Exhibition dates: 29th October – 6th December 2009
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Australian, 1910-1996) My Country 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
“One can theorise about beauty all day, but words are weak and at day’s end one will go out into the blue and golden and multifarious world, and one will know with the responsive heart, before there is time for words, what is and isn’t beautiful.”
Leo Rubinfien1
There are certain existential experiences in art one will always remember:
~ The maelstrom of convulsive colours in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner at the Tate in London
~ Being alone in a gallery at the Louvre with six self-portraits by Rembrandt and embracing their inner humanity
Added to this list would be my experience of this exhibition of paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
It was a privilege to spend time alone with the work, just wandering around the gallery that is situated in an industrial estate in Port Melbourne. It is difficult for me to describe the experience such was the connection I had with the work, with the earth. I am emotional even writing about it. Standing in front of these paintings all pretensions of existence, all trappings of society, dissolve in colour, in presence.
I am a naturalised Australian having been born in England; I have never been to the far desert. This does not matter. What I felt, what I experienced was a connection to the land, to the stories that Emily has told in these paintings. We all come from the earth and return to it.
The paintings were painted horizontally (like the painter Jackson Pollock who intuitively accessed the spiritual realm) and evidence a horizontal consciousness not a hierarchical one. Knowledge is not privileged over wisdom. There is a balance between knowledge and wisdom – the knowledge gained through a life well lived and the wisdom of ancient stories that represent the intimacy of living on this world. The patterns and diversities of life compliment each other, are in balance.
Wisdom comes from the Indo-European root verb weid, “to see,” the same root from which words like vision come.2 In this sense these are “Vedic” paintings in that they are ancient, sacred teachings, Veda meaning literally “I have seen.”
On this day I saw. I felt.
Rarely do I have such an emotional reaction to art. When it does happen it washes over me, it cleanses my soul and releases pent up emotions – about life, about mortality, about being.
As Cafe del Mar in one of their songs, “The Messenger” sing:
“We, We got the feeling of Mystery, We got the touch of humanity, I know, we can’t live forever.”
Go and be touched.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Rubinfien, Leo. “Perfect Uncertainty: Robert Adams and the American West, (2002)” on Americansuburb X: Theory. [Online] Cited 22/11/2009 no longer available online
2/ Doczi, Gyorgy. The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture. Colorado: Shambala Publications, 1981, p. 127
Thank you to Leanne Collier and DACOU Aboriginal Art for allowing me to reproduce the three large photographs of two Wildflower paintings and one My Country painting.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Australian, 1910-1996) My Country 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Australian, 1910-1996) My Country 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Australian, 1910-1996) My Country 1996 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Emily Kame Kngwarreye is Australia’s most important and famous female artist. Hailed as a modernist ‘genius’, she has been compared to Rothko and de Kooning. An Anmatyerre elder from Utopia in the remote central desert region of the Northern Territory, Emily first took up painting on canvas in her late 70’s. She quickly became one of the leaders in the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, transforming her style several times during her short career of eight years. Today she is known as one of the greatest abstract painters of the 20th century.
This important exhibition of over 80 pieces covering all significant series and periods of Emily Kngwarreye’s artistic career is the first commercial retrospective exhibition to be held since she passed away in 1996. It gives the public an outstanding chance to view and purchase works in each of her styles. DACOU has retained numerous magnificent pieces over the years that will be included in this exhibition, such as rarely seen works from Emily’s Ochre Series, created with ochre and charcoal she collected from her country. On show will be the sister painting to the famous Earth’s Creation (also titled Earth’s Creation, 1994, 4 panels, 211 x 596cm) and just as splendid in colour and style.
Text from the DACOU Aboriginal Art website [Online] Cited 27/11/2009 no longer available online
Inspired by her cultural life as an Anmatyerre elder Emily produced over 3000 paintings over the course of her short eight-year painting career. Her lifelong custodianship of the women’s Dreaming sites of her clan country and in particular her yam Dreaming is the driving force behind her work (Kame meaning yam seed). Her work displays an instinct created by decades of making art for private purposes, drawing in soft earth and ritual body painting. Strong lineal structures whereupon individual dots overlap lines and appearing within others trace the appearance of seeds, plants and tracks on her country.
Text from the University of Canberra website [Online] Cited 11/05/2019
Exhibition dates: 12th November – 6th December 2009
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
These are terrific – I want one!
A big thank you to Alex for allowing me to reproduce the images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
Glowlab is pleased to present The Eventuality of Daybreak, a solo exhibition by Alex Lukas featuring a new series of post-apocalyptic urban landscapes that blur the visual boundaries of fiction and reality.
Lukas’ work explores the existence of disaster, be it realised or fictitious, in contemporary society. Hyper-realistic motion pictures and unforgiving news footage depict seemingly identical – and equally riveting – facades of tragedy. The artist recognises that relentless visual bombardment has resulted in society’s desensitisation to the aesthetics of destruction.
For The Eventuality of Daybreak, Lukas has selected photographic spreads of well-known metropolises from vintage publications and uses them dually as canvas and unlikely subject. Through a deft handling of paint and carefully placed screen-printed passages, the artist pushes these ageing illustrations in futuristic contexts. Submerging these cities conceptually and physically, Lukas inundates images of American cities with layers of media representing cataclysmic floods and crippling overgrowth.
