labour – and the fact that there is a reason “business class” is better than “economy” class.

Therefore, is there a reason the creator of these works has given a face to the skulls on the canvas to the right – eyes to see and a mouth to speak (not yet open) to vocalize? If one were to draw imaginary diagonal lines from one corner to its diagonal opposite of each canvas, the lines would dissect directly in the middle – where the “mouths” are. Is this important to the creator? Does it mean the “heads” will speak of the “truth” – of “reality”? It seems the creator wants the viewer to be the speaker. The creator will watch from a dark distance at the impending neutralization of that voice by a force unknown…..

This sets the tone for what I believe is a beautiful set of paintings. There is an aesthetic consciousness involved here, surrounded by a very, very bold statement – THE LONELINESS OF HUMANKIND. I believe the creator has stated this within a blanketing silence. It is that silence that I disagree with, from a political point of view. However, I strongly welcome this argument of silence into this forum. For it is their polemical power that makes them a strong piece of art.

I’ll be interested to hear what Danny, Brian, Will, Paul K, Paul W, Amber, Nicola, Dianne, Ben, Gaye, Linda, Lani, Hannah, Chantal and Bernhard have to say.

EXHIBITOR: Ron Rydz
RESPONDENT: Gaye Roberts

Walking into the gallery space I am confronted with Ron Rydz’s three paintings and immediately I am reminded of Robert Rauschenberg and Ad Reinhardt. Dense black paint. covering the canvas to the very extremes, around the periphery and spilling over the edges. A black which reflects no gloss or sheen, yet, just as you might close your eyes, turn off the lights or sit within the darkest room, the mind plays tricks to counteract the void and slowly images materialize, for, from the very centre of each of Rydz’s canvas’ radiate the form of a human head.

Three heads. Three heads are better than one...

The artist has painted each human head differently. Heads which reveal below the surface different layers of anatomy in what seems to represent various stages of exposure. The heads are not complete in themselves. The skull has no skin, the face has no skull.

The three paintings are each about a metre square and hang along one wall. Square, not a millimetre extra outside the square. Very precise and very orderly like punctuation marks. Rydz has deliberately placed each canvas a specific distance apart. The space is almost too far for them to be considered a triptych, yet they read as one. They belong to each other and they feed off each other. The same size and same blackness as each other. The careful application of paint with no give away signs of brush marks or texture to show how the paint was applied talks about the absence of the artist’s hand. This seems to play against the artist’s intention, for the images of the human head slowly reveal the vulnerability of the artist. I’m not convinced that Rydz is talking about himself personally but rather the universal man.

The three floating heads are not grounded or fixed to a geographical location for these are universal heads. They are every person. They each add to the dialogue of self, experience and what it is to be human.

The bony framework of the head, the human skull is really the casing for the brain. It is the keeper of the intellect and the custodian of thoughts and ideas. A symbol of life and death. An image used throughout the ages to remind us of time and our own mortality. A reference to human fragility.

Reading the paintings from left to right and beginning with the first on the left. This canvas, within its blackness, holds a human skull. Real skulls are hard, these bones are soft. Soft focus. This is not a medical illustration, rendering anatomical bits. We have the privilege to get under the skin to look beneath the surface similar to a slice of a MRI scan or an out of focus x-ray. Not only does the artist want us to see a skull, but also the inside. The inside of what belongs in all of us. The interior of the mind of all humans. This luminous image radiates from the surface and reinforces the notion of the brilliant intellect, illuminated and enlightened.

The next painting sitting in the middle also shows a skull. This is overlaid with delicate drawn lines. Fluid, liquid lines of blue and white. There’s a dash of red to add drama, to highlight and lift the image. You can feel the brush gliding down the side of the skull fleshing out an identity. The artist’s own? I can’t be sure. Maybe a portrait of a heroic figure, symbolizing every man. Yet this head wears glasses. Sunglasses? A sign of gender, class and identity. Cut the glare, put on the disguise and hide. Glasses to hide the eyes and puff up the ego. Hoping not to reveal our real self. We are invincible. We ask what lies behind the mirror image of the glass as it stares back at us. We catch an image of ourselves in the lens. Perhaps they are intended to give focus. To focus on the identity of the wearer. All the better to see you with.

Are they earrings or ear lobes, twitched? Maybe not but the seed is planted. It’s about how we see each other. The external image of someone is portrayed by the adornment and apparel of what they wear. This head indicates that it is prejudged by appearance before the external layers are stripped back to reveal the underbelly or bones that are common in all humans. The skull bones again reinforcing the uniqueness of the individual’s thoughts and ideas.

Lastly, in the centre of the final black square sits a face. This represents the external and outward appearance of the human form. Worn, red and fleshy. The eyes are piercing out of the canvas. There is nothing soft in their gaze. Lined with time and experience. The general appearance is one of melancholy. Past events reflected in the mind’s eye.

Hold on........ Wait a minute........ The black square has thrown me off centre.

A Reflection! Could it be a screen? A monitor not turned on or a camera lens? The head, the luminous head, the out of focus head and the ruddy imperfect flesh. So superficial and shiny. The face staring back at me is my own....... I am that person who is so exposed and vulnerable, because after all, once we peel back the surface we are all the same.

EXHIBITOR: Benjamin McKeown
RESPONDENT: Paul J. Kalemba

Safe and warm

The VCA student Gallery #3, or more commonly the Masters gallery in the student vernacular, presents us with a fairly non-descript and common white cube with track lighting and a humble patchy grey unsealed concrete floor. Upon entering the Gallery I find myself standing before seven seemingly disparate works, absent of any formal continuity, overt material linkage or assertion of the artists style or hand. There is however, at first glance a declaration of indigineity, and Australian Aboriginality and this instead provides the thread and my initial lens through which to view the works and the show as a whole.

A stretched canvas in landscape format, presenting two simply painted illustrations on a bright, flat red background is the first of the seven works installed by McKeown. The first image is that of a simple building, possibly a dwelling: a cottage. The second image a symbol. A camp or meeting place constructed by concentric circles of dots of paint in ochre tones, a familiar symbol in Aboriginal dot painting. The Building appears to be a home and is undoubtedly colonial in juxtaposition to the camp posited in the second image on the canvas. We are presented with nothing more in this work and can only join the dots, (pardon the pun) by analysis of the juxtaposition. Concepts of home, an idea of disruption, thoughts of displacement and assimilation.

The next three works are objects clustered in approximation of the canvas’ height and immediately to its right. Here we are presented with handcrafted jewelry: two necklaces one threaded reeds, one shells and a bracelet woven from a raw natural fiber. I double take on my initial impressions of banality for as individual works they seem to offer a key to the work as a whole. Decorations in the form of body adornment bring forth notions of culture, the materials evoke the coast and the natural world. Raw, hand crafted. Displaced from their cultural function they evoke objects traded with tourists. The idea of colonial disruption meets concepts of culture.

