Review: ‘Mark Strizic: Melbourne – A City in Transition (Rare Silver Gelatin Photographs)’ at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 8th April – 2nd May, 2009

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) 'Eastern Market Destruction - 1' 1960 from the exhibition 'Mark Strizic: Melbourne – A City in Transition (Rare Silver Gelatin Photographs)' at Gallery 101, Melbourne, April - May, 2009

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Eastern Market Destruction – 1
1960, printed 1996
Silver gelatin photograph
19 x 22.5cm

Social Fact and Urban Vision

This is an exhibition by the veteran Australian photographer Mark Strizic that plays like the coda at the end of a piece of music, the pensive full stop at the end of a well read book. There are some stunning highlight photographs among the 139 black and white silver gelatin prints on display, some good photographs and some fairly mundane images and prints. With some judicious editing of the photographs (perhaps by a third), the exhibition could have had a stronger artistic aesthetic and carried the voice of the photographer with greater projection. As it is the exhibition will be popular drawing in the crowds because of the photographs subject matter and their appeal to both an individual and collective nostalgia.

Examining Strizic’s photographs we note a traditional structure to the picture plane. Unlike the photographs of Eugene Atget who photographed Paris in the early 20th century there is little sublime spatial representation in Strizics photographs, that different angle of alignment that Atget achieved with the positioning of his camera. Further, we observe that unlike an immigrant to another country at around the same time, Robert Frank and America, the photographs follow traditional format: none of the revolutionary experimentation in handheld, grainy images of jukeboxes, cut up people or images of flags appear in this work. We can also say that unlike Helen Levitt’s early black and white images of New York from around the same period there is little ‘joie de vivre’, little engagement with the actual nitty gritty stuff of living in Strizic’s work. The quote below articulates what Strizic’s photographs both address and dismiss:

“To walk in the city is to experience the disjuncture of partial vision/partial consciousness. The narrativity of this walking is belied by a simultaneity we know and yet cannot experience. As we turn a corner, our object disappears around the next corner. The sides of the street conspire against us; each attention suppresses a field of possibilities. The discourse of the city is a syncretic discourse, political in its untranslatability. Hence the language of the state elides. Unable to speak all the city’s languages, unable to speak all at once, the state’s language become monumental, the silence of headquarters, the silence of the bank. In this transcendent and anonymous silence is the miming of corporate relations. Between the night workers and the day workers lies the interface of light; in the rotating shift, the disembodiment of lived time. The walkers of the city travel at different speeds, their steps like handwriting of a personal mobility. In the milling of the crowd is the choking of class relations, the interruption of speed, and the machine. Hence the barbarism of police on horses, the sudden terror of the risen animal.”1

We observe in the photographs an emphasis on surfaces, on a supreme understanding of light and shade coupled with a certain distance and emotional remoteness from the frenetic hubbub of city life. Empty streets and isolated people fall into shadow and their is little evidence of ‘play’ in the photographs. This is observation not interaction or integration as an immigrant observing Melbourne life. There is no up front presence of disembodied people as in Robert Franks photographs in The Americans. Here the alienation that pervades the photographs is the alienation of the photographer from the people as much as it is the alienation of the people from themselves. People are shot in silhouette against the sun or shop windows or peering in at unobtainable goods; desolate streets and working class suburbs all express the isolation of city life but at a structured distance from them.

When Strizic’s photographs are good they are very good. His understanding of light is magnificent: light reflects off water, hazes and shimmers off city buildings. The mixing of shadows and sun and his use of the technique of ‘contre jour’ (shooting into the sun) the one thing Strizic does against traditional conventions works to good effect in some of the best photographs. His 1968 night time long exposure photograph of the old Gas and Fuel Building is rewarding for the black bulk of the end of the building looming over Flinders Street and the striations of car headlamps. The photograph Flinders Lane (1967, below) shows a delicate use of depth of field where the foreground of cars and person are out of focus, the light bouncing off the edges of the woman, the focus of the image in the far distance. The photograph McPhersons Building (1958, below) is one of my personal favourites in the exhibition and is a stunning photograph for the atmosphere the photographer has captured.