Also included in the exhibition are works on paper depicting near-future scenes of devastated landscapes – crumbling infrastructure, overturned trucks and telling signs of human despair. As a counterpoint to the underwater cities, these darkly atmospheric and barren vistas signal devastation through an unsettling sense of absence.
Lukas’ intentional use of dated imagery presented in tandem with contemporary situations forces the viewer to reconcile two differing ideologies of urban space. The artist’s work calls into question society’s collective acceptance of the urban environment as an arena of destruction, once thought unthinkable and now seemingly inevitable.
The Eventuality of Daybreak is Lukas’ first solo exhibition with Glowlab. Lukas’ work has also been exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Stockholm and Copenhagen as well as in the pages of Swindle Quarterly, Proximity Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The Drama and The New York Times Book Review. Lukas is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.
Press release on the Glowlab website [Online] Cited 20/11/2009 no longer available online
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
Alex Lukas (American, b. 1981) Untitled 2009 Acrylic and silk screen on two book pages
David Stephenson (Australian born America, b. 1955) Nave, Laon Cathedral, Laon, France 2006/2007
I remember many years ago, in the mid-1990’s, seeing the wonderful Domes of David Stephenson displayed in Flinders Lane in what is now fortfivedownstairs gallery. They were a revelation in this light filled space, row upon row of luminous domes seemingly lit from within, filled with the sense of the presence of divinity. On the opposite wall of the gallery were row upon row of photographs of Italian graves depicting the ceramic photographic markers of Italian dead – markers of the impermanence of life. The doubled death (the representation of identity on the grave, the momento mori of the photograph) slipped quietly into the earth while opposite the domes ascended into heaven through their numinous elevation. The contrast was sublime.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the latest exhibition Heavenly Vaults by David Stephenson at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond.
The problems start with the installation of the exhibition. As you walk into the gallery the 26 Cibachrome photographs are divided symmetrically down the axis of the gallery so that the prints reflect each other at both ends and each side of the gallery. It is like walking down the nave of a cathedral and observing the architectural restraint of the stained glass windows without their illumination. Instead of the punctum of light flooding through the stained glass windows, the varying of intensities, the equanimity of the square prints all exactly the same size, all reflecting the position of the other makes for a pedestrian installation. Some varying of the print size and placement would have added much life and movement to a static ensemble.
Another element that needed work were the prints themselves which, with a few notable exceptions, seemed remarkably dull and lifeless (unlike their digital reproductions which, paradoxically, seem to have more life!). They fail to adequately represent the aspirations of the vaults as they soar effortlessly overhead transposing the earth bound into the heaven sent. In the earlier work on the domes (which can be found in the book Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture) the symmetry of the mandala-like domes with their light-filled inner illumination worked well with the square format of the images making the photographs stand as equivalents for something else, other ineffable states of being.
“The power of the equivalent, so far as the expressive-creative photographer is concerned, lies in the fact that he can convey and evoke feelings about things and situations and events which for some reason or other are not or can not be photographed. The secret, the catch and the power lies in being able to use the forms and shapes of objects in front of the camera for their expressive-evocative qualities. Or to say this in another way, in practice Equivalency is the ability to use the visual world as the plastic material for the photographer’s expressive purposes. He may wish to employ the recording power of the medium, it is strong in photography, and document. Or he may wish to emphasize its transforming power, which is equally strong, and cause the subject to stand for something else too.”1
As Minor White further observes,
“When the image mirrors the man And the man mirrors the subject Something might take over”2
When the distance between object and image and image and viewer collapses then something else may be revealed: Spirit.
I found myself observing without engagement, looking without wonder or feeling – never a good sign!
The photographs of Domes and Vaults have served David Stephenson well for numerous years but the concept has become tired, the inspiration in need of refreshment through other avenues of exploration – both physical and spiritual.
Many thankx to Daniel and John Buckley Gallery for allowing me to reproduce the photographs from the exhibition. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
David Stephenson (Australian born America, b. 1955) Choir, Laon Cathedral, Laon, France 2006/2007
David Stephenson (Australian born America, b. 1955) St. Hugh’s Choir, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, England 2006/2007
Installation view of Heavenly Vaults by David Stephenson at John Buckley Gallery, Richmond Photo: Marcus Bunyan
David Stephenson (Australian born America 1955) Nave, Cathedral of St. Barbara, Kutná Hora, Czech Republic 2008/2009
David Stephenson (Australian born America 1955) Choir, Cathedral of St. Barbara, Kutná Hora, Czech Republic 2008/2009
“While the subject of my photographs has shifted… my art has remained essentially spiritual – furthermore than two decades I have been exploring a contemporary expression of the sublime – a transcendental experience of awe with the vast space and time of existence.”
David Stephenson
Internationally renowned photographer David Stephenson has dedicated his practice to capturing the sublime in nature and architecture. Fresh from a successful exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery in New York, Stephenson returns to John Buckley Gallery for his third highly anticipated exhibition Heavenly Vaults. The exhibition will feature 26 selected prints from his latest monograph published by Princeton Architectural Press; Heavenly Vaults: From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture. Shaun Lakin, Director of the Monash Gallery of Art, will launch the book and exhibition at the opening, November 7th.
