the art life

From Isobel Johnston...

The raven is a bird often seen as a portent of evil or a bad omen. In their absence or their presence there lies the unsettling suggestion that something evil follows. From the six ravens that legend requires be present to prevent the fall of the kingdom at the Tower of London to the Edgar Allen Poe poem The Raven, it’s a bird that is seen as a harbinger of doom.


Matt Glenn, Raven 1, 2009.
Mirror, plastic, high gloss auto paint, 74.5 x 43.5 cm.

Matt Glenn’s exhibition Raven, recently shown at James Dorahy’s Project Space was a tight and beautifully counterbalanced show where gothic mirrors echoed gunshot car duco pieces creating a sense of unease in a space where past and future coexist. Six images reflected the other - the mirrors coated in black baked enamel and the six coloured and steel surfaces. The panels, with their immaculate surfaces ripped through by gun shots (mostly discrete bullet holes made by a .38 calibre rifle but some are blasted with lead shot) captured the feeling of uncertain times both past and present. Raven also acts as both a prompt and aide de memoir for other haunting shows.

The nature of what gets reviewed and what doesn’t seems as random as most other things in life quite often determined by space, time and deadlines as much as by merit. Some shows have a much greater lasting impact than the duration of the exhibition and become cardinal points of reference for other exhibitions, pointers to future directions, often signalling the beginning of a particular artist’s or group of artists’ emergence into the art world consciousness.


Robert Habel, Paessagio Urbano Italiano, Rogues Gallery 2008.
Oil on canvas, 170x170cms.

This afterglow impression of recalling other exhibitions was also tripped at Firstdraft with Visage shown in April this year. Curated by Felix Ratcliff this was a group show of painters. A number of these artists are represented by Gallery 9 and have had interesting shows in the last year or so. Jake Walker had work showing simultaneously at both Firstdraft and Gallery 9. As well as exploring the boundaries of portraiture the idea of small scale painting in a range of media from watercolour to oils the work signalled a shift of direction. Visage echoed a trait apparent in earlier shows by numerous artists recently where small works and assorted media have began to take hold.

In Visage, Julian Hooper’s haunting portraits whose subjects of flower/figures morphed still life and portraiture into one. Michelle Hanlin’s metamorphosis took another form as it punned Dali-esque and shadow puppets for a psychological portrayal. Colour, abstraction and a shift in scale gave the show its edgy-ness.

Julian Hooper’s show at Gallery 9 last year comprised works originally created for the frames belonging to a NZ regional gallery that he filled with his strange vegetal personages. At Gallery 9 they were shown devoid of the collection's frames and placed in a different series of frames creating a kind of additional absence. The show served as a good example of an interesting concern that has been appearing in many recent exhibitions - a focus that taps into subject matter that might best be described as ‘stretching across time’. This suggestion seems to be being made by a number of different artists in a variety of ways and deals not only with quotation or appropriation but also with a disruption of the idea of a pictorial continuity or a seamless surface; replacing it instead with absence often seen as gaps in the picture plane that are both literal and metaphorical.

Jess MacNeil’s work does this conceptually as well as actually by removing the figures but leaving their trace as they transverse their urban landscapes. This was demonstrated in her powerful show at Gallery Barry Keldoulis in March that bought together her video works and her painting in a synergistic coalescence of matter, medium and immateriality. Sean Rafferty’s Ghost Mountain at Mop in January traced a link between memory and recall of both the filmic and the real. Rafferty used cardboard, graphite and film to play off nostalgia burning it instead into the viewer’s mind as an after image rather than a recollection. And so it goes that the nature of viewing work is also about recalling absent work, it’s serendipity is our part in the process but beyond this comes hindsight - the lynchpin for generally acknowledged agreement. It is very easy to digress into a round up of the high lights every notable show and maybe that’s the clincher for why this sort of retrospection is usually anchored to a specific artist’s work and not discussed in such meandering terms.


Ben Cauhci, The Start of It All, 2009.
Ambrotype.


And with that in mind it was in fact two quite specific shows that have been doing the haunting for me - The New Victorians (University of Sydney Art Gallery curated by Louise Tegart in 2008) and A Fragile State (Martin Browne - curated by Matt Glenn in January 2009) Even the some of materials read like a list of ritual ingredients for some spell or hex- hair, bone, wax, ink and air -in both exhibitions.

The New Victorians was a great little show (little only in terms of the space and great in so far as the work went): the Sydney University Gallery is a small space and in true Victorian style it quite a tight hang. Ben Cauchi’s ambrotypes - one off photographic plates - captured the spookiness of an age where the spiritual loomed large. Liyen Chong use of her own hair to embroider pieces served as a memento mori both implied and actual. Chong’s work reappeared in Matt Glenn’s A Fragile State.


Liyen Chong, I don't know who I am but I know who I might be, 2008.
Hair embroidered on linen, 32x37cm.

A Fragile State was a marvellous wake up call. It asked us to consider not only the act of viewing and the materiality of the work but suggested a parallel thread between the experiential and the actual, the seen and the unseen as if these aspects of the art works could stand in for that lived experience. Roh Singh drilled holes in sheets of the perspex to make solid forms appear from thin air. Built up with layers of clear acrylic sheets the image was sandwiched as though it were both fixed and yet suspended, caught in the moment between one movement and the next, like a single a heart beat that divides life and death. Stuart Fleming’s mesmerising ink dot painting suggested the possibilities of phenomenology where colour takes on both the form and the idea and we are aware of another kind of perception of it. Charles Karubian and Leslie Rice’s paintings seemed to share a kind of ambiguity as if the figures in their paintings were being reabsorbed into their dark backgrounds. Destabilising the idea of painting as able to suspend time and space they too took on a fleeting quality. In various ways and to varying degrees each of the artists in the exhibition demanded some kind of reassessment of our experience of the artwork.