Gloss on matt black, the allusive profile of a crudely executed silhouetted human head is the fifth work in this grouping, by means of acrylic on paper. Notions of Blackness and Aboriginality meets the portrait. An enigmatic person, hidden within its background, by colour. A sense of Darkness, loss and melancholy. The idea of portraiture and the individual. This works raw simplicity speaks for itself.

The sixth, largest and most confronting work in the exhibition presents us with an older Aboriginal woman rendered in high contrast black and white stencil-like definition with acrylic paint, heavy in mark texture on the supporting paper. A crochet blanket hangs in front of the painting concealing her breast and hangs beyond the picture’s border. In this work the stereotypical image of an Aboriginal woman makes me hyper aware of my expectations. More specifically, the expectation of a bare breasted woman, a nameless woman, a noble savage. However here she is not the image of a constructed stereotype, not culturally natural, but clad in a European cultural artifact. Nana’s handmade blanket on an Aboriginal elder. A cultural hybrid. One symbol of Comfort and warmth rupturing another. A change though the generations, and not by accident. The construction of a colonial religious mission. Images of the past.

The final work is another painting in black, muted reds and ochre acrylic on paper. Presented with an abstracted image, with no reference for building an understanding of its language, I consider this piece on face value. Beyond the familiar colour scheme and its connotation, I read this work as a personal mindscape / dreamscape or maybe an abstracted landscape or map but come up short of a deeper engagement with this work as a singular. However in the context of the groups of works I am facing, it seems as if this could be enough to go deeper into the work as a whole.

Moving closer I begin to dialogue with the concepts of safety and warmth, place and home, or more specifically their disruption. An absence, a rupture, a longing. Armed with the impressions of the silhouetted figure and the abstracted painting, the unified work appears to evoke an intimacy. More personal than strictly “Aboriginal” despite the initial surface perceptions. Perhaps the artist as individual is representing a personal story though a language with which they are familiar, addressing these issues of security, home and rupture from a personal rather than political overture. Is the house McKeown’s or his families? Is the woman his Nana? Did she make the crocheted blanket? Who made the jewelry? The works feels personal.

From the perspective of the personal story I engage with the political through the personal, and share in a common experience of humanity. If I lacked in empathy I could see the woman as my own grandmother, place myself in McKeown's position, and imagine my own emotions with the political in line with the personal. What does it mean to be an Urban Aboriginal? Such a twisted history to wade through let alone be a part of. Colonisation was no picnic for any indigenous people. How would it feel to be part of that story? McKeown engages me though this story as I take in this exhibition.

I take a moment to ponder. A deep, quiet reflection as I walk a mile.
No hard answers, but a string of questions. A sense of displacement.
Where is home? A place that is safe and warm.

EXHIBITOR: Ben McKeown
RESPONDENT: Brian McKinnon

Looking at McKeown’s recent works and works from earlier in the year you are quite able to see a stability and maturity in his work. I think his painterly style follows in the footsteps of our predecessors in urban or contemporary Aboriginal art. For example, his landscapes of a more traditional European style reminded me of the Hermansberg School. Because, in the way McKeown uses colour in his backgrounds, sky and formulation of the subject matter, this is also reminiscent of the artists from the Carrolup School of South Western Australia.

The artists I refer to from the Hermannsburg School are people such as, Albert Namatjira and Billy Ben Perule. Mckeown seems to be able to have the control of colour and the maturity in the use of colour, as does Namatjira. Then there is his innocence in the use of the figurative style of composition not dissimilar to that of Billy Ben. In addition to the artists from the Carrolup School, the bright colours of Barry Loo, Revel Cooper, Reynold Hart, and the figurative of Revel Cooper, Reynold Hart, and Marjorie Cooper. Mckeown’s blending of the several styles of these artists mentioned above shows an understanding and maturity beyond his age and training. In saying this I can see that McKeown has had a difficult journey through his youth. This seems to be reflected in his works, as they seem to all show isolation and give a sense of confinement.

McKeown’s works, to me, are contradictory, because the manner in which they are constructed seems free and innocent, in addition to how his use of materials seems constricted by convention. McKeown also uses more traditional styles, blended in to show his connection to country and culture. McKeown’s traditional symbols used in his works seem to be generated so naturally from the creation period, in the so called dreamtime (by Europeans that is). They remind me of the great exponents of traditional artists, such as, Dr George Ward Tjapaltjarri from the Western and Central Deserts. Tjapaltjarri Tingari cycle paintings showing the long and arduous journeys they made during the creation period.

Although McKeown says his works do not represent the Tingari cycle, it seems from talking to him about his work and personal life that he too has had a long and arduous journey. These works then take in the Pupunya Tula style of dotting in sections giving a different dimension altogether adding again the pockets of isolation, as do the different colours in some sections. There are also more contemporary recent artists reflected in his work, including Gordon Bennett in the way McKeown uses abstract construction of housing estates and again the use of colour to isolate one of the houses. I think in a lot of ways these isolated parts of his paintings actually represent him.

Then you have the ancestors of the different groups from NSW who used similar designs in their dendroglyphs, marking the boundaries of their country, also specific ceremonial grounds and burial sites. The people of the Kimberly Pilbara regions of WA use the designs to map country and represent ceremony rites to do with passing into manhood and claiming all the rights of passage and respect for knowledge associated with these ceremonies. McKeown also seems to be mapping country. Although, in some instances foreign to him, he is becoming comfortable with his environment, and as time and urban ceremonies take place he also passes through with acceptance from locals; the all important path to manhood.

In Ben’s works I see a definite struggle suffered by all indigenous people worldwide. Such as, the constant struggle against a dominating race that cares not for any kind of reconciliation or acceptance of what they consider to be an inferior race of people. I find Ben’s work to be very personal, yet also very political, in a very considered, unassuming, but not so naïve way. The politics embodied in his work are quiet but overtly so in its silence. From here I see so many arguments and debates coming from the art market regarding the value of contemporary urban Aboriginal art versus the perceived more traditional art from the Northern Territory, North West, Central and Western Desert styles.

In Ben’s work he proves that there will always be an overlap between the two. This overlap can be seen coming from both the perceived ‘true Aboriginals’ from the desert and the ‘false Aboriginals’ from the urban walks of life. Ben shows that although he is believed to be one of these urban Aboriginals there are none of the perceived boundaries that are placed upon us, that very strong connection to country and culture is a birthright that nobody can take away from us.

In my opinion, there is no doubt that in the selling of Aboriginal art, spirituality and the connection to Dreamtime stories, evident in the images, play a crucial role in the commercial distribution of Aboriginal art. In the 20th and 21st centuries it appears as if the younger generations of Christian background or heritage are seeking alternative spiritual connection. Aboriginal spirituality embodied in our art seems to fill this void. This raises questions regarding the authenticity of Aboriginal art and artists, which has often been governed via the ethnographic and anthropological approach, in the interpretation of Aboriginal art. This sheds light on the desire advocated by many urban Aboriginal artists not to be classified and pigeon holed by methods of knowing that are entrenched within ideologies that have often oppressed Aboriginal peoples, land and culture. An argument supported by Richard Bell in Bells Theorem of Aboriginal art: ‘it’s a white thing’ (2003).

