Installation views of Judith Wright’s exhibition Desire at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne
On a beautiful sunny Autumn afternoon in Melbourne I made a visit to Space Furniture on Church Street to ogle at the wondrous designs and then to the galleries of Albert Street in Richmond for three outstanding painting exhibitions: John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, McLean Edwards at Karen Woodbury Gallery and Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery. First cab off the rank is Judith Wright but reviews of the other two shows will follow…
There is a part in Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) where the anti-hero stares into the eyes of a dog and Jarmusch just holds the scene for what seems like an eternity. The camera observes the infinite bond between human and animal, an almost palpable connection across time and space, with an unflinching eye. The same can be said of Judith Wright’s encaustic paintings (also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which coloured pigments are added) but here she pushes the relationship further – into an investigation of the animal in the human and vice versa, and their erotic charge when placed together. Here is the carnivalesque at it most daring, most paired back, revealing in quiet Zen like compositions the dissolution of boundaries between both states of being.
Nominally based on the symbology of characters presented in two videos in the exhibition (masked figures playing with each other, a comical goats head with horns being one figure) the paintings are much more interesting than the videos. Painted on Japanese paper in wax and acrylic the biomorphic forms of babies heads, torsos and sculpted free forms and designs suggestive of living organisms address the title of the exhibition: desire!
Wright plays with scale and form, using earth tones and a luminous palette of oranges, yellows and pinks. Her shape-shifting paintings work to unhinge stagnant systems of thought that surround identity and the body. The waxed Japanese paper adds to the sensuality of the skin-like work. A baby seems to feed on a double nipple but the nipple has missed the mouth and is invading the eye. Forms intersect and the sensual shapes slip over each other: as in the Zen idea of ‘satori’ or enlightenment attained when two circles intersect here we have the intersection of an erotic enlightenment.
As Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin notes the carnivalesque is the contravention of normal laws of behaviour, “and he proposes that the carnivalesque is also the home of the grotesque, where otherwise antithetical properties or characteristics are matched together in the same being: beast with human, youth with age, male with female.”1
“The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”2
And this is what these paintings propose: a new order of things, a chance for desires formed of new pleasures.
As Michel Foucault has observed,
“The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our bodies, our pleasures … It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. “We have to liberate our desire,” they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow.”3
In their luminosity, in their skin-like textures, in their balance between the colour of the paper, the dark voids and the brown of babies heads we feel the sharp intake of the cold breathe of winter on the nostrils – we feel an evocation of new pleasure, of possible desires within us and the loosening of the grip of conformity. Like the perfect placement of rocks in a Japanese garden and the ripples of the gravel, of a reality that swirls around them these paintings open hearts and minds to inner states of being unexperienced before. And yes, I did enjoy the ride.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
3/ Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. “Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p. 31.
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [14] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 200 x 200cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [5] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 100 x 100cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [7] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 100 x 100cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16] 2009 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper 300 x 300cm
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) The Gift [2] 2008 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper
Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) The Gift [7] 2008 Acrylic and wax on Japanese paper
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne Phone: +61 3 9421 0857
Artists: Bindi Cole, Tamara Dean, Lee Grant, June Indrefjord, Bronek Kozka, Ka-Yin Kwok, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Morris, Aaron Seeto, Martin Smith and Toni Wilkinson
Many thankx to the ACP for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
June Indrefjord Piano 2005 From the series Landaas
Aaron Seeto (Australian) Oblivion 2006 From the series Oblivion Daguerreotype
Aaron Seeto makes alternate historical positions and experiences visible through an exploration of archives, family photo albums and photographic records. In recent bodies of work Fortress and Oblivion, Seeto has utilised the daguerreotype, one of the earliest and most primitive photographic techniques, to highlight the malleability of narratives within archive records. Not only is the chemical process itself highly toxic and temperamental but the daguerreotype’s mirrored surface means the image appears as both positive and negative, depending on the angle of view. For Seeto, this mutability captures the essence of our experience of history and memory, reflecting how images degrade, how stories are formed and privileged, how knowledge and history are written. …
For his ongoing series Oblivion Seeto sourced details from images of the Cronulla riots – beachside riots around race and territory – of 2005 found on the internet. In reproducing these as daguerrotypes he seeks less to represent the incident than to look at how it was reported, understood and remembered. The instability of the virtual information found online is echoed in the photographic process.
Text from the Stills Gallery website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960) Useless 1974 1994 From the series Scarred for Life
Useless, 1974 is a photo-lithograph by the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt. The work shows a girl stooping down to wash a car, with one hand wiping a headlight with a sponge and the other resting on the bonnet. She looks towards the camera rather than at the car, her face bearing a serious and potentially hurt or angry expression. The caption accompanying the photograph explains that ‘Her father’s nickname for her was “useless”‘. Despite this, it seems that in this picture she is being put to use, and perhaps the car she washes is her father’s. The caption, her expression and the direction of her gaze may suggest that the viewer occupies the position of the girl’s father looking down on and supervising his daughter while she carries out her chore. …
The work’s title is a reference to the cruel nickname given to the girl in the photograph, and the date in the title, 1974, suggests the year according to which the photograph has been styled by Moffatt, who employs actors and constructed scenes to create her photographs. Curator Filippo Maggia has compared Moffatt’s photographic method to that of a film director, stating that she ‘often does not take the photographs herself but directs a sort of bona fide movie set that she organises and controls after having pictured it in her mind again and again, meticulously decomposing and recomposing it’ (Maggia 2006, p.12). As the artist has stated, ‘I often use technicians when I make my pictures. I more or less direct them. I stand back and call the shots.’ (Quoted in Maggia 2006, p.12.)
Moffatt’s photographic series often deal with themes such as race, gender and the politics of identity. Drawing on memories from the artist’s childhood, the Scarred for Life series mimics photo spreads from the American magazine Life, with their explanatory captions and focus on the family environment. The captions’ terse descriptions hint at the traumatic stories behind the images. Moffatt has commented: ‘a person can make a passing comment to you when you are young and this can change you forever. You can be “scarred for life” but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The photographs can be read as both tragic and comic – there is a thin line between both.’ (Quoted in display caption, Tracey Moffatt, Birth Certificate 1994, Tate P78101, accessed 28 August 2015.) Furthermore, Maggia has argued that the Scarred for Life series ‘gives us life as it is, the harshness and aridity of human relations, adolescence with its fears of not being accepted’ (Maggia 2006, p.13).