Isobel Johnston, August 2009

Labels: artist run galleries, commercial galleries, exhibitions, Isobel Johnston, painting

Over the last few years John A Douglas has been exhibiting his ongoing Screen Test series in various artist run galleries. His latest work is now on show in the ambitious exhibition Screen Test [Americana/Australiana] - Fragments and Stills at Chalk Horse until May 17. He spoke to the Art Life about the project...

Could you explain the genesis of the show?

John A. Douglas: The initial idea for the Screen Test project began in late 2003 when i was curated in a group show at First Draft. I was interested in investigating cinema as a mode of art practice and using the idea of a screen test to perform fragments of film. At the time, I was starting to build an extensive home library of DVD and I remember looking at a few Hitchcock screen tests as a DVD extra (from Rebecca, I think) which sparked the idea of creating my own version of a Hollywood screen test. The concept was very simple: to perform a simple action selected from a specific point in a film, to follow a set of written instructions and perform them, which is in essence what a Screen test is (and really, if you think about it, can be used to describe the cinematic process as a whole). I later found out that Andy Warhol had also played with screen tests in the days of the factory so there was a precedent to this in terms of a legitimate art practice. People often ask why don't I just make movies but I think that it is only in the realm of art practice that the aesthetics of cinema can be realised. This has been true for a lot of artists since the 70s. I also wanted to explore the relationship between the moving image and the film stilled so there was also the beginnings of shooting staged photographic tableaux as a film still. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Bernard Faucon had constructed cinematic images however I wanted to create photographic works that inhabit cinema itself. The current exhibition is the outcome of these investigations and the six photographs and videos span 20 years of cinema history from 1950 - 1971. I also wanted to create a relationship between the cultural aesthetics of Hollywood interior and the light and space of exterior locations in Australian cinema.


John A Douglas, Screen Test #1(Americana), 2008.
C-Type photograph on alluminium, 1400mm x 1000mm.

Your choice of films to quote seems very idiosyncratic -are they of a particular personal resonance for you?

JAD: Yes, each work is highly subjective and draws upon personal experiences. But the very nature of how cinema is perceived is contingent on this subjectivity. Lacan believed that cinema works at the level of symbolic mirroring of the self so that what we see on the screen is a projection of our own ideas about how we perceive ourselves and others in the world. This has the possibility of bringing cinema into the realm of the political where cinema can be used as a tool to perpetuate specific ideologies about society in general. There is no doubt that Hollywood has played a major part in the perpetuating of American ideologies worldwide especially in this country. For example, with Screen Test #1, I perform an action from the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevarde. This work was a direct response to my own experience of being an aging emerging artist who graduated from art school when I was 42. It's not easy when you look around and see that those that make it in the art world and in fact any of the arts (especially artists who place themselves in their work) are young, good looking and often from wealthy families. It's kind of absurd for a middle aged artist to be showing in artist run spaces with people 20 years younger. Sydney, in particular, is a city of cultural paedophiles. In fact a gallery manager once told me I would probably do alright if I lost some weight and stayed behind the camera - they like 'em young here. So for me Norma Desmond embodies the struggle of aging and beauty which affects men as well as women. Sunset Boulevarde was interesting to me because it is a critique of Hollywood and the star system by Hollywood. The film has also been a profound influence on David Lynch. I like the sad, comic and camp irony of playing Norma and at the same time using her as a vehicle to poke fun at fame.


John A Douglas, Screen Test # 4 (Australiana) - A suicidal synthesis, 2006. 2 mins 30 secs.
Colour, DVD PAL, 16:9 SD with audio.

Some of these films aren't that well known now, especially to a younger audience - do you have a sense of how these images might be read without knowledge of their source?

JAD: Actually, I am not sure whether that is always true. The availability of film via DVD and now online means that cinema is often revived by a range of audiences. Laura Mulvey in her recent book Death 24 x a Second postulates that 100 years of cinema is now consumed and exhumed from it's graveyard at a rate that has never been seen before. This is also true for the music industry. My 15 year old nephew's favourite bands are Led Zeppelin and the Doors so I think that because of new technologies this gives us an immediacy never seen before. This has been great for researching the work and examining each film. Online resources such as IMDB and Amazon, as well as cheap DVD players which allow for prefect stilling and slowing of film and software which allows me to create film stills on my desktop all add to the creative experience. When I was in Tokyo in 2006, I saw a group of around 20 young women all dressed as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys, complete with beehives and pearls. It's interesting that an iconic character from a specific moment in cinema some 50 years ago has found its way into the vernacular of contemporary Japanese Street culture. Essentially, I am inviting the audience to play a game where they figure out what films I am performing. In the Australiana part of the project I deliberately chose a lost and forgotten film, Wake in Fright , and the rarely remembered suicide segment from Walkabout. The relative obscurity of these sequences enhances the contrast between the Hollywood films I chose to preform and the Australian fllms. In fact when I researched these films I discovered the tragic reality of Australian cinema; both these films were directed by overseas directors because at the time it was believed that Australia was incapable of making world class films and, thus, that it was better for British or Americans to star in and direct our cinema. So Wake in Fright and Walkabout are actually an outsider's interpretation and construction of Australian culture. Sadly, I believe this attitude is prevalent in Australia and not just in the film industry. So really, I don't think it really matters whether viewers recognise the films or not - but if they do, it will add to the experience of the work. However the shots that I chose to use as the raw material for interpretation were also used because they look good so had a lot of fun playing around with the look of the film purely at the level of stylisation and artifice.