The number of artists holding the knowledge is declining rapidly and younger people are reluctant to take up the “Old Ways”. Given the above, a dying, soon dead culture is being raked over. The image of the ‘Noble Savage’ (from whence comes the spirituality) implies a position of racial superiority (consciously or not). It is not necessary to invoke spirituality when promoting artists as individuals. It is a matter of who they are, where they’re from, what they know, what they’ve done. These things become crucial. A proliferation of white experts is belittling the people who own the culture. For example, the ‘Named White Expert’ is far better known than the mostly unnamed ‘Unnamed’ Aboriginal artists from the famous Pupunya School of painters. That the fact that the lack of Aboriginal input into areas of concern is continually overlooked has created the feeling that culture is being stolen.

EXHIBITOR: Danny Sgro
RESPONDENT: Dianne Dickson

A man has been here
What do I see?
What do I feel?
I could be a child, a dog a workman
A homeless person
Wandering through this landscape
Seeking treasure, playing a game
The steel becomes a ruin, the concrete slabs
Sides of a Barren Mountain
A cave
A place of secrets, danger artefacts of industrialisation
Chemicals, asbestos,
I can hear the wind, the thin steel rattles
I am startled
I walk toward the beautiful blue bottle
It seduces, me,
I am drawn to it
Surrounded by objects like land mines
Danger above, thin rods hold a massive slab
Will it fall?
Crush me as I peep into the blue vessel
I want to know
Air to fill my lungs with clean pure oxygen
Maybe the poison gas of industrialisation
To fill my lungs with carcinogens
Or a beautiful blue sky of a utopia
I feel the fear the anxiety the curiosity
The sounds of past voices, workmen machinery
Drills
Its smoko
A good day’s work
It’s quiet again. The stillness
Evokes what remains
Who are they?
Who are we?
Danny’s work is provoking, gentle.

EXHIBITOR: Nicola Page
RESPONDENT: Hannah Gatland

What was it about Jeff Koons’ monumental ‘Puppy’ sculpture that mesmerised and captivated myself as well as many other audiences around the world? Was it the cuteness and the hyped up kitsch aesthetic of an oversized puppy towering in art museums courtyards and grand public places, or was it the simple notion of delivering the beauty of nature back to the masses through a popular and easily digestible imagery? And why is it that a shopping centre like that of Melbourne Central will spend copious amounts of money on a feature wall that doubles as a living garden? These are the questions running through my mind as I encountered the artwork within Nicola Page’s exhibition.

There is something to be said about the decorative aesthetic and it’s ability to captivate audiences throughout generations. Just take a look at the crowds of people streaming through the NGV’s ‘Art Deco’ exhibition that is open at the moment. These audiences are attracted to and pay good money to experience Art Deco’s mixture of high art and low art (i.e. ‘the decorative’). In saying that, I believe there is no exception here with Page’s artwork. Immediately, the four tiles that are installed in the gallery’s right hand corner intrigued me. The contrast of the black background is intense against the colourful patterns of flowers and leaves within these tiles. Having prior knowledge of the artwork, I know these flowers and leaves are carefully scanned, sorted and meticulously arranged in particular patterns. But in seeing them installed, I cannot help think of them as living plants trapped between the black background and a glossy transparent surface. They appear to be living candy-like nature; forever suspended just an inch away. I really would love just to lean over and give one a big indulgent lick… But no! I cannot, because right in front of these tiles, in this corner installation, ‘the decorative’ has been smashed up all over the floor.

The crunching of the plaster ceiling rose on the concrete is a satisfying sound to me. It seems strange to see an image that is associated with the action of looking up, to be found on the ground. This image has been turned on its head. Here Page makes a direct link between the patterns in her flower tiles and the patterns of interior decorations. This link seems to be an obvious one and yet the pattern on the floor has been torn apart. The broken bits of plaster dispersed around the ceiling rose blend in with the white splashes of gallery wall paint on the concrete floor. Page is celebrating the decorative and destroying it in the same breath.

The subtleness of the two large pastel pink paintings on stretched out canvas is stark to that of the contrasted colours in the four tiles. The patterns and tones are softer and it is harder to recognise the painted images. It becomes a blurred version of the smashed up plaster ceiling rose. The fleshy colour of these painted patterns directs my thoughts to household wallpaper and yet at the same time to the fleshy coloured sculptures of Louise Bourgeois. It becomes a strange sensual tension between femininity and the decorative.

The symbol of the flower has long been recognised as a representation of femininity and the female sexual organ. Page’s employment of this loaded image through the use of the decorative aesthetic sets up a dialogue that swings between notions of amplified nature to the smashed up decorative. The flora in the four tiles could well be hybrid versions of garden varieties. Beauty and nature all seems too artificial now days. I think back to Koons’ ‘Puppy’ and the feature garden wall in Melbourne Central, and consider the idea that people seem to need nature to be presented to them in a more palatable way.

There is a clever language at play by Page. This is a language that employs the decorative and kitsch aesthetics to produce a body of work that investigates ideas of femininity and beauty, of nature and the artificial, and of architecture/the decorative and art.

EXHIBITOR: Nicola Page
RESPONDENT: Ben McKeown

Nicola Page presents us with a body of work that conjures up an eclectic tapestry of the delicate, organic and feminine. Featuring digital prints beautifully composed and presented alongside paintings that reflect a similar vein. Then she slaps the viewer with a sculptural piece that literally shatters the notion of this serene and visually aesthetic medley. This metaphorical melodic tapestry is interwoven with images that Page has constructed through the result of deconstruction: a relationship exists between form and beauty, form and the decorative and decorative and kitsch.

Rich yet subtle, these works are constructed with the natural and its influence on the manmade in mind, flowers delicately arranged in shapes echoing architectural fittings. An example of this can be seen in the clearly identifiable ceiling roses and wrought iron corner pieces. Such fittings are often found in homes belonging to the Victorian era: a time of opulence and grandeur, of curiosity, discovery and let’s not forget industry. The Victorian era lasted from 1837 until early 1901, a long period in time and one that has been discarded from the collective memory of mankind for being unfashionable until recently when kitsch is once more kool.

The collection and preserving of flowers was once an extremely popular pastime. Flowers would be collected together and pressed between tissue paper in a heavy book such as a dictionary or bible to flatten out and preserve for a later time. In the same way, Page has reinvented that practice using modern technology while keeping as true to the original individual form as possible. These digital printed works are a new addition to the stable of work for Page’s practice and they are executed with a presence and identity that is recognisable as works by Page and seem to be an evolutionary step in the artist’s dialogue.

To the left of the prints there are three works on canvas: one small, the other two larger unstretched works. These works seem to be an intermediate response to Page’s desire for painting and the seamlessly endless possibilities that digital art provides. These act as a transition between the old and new.