Louise Hughes August 2015
Filippo Maggia, Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality, exhibition catalogue, Spazio Oberdan, Milan 2006, p. 13, reproduced p. 117.
Extract from Louise Hughes. “Useless, 1974,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Lee Grant (Korean-Australian, b. 1973) The Day Meg Wore a Dress from the series Brothers and Sisters 2007
“You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.”
From the tight nuclear unit to the multi-generational extended family, from refuges for the homeless to middle class suburbia, Inheritance examines the way our families shape the person we become; for better or for worse.
Taking Tracey Moffatt’s acclaimed series Scarred for Life as a starting point, the exhibition includes the work of eleven Australian artists who explore the modern family through a range of photographic disciplines, including documentary, portraiture and video. Sometimes serious and sometimes satirical, Inheritance is a family album that celebrates the skeletons and the psychodramas alongside the newborns and the nuptials.
Text from the Australian Centre for Photography website [Online] Cited 20/05/2009. No longer available online
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Nathan & Mac, BMX bros 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian / Wathaurung, b. 1975) Wathaurung Mob 2008 From the series Not really Aboriginal Pigment print on rag paper 1035 x 1235cm
Our Past Is Our Strength – Culture and Identity
I’ve always been told that l was Aboriginal. I never questioned it because of the colour of my skin or where I lived. My Nan, one of the Stolen Generation, was staunchly proud and strong. She made me feel the same way. My traditional land takes in Ballarat, Geelong and Werribee and extends west past Cressy to Derrinallum. I’m from Victoria and I’ve always known this. All the descendants of traditional Victorian Aboriginal people are now of mixed heritage. I’m not black. I’m not from a remote community. Does that mean I’m not really Aboriginal? Or do Aboriginal people come in all shapes, sizes and colours and live in all areas of Australia, remote and urban?
Bindi Cole Chocka, Wathaurung text from the Culture Victoria website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Wathaurung Mob is a group portrait depicting members of Cole’s family sitting in their lounge room, their faces blackened with minstrel paint, and wearing red headbands traditionally worn by indigenous elders. The controversial practice of “blackfacing” refers to the populist minstrel shows of the 19th and 20th centuries in which a white actor put on blackface, then performed a racist caricature.
As we stand before the work, Alessi says he finds it confronting and uncomfortable. “Wathaurung Mob is quite powerful because what stands out are the eyes of each sitter; they look directly at the viewer, so you can’t help but feel challenged by that,” he says.
“There is also something quite uncomfortable about the work because, in some ways, you are being implicated in Andrew Bolt’s view, as white Australians having to own up to the broader history of the relationship between white and indigenous Australia.
“And more broadly it is about coming to grips with what is still a major issue in Australia around reconciliation and the way that we treat indigenous people. In one single frame this photograph captures 200 years of history, and I think it is an area that people like Bindi Cole are really courageous to navigate through because they have been open to criticism by people like Andrew Bolt, which is completely unfounded.”
Extract from Bronwyn Watson. “Facing up to the stereotypes,” on The Australian website November 16, 2013 [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Fiona Morris (Australian) Sean and Jade, Wesley Mission 2006
Sean with his daughter Jade outside their tempoary accomodation provided by Wesley Mission. They can only stay their for a maximum of two months. Leah and Sean became homeless with their children after increasing rent rises in Sydney and the cost of living.
Tamara Dean (Australian, b. 1976) Alex and Maeve 2006
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Jungle with Cassowary 2008 Oil on Linen 106 x 150cm National Museum for Women in Arts, Washington
I was walking around Anne Marie Graham’s new exhibition of painting at Gallery 101, Melbourne having read a review of her work on the gallery wall where the reviewer compared the structure of the work to the essentialness of the paintings of Giotto. A lady approached me and said, “You don’t want to believe everything that you read.”
And I said, “I don’t. I make up my own mind.”
This was the artist Anne Marie Graham.
We had a wonderful conversation about her work talking about space, colour and form. This is what Graham’s work is about. No conceptual arguments are needed. The work addresses the landscape in a magical way, drawing the viewer into the compositions like a piece of music. The viewer finds entrances and passageways, spaces through the images which open up a dialogue with the landscape.
Using repeated patterns and layered construction, from bottom to top, from front to back, the images subtly push and pull the viewer: space quietly recedes and comes towards the viewer. Complimentary bands of colours are muted except for stunning highlight colours – the red of flowers, the blue of leaves or the unexpected pink or yellow of a background. The forms and textures delight. Dr Sheridan Palmer is correct, these paintings have an almost hypnotic effect, meditative and peaceful. They make you feel good!
Their presence is undeniable. For such complex paintings, which on the surface seem very simple (a difficult task to accomplish); for such essential representations that address the heart of the matter… their affect is powerful.
Graham’s refined aesthetic allows the viewer to engage with the poetic spaces she creates, allowing them to appreciate the colour fields, plants and landscapes she orchestrates and to be subsumed into their fold. Here we come to understand the diverse empathy of an artist who lays it all ‘on the line’ and knows how to do so in a brilliant way.
A talented artist and a nice lady as well – what more can you ask for!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exotic Queensland: Recent Painting installation views at Gallery 101, Melbourne
These landscapes are inspired by the areas around Noosa, the Glasshouse Mountains and the Botanic Gardens in Cairns. Look at the bromeliads, those cousins of the pineapple that store pools of water in their depths. And the helliconias – they’re also called lobster-claw plants and you can see why! Look at the massive scarlet tassels set against tropical green – and not just the one green but the subtlest of shades and tones in combination.
How much further in both place and mood could Anne possibly have travelled from the order and long humanist traditions of her childhood home in Austria? In these Queensland paintings you’ll discover cockatoos, a water dragon, a fat goanna, ibises in the lotus pond, and the shy endangered cassowary almost hidden in the jungle. And look at the sky in that painting – the rosiest pink of a twilight had tells us tomorrow will be a perfect day.
