Natasha Dusenjko (Australian) Towers of Babel 2009 Mixed media
Three very interesting exhibitions at Craft Victoria at the moment: Babel by Natasha Dusenjko, Gleaning Potential by Simon Lloyd and Cycle by Liz Low. I particularly liked the delicacy and textuality of Natasha Dusenjko’s sci-fi towers and bone fragments and the wonderful box of 6 red bricks (small and large) that you can buy from the Simon Lloyd show, like blocks for a child builder.
There is an excellent and erudite review of the exhibitions at Daniel Neville’s Nevolution website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Craft Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The two tables allow for different meanings and scales when viewed in opposition. Table 1 alludes to star charts; constellations of texts hinting at importance, especially in relation to the placement of towers. The map looking up to the stars via the towers of babel, communicating unknown messages to the stars above. The cold stark forms of the towers work well with the organic forms of the bones on Table 2. Perfectly ordered and numbered archaeological bone fragments repeat the textual ciphers and codes, meticulously ordered. The jump in scale between the architectural and the archaeological is lovely; each hinting at an underlying language and mythology. Meanwhile both contain elements of each other – the towers of rationality have been placed in a seemingly random manner, while the organic forms of the bones have been laid out in perfect order ranging down in sizes.”
Daniel Neville. Extract from “On the nature of language, order and decay,” on the Nevolution website June 03, 2009 [Online] Cited 05/06/2009
Installation views of Natasha Dusenjko’s exhibition Babel at Craft Victoria, Melbourne
Babel is a word-based collection of fine porcelain and paper works. This collection of short texts constitutes a series of incantations, codes and instructions scrolled around porcelain bones or thin spines. The porcelain bones are internal structures and vessels of ancestor memory. This memory is fluid, is evasive, is aquatic. The thin spines resemble futuristic Towers of Babel reaching into space, anticipating communication and new frontiers. These towers have either an upright or collapsed form.
In the making, both forms build toward new possibility, words become obscured, resulting in a non-defined beginning or end, now replaced by chance permutations of the accumulated text.
The sculptural works are deliberately placed onto two large scale text based charts. Each chart is placed on a raised surface, analogous to work benches in an observatory or laboratory suggesting a process of decipherment. Map 1 exhibits a similarity to ancient star charts, the placement of towers alluding to significant points of a constellation. The accompanying Chart 2 resembles an organised series of archeological artefacts, each piece methodically numbered and labelled.
Ultimately, Babel evokes a spiral passage both outward and inward. To unravel the scrolls initiates a return to the spine – the axis mundi, the source of a universal native tongue – love.
Text from the Craft Victoria website [Online] 05/06/2009. No longer available online
Natasha Dusenjko (Australian) Babelbones 2009 Mixed media
Craft Victoria Watson Place, off Flinders Lane Victoria 3000 Phone: 03 9650 7775
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Darwin 2009
The final exhibition of the afternoon were the ephemeral images of John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne. This was an enthralling show that I enjoyed tremendously. Beard draws in a multitude of cultural sources for his paintings often referencing painters, scientists, animals and evolution. His work has an intimate sense of knowing, a meditative mediation on the essence of the object being painted, the very presence of the thing itself. The marks on the canvas may be intuitive but it is an informed intuition that results in works that hover at the edge of consciousness. As much as the works are after images, or ghost images, they are also about the persistence of vision, the persistence of the artists vision in addressing issues of collective memory and cultural history that draw emotive responses from the viewer.
These images may be ‘on the verge of disappearance’ as an after-image but they are also pre-images as well, conjured from the mind of the artist and layered with complexity, presence and holistic wholeness. Their seduction, if I may use that word, is that they draw from the viewer peripheral memories and emotions that flit at the edges of consciousness. As Portugese curator Isabel Carlos has noted, “… Beard recreates a ‘figural’ space where the essence of the thing represented lies beyond its singular physical evidence.”1
Beard’s fragmented surfaces form a rhizomic web of dissolved pixellation, their structure almost fractal like in their linked hyper-real intimacies. These in between spaces open up the possibility of subversive commentaries that, on one level, bring a sense of disquiet to the holistic presence of the work. As Mark Poster has noted of the work of Deleuze and Guittari and which can be aptly applied to the work of John Beard,
“Deleuze and Guittari configure the social as a complex of bodily intensities in a state of continuous nonlinear movement. The logic they present is multidimensional, shifting, discontinuous. They speak of strata, assemblages, territorializations, lines of flight, abstract machines, a congerie of terms that disrupts the function of concepts to control a field through discursive articulations. Their categories cut through the normal lines of comprehension, the binary logic that governs modern social theory to present a picture of reality from the perspective of a sort of primitive life force. It is as if the earth itself were to describe the changes on its surface in the course of human history, a vantage point quite remote from the ego of the individual or from the disciplined consciousness of the social scientist.”2
Nonlinear, logical, shifting territorializations in multidimensional environments that hover below the edge of consciousness, investigations into the binary of presence / absence in the dreams of the imaginary. Powerful and poetic these works irradiate the viewer with their visceral presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isabel Carlos quoted in Wright, William. HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008. Catalogue essay
2/ Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 135-137
Many thankx to John Buckley Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Gorilla 2007
Installation view of John Beard’s exhibition After image at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Hand 6 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Head SP3 2004
“Beard’s paintings often convey an overpowering sense of brooding stillness, but equally this volatile effervescence of light-reverberant phenomena, where head, headland, the Adraga rock, are no longer object so much as apparition, a painted parallel existence, a material presence invoking nature’s own organic processes …
There is a distinctive sense when encountering a body of John Beard’s works of entering into a site of composure, withheld, of images silently bespeaking truths both personal and historical; hovering presences each conveying some species quality of time-less recognition.”