Like handmade paper or perhaps a sample of a William Morris designed fabric - again echoes from Victorian times - these works seem to act as portals into the decadence: a reminder of an era’s aesthetic choices that went into the domestic realm. Wallpaper and fine hand made fabrics. Etc.

The softness of the hues work in the favour of these works I feel, and give the viewer an opportunity to study the spaces and forms painted with curiosity and interest… a joy in the detail is a rewarding experience when viewing the works of Nicola Page.

EXHIBITOR: Linda Tegg
RESPONDENT: Brian McKinnon

The first series of Tegg’s photographs I came into contact with raised some serious questions. These questions were about the use of children in photography, and whether parental consent was needed, or whether the artist had the artistic licence to photograph whomever wherever. This question in the broader sense is still open to debate, however it is illegal to photograph children without written parental consent.
Without parental consent I believe the integrity of the work suffers greatly.

Although the works were beautifully constructed and the children seemed happy to be photographed - the way that they were presented also disturbed me as the series of photographs took on all the aspects of an ethnological display. The type of untitled display one would find in a museum setting, not in a gallery.

Having said that, I now make a contradiction by comparing them with the Brooke Andrew series of works at the National Gallery of Victoria. The series of prints on a reflective foil called Gun Metal Grey deals with issues centred on ethnological collections and the disappearance of Aboriginals from the landscape.

The other photographic artists that come to mind are Walker Evans and his portraits showing people in a setting very familiar to them. Also, Christian Boltanski and his works like The Reserve of Dead Swiss (1990), in the presentation of the group of Aboriginal children. Tegg’s group of photographs as previously stated takes on the aspects of a museum presentation and this reminded me of the notion of recording what is left of a dying race as the then 1900s bureaucracy believed.

Tegg’s second set of works showed dogs of differing breeds in what appeared to be large aquariums, filled with water, before the dogs are placed in them. The dogs were then photographed, they seemed to be in a state of panic as their feet couldn’t reach the bottom and they had no exit from the water. The still photograph then seemed to suspend the dogs in time and space; this is reminiscent of Damien Hirst and his suspension of animals in formaldehyde. Also, William Wegman’s works as does Tegg’s appears to put dogs in very unnatural settings. In some of Wegman’s works the dogs seem to be in distressing situations.

The most recent work of Tegg’s for me seems to come from left field as far as my experience of her work goes. When on first walking into the gallery, seeing the nude models, my first thoughts were of predation. After the initial shock and time to think, my thoughts shifted to sexual predation. These thoughts came mainly because of the stature of the models and the positions they were placed in the pose. The larger of the two being on the bottom in the pose, a succulent morsel, the victim it seems, the second of the two on top, the predator. The girl on top (the predator) was of very thin stature, the backbone and elbows very prominent, ribs exposed, her face and mouth buried it seemed between the victim’s head and shoulder. Apparently attacking the neck, reminiscent of vampires, or meat eating predators, raptors.

As I have been reading a lot on Salvador Dali over the last few weeks, thoughts turned to that area and I started thinking of Dali as the succulent morsel (in some people’s opinion), and Gala as the predator, the raptor, preying on young pretty things to appease her voracious sexual appetite. There are also Dali’s afternoon teas / veritable orgies. A part of this also extends to Andy Warhol and his association with Dali and Gala, his warehouse studio where he made his films - sometimes these, it is said, took on similar paths to sexual appeasement.

Then the attention turns a more recent artist in Julie Rrap and her 2004 Flesh Pool. Tegg I believe takes on a completely different issue to Rrap’s work, but the poses and the naked female image in a similar pose to that of the raptor demands mentioning. Rrap’s work talks about the exploration of the body and its other: its shadow, its reflection. Julie Rrap stated:

How is it that, on one hand, medical science can cull disease and deformity in the unborn, while at the same time, foster the “deformity” created by plastic surgery typified by many celebrities? The more we appear to master the fragility of the body through medical science, the more I believe we expose our deeper psychological frailties (2004 Exhibition catalogue for 2004 at NGVA).

I believe Tegg’s performance work could also be interpreted in this vein, so what I’ve written is purely my interpretation. In this catalogue there is another work by Guy Benfield, this work consists of a mix of live/pre-recorded video, performance, drawing painting and sculpture. Overall, Tegg’s work took on a persona of a clinical set, with Tegg as the ‘Puppet Master’.

EXHIBITOR: Linda Tegg
RESPONDENT: Lani Pinnington

A Monumental Tribute to Fleshy Barbaric Practices

I cringe as I view Linda Tegg’s work. The most uncomfortable, embarrassing, and awkward moments of my life are being played out - larger than life projection-style for all the student gallery to see.

On one wall is my first Bra fitting. An experience so humiliating that I have never told another person about it until Tuesday night when I viewed Tegg’s new work for the first time.

Like a mirror to my memories, I (a teenage girl about to attend her first formal school ball) go with my mum to the ritziest lingerie shop in Mildy to be fitted for the perfect specimen. I go in to try on several bras in the store fitting rooms when I am rudely interrupted by an enormous woman (tape measure draped around her neck) who gives no warning as she enters the curtained off cubicle to grab hold of my barely there, uncomfortable, wannabe breasts pushing them upwards and outwards into the sexy lacy bra sockets. With a rough husky voice she then demands that I bend over to touch my toes and without any warning at all grasps me by the waist, pulling me against her fat flabby body partly lifting and part shaking me into the contraption - I was left behind beside myself, I went out and waited in the car while my mum purchased whatever bra the fat lady recommended as the best fit. When I got home I threw myself on my bed (in typical teenage girl style) and cried out my awkward humiliation at being molested by the bra shop assistant.

On a second wall screen is my first kiss with a girl. The girls in the mirror screen tangle and entwine their hair together. I remember being on acid and chopping off half my girlfriends waist length blond hair at a party but it’s close enough. Close enough to be uncomfortable.

Tegg serves up personal discomfort with a side serve of pleasure. Or better yet, sandwiches them together with us in the gallery space. It’s a sandwich of flesh that we devour in its familiarity and are repelled by at the same time (are we really supposed to see these most personal of moments) is Tegg a traitor to the secret society of women’s business?

The meatiness of this sandwich is the presence of two Life models. Centre stage in the gallery they mount and hold each other. They are one animal or a breathing mountain. They are the polar opposites of size, the embodied shape of abundance versus the withering shape of need and like two poles they are connected - entwined in a way that denies us the knowledge of where one ends and the other begins.

I glance around the room from the models to each projection like my eyes are nervous and can’t stay still. The screen becomes a mirror of two women admiring themselves in their underwear, holding touching and flattening their skin with their own hands. I begin to think these images might be sent from space: from an alien documentary of the female earthling woman and its strange customs. Images recovered from some broken probe that might have been sent to gather information on the rituals of women and in its malfunction transmits these looped and broken memories back to us.