Jane Clark Senior Research Curator, Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart
Extract from speech given at the opening of the exhibition Exotic Queensland, Gallery 101 Melbourne May 2009
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Water Dragon with Banksias 2008
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Heliconia No. 1 2008 Oil on Linen 106 x 150cm
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Variations in Green and Mauve 2008 Oil on linen 106 x 150cm
“Anne Marie Graham’s painting career now spans more than six decades. Observed with a penetrating and affectionate gaze, her images are beautiful records of Australia’s vast landscape. Each work is an engagingly optimistic view, evoking the mystery and fragility of Australia’s rich environment. This survey of recent paintings concentrates on the tropical Queensland landscapes around Noosa and the Cairns Botanic Gardens.
As she casts he vision over mountains, rain forests and panoramic vistas or as she leads us into an intimate world of gardens, winding pathways and potted plants, we find ourselves amongst large succulents, variegated foliage, ferns and brilliant flowers, visually engaging at a Lilliputian level in her richly orchestrated fields and forests. In these locations she constructs marvellous labyrinthine worlds that reveal layers of muted colours, folding forms and textures that induce a most extraordinary hypnotic spell.”
Dr Sheridan Palmer, Art Curator, from the catalogue essay
Anne Marie Graham (Australian born Austria, b. 1925) Heliconia No. 2 2008
Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Scott Thornton
Rowan McNamara as Samson and Marissa Gibson as Delilah
This is a tough nugget of a film, an absolute gem. It is a love story.
The deceptively simple narrative takes you into the dark side of Aboriginal life in the remote desert communities of central Australia. It pulls no punches taking the viewer on a empathetic ride into the lives of two young people struggling to find their reason for being on this earth. Here is violence, abuse, rape and addiction with the subtle hope of redemption.
Samson is addicted to petrol sniffing. Delilah tries to ignore him. She looks after her grandmother who is an artist, pushing her around in an wheelchair, feeding her medicine and taking her to the health clinic. Samson forces himself on Delilah, sleeping next to her but never with her. Then her grandmother dies and Delilah is blamed by the women elders of the community. Samson’s addiction escalates. He steals a car and with Delilah in tow they flee to Alice Springs to live under a flyover and sniff petrol, to be looked down upon by tourists in trendy cafes. Things get worse before they get (slightly) better.
That is the bare bones of the story. But I want to talk about other things.
The film is the traditional three acts but the narrative reads like an oral history only shown in images: themes are repeated over and again with subtle variations, like the arc of great music reiterating the flow of energy. There is little dialogue which intensifies the sounds of the desert, the band that plays on the verandah and the ringing of telephones. Every human seems to be alienated from the landscape. The Aborigines seem to be just floating on the surface of the land like everyone else, just struggling to survive. The landscape towers above the participants. Unlike our usual perception of Aboriginal people being in touch with the earth through the Dreamtime, here the director Warwick Thornton seems to suggest otherwise, until right at the end of the film.
Delilah is the strength in the film. It is her stoicism, her strength that helps Samson see it through. She ends up pushing Samson in the same wheelchair that she pushed her grandmother around in. His loss of strength is palpable, his addiction ongoing. You believe this story, the non-professional actors grounding you in the red dust of the desert.
There are several remarkable elements that lift this film to sublime places. Some of them are the most moving moments I have seen in a film in many a year:
The soundtrack, like a disjointed heartbeat, that accompanies their life under the flyover. The soundtrack of Samson’s rock and roll competing with Delilah’s music in her 4 wheel drive as one fades into the other.
Samson and Delilah sitting outside the health centre in white plastic chairs picking their feet off the ground so they won’t get bitten by ants.
Samson sitting in the wheelchair in the middle of the road at night, rocking back and forward on the wheels of the chair, so off his face that he is oblivious of the approaching 4 wheel drive until it is right upon him. Exceptional.
Delilah, towards the end of the film, washing the body of Samson with soap while he sits in a trough of water. More sensuality, more sexuality packed into 30 seconds than you will ever see in a full blown love scene. Amazing.
Samson, his head under a blanket under the flyover. The scene fades not to black as it does regularly in this film but to 80% of black and hovers there, just under the level of consciousness, before the sun rises again. This is masterful, poetic film making.
Samson, taking his ghetto blaster outside at night, dancing under the light of the verandah to rock and roll music watched by Delilah from her refuge in a 4 wheel drive. This scene is so beautiful, so genuine. The natural grace of Samson’s dancing opens Delilah’s eyes towards him. For the audience it is a revelatory, transcendent moment that crosses space and time as great cinema does. It grips you in an esoteric awareness: we are all human, we all live on the same earth. We all dance.
. Go and see this film. It is one of the finest ever made in Australia. Besides a beautiful love story it will take you to places and connect with your heart like no other. It’s not perfect by any means (in terms of some improbabilities in the narrative) but this can be forgiven in the arc of the story telling. It is harrowing there is no doubt, but in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the film, in the communion with the infinite, something that defines human existence, this film stands above all else.
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) Hot/humid/oppressive/stifling/still 2009 Pigment print and collage 90 x 130cm
This is an interesting, well constructed exhibition of photographs, collage and sculpture by Martin Smith presented at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne that addresses issues of place and faith: memories of growing up within a religious framework. The work is well resolved, the themes explored are poignant, full of pathos, laden with sardonic humour and pull no punches.
The main body of the exhibition are contemporary personal photographs of sunsets, landscapes and urban spaces (such as the photograph of Central Park in New York, above). Incised into the surface of the photograph, actually cut into the surface, are narratives of boredom, anger and the blind injustice of devotion, memories of stories of a fifteen year old boy. In some of the photographs the lettering follows the pictorial representation of the photograph, in others it overwrites it. The cut letters fall away to the bottom of the picture and are captured by the picture frame, sitting at the bottom of each image like the leaves of autumn – half remembered stories that become jumbled in the mind, played over and over again.