Stephenson began to photograph Gothic vaults in Spain and Portugal in 2003, while completing the work for his Domes project, and his first monograph Visions of Heaven: the Dome in European Architecture. He began to focus on the Vaults project in 2006, photographing Gothic churches and cathedrals in England, Belgium and France. With the assistance of an Australia Council Artist Fellowship in 2008-2009, Stephenson completed extensive fieldwork for the Vaults project, intensively photographing Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany. The exhibition at John Buckley Gallery coincides with the launch of his second monograph, Heavenly Vaults: from Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
Even though the traditional systems the underpinned church architecture have lost their unequivocal power, David Stephenson’s photographs capture the resonance of those times. More importantly his work also suggest that the feelings of aspiration, transcendence, and infinity these buildings evoke in the viewer have an ongoing relevance beyond the religious setting and help us understand who and what we are.
Excerpt from Foreword, Heavenly Vaults, by Dr Isobel Crombie 2009
David Stephenson’s new book of photography is a love letter to the intricate, seemingly sui generis vaults of Europe’s Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and churches.
Press release from the John Buckley website [Online] Cited 11/11/2009 no longer available online
‘While the subject of my photographs has shifted from the landscapes of the American Southwest and Tasmania, and the minimal horizons of the Southern Ocean, and the icy wastes of Antarctica, to sacred architecture and the sky at both day and night, my art has remained essentially spiritual – for more than two decades I have been exploring a contemporary expression of the sublime – a transcendental experience of awe with the vast space and time of existence.’
David Stephenson 1998.1
With poetic symmetry the Domes series considers analogous ideas. It is a body of work which has been ongoing since 1993 and now numbers several hundred images of domes in countries including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, England, Germany and Russia. The typological character of the series reveals the shifting history in architectural design, geometry and space across cultures and time, demonstrating how humankind has continually sought meaning by building ornate structures which reference a sacred realm.2 Stephenson photographs the oculus – the eye in the centre of each cupola. Regardless of religion, time or place, this entry to the heavens – each with unique architectural and decorative surround – is presented as an immaculate and enduring image. Placed together, the photographs impart the infinite variations of a single obsession, while also charting the passage of history, and time immemorial.
1. Van Wyk, S. 1998. “Sublime space: photographs by David Stephenson 1989-1998,” National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne np 2. Hammond, V. 2005. “The dome in European architecture,” in Stephenson, D. 2005, Visions of heaven: the dome in European architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York p. 190
Atget, one of my all time favourite photographers; Paris, a city that stirs the heart – what more can one ask!
Many thankx to the Frist Museum of Art (formerly the Frist Center for the Visual Arts) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) French Can Can Dancers, Moulin Rouge 1931 Gelatin silver print
Andre Kertesz (Hungary, 1894-1985) Eiffel Tower, Paris 1929 Gelatin silver print
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts [now the Frist Museum of Art] will present Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris, opening Sept. 10, 2009, in the Upper-Level Galleries. The show, which offers a unique perspective on Surrealism by examining the intersection of documentary photography, manipulated photography and film, will be on exhibition through Jan. 3, 2010, when it will travel to the International Center of Photography in New York followed by the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga.
Guest Curator Therese Lichtenstein, Ph.D., New York-based art historian and photography scholar, has organised the exhibition, working with Frist Center Curator Katie Delmez.
The exhibition of more than 150 works, which features a preponderance of photographs but also includes films, books and period ephemera, explores the city of Paris as the literal and metaphoric base of Surrealism in the wake of the World War I. It was believed by the Surrealists that unconscious dreams, chance encounters and actions and automatism freed “pure thought,“ from all constraints imposed by conscious thought, reason or morals.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Frist Center will partner with Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre and Vanderbilt University’s International Lens and the school’s French and film departments to present a Surrealism film series which will include the classic Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalà and several other rarely screened period films.
As Dr Lichtenstein writes, “The images in Twilight Visions form a collection of views of various urban spaces, filled with cultural artefacts. The viewer is invited to slowly contemplate the city – its architecture, its monuments, its public spaces and its denizens – as an ephemeral ruin, at once both of the past and the present.”
The Exhibition
Twilight Visions comprises five sections: images of the city at night and in the day, the transformation of well-known public monuments, the influence of Eugène Atget on the Surrealists; Parisian nightlife after hours and surreal figures.
Section three, entitled “Looking at Atget”, examines the powerful work of Eugène Atget, a photographer who was “discovered“ in the 1920s by Man Ray. Following a stint as a sailor, a brief career as an actor and an attempt at becoming a painter, he turned to photography. Working quietly and modestly, Atget documented the loss of “old“ Parisian culture after the turn of the 20th century. But in so doing, his “poetry of the everyday“ also became a personal expression of nostalgia for the world that was disappearing before his lens. His work was straightforward yet magical. Works include Pont Neuf (1902-1903), The Wine Seller, 15 Rue Boyer (c. 1910) and Boulevard de Strasbourg (1926) (see photographs above).
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) The Wine Seller, 15 Rue Boyer 1910-1911 Gelatin-silver print (printed by Berenice Abbott) Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Boulevard de Strasbourg 1926 Albumen print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue du Figuier 1924 Albumen print 9 x 7 in. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. by Exchange, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Pont-Neuf 1902-03 Albumen print 8 7/8 x 7″ (22.6 x 17.8cm)
Andre Kertesz (Hungary, 1894-1985) Distortion 144, Paris 1933 Gelatin silver print
Andre Kertesz (Hungary, 1894-1985) Distortion 147, Paris 1933 Gelatin silver print
The Distortions were made with a glass plate view camera and Kertesz used two particular female models for the series, Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine. Kertesz began this surrealist experimentation with mirrors in the late 1920’s with most of the exhibited images being attributed to 1932-33. The series was first exhibited in Paris in 1932 causing a sensation that helped catapult Kertesz to international fame in the art world. In 1936 they were exhibited in New York at the Museum Of Modern Art, again causing a furore. Kertesz had “fun house” mirrors installed in his studio to experiment and create the landmark series.