Tegg transforms the gallery space into an unavoidable garden of flesh where all that grows is woman, thick or thin they climb the walls here but the work makes no comment to support a feminist discussion. There are no cries of empowerment, no whines of inequality. There is no quest for maternal sentimentality. We are neither laughing at nor applauding them. They play out their games on the walls whether there is an audience or not, our duty and our only role is that of the voyeur – we are, in the words of the great David Bowie, ‘The voyeur of utter destruction (as Beauty)’. The destruction is the deconstruction of the ego image of the female. The beauty is painfully obvious.

We are given so much here and yet the work still promotes questions. Are these projections modern day cave paintings for a digital world? Is the living lump an idol fit for worship? Should we gather here as women to watch our secret society unfold and reveal its primitive ideals. Do women meet here in the middle of the night to swap stories, swap bras maybe, tangle their hair and pose for each other. Or do we seal this place up with cement as a tomb or a time-capsule for future woman to find and marvel at our barbaric practices.

EXHIBITOR: Amber Wallis
RESPONDENT: William Mackinnon

I could relate these new collage/ drawings/ decollages to those wonderful 60s Whiteley paintings with hints of flesh, breasts and penises evoked through washy areas of oil paint and threaded with lyrical meandering drawing. One also thinks of Sally Smart’s wall tableaus, however this is only a visual link. Wallis’ work is less contrived, less cerebral. There is a tension between the apparent simplicity and lyrical nature of the mark making which is set off by something sinister. There is a tension between the spontaneous and inspired gestalt mark making and the collage. There is almost an ‘outsider art’ aesthetic going on. The collaged elements give the work a second gear, the layering adds a certain kick. There is an intrinsic violence to collage and I can’t help but think of Henson’s large- scale photo-collages where he tears and slashes his own photographs and then reassembles using the backs of the photographic paper and areas of black paper. These different elements are fixed with both pins and black. This method of fixing is very deliberately left visible, rendering the implied violence in his work explicit. They become seriously violent landscapes conveyed both through the subject matter and its method of representation. Similarly Amber has violated her own work. Bodies are truncated, amputated by her own hand in the editing process. The large work is stained and cut. A truncated clawed figure reaches out right off the page. I would like to see some torn paper, revealing the chancy deckled edge.

Wallis is a natural mark maker with a light touch, and is most at home drawing. I feel she is trying to break her own mold and reinvent her work. She is literally deconstructing and reconstructing her own work. Elements creep off the page. A page that is wobbly and out of square, cut straight from the roll. The paper is not stuck down flat. I feel that some of these technical decisions could be refined to maximize the impact of the work. If the added paper pieces and drawings sat flush on the picture plane creating a seamless field; there would be a greater coherence to the work, and the quieter and louder moments would have greater resonance. As the work stands the half glued down edges are distracting as are the protruding, curling pieces. It makes me wonder, if the work is not defined by the armature then why not do away with it altogether and make these wall drawings?

I walk back and examine the three pieces up close. I scan for imagery, or symbols to read into. Here I draw a distinction between the large overtly figurative piece I have focused on and the other two. The middle piece is the only one with a title. Bat Park/ Penis Mountain. This gives me some insight into the intentions of the artist, that these apparently abstract pieces are referential. Like Dale Frank’s evocative and lengthy titles locate his work within a landscape tradition rather than within a purely abstract arena, Wallis’ work sits in similar territory. A colleague commented that Wallis’ prize-winning painting was evocative of Captain’s Flat.

Although to me, a stranger to that location, I read the piece as a gestural abstract painting. There is something compelling about Wallis’ forms which is hard to describe. I get the impression they have all come from somewhere in her life, from memory. A place or an experience is the catalyst for a meandering line. But like a memory the forms are unclear, Wallis doesn’t try and render or describe a specific place for us. I think these are landscapes of her life filled with symbols, fears and desires. Experience imbeds its marks on us and I think Wallis is able to translate these experiences into mark making, which gives the work potency. This power and sensitivity is felt by the artist and thus conveyed to the viewer.

EXHIBITOR: Amber Wallis
RESPONDENT: Linda Tegg

un-photographed

How would one go about undoing a photograph? Is it a chemical process? Is it a matter of file erasure? Could an authority take testimonies of those present for the photograph and declare it invalid? Or does one have to time travel to alter events, skewing them around the moment the photograph would have been taken?

The photograph is often treated with mistrust, its indexical relationship to the world considered deathly, misleading and an affront to the selective and imaginative nature of our own memories. The various truth systems surrounding photographs and collective history seem as complex and uncertain as memory itself.  

Amber Wallis strives to recreate her un-photographed memories. Reading her paintings, drawings and collages as photographs, for Wallis the un-photographed is something that simply did not get photographed. Physical or metaphysical, the search for the un-photographed continues to underpin Wallis’ practice.

Wallis’ preoccupation with memory is apparent throughout her work. Her distinctive mark making works its way from abstract line into a representation of animal, place or face. An emotive recollection that gives, takes and alludes to, it implies and insinuates but refrains from the explicit, weaving in and around as if engaged in polite conversation. The effect is subliminal, re-connecting the viewer with a generic sense of nostalgia, uncertainty and innocence.

Wallis’ process seems reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalytical concept Nachträglichkeit, a process that continually gathers up disparate memories and emotions, rearranging them in relation to shifting circumstances imbuing them with revised meaning. The process hinging on line and colour as both a trigger for memories and emotions and as a formal reconciliation.

Presented in the Gallery are three collages pieced together from the artist’s drawings cut up and reworked again into new compositions. The collages act like the shifting nature of memory where nothing is ever really erased just repressed, temporarily forgotten until re-emergence.

Collage provides a platform for the chance encounters, juxtapositions and interactions associated with the surrealist movement. In contemporary culture our daily experience is increasingly collaged: a vast range of physical and mediated interactions converge on us at any one time. Wallis’ work is reflective of this convergence, as multiple worlds and meanings are allowed to flourish simultaneously.

Wallis perpetually turns inward, working visually with colour and line she searches for a poignant moment. The centre work is titled Bat Park/ Penis Mountain, the others are yet to be named. The title alludes once again to a narrative, perhaps autobiographical, perhaps not. The title - like the work itself - serves to ignite the imagination of the viewer, whilst respectfully using abstraction and obfuscation to walk the line between public and private spheres.

Mainstream media continually focuses on biographical details of the individual and as audiences we are constantly satisfied by the revelation of personal histories. It is no wonder that many might find the apparent veiling throughout Wallis’ work somehow frustrating, we might wonder if the process itself is not short circuited by audience, or what the artist would produce if we were not there to see it.

Perhaps for Wallis memory is an agent of imagination and emotion rather than one of factual recollection. The abstract lines and forms are the most direct way of communicating an emotional base. The line work in the collages are often seem infantile, as if Wallis is re-connecting to innocence of childhood searching for a more authentic and immediate experience of the world. In a process employed by 20th century author Proust, Wallis uses memory to connect past and present and communicate personal truths to her audience.