These images consolidate both photographic and written texts while at the same time undermining their veracity and referentiality. Image and text are performative, playing off of each other to provide a transgressive textuality that becomes a mode of agential resistance capable of fragmenting and releasing the subject. In this engagement between image and text the work becomes intertextual, the ritual of production engaging a network of texts, a discursive multiplicity that traverses the entire scope of social, cultural, and institutional production. The childhood taboo of not criticising ‘faith’ is cross/ed in the process of re-remembering, re-inscription.
In these assemblages the surface of the photograph and the body of the text are subverted through a ritualised cutting, like the incision of the stigmata into the body of Christ. They become sites of resistance. As Deleuze and Guittari have noted of this process the site of resistance is both a productive and disruptive re-territorialization and de-territorialization of meaning:
“For them (Deleuze and Guattari), assemblages are the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other, a process that can be both productive and disruptive. Any such process involves a territorialization; there is a double movement where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings. The organization of a territory is characterized by such a double movement … An assemblage is an extension of this process, and can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.”1
The particular site, the particular intersection that Smith addresses in his work is that of memory, faith and place. The lack of fixity in this intersection provides the artist with abundant opportunity to reinscribe the already inscribed ritual of faith, subverting the iteration of the norms already attributed to it, providing a loss of original meaning and the gaining of new meanings. This productive, disruptive re-inscription provides the positionality of the work and the viewer struggles with the emotional conflicts that result from this territorialization: even if you don’t know these stories they challenge what you believe, now.
Counterbalancing the colour photographs are white collages that are embossed with the answer to the celebrants greeting “The Lord be with you” to which the people respond “And also with you.” Hovering in the background of the work the words are again subverted, this time in a resurrection of cut letters – instead of being cut into the photograph the letters project outwards towards the viewer forming commodified shapes such as cars, underpants and people. The joy doesn’t stop there: the two sculptures in the exhibition add to the chaos with a wonderful sense of humour.
Through their hypertexts the work “becomes more and more layered until they are architectural in design, until their relationship to the context from which they have grown cannot be talked about through the simple models offered by referentiality, or by attributions of cause and effect.”2
Without absolute attribution the work becomes a form of transubstantiation. The flexibility of memory and the orthodoxy of religion are transformed into a spirituality of the self that the child of fifteen with blood running down his arms from his personal stigmata of boredom could never have imagined. At the end of days, when all is said and done, the funny diatribes with their ambiguous photographs are homily and heretic, and together form a more inclusive body of bliss: ‘And also with you and you and you and you’.
Whatever your faith, whoever you are.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p. 166
2/ Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, & the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 137-138
Thank you to Edwin Nicholls for his help.
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) Hot/humid/oppressive/stifling/still (detail) 2009 Pigment print and collage 90 x 130cm
In the above installation photograph you can just see the cut letters lying at the bottom of the picture frame
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) I still hate that man 2009 Pigment print and collage 130 x 180cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) My Frenetic, Anxiety Driven Snuffing 2009 Pigment print and collage 90 x 130cm
Artist statement
I grew up in the bayside suburbs of Brisbane, Australia with a speech impediment. My teenage years were spent watching and observing, as I was too embarrassed to speak. My inability to express myself during this time left an indelible mark on my personal history and has provided the impetus for my artistic enquiries. Therefore it is no surprise that my art practice is primarily about language and the modes of representation used to express and interpret personal experience.
Among the studio methodologies that I employ are the combination of traditional story telling writing with vernacular photography. The text and the images have no literal relationship and I am very careful to avoid any obvious connection between the two. I write personal stories then hand-cut the text out of the image. The removed letters from the image are collected and captured by the picture frame, sitting at the bottom of each image like fallen leaves creating an Autumnal scene where visible change has occurred and the picture and the figure are going through a transition. The text punctures the surface of the image disrupting the way we view and read the work. We can’t fully view the image because of the text and we can’t read the text without the image creating a constant back and forth between the two. When viewing the visual and textual oscillation between the two narrative devices that have no literal connection we find balance outside the picture frame in a new discursive space. It is through this collision of narrative and languages that unique interpretations of personal experience are built. I am interested in exploring spaces of meaning that are created when two or more narrative devices are blended.
In other works the letters are also glued directly onto the wall of the gallery to form recognisable but featureless figures. These installations explore how meaning and identity are generated through language. The individual letters (the building blocks of language) combine together to form a representation of a life that exists only through the formulation of language.
Recently I performed a stand-up ‘comedy’ routine as another vehicle for exploring story-telling and personal histories. The routine titled “Hello Newmarket Hotel” was performed at an ‘open mic’ night in front of a regular comedy audience. The aim was to recreate and recontextualise a particularly painful childhood memory while incorporating known ‘comedy’ tropes. This work along with my whole practice is interested in the role that photography, and other forms of narrative, plays in the construction of our identity and how personal histories are written and interpreted.
Martin Smith 2017
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) The Relationship Blossomed 2009 Pigment print and collage 115 x 115cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) The Relationship Blossomed (detail) 2009 Pigment print and collage 115 x 115cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) The Homily 2009 Pigment print and collage 130 x 90cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) And also with you #2 2009 Collage on paper, eva 42 x 30cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) And also with you #3 2009 Collage on paper, eva 42 x 30cm
Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1972) After 3 months on the road Mary started to loosen up 2009 Photographic carving on marble base 18 x 10 x 10cm
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street Richmond, Vic 3121
Opening night crowd at So It Goes by Laith McGregor at Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne with the works My kinda of Blue (red) and My kind of blue (black) behind
The opening of the night – simply spectacular!
Great crowd, great atmosphere, great work.
Winner of the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize in 2008, the artist’s work in biro and oil is outstanding. I have never seen such art made using a biro before: truly inspiring. Inventive, funny, poignant and outrageous this is a must see show. Don’t miss it!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) My kind of blue (black) 2009 Ballpoint pen on paper
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) My kinda of Blue (red) (detail) 2009 Red and blue ballpoint on paper
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) Wiking 2009 Biro on paper 100.5 x 66.5 cm
“McGregor’s work blurs the boundaries between portraiture, memory and imagination. Into each picture, drawn from and nourished by his past, notions of the unconscious mind are introduced and investigated and the certainty of memory and markers are challenged and slowly unravelled. Figurative forms metamorphose into uncanny, exaggerated, and often incongruous images and arrangements. Beards are grossly elongated, hair extends seamlessly to form a tree or a cocoon that envelopes a face and a neck transforms into a weighted mound in ‘portraits’ that are at once warm, playful and pensive. “It’s important for me to see the imagery appear otherworldly, whimsical and strange. I want it to be amusing and serious simultaneously, for the work to push and pull between its contrasting qualities.”