How do you see the photographic and video work in terms of performance? Are you concious of the limits of versimilitude when emulating the look of the original films?

JAD: My intent was to follow a set of instructions for a selected scene and actions. Each performance is an enacted moment of cinema iconography, but clearly it was also important for me not to take this too seriously. So there is a palpable sense of the ironic in these works. The earlier Screen Tests are concerned with a form of emulation, of 'getting it right' so to speak - and that imposes its own limits, in some ways. As the project progressed, though I moved away from the literal renderings in order to create something other than the director's original intention. I wanted the works to become more an impression of the performed instruction and mise en scene, rather than trying to perform it exactly as it was in the original scene. These are the alternative versions, if you like. For Screen Test #5 (which is the suicide scene from Wake in Fright), my performance is of three actions by three different characters in the original film which I merged into one character. So this gives a heightened sense of those actions because they are are edited together in one sequence. I also started to play around with the look of the film (rather than replicating a set), so that the action now takes place in abandoned 1960's petrol station (a nod to Ed Ruscha) instead of in an outback pub. Similarly, in Screen Test #4, I use a Holden Kingswood instead of a VW. That VW in Walkabout really annoyed me, actually. Surely a middle class Australian family man in 1971 would drive a Kingswood? I also extended the length of the scene and directed my own shots based loosely on the original. I took this even further with my final Screen Test, which is almost completely removed from James Dean's performance in Giant, and instead gives only impression of the film, relocated in the outback. Screen Test #6 (James Dean Jesus) builds on the aesthetic elements of that Giant rather than any specific scene, drawing on elements like the molasses representing oil, cattle, the car crash after the film and the death of James Dean, etc. The performance was based around the iconic shots of James Dean on the Giant set where his body forms the shape of a crucifix, and also drew on the wooden ruins Little Reatta which still satnd on the Marfa Plains. I was lucky enough to find a similar structure on the Hay Plains in NSW.


John A Douglas, Screen Test #5 (Australiana), 2008.
C-Type print on alluminium, 1400mm x 1000mm.
It's interesting that the moments that you've taken from these films are quite violent, or are about violence in some way, yet their delivery is quite subtle, less overtly dramatic than the performances in the films, and have a sense of stillness. Was that an effect you were looking at?

JAD: I never thought of it like that but it's an interesting observation. I guess my main concern in the depictions of violence were twofold. Firstly, I wanted to draw attention to the self-destructive tendencies often portrayed in films about or made in Australia as well as the highly destructive nature of male violence in Hollywood cinema. Obviously, this is why I chose the genres the western and the war film for Screen Test #2 and Screen Test #3. But the films those works were based on (WestWorld and Dr Strangelove) were a critique of those phenomena. The typical representation of masculinity in Australian cinema is full of ockerisms and depictions of hyper-Aussie men who survive on a diet of alcohol and violence, and I wanted my performance of that violence or intended violence to have an almost carnivalesque irony. Secondly, I wanted intensify the aesthetic qualities of the actions performed - and the stillness is part of that. In Screen Test #4, for instance, the action is slowed down and the shots are extended to show visual detail that is missed in the original. We see the car burning for a longer period and the destruction of the picnic set is slowed down and exaggerated to the point where it becomes visually fetishised.

The installation of the works is quite simple. A wall of images facing two flat screen TVs. Is there a dialogue between the two walls?

JAD: In showing the photographs with the video, I wanted to articulate the relationship between the motion image and the still. Raymond Bellour, who has written extensively on cinema and the practice of stilling the film, explored this relationship in the 1980s when he paused the VCR on the shot of Mrs Danvers consumed in flames from Hitchcock's Rebecca. He observed, in conversation with the psychologist Guy Rosalto, that for him, the effect of that particular shot evoked a feeling of terror not experienced in the normal linear time frame of the motion picture. Rosalto remarked that the experience stilling a film often evokes early childhood memories of primacy and Laura Mulvey explores this too when she discusses the feelings of the uncanny evoked the slowing and stilling of the shot. One of the primary objectives of the Screen Test project was to take this fragmentation of film one step further; I wanted to become the still and to occupy and inhabit this primal territory. Interestingly, the Hollywood director Michel Gondry recently recreated a set from his film Be Kind Rewind and exhibited it as an installation at Dietch Projects in New York in March this year. He invited the audience to the perform their own versions of cinema and exhibited the set and the outcomes at the gallery. He felt that it was only possible for this to happen in the environment of the gallery. Hollywood had finally made it to the art world.

Labels: artist run galleries, performance art, photography, video art

From Isobel Johnston...

January is generally regarded as a time when most galleries are closed – everyone’s on holidays and nothing much happens. The gallery year really gears up in February, when Sydneysiders all return to work. While the Sydney Festival eclipses the cultural limelight in January things happen in the art galleries. There were major shows and retrospectives at the public institutions, some of the commercial galleries banded together to showcase sculpture and a smattering of galleries opened with group shows. All of which is fairly predictable. But what stole the show was the work of younger artists. My theory is that the commercial spaces give their young and least tested artists a go in January (or at least Martin Browne and Michael Reid's galleries did). This coupled with cracker shows at Firstdraft, MOP and James Dorahy this January started the gallery year with a bang.