By connecting to this mutual memory Wallis’ works provide a portal for the viewer to similarly connect. Such is the effect of artists who work on the edge of abstraction. Rhys Lee’s sombre portraits provide us with enough information to find our own recognition transmitting a haunting sensation that might linger in the subconscious. Todd Hunter un-photographs pornography in a sense, working over the images until new forms emerge, the figures are abstracted into state which Hunter understands to be real, more real than the photograph.

Whilst photography has tricked and misled audiences since its inception, its capacity for accurate recall maintains the power to overthrow the imagination, like Richard Dawkins in conversation with a suburban clairvoyant.  Conversely it often leaves an incomplete picture, as demonstrated by Sophie Calle’s colourful recollections in comparison to the matter of fact documentation of the private eye paid to watch her. Perhaps to un-photograph is to reject the realities imposed upon us by the mechanisms of logic and seek personal truths through memory and imagination.

EXHIBITOR: Dianne Dickson
RESPONDENT: Paul Williams

Dianne’s artwork is an exercise in retrospection. Moments in time and their repercussion in memories and on film, holds the focus of this exhibition.

The show conveys the melding of technology with memory. Like an artificial limb or the robotic extension of the self, these memories are coerced, framed within, seen within the light of and limited by, available technological advancements. As memory fades our desire to hold onto the past brings us to fill in the blanks using photos or footage. It may be said that a substantial part of our identity is constructed from our memory, and as our memory fades it is supplanted by distorted pieces of documentation which may help us to embellish our life or detract from the gravity of it.

Ultimately we have the capabilities to control the medium to bolster emotive impact if that is the desired effect. Photographic imagery subtly manipulated for maximum emotional impact is the effect Dianne delivers here.

Repetition of a played out memory in the mind is suggested here in the looped footage projected onto a wall. A television stands in the middle of the projection and plays the same footage yet out of sync with the projection. The loop consists of a parade in the country town of Rainbow where I assume Dianne is from. The warmth and friendliness of a tightly knit small town in Australia is expressed. The parade footage begins with imagery of Dianne’s Mum dressed as a man in a captain’s suit, with a man dressed as a Princess or possibly the Queen; they ride together in a convertible pulling a speedboat. Adoration and good times permeate this footage. The loop then passes to a series of stills taken as Dianne’s mum, surrounded by her family, passes away.

The two events follow each other as they would in memory, harder times with good times, one compounding the other. The overlapping and out of sync delivery of the two pieces of footage simulates multiple layers of memory perpetually played out through the mind.

Mounted on the wall as a triptych, are photo-shopped, collaged photos, presented in a painterly format. To begin with, the hanging of the triptych conforms to an altarpiece convention with the centre piece raised higher than the other two making a cruciform. The components of the images: the darkness of the picture-plane, the red drapery-like material, the tumultuous clouds and the fleshy figures, place them within the realm of classical painting.

In front of this centre piece, faces an empty chair of the kind you can imagine an elderly person full of history once sat. The placement of the chair in front of these screen-like images also lends it a lounge-room feel implying homeliness.

The images seemingly flashing onto the screens are at first glance foreboding. But perhaps this is from the portrayal of indefinite forms, as they may exist in the mind as they are conjured up and discarded in the rush of passing thoughts.

The panel to the left is framed by red curtain forms, subsequently transforming the other objects in the image into props on a stage. An old lady sits on a chair, her face obscured by what looks like microscopic imagery of cells. Perhaps this is the indifference of natural processes of decay, obscuring her identity. The other things left in the room, possibly by her, are homemade objects magically instilled (for those who can identify the associations) with the atmosphere of a particular human being. The wall behind her is gone because it isn’t important for the narrative. An outback scene is in its place symbolizing nature or possibly simply placing her in a country context.

In the central panel, man and woman are stripped of any character defining clothes. Instead, a recurring horrific dynamic in the human condition is played out using faceless dummies. In an atmosphere of isolation, a man in a black mask lunges at a woman who is covering her face in fear. The book of short stories - “A good man is hard to find” by Flannery O’Conner comes to my mind, with the recurring motif of woman in the isolation of the country, resigned to the instinctive violence of men. A farmhouse like a stroke of pale paint provides the context of the scene. I read this as a parable of domestic violence. It’s set in a kind of Australian-gothic atmosphere, although it’s devoid of the romantic element which sanitizes that tradition. Once again red drapery blowing in the wind brings it back to old master works, they form wings on this demonic character.

Throughout the final two panels there is a levitation of objects as if in a tornado. “This aint Kansas anymore Toto” resounds in my mind.

A work mule is repeated four times in the final panel: this is possibly a metaphor for physical workload or of a heavy burden to carry. The young woman in this work is pulling a line, or following a hereditary line. A paper cutout of a tree - a family tree perhaps, complete with roots, covers her face; dissolves her individuality into the broader notion of a company of selves.

There is a three dimensional aspect to the work, in the form of garden decorations, such as chickens, magpies and cockatoos and also a chair and a stool. These objects testify to the idea of inanimate objects containing a spirit. This is the acquired spirit formed from cultural associations.

Some of the imagery here has universal negative connotations, as in the obliterating of the faces. However, complimented with the incredible warmth of the footage, a second look is demanded of the more morbid photographic works. They come across as expressed memories shed of any sanitizing attempts, to gussy things up for art gallery walls.

I find that the two main elements of this show: the photographic and the projected, work together like light and dark, negative and positive. The space acts as the interior of a skull where these memories continually duel it out.

EXHIBITOR: Dianne Dickson
RESPONDENT: Nicola Page

Australian art and literature has a history of exploring a gothic relationship between the Australian landscape and the people that inhabit it. As I look into the collages of desolate rural landscapes, a dishevelled country church and foreboding masked figures, I am reminded of a tradition of colonial storytelling. Verbal histories of escaped convicts surviving in the bush, bush rangers and settlers coming to terms with an alien landscape with fear and the ever present threat of violence. This tradition is continued with contemporary counterparts found in the lyrics and music of Nick Cave, through Australian literature like David Malouf’s ‘Remembering Babylon’ and modern urban variations like Andrew McGahn’s novel ‘Praise.’ This is a gritty history, violent and dark, one that reflects common themes of basic survival, alienation, dark psychologies and close knit isolated communities. Dickson extends this through the visual medium of home-style film, photography and digital collage.

Work displayed in the gallery moves between reflections of an external representation of memories and of the artist’s internalisation of this same space. Dickson’s work holds rawness in style. Digital collages crudely layered, images of low-resolution digital photographs, lacking consistency in style and lighting. There is no studio seamlessness to the work. We are given a sense of urgency as if personal demons have had to be excised immediately and without consideration of the final product. These mindscapes are a realm unto themselves, manifestations of Dickson’s imagination and personal mythologies. The rustic installation of an old fractured chair ominously turned away, simple wooden table and naive handmade tin birds rupture the illusion. The imagined leaps off the wall and into the gallery space. I feel as if these objects should not in reality exist, as if they are only real in the artist’s mind and we should only know them through these dark Surrealist images. But seeing them in the flesh creates an unease, her imagined world is spilling over into our reality.