By the 1960’s the entire series of original glass plate negatives was thought to be permanently lost due to deterioration and oxidation. In the early 1970’s a highly trained restoration specialist was employed to salvage these innovative pieces of art history. Using a newly discovered technique for removing oxidation, he meticulously and painstakingly laboured on the plates until this masterpiece collection was perfectly restored to its original beauty…
Andre Kertesz (Hungary, 1894-1985) Distortion 38, Paris 1933 Gelatin silver print
Andre Kertesz (Hungary, 1894-1985) Distortion 40, Paris 1933 Gelatin silver print
Frist Art Museum 919 Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee, 37203
Exhibition dates: 22nd October – 21st November 2009
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) The Strength of one Hand (With Canadian Mountain Goat) 2009 Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, Canadian Mountain Goat
We are the clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly! – yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost forever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest. – A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise. – One wandering thought pollutes the day; We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep; Embrace fond foe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same! – For, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free: Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
Mutability by Percy Bysshe Shelley
When human imagination takes flight, as it does in this exhibition, the results are superlative. Piccinini is at the height of her powers as an artist, in full control of the conceptual ideas, their presentation and the effect that they have on the viewer. Witty, funny, thought-provoking and at times a little scary Piccinini’s exhibition (paradoxically entitled Unforced Intimacies) is an act of revelatio: the pulling aside of the genetic curtain to see what lies beneath.
Featuring hyperrealist genetically modified creatures and human child figures Piccinini’s sculptures, drawings and video seem passionately alive in their verisimilitude (unlike Ricky Swallow’s resplendently dead relics at the NGV). In The Strength of one Hand (With Canadian Mountain Goat), the title perhaps a play on the traditional Zen koan The Sound of One Hand Clapping, a meditation on the nature of inner compassion, a walrus-child balances on one hand on the back of a Canadian Mountain Goat. The walrus-child has extended eyes, a voluminous lower lip with whiskers under the nose; the hyperreality of the hand on the back of the goat makes it seem like the hand will come alive! A mane of hair flows down the walrus-child’s back to feet that are conjoined – like an articulated merman – ending not in flippers but in toes complete with dirty, cracked and broken nails. Here the natural athleticism of the mountain goat, now dead and stuffed, is surmounted by the mutated walrus-child’s natural athleticism, poignantly suspended like an exclamation mark above the in-animate pommel horse.
In Balasana (The Child’s Pose) a child reposes in the yoga position on a tribal rug. Balanced on top of the child is a stuffed Red-necked Wallaby that perfectly inverts the concave of the child’s back, it’s front feet curled over while it’s rear feet are splayed. The luminosity of the skin of the child is incredible – such a technical feat to achieve this realism – that you are drawn to intimately examine the child’s face and hands. The purpose of The Child’s Pose in yoga is that it literally reminds us of our time as an infant and revives in us rather vivid memories of lying in this position. It also reminds us to cultivate our inner innocence so that we in turn may see the world without judgement or criticism. The paradoxes of the ‘unforced’ intimacy between the child and the wallaby can be read with this conceptualisation ‘in mind’.
With The Bottom Feeder (2009) Piccinini’s imagination soars to new heights. With the shoulders of a human, the legs and forearms of what seems like a marsupial, the lowered head of a newt with intense staring blue eye (see photograph above), luminescent freckled skin covered in hair and a rear end that consists of both male and female genitalia that forms a ‘face’, the hermaphroditic bottom feeder is a frighteningly surreal visage. Inevitably the viewer is drawn to the exposed rump through a seemingly unforced interactivity, examining the folds and flaps of the labia and the hanging scrotum of this succulent feeder. Here Piccinini draws on psychoanalysis and Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage in a child’s development – where the child wants to merge with the mother to erase the self / other split by fulfilling the mother’s desire by having sex with her – thus erasing the mother’s lack, the idea of lack represented by the lack of a penis.1
As Jean Baudrillard notes of the mass of bodies on Brazil’s Copacabana beach, “Thousands of bodies everywhere. In fact, just one body, a single immense ramified mass of flesh, all sexes merged. A single, shameless expanded human polyp, a single organism, in which all collude like the sperm in seminal fluid … The sexual act is permanent, but not in the sense of Nordic eroticism: it is the epidermal promiscuity, the confusion of bodies, lips, buttocks, hips – a single fractal entity disseminated beneath the membrane of the sun.”2
An so it is here, all sexes merged within the anthropomorphised body of The Bottom Feeder, a body that challenges and subverts human perceptions of the form and sexuality of animals (including ourselves) that inhabit the world.
In Doubting Thomas (2008), my favourite piece in the exhibition, a skeptical child with pale and luminous skin is about to put his hand inside the mouth of a genetically modified mole like creature that has reared it’s hairy snout to reveal a luscious, fluid-filled mouth replete with suckers and teeth. You want to shout ‘No, don’t go there!’ as the child’s absent mother has probably already warned him – to no avail. Children only learn through experience, I suspect in this case a nasty one.