Martin Browne was showing work by the youngest artist in their stable Simon Taylor at prices that, for this gallery, were amazingly affordable. The work is alluring. Skilfully executed mesmerizing patterns of dots that shimmer and tug the push and pull of the painting’s surface. The work references the environment and alludes to Aboriginal painting. This was Taylor’s second show with the gallery. Knowing he holds a degree in Environmental Science, and has spent time living in the central desert with Aboriginal communities makes sense of these nuances. To acknowledge the influence of Aboriginal painting as a non-indigenous contemporary artist creates a visual dialogue that situates the formal concerns of abstraction of both within the context of contemporary painting and its audience. (This offers a tantalising proposition : true parity and opens up a much more level playing field for a generation that could be perceived as truly (post) politically correct.)




James Dorahy Project Space
A little further along Macleay Street and accessible from Orwell Street is the James Dorahy Project Space. Colouring In (sculpture) featured works by five of the gallery’s nine represented artists – Paul Donald, James Dorahy, Sarah Newall, Elvis Richardson and Nuha Saad. Towers of trophies by Elvis Richardson in an aqua and brown of past and resplendent melted silver cups revivified the traditional lifespan of the trophy. A trophy belongs to the proud winner but its shelf life is directly connected to the life and career of its recipient. Junk shops and auction houses often become the final resting place for these hard won accolades. Richardson’s breathes new life into these objects at the same time displacing the kitsch with high art. Her work begs questions about the relationship we hold to objects that link us to a specific moment in time and what becomes of this traffic of unhitched objects when the owner no longer exists. Sarah Newall takes on still life and the painted surface - in orange or in green. She uses the formality of the grid and rigid constraints of limited colour or form (and this is also true for some of the other artists in the show) and brings together the playful and the serious. It is a lightness of touch that makes Colouring In (sculpture) both bright and deep.


Silke Raetze, Whispering Desert, 2007.
Pen and ink on sculptural paper form, 45.0 x 45.0 x 10.0 cm.
Silke Raetze and James Culkin have day jobs at Michael Reid Gallery and this is the second year they’ve been given the opportunity to showcase their own work at the gallery (which says a lot for Reid’s support of younger artists and his staff.) Raetze’s delights in the skill of drawing and the cheekiness of the subject – women’s underwear. The materiality of her subject is created with sculptured paper and the delicacy of her line work and is presented “like boxed chocolates” in deep frames. Rather than exuding salaciousness or sordid sexuality – they are not stained by fluids, tainted by hair which would have been their insignia for feminists artists of an earlier generation- instead ‘Sweet Nothings’ celebrates a delight in the sheer sexiness of ‘smalls’ and drawing skill. Culkin’s paintings are layered like the surfaces of walls in old houses, where pastel tints abut each other and traces of other lives seep though to surface here and there. Wallpaper, ancient lead pencil handwriting–(like my grandmother’s), packaging and playing cards - all recall the past. Recording the detritus of lived experiences provides a point of connection for the work of these artists.



At Firstdraft there was a curated show ‘I AM A GOOD BOY’. Elise Routledge is a curator going places. The rationale works- bad boys: the expectations of masculinity in a post-feminist age. Tongue in cheek the game is loaded and everyone gets a serve - an ogling priest’s with his eyeballs on the floor (Christopher Hanrahan); bikes that fart flames ( Marley Dawson); a slow motion serenade (Todd Mcmillian); a close up of partied out girl (Peter Volich); death and football games (Michael Moran) - all sit side by side while the disembodied head of the trophy looms large (Ben Quilty) and the pool table ascends to it’s rightful place above all else. It’s fun, it’s tough and it deals with the all the baggage and has a laugh. Ben is already a star but they’re all worth watching. Mitch Cairns whose work deals with fathers, sons, death and bricklaying is known mostly as a painter but is curating a show coming up at Mop later in the year – it too is also worth watching out for.


Meow? Stephen Hodge's psychedelic kittens at MOP

MOP used to occupy a very small space in Elizabeth Street but moved to a much bigger gallery space in Abercrombie St last year and now offers three rather than two shows in the one space or at least this was the case in January with Agatha Gothe-Snape, Stephen Hodge and Leslie Rice. The space therefore remains fairly tight and the restrictions were dealt with by Gothe-Snape by expanding the exhibiting field with the inclusion of a photograph of the artist working in her garden surrounded by works that could be purchased from a numbered guide sheet. Stephen Hodge, who had the largest share of the gallery presented paintings without a signature style. So much so that at first glance they appeared to be the work of a number of different artists. Freed from the constraints of a particular style or identifiable medium Hodge’s work skated from art historical referencing, to installation, to pencil drawings. Value, pricing and affordability seemed to be the question as Hodge’s work was ridiculously cheap and in the case of the installation prices could be negotiated piece by piece. Not often are questions of art as commodity challenged at both the level of the intellectual and the actual. Black velvet and art history collide in Rice’s paintings where Christians and lions occupy centre stage. A grey wall opposite cuts down the reflection as you peered into a half recollected space of the paintings or prints in some old relative’s dark hallway- creepy yet familiar- not a bad trick for a white walled well-lit gallery space.

Glimpsing the Australia Day BBQ at Firstdraft seemed to locate it all -the heat, the sausage sizzle on the street and the buzz of the next generation of artists comfortably able to embrace both art and culture.