On the next wall a television displays a video loop, behind this still images are projected onto a large screen, the quality again low tech. This work varies to the former, perhaps in its complete absence of style. The footage and photographs are raw, like spontaneous holiday shots and the film is lacking in any cinematographic conventions. The work in this way is more real, uncensored and almost blindingly authentic.

Rolling footage like that of a home video filmed through the lens of a handheld camera, family memories, a country town street parade, elderly women absurdly dressed waving from the back of a convertible car. Behind on the larger screen family snaps, old friends and relatives smiling, eating cake. All reflect so much familiarity they could be found in any family album, only with some vital additions. The images flip to stills of friends and family posing solemnly with the artist’s deceased mother, tributes to her sprawled across shop windows of the town, sentiments of the collective mourning of a small rural community.

Like a memento mori we are reminded of mortality and fleeting moments of life. While the film and photographs may live on longer than the subjects and the authors they are but hollow documentation of time and place after the sentiment, people and stories attached to them finally fade. The work in this way explores vanitas themes in new forms of everyday disposable personal photography and film. Dickson questions these practices and what is retained in this endless stream of collected images, how often do we reflect on them? How important have they become to our process of remembering and finally, what is retained and what is omitted from our private albums and archives? We are confronted with grief, nostalgia and memory. What the work lacks in refinement it makes up for in authenticity. It is rare to find an artist willing to share her grief and so completely.

EXHIBITOR: Lani Pinnington
RESPONDENT: Paul J. Kalemba

The Infected Mushroom of a Modern Day Prometheus

Upon entering the gallery I am greeted by a six-legged green creature, which oddly resembles a shell-less turtle. We exchange a questioning glance and he quickly convinces me to suspend disbelief and move on. Leaving him to his business I cross the threshold, proceeding on instinct I am drawn to an installed sculpture ahead. Splattered across the gallery floor like the aftermath of a road kill incident, I see two more creatures, shattered into the bloody fragments of their former selves. A mess of eyeballs, guts, bones, skin and fur. I take a moment to search for the mask of twisted masochism I sometimes put in my backpack. I’ll need it. I am entering into the world of Lani Pinnington.

To the left of the fuzzy mess, is an un-bashfully comical display of taxidermied trophy heads. Like the creatures in the chunky splatter below, while not obscured by carnage, they are clearly not identifiable creatures from this world. The blankness of the expression in their beady eyes and cuddly fuzzy fur is more reminiscent of a playful hybridization of childhood teddy bears. I am momentarily tripping down memory lane of teddy times of old, however within the symmetrical composition of these bizarre cuddle trophies hangs the rotting remains of another fleshy would-be mammalian specimen. Quickly, I return to the earthly rot and fleshy reality of this world.

Stepping back over the road kill blood splatters and continuing clockwise around the room, we are next confronted by what could easily pass as a dead rodent on a plinth. Within suggestive proximity to the corpse is what appears to be some kind of mechanism containing a human heart-like organ and from the machine two wires curving towards the rodent. Who made this machine? Who pulled the plug and why? Was it for the benefit of the rodent or the heart? This plinth, standing like a giant question mark, leaves us with one final and perhaps the most important question for this work: What was this machine doing?

Next a series of photographs, which seemingly document the “real life” crime scene of the road kill, or at least someone from the victim’s species, appears oddly out of place even beside the artist’s interpretation of the act. The inkjet prints on office paper loosely sprawl across the rear wall of the gallery offering the viewer snapshots of a crime and details of the scene and the dismemberment. A step closer (or further) from the vicarious voyeurism offered in a reality TV crime investigation program.

Moving along, we step away from the screen and back to reality, presented with another hybrid creature. Complete with the exposed bones and textured flesh we have come to expect from Pinnington, the creature appears simultaneously in the state of creation and decay. Standing on its own two feet but just lacking, either in its completion or ability to become entirely animate in this world and falling slightly short of the illusion, the knee-high creature does answer a very important question. If nothing else at least we now know exactly where chicken-prawn dumplings come from.

Continuing around the determined installation in the gallery we meet a series of small-scale sculptures presented over three plinths. The first of which, in both style and gore, seems to pay a sculptural homage to the surreality of the painter Mark Ryden and the outsider art movement. Atop a highly reflective plastic lake, fringed by irregularly placed stones, we find three circus-punk Rydenesque swans, all but one sporting a human head and a delicate porcelain face. Here we witness the eerily calm aftermath of the fourth circus-punk-swan-lady’s decapitation and can easily follow the blood trail and find the culprit. The strangely beautiful creatures severed head is in the mouth of our old friend the welcoming shell-less, six legged turtle. No wonder he didn’t say much and was so keen to get us moving along.

Next, what may have once been a plastic children’s doll, perhaps the object of vicarious role-playing or maternal affections, is re/presented to us as a faceless captive in a Sigourney Weaveresque moment from Alien 3. The doll, ankle deep in its own blood, is shown arms raised and shackled to the lid of the glass jar which contains it. More disturbingly however - and the clear focal point of this piece - is the organic mass rupturing the body from the stomach or womb area of the doll and spilling outward and down her leg in a grotesque load of bloody gore. Here the brilliant and gruesome fantasy of the constructed object and its reality is only broken by the surrounding haphazardness of the broader installation.

As we draw to the end of our infected mushroom trip down fantasy lane we are confronted by a terrestrial orchid freeing itself from the confines of the glass jar which has both nurtured it and held it captive. I am reminded of teenage adventures through rave décor, a traversing of installations and spaces simultaneously with altered states. However here it is blue Tuesday. The bright hopeful colours of the psychedelic revolution are turned a cynical and skeptical gray, stripped of its naivety and left with a darker reality. The illusion and tone are more reminiscent of the winter of a Scandinavian industrial metal chill than a Mediterranean hippy trail of Israeli psy-trance enthusiasm.

In summary, viewing these moments in the world of Lani Pinnington, we are invited to traverse the realms of the mad science of tinkered genetics coupled with a blood addled, warts and all, playful other worldly sensibility. From behind my snug mask of twisted masochism, I revel in every detail, from the work’s propositions and gore to the crafting of the flesh, as I comfortably draw association from my daily world through this skillfully constructed one. Critically however, I am only at a loss for praise when this beautifully escapist world is ruptured: either through a feeling of incompleteness with a particular object or creature, or via the jarring of the eclectic presentation of moments in this fantasy. As I exit the gallery I remove my mask popping it away for another as I thank the turtle. The pleasure is all his he gestures, but in this sentiment we are unified. The work was a dark please, a monument to the failed gestures of a would-be Dr. Frankenstein and the genetic experiments of a modern day Prometheus and possibly his darker trips on Greco-magic mushrooms.