The terrains the Piccinini interrogates (nature and artifice, biogenetics, cloning, stem cell research, consumer culture) are a rematerialisation of the actual world through morphological ‘mapping’ onto the genomes of the future. Morphogenetic fields3 seem to surround the work with an intense aura; surrounded by this aura the animals and children become more spiritual in their silence. Experiencing this new world promotes an evolution in the way in which we conceive the future possibilities of life on this earth, this brave but mutably surreal new world.
This is truly one of the best exhibitions of the year in Melbourne.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Klages, M. Jacques Lacan. Boulder: University of Colorado, 2001 [Online] Cited 09/10/2009 no longer available online
2/ Baudrillard, Jean. Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995. London: Verso, 1997, p. 74
3/ “A morphogenetic field is a group of cells able to respond to discrete, localised biochemical signals leading to the development of specific morphological structures or organs.” Morphogenetic field definition on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 05/05/2019
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) The Strength of one Hand (With Canadian Mountain Goat) 2009 Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, Canadian Mountain Goat
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) The Strength of one Hand (With Canadian Mountain Goat) (detail) 2009 Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, Canadian Mountain Goat
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) The Bottom Feeder 2009 Silicone, fibreglass, steel, fox fur
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) The Bottom Feeder (detail) 2009 Silicone, fibreglass, steel, fox fur
Exploring concepts of what is “natural” in the digital age, Patricia Piccinini brings a deeply personal perspective to her work.
Rachel Kent notes: “Since the early 1990s, Piccinini has pursued an interest in the human form and its potential for manipulation and enhancement through bio-technical intervention. From the mapping of the human genome to the growth of human tissue and organs from stem cells, Piccinini’s art charts a terrain in which scientific progress and ethical questions are intertwined.”
Text from the Tolarno Galleries website [Online] Cited 05/05/2019 no longer available online
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas 2008 Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, chair
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas (detail) 2008
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Doubting Thomas (detail) 2008
“Time and again my work returns to children, and their ambiguous relationships with the (only just) imaginary animals that I create. Children embody a number of the key issues in my work. Obviously they directly express the idea of genetics – both natural and artificial – but beyond that they also imply the responsibilities that a creator has to their creations. The innocence and vulnerability of children is powerfully emotive and evokes empathy – their presence softens the hardness of some of the more difficult ideas, but it can also elevate the anxiety level.”
Patricia Piccinini quoted on the Kaldor Public Art Projects website [Online] Cited 05/11/2009 no longer available online
“I am interested in the way that contemporary biotechnology and even philosophy erode the traditional boundaries between the artificial and the natural, as well as between species and even the basic distinctions between animal and human.”
Patricia Piccinini quoted in Sarah Hetherington. “Patricia Piccinini: Related Individuals,” on the Artlink website [Online] Cited 05/05/2019. No longer available online
Patricia Piccinini (Australian, b. 1965) Balasana Silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, Red-necked Wallaby, rug 2009
Exhibition dates: 20th October – 14th November 2009
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Rabinova 2009 Oil on linen 82 x 76cm
“I am interested in this border between the real and the imagined, the constructed and the natural.”
Vera Möller quoted in “Artist earns her stripes” on The Age newspaper website May 28, 2005 [Online] Cited 23/06/2022
There is a lot of mutability floating around current exhibitions in Melbourne at the moment. At the National Gallery of Victoria we have the deathly, eloquent freeze frame mutability of Ricky Swallow; at Tolarno Galleries we have the genetic hyper-realist mutability of Patricia Piccinini; and at Sophie Gannon Gallery we have the surreal, spatial mutability of Vera Möller.
In this exhibition the real meets the imagined and the constructed encounters the natural in delicate sculptures and beautiful paintings. Coral snake and mutated striped hydras float above Phillip Huntersque backgrounds, looking oh so innocent until one remembers that hydras are predatory animals: the stripes, like the strips of a prisoners uniform not so innocent after all.
These ‘portraits’ (for that is what they strike me as) emerge from the recesses of the subconscious, rising up like some absurd alien fish from the deep. The sculptural forests of mutated specimens waft on the breeze of the ocean current. This detritus of biotechnology, living in the dark and the shadow, emerges into the light and space of the gallery – genetic recombinations in which a strands of genetic material are broken and then joined to another DNA molecule. In Möller’s work this chromosomal crossover has led to offspring (called ‘recombinants’) that dance to a surrealist tune: genetic algorithms that use mutation to maintain genetic diversity from one generation of chromosomes to the next.1
Spatially there is a lightness of touch and a beauty to their representation that brings the work alive within the gallery space. However, Möller’s recombinants are as deadly as they are beautiful. I really liked these creatures narcoleptic shadow dances.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Definition of mutation (genetic algorithm) in Wikipedia.
Many thankx to Sophie Gannon Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Martinette (installation view) 2009 Modelling material, acrylic and enamel paint, MDF, perspex cove
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Veronium 2007 Oil on canvas 167 x 199cm
Vera Möller(Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Shapinette 2009 Oil on linen 101 x 101cm
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Telenium 2009 Oil on linen 165 x 135cm
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Rubella 2008-2009
Vera Möller(Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Bureniana (installation view) 2008 Modelling material, acrylic and enamel paint, MDF, perspex cover 60 x 61 x 61cm
Installation photographs of Nocturnalians and Shadow Eaters by Vera Möller at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Interested in the boundaries between the real and the imagined, Vera Möller creates paintings and sculptures by placing fictional hybrid plants in existing terrains. Bright colours and patterns, coral-like and succulent-plant forms and toadstool shapes describe her depictions of dreamt-up specimens that evoke the natural world. Möller’s ‘fantasy specimens’ demonstrate the way in which her science background and art practice have steadily converged.