Labels: artist run galleries, exhibitions

The latest poll results for the most influential artist of all time has thrown up some surprising results. As of today, it's a dead heat between Lloyd Rees, Brett Whiteley, Mike Parr and Mark Titmarsh, with Daniel Mudie Cunningham and Ken Done a close second. We would have bet money that Matthys Gerber would have been the easy winner. All roads lead back to that erstwhile lecturer in painting at Sydney College of The Arts, his invisible hand evident in an awful lot of painting, much of it awful, an equal measure not. The group show at Gallery 9 that's finishing out their big first year, has a few artists in it who seemed to have learned a trick or two from the happy Dutchman.


Nana Ohnesorge, Snow white, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9.
Nana Ohnesorge's work is especially redolent of Gerber-esque colours and landscapes, mashed up with random bits and pieces of decoration, dividing lines and faux textures, a menstruating woman lost in a swamp possibly Ohnesorge's own invention. Along with the paintings are an accompanying series of works on paper called Nature Studies which layer images and patterns and, despite the sense that you've seen a lot of this kind of thing a before, they are spookily effective. If Ohnesorge could be said to be into Figurative Gerberesque, Phil Williams whose work shares the room, is also a disciple of Abstract Gerberism. His big paintings are like small Gerbers, swirls of colour very carefully and deliberately applied so you end up with a kind of Hesitant Abstraction, mixed with a florid representation of nature. In an act perversity typical to The School of Matthys, Williams has a series of portraits on paper that look like they are straight outta the 70s, like the illustrations you'd find on the front of school exercise books. With titles such as Kurt, Miranda and Jesse, the works combine a blocky image of a face with star bursts, star fields and rainbow prisms. Remember what they used to say in the 70s? Space is the place!


Phil Williams, Dark, dark house in a dark dark wood, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9

While viewing the group show we were told that Timothy Price, whose work is out the back, is "big in Canberra". Trying to imagine his deliberately crude paintings in the windows of a Manuka gallery conjured up images of flaming torches, pitch forks and a pyre of paintings crackling in the cold air of a Canberra winter. Chilling.


Timothy Price, Space Precinct, 2007. Courtesy Gallery 9
Matthew Hopkins continues to be an artist of promise. Instead of Gerberism, Hopkins has turned to Stephen King for inspiration. Sometimes people tell you useful things while looking at art. In this case we were told that the Hopkins works - sculptures, drawings, paintings and video - were all related to the King book/TV show IT, which was very handy because we have never read a King novel and have only by accident seen the movies. Until that moment we did not know what to make of Hopkins mini-show. Had the artist gone mad? Was the whole clown motif an overworked and overwrought pop culture reference point? Maybe, but once we had our bit of contextualising information it was a relief, not mad after all, a rabid fan perhaps, an act of homage. 10 Corporate Portraits of IT might be Hopkins play at mainstream acceptance, being rather expertly applied paint instead of his usual spider drawings. That it sold and may yet end up in a coporate boardroom is a fantastic thought.


Matthew Hopkins, 10 Corporate Portraits of IT, 2007. Installation view. Courtesy Gallery 9.
In the next room is a big installation by Tom Polo. Although relatively young, Pollo seems to have won many, many awards - from language class and attendance awards to a special certificate for being the "quietest achiever". Lovingly saved by his mother over the years, these dozens of awards, certificates and prizes create an informal wallpaper of excellence against which Polo has created shelves featuring statuettes for his sporting activities and paintings featuring smiling faces and childish heads. On closer inspection you notice that the sports trophies aren't his, the name TOM POLO Dymo-labelled into place. Slowly, what seems to be a monument to achievement, becomes increasingly uncertain, partly jokey yet sincerely deprecating. Lovely.


Tom Polo, Winners are grinners, 2007. Installation detail. Courtesy Gallery 9 and the artist.

Over at Chalkhorse in leafy Surry Hills, are the last couple of days of a show featuring three artists - Alex Davies, Stephanie Smiedt and Renny Kodgers. It pays to go to exhibitions in artist run galleries, if not on the opening night, then certainly in the first few days following because as time passes most ARIs seem to find it harder and harder to keep up standards. At Chalkhorse, the lights were turned off and the gallery person unimpressed by our request for a roomsheet.

Smiedt's work is a big room of paintings with splats of paint dolloped onto huge acreages of white canvas. It looked great and might have looked even better if the lights had been turned on. In the small second gallery Renny Kodgers installation/performance/video was said to have been a huge hit on the opening night, featuring Renny nude in a specially constructed sauna meeting and greeting fans as they came in for a steam. On our visit, the sauna was cold and empty but a video screen showing the action of opening night beckoned. Popping on the headphones we saw [NAME REMOVED ON LEGAL ADVICE] gently stroking Renny's massive penis and offering to fellate it [or words to that effect]. On the bench next to Renny was [NAME REMOVED ON LEGAL ADVICE], also nude, explaining how they do it in Finland. Boy, did we ever miss out. You really had to be there.


The show we'd come to see was Alex Davies show Ultimate Stocking Stuffer Sale! a massive collection of prints of images shot over the last couple of years. Older people would call his style "reportage" but instead of objective photojournalism, there's something much more immediate and personal in Davies encounters during APEC, his portraits of friends, fellow artists and writers [thanks to this show we now know what Adam Jasper looks like, so we can put a face to the excellent pieces he writes for Frieze]. The photo that illustrated the invitation is amomng our favourites in this strong show Justin Shoulder APEC Ghost Protest which manages to be seem both utterly contemporary and timeless, like a throwback to Sydney in the 40s. There are a couple of series of images taken overseas - Thailand and Japan - and although Davies undoubtedly has an eye, these works seem unremarkable, touristy, and he's much better on places and subjects he knows more intimately, such as a great portrait of Shaun Gladwell.