EXHIBITOR: Lani Pinnington
RESPONDENT: Amber Wallis

‘Unfortunate’

The theme of Pinnington’s work is ‘Unfortunate’. Unfortunate means not favored by fortune or marked or accompanied by or resulting in misfortune. This is a sorry state to be in, weighted in helplessness.

The gallery space comprises a series of disparate works forming a whole, it seems that they can be read together or separately. These works in their totality seem to be an exploration in creation, fantasy, narration and deathly possibilities.

Upon entry one encounters a creature, leaving the scene, one follows the splattered blood trail behind it leading into the central point of the room. There you find what seems to be a killing scene and skewed puppet-like creations on plinths and as hunting mementos on the wall. What is immediately prevalent is that these are no actual animal or human deaths, as we know it, but rather constructed fake puppet-like creations smeared, torn, broken, hung and placed.

I get the sensation that Pinnington’s work is anthropomorphic in many ways. She speaks of her creations as friends, comrades and inspirations, yet they are not of the animal world. Her creations are without a home, she has at once created them, given them life so to speak, as Mary Shelly gave Frankenstein life, or Jim Hensen gave his muppets/puppets life. Pinnington has created her puppets and given them a life based on an inevitable culmination of death. These are fantastical creatures that ‘meet their maker’ and exist in a zombie-like state. This is Meet the Feebles vs Brain Dead meets Shaun of the Dead.

Puppets are interesting as they only exist and perform if someone else pulls the strings, they are animated with machinery or through digital techniques. Pinnington’s puppets have lost their function somehow. There is no one to bring them to life.

Like television, film or a puppetry play, we are invited to witness the set-like spectacle and drama inherent in the works yet I am not sure what I am partaking in. It harks of resurrection and animatronics - especially the work that is a circuit board that cradles a heart-like object, yet it is not plugged into the being who languishes awaiting the mobile phone socket of life to bring it forth. I am being confronted with neither life nor death but some meditation in between.

Pinnington clearly enjoys working with the materiality of her subjects. Her materials seem to be made of easily accessible objects, bandages, natural materials such as sticks and fronds, parts of pre-existing toys, toy boxes, circuit materials, mobile phone charges, fabrics, bought fur, a fake blood concoction, bones and plastic eyes and snouts. I get the feeling that the making of the product is just as vital to the meaning of the product. Even the colour photographic printouts of the ‘killing scene’ could be made at home. There is no smoke and mirrors or gloss here. This seems to reconnect it to her as the creator and simultaneously as hunter or serial killer. It makes it relate to her own concerns and then sets it free once more.

The colours of the creations are as dirty as death themselves, brown, black, rotten, there is nothing frilly, pretty or fluffy here. Yet somehow they are cute, they are toys nonetheless. I am reminded of Garbage Pail kids, their crust or what the Muppet Oscar the Grouch represented, also the compost monster in Fraggle Rock. Her figures are uncanny in their ability to be something that had been repressed but which has suddenly returned. They are ghosts of a happier life we might have known and recognize from our childhood, because of this maybe we imbue the work sympathetically?

What is perturbing is the killing scene, it seems not based in rhyme nor reason. The photos, placed serial killer-esque, are of the creature on the gallery floor. However this creature seems to have been potentially murdered while on the phone. What I do not understand is how did the dead creature manifest itself from a being dead in the gutter to dead in the gallery? The death is out of context, why is it being viewed?

I feel that the most successful aspect of the works are the creations on the wall, hung as hunting mementos. These seem succinct, cohesive in their size, grouping and finality. Their placement alludes to a living room or hunting lodge, their height is inviting to the viewer as they communicate to me at eye level. I half expect one of them to talk to me, I wish it would. The textuality of the work, especially the bandaged piece speaks of a process not unlike taxidermy. There seems more unison in these pieces.

Pinnington’s influences of Antony Gormley and Henrich Anton Muller are prevalent in her creations and installation based work. Yet I feel they do not have the grandeur or epic-ness of their work but are more slices of her ideas and stories yet to be completed.

However Pinnington does have the ability to transport us into a distorted, deathly, humorous yet unimaginable different world with her creations. They have an irony and humour to it, a Gallows humour. Freud in his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humor) puts forth the following theory of the gallows humor:

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure".

It reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s famed last words as he died “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death; one or the other of us has got to go.” I also think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the criminals being crucified sing Always Look of the Bright Side of Life.

EXHIBITOR: Hannah Gatland

RESPONDENT: Ron Rydz.

A complementary delight, three sentinels positioned on the wall, Hannah Gatland’s works ‘Time doesn’t hold us Blue Yellow and Red’ encompasses both her thoughts, time travel and a journey into painting through the use of line, colour and form all created from her own travels. Where am I, who am I, what is this place? Work that is part of her experiences bound in process and desire, a desire to investigate form and place, form from what she has seen and released through a transformative journey to create the final work. The work begins as maps, maps of places of her travels fused with the complex form of a snow flake, symbolised by the many possibilities of what would be on the surface considered a simple form but nevertheless its simplicity belies the complexity of the endless possibilities and permutations. It is these experiences she wishes to portray a desire to remember in the labyrinth of her own mind.

The process begins with the original map or a segment of a map that is drawn on coloured paper and in a process of erasure; sections of the paper are removed or cut out providing a portal, repeating this process with other map segments along with her favourite snowflakes. The flat planar of the paper becomes fragile and floppy that folds over itself revealing the underside. A new space has been created, a transformation back into a three dimensional space. Is this a new world or a reflection of the old or is this ‘Gatland’, a playful and happy place? So through the creation of a three dimensional sculpture, a sculpture of her own travels created with her own hands, a playful space, a place she can shape and mould to her own desires. A transposition of a memory is recreated in the present, a transformation has occurred. It is these new spaces that Gatland contemplates framed with a camera, staged with theatrical lighting which further transforms her thoughts back to the planar, as if to place it under a microscope, looking more closely, peering through and stopping to think.

The transformation and recreation has resulted in new possibilities a simplification that belies the complexity of the new space. What Gatland has created through her multiple processes is a new dimension of what was the past, is now the present.

It is the complexity and fast pace of our own urban world that runs counter to contemplation, it is how Gatland has taken this head on with her own step by step process that in itself breaks down the complexity of the world and turns the transitory into a place for to think.

Viewing the three works presented there is a calming feel through the choice of colour, each painting in balance by her choice of complementary colours, blue and orange in the first, yellow and purple in the centre painting and red and green in the last. Although generated from her experiences these works are offered for our own considerations. A layering is present an entanglement a place to discover, to search.

Starting with the red and green piece I can see beyond through the entanglement but am not invited in, there appears to be a fence, a barrier I am allowed to peer over but am barred from entering, this is a private forbidden space.

On the other side we have the blue and orange work that beckons as the layers fold over, teasing me, inviting… come in.

Finally the purple and yellow work with open doors a clear view to beyond, a tunnel to the promised land, a new world beckons.