After training as a biologist in Germany, Möller migrated to Australia in 1986. She later completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and a PhD at Monash University. Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Japan, Finland, France, Germany and the UK, as well as throughout Australia.
Text from the Sophie Gannon Gallery website [Online] Cited 03/05/2019
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Benthinium 2008-2009 Oil on linen 140 x 220cm
Vera Möller (Australian, b. 1955 Germany arrived Australia 1986) Tokyana 2009 Oil on linen 137 x 107cm
Sophie Gannon Gallery 2, Albert Street, Richmond, Melbourne
Max Pam (born Australia 1949, lived in Brunei 1980-1983) Road from Bamiyan 1971 Gelatin silver photograph 20.1 x 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1979
Long Distance Vision is a disappointingly wane exploration of travel photography at NGV Australia. With the exception of the work of Max Pam the exhibition lacks insight into the phenomena that the curators want the work to philosophically investigate: namely how photographs shape our expectations of a place (even before we arrive) and how photographs also serve to confirm our experience – the picture as powerful mnemonic tool.
Firstly a quick story: when travelling in America to study at the Kinsey Institute I boarded a train from Chicago to what I thought was Bloomington, Indiana only to arrive many hours later at Bloomington, Illinois. Unbeknownst to me this Bloomington also had a motel of the same name as I was staying at in Indiana! After much confusion I ended up at the local airport trying to catch a single seater aircraft to Bloomington, Indiana with no luck – at the end of my tether, fearful in a foreign country, in tears because I just had to be at this appointment the next morning. Riding to my rescue was a nineteen year old kid with no shoes, driving an ex-cop car, who drove me across the Mid-West states stopping at petrol stops in the dead of night. It was a surreal experience, one that I will never forget for the rest of my life … fear, apprehension, alienation, happiness, joy and the sublime all rolled into one.
I tell this story to illustrate a point about travel – that you never know what is going to happen, what experiences you will have, even your final destination. To me, photographs of these adventures not only document this dislocation but step beyond pure representation to become art that re-presents the nature of our existence.
Matthew Sleeth‘s street photographs could be taken almost anywhere in the world (if it were not for a building with German writing on it). His snapshot aesthetic of caught moments, blinded people and dissected bodies in the observed landscape are evinced (to show in a clear manner; to prove beyond any reasonable doubt; to manifest; to make evident; to bring to light; to evidence – yes to bring to light, to evidence as photography does!) in mundane, dull, almost lifeless prints – ‘heavy’ photographs with a lack of shadow detail combined with a shallow depth of field. His remains, the people walking down the street and their shadow, are odd but as as The Age art critic Robert Nelson succinctly notes in his review of this exhibition, “To become art, the odd cannot remain merely quaint but has to signify an existential anomaly by implication.”1
If we look at the seminal photographs from the book The Americans by Robert Frank we see in their dislocated view of America a foreigners view of the country the artist was travelling across – a subjective view of America that reveals as much about the state of mind of the artist as the country he was exposing. No such exposition happens in the works of Matthew Sleeth.
Christine Godden‘s photographs of family and friends have little to do with travel photography and I struggle to understand their inclusion in this exhibition. Though they are reasonable enough photographs in their own right – small black and white photographs of small intimacies (at the beach, in the garden, at the kitchen table, on the phone, on the porch, on the float, etc…) Godden’s anthropomorphist bodies have nothing to do with a vision of a new land as she had been living in San Francisco, New York and Rochester for six years over the period that these photographs were taken. Enough said.
The highlight of the exhibition is the work of Max Pam. I remember going the National Gallery of Victoria in the late 1980s to view this series of work in the collection – and what a revelation they were then and remain so today. The square formatted, dark sepia toned silver gelatin prints of the people and landscapes of Tibet are both monumental and personal at one and the same time. You are drawn into their intimacies: the punctum of a boys feet; the gathering of families; camels running before a windstorm; human beings as specks in a vast landscape.
“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”2
The meditation on place and space that the artist has undertaken gives true insight into the connection of man and earth, coming closest to Alain de Botton’s understanding of the significance of sublime places. Through a vision of a distant land the photographs transport us in an emotional journey that furthers our understanding of the fragility of life both of the planet and of ourselves.
While the National Gallery of Victoria holds some excellent photography exhibitions (such as Andreas Gursky and Rennie Ellis for example) this was a missed opportunity. The interesting concept of the exhibition required a more rigorous investigation instead of such a cursory analysis (which can be evidenced by the catalogue ‘essay’: one page the size of a quarter of an A4 piece of paper that glosses over the whole history of travel photography in a few blithe sentences).
Inspiration could have easily been found in Alain de Botton’s excellent book The Art of Travel. Here we find chapters titled “On Anticipation”, “On Travelling Places”, “On the Exotic”, “On Curiosity”, “On the Country and the City” and “On the Sublime” to name but a few, with places and art work to illustrate the journey: what more is needed to excite the mind!