We were sorry we'd missed the opening of these shows and regretted that we'd left reviews so late, so when we were admonished by Vicki Papageorgopoulos that her show with Jonathon Bailey The Stickers hadn't been appropriately 'big-upped' on the blog, we decided we'd make damn sure that we'd get down to Firstdraft and see the show proper. We'd also been hearing positive word on Emily Hunt and Sean Bailey's shows too. Unfortunately it was not to be. Despite checking and double checking the opening days and hours, when we got down there we realised we'd forgotten about the Curse of The ARI... Firstdraft was closed. We can't be too harsh on Firstdraft or any other ARI, gallery or institution at this time of year. Xmas rot has set in. There is a feeling of the end, the place closing down until late January.


Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Porcelain, 1985 / 2007. Courtesy the artist


That feeling of the end is embodied in Daniel Mudie Cunningham's show Funeral Songs at MOP. The set up is fairly simple, yet amazingly profound. Cunningham asked 150 people to nominate a song that they would have played at their funeral, from serious stuff like John A Douglas's nomination of 4th Movement Symphony #3 with text by Friedrich Nietzsche by Gustav Mahler to Margaret Mayhew's desire for her near and dearest to hear The Muppets version of Danny Boy. All of the songs have been compiled onto CDs and loaded up into an antique CD juke box. Visitors to the gallery can select favourites and imagine the end. On a video screen Cunningham mimes enthusiastically to his own song. We won't spoil it for you by telling you which song it is, but we have to say, he's go some serious moves in his dance repertoire.

Labels: artist run galleries, painting, photography, reviews

The recent exhibition of new work by Halinka Orszulok and Rachel Scott at MOP was shit hot. While not curated as a joint show, these concurrent exhibitions both utilised suburbia as a literal and metaphorical site for investigating what is common to individual subjective experience.

To my mind, Orszulok has produced her best group of works in this series Melrose Park, seven paintings depicting scenes from the suburb she grew up in. Her remarkable competence with traditional representational technique allows her to produce photo realistic paintings which evoke intense sense memories, not just of her experience, but of our own.


Halinka Orszulok, Melrose Park, 2007.


Orszulok’s suburbia is both personal and generic then. The homes, the streets, and the park lands that surround them are purposefully undistinguished, reminding us of the way in which our relationship to the spaces we inhabit is always, already mediated by our experiences of them. It is representative of a space in which conventional dichotomies break down and are in a constant state of renegotiation: private versus public, safety versus danger, home versus displacement. And perhaps the creepiest of all: fantasy versus reality.

Orszulok’s depiction of these spaces at night, concealed and revealed through the play of light and dark, is not accidental in relation to her preoccupation with the uncanny. The scenes she paints are of places filled with anxious anticipation. For example, a picture of a girl’s toilet block draws our attention to the ambiguity of its signification. This is just a fancy way of saying that one person’s nostalgia for smoking menthol cigarettes is another’s fear of a random act of violence.

Look inside one of Oszulok’s bedroom windows and you may just find someone like Rachel Scott making art.



Scott’s (Don’t) Beat Yourself Up Over It featured framed, original poems written by her as a teenager in the late 80s and a video depicting a long session of self-flagellation with rose stems in her suburban bedroom, set to a Robbie Williams smash hit.

In this exhibition Scott puts her money where her mouth is in relation to her general project of articulating an aesthetics of the psychology of ‘failure, longing, human weakness and self-consciousness’. The poems are cringe worthy, adolescent attempts at profundity – ‘A nothing, a nobody/But somebody deep inside’ - the video as dramatic as the inane arguments over the car keys one imagines have been taking place for years in the generic lounge room beyond: I Just Want To Feel Real Love, just like you Robbie, just like all of us.

Scott’s work, both as an act of art and life, pricks the pretension of Nietzsche’s beautiful idea that pain does not necessarily make one a better human being but certainly a more profound one. Maybe that’s OK for the Germans, she seems to be saying, but some of us grew up in Crows Nest.

This is not to undermine the seriousness of Scott as an artist. She deals with some big ideas, with modesty and humour. For instance, these latest works give lie to received ideas about art as a mode of self-expression: it is not simply the externalization of the creative individual’s innate psychological states and feelings but rather a performative act constitutive of the subject-as-artist (or poet, or love interest, etc). By exposing the amateur aspects of the performance of her own psychodrama she allows us to see, in a more general way, how our often pretentious aspirations to overcome the chronic mediocrity of day-to-day existence congeal, over time, into something perhaps equally mundane. Existential alienation as a lifestyle concept.

Carrie Lumby

Labels: artist run galleries, blog contributor, reviews

Nature seems to be everywhere. Not the real thing of course, which is always inescapably everywhere, but rather the seemingly sudden and complete saturation of the art world with every other exhibition in Sydney taking nature as its metaphor. Nature is on our minds! We have pondered the meaning of this and wondered if it might have some profound connection to the very basis of the human relationship to the natural world and the expression of that relationship through art, and moreover, an expression of the animistic heart of our culture – but then, it’s probably got more to do with so much nature being on the tele at the moment.