In So It Goes it is his mother and father, who according to Laith ‘kinda looks like Jesus’, that are the subject of his gaze.”
Text from the Helen Gory Galerie website [Online] Cited 07/05/2009. No longer available online
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) Vertigo 2009 Blue and black ballpoint on paper
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) The Last Bastion (detail) 2009 Ballpoint on paper
Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977) The Last Bastion (detail) 2009 Ballpoint on paper
Opening and installation views of John Bodin’s exhibition Urban Edge at Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne
“Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows … Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived …
Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs. We should speak of the benefits of all these imaginary actions.”
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
More interesting are the eerie contemplative photographs of John Bodin presented at Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne, our second opening of the night. In a well presented show Bodin’s hyper-real photographs employ a limited colour palette to portray the constructed landscape of the urban fringe. The images work well because the artist leaves room for doubt in the mind of the viewer – what am I looking at, where is it, do I subconsciously remember these places? How do the photographs make me feel about the edges of the world, this strangeness that we inhabit? They engage the viewer in a fluid architecture of space and place.
Light and colour are important tools for Bodin and he plays with their form, darkening pavements, shooting at night, making subtle negative interpretations of roads and underground car-parks while desaturating buildings, landscapes and skies of ‘natural’ colour. Walls bleed in Witchhunt (2007) and then you work out the photograph is taken under a bridge with a pavement, graffiti providing the title of the work. Blue light emotes from behind the cloaked window of a house in Shrouded (2005) and you are left wondering by the crazed cellular like constructions of As if by Nature (2007).
Haunting and elegiac these compositions are worthy of your attention.
Lovely to meet Catherine Fogarty and John Bodin. Thank you for your help!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
John Bodin (Australian) Witchhunt 2007
John Bodin (Australian) Shrouded 2005
John Bodin (Australian) As If By Nature 2007
“Urban Edge continues on from the 2006 ‘Urban Abstraction’ exhibition at Anita Traverso Gallery by introducing contrasting elements and structure from the natural world alongside stark semi-abstracted urban scapes. Whilst we may at first perceive these as opposing forces, I contend that the integration is more harmonious than we think.”
John Bodin
When John Bodin takes a risk – which indeed he seems to do aplenty – he does so with a self-assurance that would make many photographers – and artists in general – weep.
Bodin has said that his photographs “comment on the conditioning process of familiarisation.” Indeed, the strange moment of familiarity is immediately cushioned by the sensual softness of tone he employs. If anything, it is the shock of the old.
Bodin has said that his study in philosophy and meditation serve as a visual source of reflection and are integral to his image making.
Whether it is a distinctly phallic office tower or the moments of surrealism in a found structure in the rural countryside, Bodin’s work exudes a strange peacefulness, a distinctly contemplative air. Everything he grabs from reality is given Bodin’s own air of tranquility. He doesn’t eschew colour exactly, but he tones it down, blanketing his subjects in a kind of downy, nostalgic but not quite melancholic fashion that links his entire oeuvre.
A work such as Lover’s Lane – a sandy track somewhere by the coast – links his sensual eye with a not altogether comforting sense of intimacy. The shadows of the trees encroach in an almost threatening tangle of dark shapes – the ideal place to reassure a trembling lass as they wander into the dark.
In 2006, the renowned fellow-photographer Les Horvat said in an opening speech that Bodin’s “stated interests in philosophy and meditation serve as a fertile source of reflection, integral to his image making. His images cleverly explore the contrast between the form and the aesthetic of the landscape. They do this by examining the utility of urban structure, and juxtaposing it against an aesthetic emotional sensibility that is evocatively expressed through his images.
“The paradox he lays before us is that on one hand, they ingeniously remind us of our human incursions in the natural world; on the other, they suggest that the significance of the landscape is actually assigned by these incursions,” stated Horvat.
Bodin has travelled extensively and in 2003 he served a short residency in New Delhi, India. Closer to home he held a solo show in May 2006 and participated in 11 group exhibitions over the last six years. He was a finalist in the 2005 New Social Commentaries Acquisitive Prize and the acclaimed Prometheus Visual Art Award in 2007. The respect Bodin holds amongst his peers is renowned and, as this show attests, will only grow with time.
Ashley Crawford. “John Bodin,” in Photofile 86 2009, p. 14
Artist John Bodin in front of his work Lover’s Lane (2007, left) and Object of Speculation (2008, right) at the opening of his exhibition Urban Edge at Anita Traverso Gallery, Melbourne
John Bodin (Australian) Midnight Solitude 2005
John Bodin (Australian) Stumbling into Grace 2008 Type c print 120 x 80 cm
John Bodin (Australian) Mondrian in Berlin 2005 Type C-print 60 x 80cm
John Bodin (Australian) Adrenalin Addiction 2006 Type-C photograph 108 x 183cm
Anita Traverso Gallery PO Box 7001, Hawthorn North 3122
Installation view of Jill Orr exhibition Faith in a Faithless Land at Jenny Port Gallery, Melbourne
First cab off the rank on a busy night of openings in Melbourne were the self-conscious photographs of Jill Orr presented at Jenny Port Gallery in Richmond, Melbourne (the gallery now in Collingwood). Beautifully hung in the gallery space in white frames the photographs were the least engaging artworks on the night. Their message seemed over determined, the use of reflection to add layering to the human-landscape mis en scene trite. Perhaps the performance itself would have evinced a more authentic, nuanced connection with the viewer vis a vis a response to the overwhelming expanse of nature and the place humans occupy on the thin crust of the earth. These photographs did not make that telluric connection and left me emotionally uninvolved in their pictorial representation.