Take Charles Baudelaire for example. He travelled outside his native France only once and never ventured abroad again. Baudelaire still dreamt of going to Lisbon, or Java or to the Netherlands but “the destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away, to go, as he concluded, ‘Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of the world!'”3
Heavens, we don’t even have to leave home to create travel photography that is out of the world! Our far-sighted vision (like that of photographer Gregory Crewdson) can create psychological narratives of imaginative journeys played out for the camera.
Perhaps what was needed was a longer gestation period, further research into the theoretical nuances of travel photography (one a little death, a remembrance; both a dislocation in the non-linearity of time and space), a gathering of photographs from collections around Australia to better evidence the conceptual basis for the exhibition and a greater understanding of the irregular possibilities of travel photography – so that the work and words could truly reflect the title of the exhibition Long Distance Vision.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Nelson, Robert. “In blurred focus: le freak c’est chic,” in The Age newspaper. Friday, October 23rd 2009, p. 18
2/ de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, p. 178-179
“The National Gallery of Victoria will celebrate the work of Christine Godden, Max Pam and Matthew Sleeth in a new exhibition, Long Distance Vision: Three Australian Photographers opening 28 August.
Long Distance Vision will include over 60 photographs from the NGV Collection exploring the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ and its relationship with the three artists.
Susan van Wyk, Curator Photography, NGV said the exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the unusual perspective brought by the three photographers to their varied world travel destinations.
“There’s a sense in the works in the exhibition that the photographers are not from the places they choose to photograph, and that each is a visitor delighting in the scenes they encounter.
“What is notable about the photographs in Long Distance Vision is that rather than focussing on the well known scenes that each artist encountered, they have turned their attention to the ‘little things’, the details of the everyday,” said Ms van Wyk.
From the nineteenth century, photography has been a means by which people could discover the world, initially through personal collection and albums, and later via postcards, magazines, books and the internet.
Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director, NGV said that both contemporary photographers and tourists use the camera as a means to explore and capture the world.
“Through their photographs, the three artists featured in Long Distance Vision show us highly individual ways of seeing the world. This exhibition will surprise and delight visitors as our attention is drawn to not only what is different but what remains the same as we travel the world,” said Dr Vaughan.
Born in Melbourne in 1949, Max Pam began his career in various commercial photography studios in the 1960s. After responding to a university notice for assistance to drive a Volkswagen from Calcutta to London in 1969, Pam got his first taste of being a traveller. The body of Pam’s work in this exhibition is from the series The Himalayas, which was photographed over a number of early visits to India.
Christine Godden also travelled the popular overland route between Europe and India in the early 1970s, returning to Sydney in 1978. In 1972, after a period of travelling, Godden found her home in the US where she remained for six years. Godden’s photographs in this exhibition were taken between 1972 and 1974 during her stay in the US.
Born in Melbourne in 1972, Matthew Sleeth is another seasoned traveller. During the late 1990s, Sleeth settled in Opfikon, an outer suburb of Zurich, Switzerland. The series of photographs in Long Distance Vision were taken during this time, showing Sleeth’s interest not only in street photography, but also in the narrative possibilities in everyday scenes. Dotted with garishly coloured playhouses, naive sculptures and whimsical arrangements of garden gnomes Sleeth’s photographs go beyond the ‘picture-perfect’ scenes of typical tourist photography.
Long Distance Vision: Three Australian Photographers is on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square from 28 August 2009 to 21 February 2010.”
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria press release
Exhibition dates: 12th September – 8th November, 2009
Many thankx to the Morris Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Green Warehouse, Newbern, Alabama 1997 Dye coupler print
Widely recognised as a pioneer in the field of colour photography, William Christenberry has used this expressive medium to explore the American South for forty years. While pursuing this artistic quest he has drawn inspiration from Walker Evans, and influenced a generation of emerging photographers. William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005 surveys his poetic documentation of southern vernacular architecture, signage, and landscape using a wide range of cameras, from his earliest Brownie photographs of the early 1960s to his later work with a large-format camera. Combining never-before-seen photographs, both old and new, with images that are now iconic, this exhibition comprises fifty vintage photographic works and one sculpture. Together, they convey the breadth of his singular photographic vision. Discuss the artistic objectives of his long-term interpretation of the Southern landscape with Michelle Norris of National Public Radio, Christenberry explained: “What I really feel very strongly about, and I hope reflects in all aspects of my work, is the human touch, the humanness of things, the positive and sometimes the negative and sometimes the sad.”
Text from the Morris Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 15/10/2009. No longer available online
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) House and Car, near Akron, Alabama 1981
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Kudzu with Storm Cloud, near Akron, Alabama 1981
“William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005, a phenomenal retrospective exhibition of Christenberry’s photographs, opens to the public at the Morris Museum of Art on September 16, 2009. The Morris Museum is the only Georgia venue hosting this exhibition.
“‘William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005’ is an overview of the career of one of the South’s most important living artists,” said Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art. “Organised by the Aperture Foundation, this exhibition brings to Augusta a body of work like no other. No one has so scrupulously and attentively captured a sense of place and time in quite the way that Bill Christenberry has. He is a remarkable artist, as is proven by this extraordinary body of work. He is America’s Proust.”