Anne Zahalka’s Wild Life at Roslyn Oxley takes the representation of nature found in the antique dioramas of the Mammal Hall at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and updates them to more accurately represent the status of nature in the world today. Into these immaculately constructed dioramas Zahalka has photographically introduced new elements – in a diorama of deer the artist she has added a guy with a rifle [helpfully called Deer Hunter], an alpine scene of mountain goats now has a helicopter and a discarded water bottle [Alpine Scene] – in others tourists meet a lynx, exotic birds meet a lady in kimono and some tourists hassle a brown bear. The photographs have been mounted on the gallery wall that has been painted green and cream to create a faux museum setting and visitors can pop on a pair of headphones to listen to audio - a soundtrack of natural environmental sounds mixed with tour guide chatter and coach air breaks.

Like much of Zahalka’s work, the series has a certain visual appeal but it seems to have little to do with the hammy interventions of the artist. The American Museum’s dioramas are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of an outdated attitude to nature [killing and mounting as an act of ‘preservation’] but which are nonetheless time capsules of no longer extant environments. In Zahalka’s works, the artist uses these images not for what they are but as stand ins for the idea of the ‘museumification’ of nature, a slightly comic rendition of the world in full Victorian splendour. Perhaps if that is what these dioramas were meant to have been about Zahalka’s critique might have some bite but as it stands, she is appealing to the ignorance of people who don’t know anything of the original intention and then congratulating the viewer for being as cynical as the artist. The ecological message of the works is incredibly obvious and frankly, just not very well done. The most successful work is Rising Tide, a diorama of a tropical island with a flock of flamingos flying overhead as the new sea level swamps the island. The best part about it is that you can’t tell what the artist has done, if anything, to the original, which seems to be a sort of indictment of the rest of the series.


Rohan Wealleans, Head, 2004.
Paint, plastic, polystyrene on board, 160x120x150.
Courtesy Roslyn Oxley Gallery.

Rohan Wealleans has the big gallery space at the Ox and although the nature metaphor is somewhat tangential compared to Zahalka, the anthropological aspect is just as strong. Visually reminiscent of Hany Armanious and some of the older works of Karl Weibke, Wealleans is like a grunge lite hippy with maybe too much of a liking for Dances with Wolves - entitled Tatunka the show is a series of huge Native American ‘dream catchers’ painted with startling reds, shocking blues and other inappropriate colours glooped on. From an aesthetic point of view, the works are fantastic, but there’s something so inescapably naff about a non Native American making Native American objects, not to mention that dream catchers are the trinket shop equivalent of rainbow stickers and shaky snows with dolphins inside. Yikes. Wealleans’s Head, a huge head made of paint and polystyrene has an amazing psychedelic intensity and the marbling of the surfaces is vertiginous drop into the whirl of the unconscious, an effect deftly repeated in Disciple of The Pearl, a pear shaped monster that hangs from a purpose built stand a la Dr. Seuss. We’re not sure if Wealleans is actually seeking some equivalence of the unconscious between cultures and if he is, that probably makes it all alright. If he’s not, it’s time to stop taking acid.

Paul Adair, Crate, 2005.
Giclee print, 80x80cms. Courtesy Stills Gallery.

Stills Gallery is usually a pretty straight, old school photography gallery. Occasionally they do something a little different – sculpture, video – and the current show of Paul Adair, Daniel Kojta and Pete Volich is very much in this latter category with photography only acting as part – rather than the whole – of the artist’s practice. Volich’s series of works were seen in last year’s Helen Lempriere Scholarship show and we didn’t like them much on first viewing. Second time around we’ve warmed to them considerably, especially since one is about having your polo shirt chewed by a moose. Mounting shirts like commemorative guernseys, Volich’s pieces record events that are far more ordinary. Oh dear… You Won’t Do That Again is the moose-chewed shirt with the unsightly stain, on the torn shirt and a photograph of the moose attached to the bottom of the special frame. The stories behind the other works are a little more obscure, each element adding a clue but with titles like A panel beaten life and love for the sweets, the chain of command had shifted and jnr’s voice was up for it and Reach with you right hand, live with your left. Chin up and bear it for a big life and only piss in a pocket that us reinforced, the works cast Volich as an art world cross between Sufjan Stephens and Dave Eggers.

Kotja’s video installation Alien Presence H – [hand made echo] is a rectangular screen made up of 11 joined frames, each frame a shot of a different location around the world made by the artist and 10 collaborators. The shoot was synchronised and then, in Kotja’s set up, threaded together by lining up the horizon lines of each shot. What you get in effect is a single continuous landscape made up of sectioned landscapes. According to the room sheet “we are bombarded with high velocity information daily. As a result, the possibility of experiencing the present is removed, through the consistent effect of the ‘update’. Knowledge is obsolete before it can be comprehended.” We’re not quite sure how this methodology is meant to reflect this idea, but reading further the artist says that the desert environment is free of ‘updates’ and therefore apparently allowing magic to take place. It’s a hopeful formulation at best since we have always thought that we only ever experience the present, time being a condition of an eternal ‘now’, we must ask how a shot of a desert can alleviate the continual input of living in the present – with or without updates [and precisely what does he mean by that since every second is an update?]. One can at least luxuriate in the slight fuzziness of the logic and the image itself.