Unfortunately I cannot show you any of the photographs because of copyright reasons but thank you to Jenny for allowing me to photograph the installation itself.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of Jill Orr exhibition Faith in a Faithless Land at Jenny Port Gallery, Melbourne
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) u (renoir’s garden) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Based on the music of melancholy that inhabits the shadows of the paintings of Montmarte by the French artist Maurice Utrillo, Domenico de Clario’s exhibition of paintings at John Buckley Gallery in Melbourne is a major achievement. This is a superlative exhibition of focused, resonant work beautifully and serenely installed in the gallery space.
The exhibition features seven small and seven large oil and acrylic on canvas paintings that envelop the viewer in a velvety quietness, an intense stillness accompanied by ambient music composed by de Clario himself. All fourteen paintings are reinterpretations of works by Utrillo picked at random by de Clario that strip away surface matter to reveal the shadow substance that lays at the anxious heart of Utrillo’s meta/physical body of work (Utrillo was an alcoholic at fourteen and spent numerous periods in sanatoriums). When de Clario was fifteen he was fascinated by a small book on Utrillo and found that his paintings reminded him of his childhood, growing up in the town of Trieste. Recently he noticed that the word ‘triestement’ was used to mean, essentially, an investigation of sadness, of melancholy and started an investigation into the life and work of Utrillo. From this dialogue the paintings for the exhibition have emerged as de Clario found the ‘more is’ of Utrillo, the anima of his presence within the work.
The small abstract paintings (such as renoir’s garden, above) are dark and miasmic, vaporous emanations of atmosphere that contain traces of Utrillo’s lifelong battle with the black dog but it is the seven large paintings facing each other in the main gallery space that are at the heart of de Clario’s project. They are magnificent.
Painted in a limited colour palette of ochres, greys and blacks the works vibrate with energy. Cezanne-like spatial representations are abstracted and the paint bleeds across the canvas forming a maze of buildings. Walls and hedges loom darkly over roadways, emanations of heads and figures float in the picture plane and the highlight white of snow hovers like a spectral figure above buildings. These are elemental paintings where the shadow has become light and the light is shadow, meanderings of the soul in space. In the painting i (the house of hector berlioz – night)Â below, the single dark line of the house rises from the plain; the shadowy haze of recognition sits in the subconscious like the trace of our own mortality. My mind made an association with the modernist photograph by Paul Strand of the church at Taos (see photo at bottom of posting) with the looming bulk of the ramparts: it’s funny how things just click into place.
“The watergaw, the faint rainbow glimmering in chittering light, provides a sort of epiphany, and MacDiarmid connects the shimmer and weakness and possible revelation in the light behind the drizzle with the indecipherable look he received from his father on his deathbed … Each expression, each cadence, each rhyme is as surely and reliably in place as a stone on a hillside.” ~ Seamus Heaney1
To paint these works de Clario was open and receptive to the idea of the letting go. In the wonderfully erudite catalogue essay he says he felt like he was standing under a waterfall experiencing the joyful bliss of substance, material, surface, shadow, blandness, light, plenitude and triestement while acknowledging that he could never capture them and that their value could only be fully understood once he abandoned any thought of possessing them. Like Seamus Heaney in the quotation above, de Clario experienced the glimmering in chittering light, the possible revelation in the light behind the drizzle (of the shadow) and he then paints the trace of Utrillo’s subconscious anima, the indecipherable look of his triestement. de Clario feels the fluid relationship between substance and appearance; he understands that Utrillo is embedded in the position of each building and stone, in the cadences and rhymes of the paintings of Montmarte. de Clario interprets this knowledge in a Zen like rendition of shadow substance in his paintings. Everything has it’s place without possession of here and there, dark and light.
For my part it was my soul responding to the canvases. I was absorbed into their fabric. As in the dark night of the soul my outer shell gave way to an inner spirituality stripped of the distance between viewer and painting. I felt communion with this man, Utrillo, with this art, de Clario, that brought a sense of revelation in the immersion, like a baptism in the waters of dark light. For art this is a fantastic achievement. Highly recommended.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1995, pp. 107-108.
Please click on the artwork for a larger version of the image.
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) l (le lapin agile – snow coming) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Renoir’s Garden 1909-1910 Oil on canvas
Installation views of triestement (more-is u thrill-o) by Domenico De Clario at John Buckley Gallery
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Paris Street 1914 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) r (rue ravignan – le bateau lavoir) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) l (le lapin agile and rue du mont cenis – snow receding) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) o (la grande maison blanche – snow clouds massing) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Is there any limit, I thought, to the kinds of shadows that might be transmuted into light? And is this because the key component of the nature of shadow is its deep longing for a transmutation to light?
As a consequence of these thoughts I arrived at the question that animates the core of this current project; what, I asked myself, might the original shadow-substance Utrillo experienced and subsequently transmutes into the paintings we known, have looked like? What shadow images did Utrillo first see, or even imagine, before he transmuted them into colour? …
Utrillo must have believed that the outer world of coloured light belonged exclusively to others, for he never succeeded in releasing himself from the dark inner shadows that engulfed him. Though he struggled much to reach the light he accepted shadow as constituting his world and worked ceaselessly to offer us images that reflected this side’s plenitude.
Perhaps the luminous surfaces of his paintings functioned as the thin membrane that separates the outer world of cacophonously coloured light from the velvety grey inner world of the monotic anxiety he inhabited. Upon that thought the momentousness of his gift became apparent to me …
For the purposes of this present project I believe that the shadow substance laying beneath the architecture of Utrillo’s streetscapes existed within the artist long before his paintings came into being. This non-substance generated the appearance of matter on the paintings’ surfaces and more significantly it gradually came to contain the spirit of his Montmarte-body.
The process of removing matter results in an obvious absence of substance but paradoxically this leads me to feel that here, under all this discarded visible matter, an invisible substance that has always contained more than matter awaits to be revealed. This leads to the provisional conclusion that the primal trace of normally unseen shadow is far richer than any material constituting appearance, containing as it does infinitely more substance than appearance.
Astonishing paradox; infinite substance can only be discovered once all matter is removed.