Since the early 1960s, William Christenberry has plumbed the regional identity of the American South, focusing his attention primarily on his childhood home, Hale County, Alabama. Widely recognised as a pioneer in the field of colour photography, Christenberry draws inspiration from the work of Walker Evans, while paralleling the work of such international practitioners as Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ranging from his earliest Brownie photographs to his later work with a large-format camera, William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005 is a survey of the artist’s poetic documentation of the Southern landscape and vernacular architecture that surrounded him as he grew up. The exhibition, coupling never-before-seen photographs with images that are now iconic, reveals how the history, the very story of place, is at the heart of Christenberry’s ongoing project. While the focus of his work is the American South, it touches on universal themes related to family, culture, nature, spirituality, memory, and ageing. Christenberry photographs real things in the real world – ramshackle buildings, weathered commercial signs, lonely back roads, rusted-out cars, whitewashed churches, decorated graves. Dutifully returning to photograph the same locations annually – the green barn, the palmist building, the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others – he has fulfilled a personal ritual and documented the physical changes wrought by every single year. Straddling past and present, Christenberry’s art suggests the gravity and power of the passage of time.
The exhibition is accompanied by a stunning monograph entitled William Christenberry, published by Aperture in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The book, a comprehensive survey, presents all aspects of the artist’s oeuvre as he intended it to be viewed and considered. More than half the work reproduced has not been previously published.”
Text from the press release on the Morris Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 15/10/2009. No longer available online
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Sprott Church in Alabama 1971
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) T.B. Hick’s Store, Newbern, Alabama 1976
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama 1977
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) House and Car, near Akron, Alabama 1978
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Palmist Building, Havanna, Alabama 1980
The Palmist Building is one of the most iconic structures in Christenberry’s extensive body of work. When he was a child, the clapboard building was a general store operated by his great uncle, but it was later home to a palm reader. The inverted hand-painted sign that covers a broken window initially enticed him to photograph the building in 1961. His earliest photographs pinpoint the sign itself and the peeling whitewash around it. As he became more engrossed in the project, Christenberry carefully examined the relationship of the building to its surroundings, particularly the chinaberry tree that eventually engulfed it.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Rabbit Pen, near Moundville, Alabama 1998
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Old House, near Akron, Alabama 1964
Morris Museum of Art 1 Tenth Street Augusta, Georgia 30901 Phone: 706-724-7501
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.00pm Sunday: 12 – 5.00pm Closed Mondays and major holidays
Exhibition dates: 6th October – 31st October, 2009
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Brooch 2009 Silver, paint
Jewellery as art; is art
Brooches, objects
Robust/delicate
Holistic body of work
Affirmation of line and form
Simplicity/complexity of shapes
Span ______ (meta)physical
[Interior] exterior!
elemental | articulation
Volume ((( ))) form
&
arch-itecture
SPACE
√
beauty
……………………….
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallery Funaki for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Brooch 2009 Silver
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Brooch 2009 Silver
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Brooch 2009 Silver
“A spiritual and private space. Ritual object, jewellery. Linear structures appear fragile and monumental to cradle the internal spirit. They appear to float in space, hovering, penetrating, a temporary existence. Nature is the reference, and the geometry of nature and architecture inform this world.”
Carlier Makigawa
Carlier Makigawa explores the parameters of small spaces in her new exhibition October 2009. Her spare, exacting constructions in silver wire have a monumentality that defies their scale and delicacy. Her new work consists of brooches and objects which move beyond the botanical inspiration of her earlier work to engage with more abstract notions of movement, compression and spatial manipulation.
Text from the Gallery Funaki website [Online] Cited 01/05/2019 no longer available online
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Object 2009 Silver
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Object 2009 Silver
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Brooch 2009 Silver
Carlier Makigawa (Australian, b. 1952) Neckpiece 2009 Silver
Exhibition dates: 24th September – 14th November, 2009
Exhibition artists: Peter Bialobrzeski, Stephane Couturier, DoDo Jin Ming, Toshio Shibata
Many thankx to Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
DoDo Jin Ming (Chinese, b. 1955) Behind My Eyes 2nd Movement, Plate I 2002
DoDo Jin Ming (Chinese, b. 1955) Behind My Eyes 2nd Movement, Plate VIII 2003
DoDo Jin Ming (Chinese, b. 1955) Free Element, Plate XXX 2002
Laurence Miller is pleased to present, as its opening show for the fall, The Abstracted Landscape, featuring the work of four midcareer international artists: Peter Bialobrzeski, from Hamburg; Stephane Couturier, from Paris; DoDo Jin Ming from Beijing and New York; and Toshio Shibata, from Tokyo.
Abstraction in the landscape has a rich tradition within the history of photography. Felix Teynard’s Egyptian views from the mid-1850’s are wonderfully abstract, as are those of J.B. Greene and August Salzmann. Timothy O’Sullivan, Carlton Watkins and William Henry Jackson each made views of the American west from the 1806’s through the 1880’s, that were equally rich in detail and minimal in composition. In the 20th century there are many examples, from George Seeley to Paul Strand, through Moholy Nagy and the Bauhaus to Edward Weston’s glorious sand dunes.
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website [Online] Cited 12/10/2009. No longer available online
Toshio Shibata (Japanese, b. 1949) Kashima Town, Fukushima Prefecture 1990
Toshio Shibata (Japanese, b. 1949) Grand Coulee Dam, Douglas County, WA 1996
Peter Bialobrzeski (German, b. 1961) Transition #33 from the series Lost in Transition 2005
Peter Bialobrzeski (German, b. 1961) Transition #20 from the series Lost in Transition 2005
Peter Bialobrzeski (German, b. 1961) Transition #23 from the series Lost in Transition 2005
Laurence Miller Gallery
Laurence Miller Gallery is now operating as a private dealer and consultant.
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