Returning to our nature trek, Adair’s works explore “the portrayal of reality in contemporary photography. More specifically, he is interested in exposing a reality that is quite sinister and, in a sense, radically incomplete.” In his Crate, for example, a photograph of a Ring-tailed Possum [not the more common Brush-tailed variety] encounters a milk crate. Poor possie, not only is the milk crate a poor substitute for its preferred environment of the Australian bush, he’s stuffed – literally. Indeed, the whole thing is an artificial set up created by Adair, then shot against a white backdrop, and printed as a huge giclee print. Adair has wandered into similar conceptual territory as Zahalka, but he’s taken it another step by creating more obviously artificial environments that are free of the sentimental obviousness that so badly mars Zahalka’s work. In fact, Adair’s large scale photographs share something of the sensibility of Hayden Fowler, deploying attractive Fahler-esque constructions, as if put together from a kit, with the colour saturation of a Miffy book. Not really sinister, but still creepy as hell.

We went to see two new shows at Chalkhorse, the gallery put together by the ½ Doz. team. Fergus Binns is in the big space with an untitled show and They Guard It So Carefully You’d Think It Was Gold by Kate Mitchell is out the back in the smaller space.


Fregus Binns, Colour and Pattern, 2005.

Binns was in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art last year and he does paintings of icons of Australiana, Steve Irwin, Ayers Rock, cans of VB, barbeque aprons. For this show he has resuscitated some of the Primavera paintings and added some new ones - a painting of a tropical island with a Qantas jet crashed into the ocean,another with the tail of a Qantas jet on fire and burning airliner wreckage littered around Uluru. The one of Steve Irwin holding a snake with stripes of paint on it called Colouration and Pattern from 2005 makes another appearance. The painting ‘quality’ is as bad as we have ever seen and even though some big claims are made in the catalogue for the relevance of making these images, we are profoundly unconvinced. For example:

“…[A] work entitled Diggers (2003), […] presents two faceless Australian men in khaki tropical attire digging a hole, seemingly without purpose. The myth of the Anzac Digger, perhaps our pre-eminent image, is totally undermined. What is left though is not the image of the two diggers, but a question. Why are the Diggers so important to me? This approach is also seen in the number of men dressed in animal suits, koalas and kangaroos etc, who can be found at the pub or just hanging about. What do these animal totems mean? How does a koala come to represent our nation?”

How exactly does this "totally undermine" the Anzac Digger? Brave men and women gave their lives to create the wonderful country that is Australia today and moreover, to guarantee the freedom of someone like Binns to make shit paintings. Like those troublesome Muslim youths, Binns should get down to his local RSL and learn a thing or two about the Anzac tradition. Hell, they might even offer some rudimentary painting classes.

Kate Mitchell’s show is performance art documentation of the artist digging a hole to China, she has compressed it down to 1½ minutes on a video shown on a tiny screen so small you can’t quite make out what she’s doing. In Danger Is My Daily Bread she climbs out on a rope bridge over a river and then cuts through the rope with a knife, and then falls into the water when the bridge collapses. Repeat. A sculpture called You should listen to rocks; they can tell you things (Rocky 8) is a fiberglass rock that you’re supposed to put your ear against and hear something. Unfortunately, it wasn’t turned on or it was broken. A pity.

Labels: artist run galleries, bad art, photography, reviews

The meeting of photography and painting is dangerous ground. The two mediums are utterly different and are assessed and understood in completely different ways. One medium implies time while the other captures it and the creation of the illusion of light and space on a two dimensional surface are achieved in utterly different processes. Avoiding the disaster that can occur when a painter directly translates a photograph on to canvas is a challenge that very few artists can achieve. Painters such as Jason Benjamin are brought down by the horribly compressed perspective distortions of one medium going into another space. We’re not sure what the problem is but it’s hard to escape. Some much more clever artists such as Lily Hibberd have taken that process of transfer as the very subject of what they do and instead of trying to obfuscate the translation the work celebrates it. The best thing that can happen when painting and photography meet on canvas is that the artist can use the casual recording of light and space that is particular to a camera and imbue it with the timeless suspension that painting can accomplish.


Halinka Orszulok, Park Steps, oil on canvas, 75x52cms, 2004. Courtesy MOP Projects.

Halinka Orszulok’s show Unhomely at MOP Projects is six oil on canvas works that depict suburban night streetscapes. Now we’re just guessing that Orszulok’s has used a camera because the works have the unmistakable flatness of the lens but where these works succeed is in the sheer spookiness of the images. Nightscapes are what the artist calls “uncanny nocturnal suburban environments” and the familiarity of the locations adds an interesting point of uneasy familiarity to the hidden lights, empty windows and dark trees. One looks just like the house across the road… Ahem.

Showing in the big space at MOP is Special Affects by Cash Brown and Adam Cullen. Now, a couple of week’s back we mentioned a Cullen that was included in Unwritten at the Art Gallery of NSW. We had used the word ‘typical’ in that the work had many of the artist’s hallmarks – text, paint splodges, monster faces and so on – and this prompted one eager reader to claim that Cullen’s work was now just a formula. You know how it goes – one minute you’re doing Cubism and then it’s all trademark eyes on the side of the heads and it’s all down hill from there. Maybe it’s because that kind of work was the stuff that Cullen was best known for but anyone who had gone to his gallery exhibitions at Yuill/Crowley over the last few years or paid any attention to what he was doing in his Archibald entries would see that that “typical” work is now a thing of the past. One need only check out this new work that Cullen and collaborator Brown have installed. No text, no monster heads, not even any paint on canvas and a hand made book on sale for $30. Typical? Hardly. Have a look.

Labels: artist run galleries, reviews