Text from the catalogue essay by Domenico de Clario [Online] Cited 26/04/2009. No longer available online
Maurice Utrillo (French, 1883-1955) Berlioz House 1910 Oil on canvas
Anonymous Postcard of Hector Berlioz House Nd
Domenico de Clario (Australian born Italy, b. 1947) i (the house of hector berlioz – night) 2008/09 Oil on canvas
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Inverted colour burn of his photograph Church, Ranchos de Taos New Mexico 1932
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Eastern Market Destruction – 1 1960, printed 1996 Silver gelatin photograph 19 x 22.5cm
Social Fact and Urban Vision
This is an exhibition by the veteran Australian photographer Mark Strizic that plays like the coda at the end of a piece of music, the pensive full stop at the end of a well read book. There are some stunning highlight photographs among the 139 black and white silver gelatin prints on display, some good photographs and some fairly mundane images and prints. With some judicious editing of the photographs (perhaps by a third), the exhibition could have had a stronger artistic aesthetic and carried the voice of the photographer with greater projection. As it is the exhibition will be popular drawing in the crowds because of the photographs subject matter and their appeal to both an individual and collective nostalgia.
Examining Strizic’s photographs we note a traditional structure to the picture plane. Unlike the photographs of Eugene Atget who photographed Paris in the early 20th century there is little sublime spatial representation in Strizics photographs, that different angle of alignment that Atget achieved with the positioning of his camera. Further, we observe that unlike an immigrant to another country at around the same time, Robert Frank and America, the photographs follow traditional format: none of the revolutionary experimentation in handheld, grainy images of jukeboxes, cut up people or images of flags appear in this work. We can also say that unlike Helen Levitt’s early black and white images of New York from around the same period there is little ‘joie de vivre’, little engagement with the actual nitty gritty stuff of living in Strizic’s work. The quote below articulates what Strizic’s photographs both address and dismiss:
“To walk in the city is to experience the disjuncture of partial vision/partial consciousness. The narrativity of this walking is belied by a simultaneity we know and yet cannot experience. As we turn a corner, our object disappears around the next corner. The sides of the street conspire against us; each attention suppresses a field of possibilities. The discourse of the city is a syncretic discourse, political in its untranslatability. Hence the language of the state elides. Unable to speak all the city’s languages, unable to speak all at once, the state’s language become monumental, the silence of headquarters, the silence of the bank. In this transcendent and anonymous silence is the miming of corporate relations. Between the night workers and the day workers lies the interface of light; in the rotating shift, the disembodiment of lived time. The walkers of the city travel at different speeds, their steps like handwriting of a personal mobility. In the milling of the crowd is the choking of class relations, the interruption of speed, and the machine. Hence the barbarism of police on horses, the sudden terror of the risen animal.”1
We observe in the photographs an emphasis on surfaces, on a supreme understanding of light and shade coupled with a certain distance and emotional remoteness from the frenetic hubbub of city life. Empty streets and isolated people fall into shadow and their is little evidence of ‘play’ in the photographs. This is observation not interaction or integration as an immigrant observing Melbourne life. There is no up front presence of disembodied people as in Robert Franks photographs in The Americans. Here the alienation that pervades the photographs is the alienation of the photographer from the people as much as it is the alienation of the people from themselves. People are shot in silhouette against the sun or shop windows or peering in at unobtainable goods; desolate streets and working class suburbs all express the isolation of city life but at a structured distance from them.
When Strizic’s photographs are good they are very good. His understanding of light is magnificent: light reflects off water, hazes and shimmers off city buildings. The mixing of shadows and sun and his use of the technique of ‘contre jour’ (shooting into the sun) the one thing Strizic does against traditional conventions works to good effect in some of the best photographs. His 1968 night time long exposure photograph of the old Gas and Fuel Building is rewarding for the black bulk of the end of the building looming over Flinders Street and the striations of car headlamps. The photograph Flinders Lane (1967, below) shows a delicate use of depth of field where the foreground of cars and person are out of focus, the light bouncing off the edges of the woman, the focus of the image in the far distance. The photograph McPhersons Building (1958, below) is one of my personal favourites in the exhibition and is a stunning photograph for the atmosphere the photographer has captured.
After a while the use of the ‘contre jour’ technique becomes tiresome. Other photographs simply document a city in transition. These photographs appeal both to an individual nostalgia (‘I used to work in that building’; ‘My grandmother used to live in that street’) and a collective nostalgia where people experience things collectively, “in the sense that [collective] nostalgia occurs when we are with others who shared the event(s) being recalled, and also in the sense that one’s nostalgia is often for the collective – the characteristics and activities of a group or institution in which the individual was a participant.”2
Collective nostalgia refers to that condition in which the symbolic objects are of a highly public, widely shared and familiar character, i.e. those symbolic resources from the past which can under proper conditions trigger off wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time3 and in this exhibition it is the photographs of a city in transition that trigger this nostalgia, a city now lost to the mists of time. Through these photographs we remember what Melbourne was like at this time collectively.
As Harper has observed
“Nostalgia combines bitterness and sweetness, the lost and the found, the far and near, the new and the familiar, absence and presence. The past which is over and gone, from which we have been or are being removed, by some magic becomes present again for a short while. But its realness seems even more familiar, because renewed, than it ever was, more enchanting and more lovely …”4
Does this collective nostalgia make the photographs good? This is a pertinent question.
Today, nostalgia has become a cultural phenomenon one centred on a longing for home (home is where you are happy to be!) in a collective sense and promoted through commercialisation and the realisation that nostalgia sells. The use of the value seeking word ‘rare’ in the exhibition title is instructive in this regard. Only about 25% of the photographs in this exhibition are “vintage” prints, in other words photographs printed within 3 years of the negative being taken. All other photographs have been printed within the last 15 years. Some are ‘Unique state’ gelatin photographs while others are not. What does this mean. Are they are unique state only in this size? What about the common or garden silver gelatin prints in the show? What does the status word “rare” imply for them?