William Wright 
from the catalogue essay HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008 [Online] Cited 29/05/2009. No longer available online
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rose 2007
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Einstein 2 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rembrandt 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Fifty-Fifty 2009
The next show on our marvellous walkabout were the eclectic paintings of McLean Edwards at Karen Wodbury Gallery, Melbourne. Continuing the carnivalesque theme from the previous review these heterogeneous paintings are a knockout with their wonderful, layered presence – they really command the viewer to look at them and celebrate the characters within them. Whimsical, ironic and full of humour these phantasmagorical images of creatures cast adrift with the night sky as background are fabulous assemblages of colour, form and storytelling.
Further to the evidences noted in the text on the website (the coils, the curling smoke, the starry night sky) one can also say other things about the paintings. There is an effervescence of colour within the blocking of clothing areas. There is the disproportionate size of the hands and bulbous noses of the characters, the shortening of the feet so that the figures almost become caricatures – but hold back from this through the mastery of the painting, through the intent of the artist. There is the symbology of other elements within the pictures: a doll with pins stuck in it’s body being clasped in a clumpy hand, a small house protruding over the protagonists shoulder (Fifty-Fifty); beetles on tree stumps with human faces (Hey, Bastard, Hey); and flowers, teapots and small humans appearing from around the edges of the larger characters in several of the works (Julia 1 and Night Nurse #2 for example). The numbers in the paintings were also puzzling but it turns out that they represent the age of the artist when he painted the works.
Finally one must acknowledge the carnivalesque in the paintings – their fun at playing dress-ups, the almost Alice in Wonderland fantasy and humour of the characterisations. There is an almost androgynous feeling to these characters as some of the female faces seem almost male. Personally I had a feeling that the artist is investigating the subconscious of Carl Jung’s ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ – the feminine inner personality of the male (anima) and the masculine inner personality of the female (animus). These states are manifested by appearing as figures in dreams and so they seem here: the anima or animus vies for attention by projecting itself onto others, here projecting itself outwards onto the painted surface.
My friend and I really enjoyed this exhibition. We were captivated by these songs, going back to the work again and again to tease out the details, to feel connection to the work. These are not lonely isolated figures but sublime emanations of inner states of being expertly rendered in glorious colour. And they made us laugh – what more could you ask for!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Karen Woodbury Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of McLean Edwards: Songs from the Ghost Ship at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Venus 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Hey, Bastard, Hey 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Restoration 2009
“McLean’s works are theatrical, comical, eccentric and often political with the employment of symbolic imagery. His painting technique involves a painterly layering to create a defined and textured surface.
In this most recent series, Songs from the Ghost Ship, semi-fictional characters are set against the dark starry night sky. The exhibition includes nine oil paintings in addition to four works on paper. One of the works on paper shares its name with the exhibition, depicting a jumpered man with a white ghost looking over his shoulder.
The ink on paper work introduces a theme prominent throughout the exhibition, that of wafting smoke. Emanating either from a clasped cigarette or an iconic green curled mosquito coil, the smoke, in elegant strokes of white, grey, tan or black, draw the eye to the face of the central figures. The figures, often with the light of the moon or stars behind them only partially illuminating their faces, stare into the distance or coyly at the viewer, almost unaware of their solitary state against the night sky. The coil appears elsewhere, surreptitiously working its way into the dark pink weave of Twiggy’s jacket, or the blue and red dress of Venus, in the tyre marks of the Arctic Traveller or the grassy landscape in Hey, Bastard, Hey. The soft curl and filigree detail of both the smoke and the mosquito coil are similarly echoed by elements in other works, through the organic features of flowers, leaves and bugs.
Adrift at night, these haunting figures are about to embark on a journey, either from the wharf at the edge of an ocean, as in Venus, or across the vast ice of the Arctic, through the mist and smoke.”
Text from the Karen Woodbury website [Online] Cited 28/05/2009. No longer available online
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) For Elsa (Twiggy) 2009
McLean Edwards (Australian, b. 1972) Night Nurse #2 2009
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
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
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
![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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