I remember seeing an exhibition of the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson in Scotland about ten years ago. Three rooms had large prints of his work. One room just had vintage prints. The contrast was astounding. The room full of vintage prints had an intensity of vision, of his vision at the time he took the photographs evidenced in small jewel like photographs that the three other rooms photographs simply did not possess – through scale, printing and aesthetics. The same question, without any need for an answer, can be posed here. Only the word ‘rare’ demands that answer for the modern prints are just what they are and nothing more.
In conclusion this is a strong show by Strizic that could have been edited and focused in a more rewarding way. Strizic is one of Australia’s best photographers for understanding the significance of place. His use of light is superb but there always seems to be an emotional distance to his photographs. An element of collective nostalgia adds to their documentary appeal but the best photographs do not just record, they challenge and transcend the subject matter taking the work to an altogether different plane of existence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 2. Prologue
2/ Wilson, Janelle. “”Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia,” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; pg. 296, 9 pgs
3/ Davis, F. Yearning For Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press, 1979, p. 222
4/ Harper, R. Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfilment in the Modern Age. The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966, p. 120 quoted in Wilson, Janelle. “”Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia,” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; pg. 296, 9 pgs
Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Mark Strizic: Melbourne – A City in Transition exhibition at Gallery 101, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Mark Strizic, one of Australia’s eminent photographic artists presents us with nostalgic views of Melbourne and the changing face of the city in rare silver gelatin photographs. The exhibition, Melbourne – A City in Transition will be held at Gallery 101 from 8th April – 2nd May. There will be an evening artist reception on Thursday 9th April to celebrate the opening of the exhibition. Strizic’s oeuvre represents a collection of iconic images of architecture and of life – a record of the changing face of a migrating society of new prosperity, youth and popular culture – taken with a sympathetic eye for humanistic detail.
The exhibition will coincide with the announcement of the forthcoming publication, Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern, published by Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria. In 2007, the State Library of Victoria acquired Mark Strizic’s entire archive of approximately 5000 negatives, colour transparencies and slides. In addition, the Library holds a fine collection of Strizic photographs, including examples of all types of photographic print, from gelatin silver to digital, produced by the photographer during his long career.
Press release from Gallery 101
“‘Melbourne – A City in Transition’ is a collection of iconic images of Melbourne city life taken with a sympathetic eye for humanist detail. Strizic accurately depicts the joys and hardships experienced in everyday life with a fresh and living memory. He successfully captures the vicarious essence of suburban life. His portrait of Melbourne includes the city, harbour and river banks – streets and trams, pavements, arcades and lanes, stations and bridges, billboards and facades and public sculpture. We see people going about their daily activities – commuting, shopping at leisure, trading, embracing, conversing, reading the newspaper and visiting the beach. Other works record the demolition and construction of building sites and the changing face of Melbourne, both in society and the urban landscape.”
Text from the exhibition flyer
“In these eloquent studies of light and shadow, Strizic finds beauty in the commonplace – Melbourne’s desolate lanes, street paving, derelict ferries – adopting interesting camera angles, viewpoints and cropping. Through his images, this visual humanist teaches us to observe, to see our surroundings, perhaps with the intention of stimulating us to a higher level of civilisation.”
Emma Matthews. Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern. Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria, September, 2009.
“This magnificent collection of photographs arose from the creativity of a young photographer and his adoption of his new home town, Melbourne. His pictures were taken at a time when the Victorian elegance of the city once known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was being punctuated by a wave of development and the modern architectural movement. Today Mark Strizic is renowned as a photographer. In the 1950s he was a young science student from Europe playing with the possibilities of the camera. As he gained work as a professional his commercial success was accompanied by the instincts and eye of an artist. His solid technicality was accompanied by the whimsy and wit that made him the ‘poet of the fleeting movement’. The versatility of his work shows us many aspects of Melbourne – its magnificent architectural heritage, its intimate and vibrant laneways, its grand arcades counter-posed against the sudden spaces of the wrecker, the brash intrusion of the glass and concrete skyscrapers, the poignancy of poverty in the rundown inner suburbs. We see the people, on grand occasions such as the 1954 Royal Visit, or just caught in their own world of travelling, shopping, resting, walking, working.”
Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern book cover
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) From Princes Bridge 1958, printed 2006 Silver gelatin photograph 58 x 39cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Near Spencer Street – 1 1950 Silver gelatin photograph 27.5 x 38.5cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) At St. Pauls (St Paul’s Cathedral steps) 1954, printed 1999 Silver gelatin photograph 17.8 × 24.5cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) St Paul’s Cathedral steps 1954, printed 1999 Silver gelatin photograph 17.8 × 24.5cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Collins Street at Russell Street 1957, printed 1997 Unique silver gelatin photograph 39 x 56cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) St Georges Road, Northcote at Summer Av. 1958, printed 1998 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) St. Patrick’s Cathedral January 1967, printed 1998 Unique silver gelatin photograph 27 x 41cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Bourke Street from the Parliament – 2 1967, printed 1998 Silver gelatin photograph 38 x 27cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Russell Street Pawn Shop 1958 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Block Arcade 1967, printed February 2008 Unique silver gelatin photograph 53.5 x 37cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) From Princes Bridge (Winter moorings from Princes Bridge) 1955, printed 2006 Silver gelatin photograph 58 x 39cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Flinders Lane 1967, printed 1998 Unique silver gelatin photograph 41 x 41cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Swan Street, Richmond, at Church Street 1963 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Queensberry Street at Errol Street, North Melbourne 1963 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Swan Street at Church Street 1963, printed 1998 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Coates Building 1960, printed 1961 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 23.5 x 15cm
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) Macphersons Building – 1 1958 Silver gelatin photograph
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) On Princes Bridge 1959, printed 1996 Silver gelatin photograph 17 x 24cm
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [14]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg14-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [14]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [5]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg5-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [5]' 2009 from the exhibition 'Desire' paintings and video by Judith Wright at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, May - June, 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [7]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg7-xlg2.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'Desire [7]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-desiresgg16-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) Desire [16]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [2]' 2009](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-the_gift2-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [2]' 2009")
![Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [7]' 2008](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wright-the_gift7-xlg.jpg "Judith Wright (Australian, b. 1945) 'The Gift [7]' 2008")
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