After a while the use of the ‘contre jour’ technique becomes tiresome. Other photographs simply document a city in transition. These photographs appeal both to an individual nostalgia (‘I used to work in that building’; ‘My grandmother used to live in that street’) and a collective nostalgia where people experience things collectively, “in the sense that [collective] nostalgia occurs when we are with others who shared the event(s) being recalled, and also in the sense that one’s nostalgia is often for the collective – the characteristics and activities of a group or institution in which the individual was a participant.”2

Collective nostalgia refers to that condition in which the symbolic objects are of a highly public, widely shared and familiar character, i.e. those symbolic resources from the past which can under proper conditions trigger off wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time3 and in this exhibition it is the photographs of a city in transition that trigger this nostalgia, a city now lost to the mists of time. Through these photographs we remember what Melbourne was like at this time collectively.

As Harper has observed

“Nostalgia combines bitterness and sweetness, the lost and the found, the far and near, the new and the familiar, absence and presence. The past which is over and gone, from which we have been or are being removed, by some magic becomes present again for a short while. But its realness seems even more familiar, because renewed, than it ever was, more enchanting and more lovely …”4

Does this collective nostalgia make the photographs good? This is a pertinent question.

Today, nostalgia has become a cultural phenomenon one centred on a longing for home (home is where you are happy to be!) in a collective sense and promoted through commercialisation and the realisation that nostalgia sells. The use of the value seeking word ‘rare’ in the exhibition title is instructive in this regard. Only about 25% of the photographs in this exhibition are “vintage” prints, in other words photographs printed within 3 years of the negative being taken. All other photographs have been printed within the last 15 years. Some are ‘Unique state’ gelatin photographs while others are not. What does this mean. Are they are unique state only in this size? What about the common or garden silver gelatin prints in the show? What does the status word “rare” imply for them?

I remember seeing an exhibition of the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson in Scotland about ten years ago. Three rooms had large prints of his work. One room just had vintage prints. The contrast was astounding. The room full of vintage prints had an intensity of vision, of his vision at the time he took the photographs evidenced in small jewel like photographs that the three other rooms photographs simply did not possess – through scale, printing and aesthetics. The same question, without any need for an answer, can be posed here. Only the word ‘rare’ demands that answer for the modern prints are just what they are and nothing more.

In conclusion this is a strong show by Strizic that could have been edited and focused in a more rewarding way. Strizic is one of Australia’s best photographers for understanding the significance of place. His use of light is superb but there always seems to be an emotional distance to his photographs. An element of collective nostalgia adds to their documentary appeal but the best photographs do not just record, they challenge and transcend the subject matter taking the work to an altogether different plane of existence.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 2. Prologue

2/ Wilson, Janelle. “”Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia,” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; pg. 296, 9 pgs

3/ Davis, F. Yearning For Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press, 1979, p. 222

4/ Harper, R. Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfilment in the Modern Age. The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966, p. 120 quoted in Wilson, Janelle. “”Remember when …” a consideration of the concept of nostalgia,” in et Cetera. Concord: Fall 1999. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; pg. 296, 9 pgs

Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Mark Strizic: Melbourne - A City in Transition' exhibition at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Installation views of the exhibition Mark Strizic: Melbourne – A City in Transition exhibition at Gallery 101, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Mark Strizic, one of Australia’s eminent photographic artists presents us with nostalgic views of Melbourne and the changing face of the city in rare silver gelatin photographs. The exhibition, Melbourne – A City in Transition will be held at Gallery 101 from 8th April – 2nd May. There will be an evening artist reception on Thursday 9th April to celebrate the opening of the exhibition. Strizic’s oeuvre represents a collection of iconic images of architecture and of life – a record of the changing face of a migrating society of new prosperity, youth and popular culture – taken with a sympathetic eye for humanistic detail.

The exhibition will coincide with the announcement of the forthcoming publication, Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern, published by Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria. In 2007, the State Library of Victoria acquired Mark Strizic’s entire archive of approximately 5000 negatives, colour transparencies and slides. In addition, the Library holds a fine collection of Strizic photographs, including examples of all types of photographic print, from gelatin silver to digital, produced by the photographer during his long career.

Press release from Gallery 101

“‘Melbourne – A City in Transition’ is a collection of iconic images of Melbourne city life taken with a sympathetic eye for humanist detail. Strizic accurately depicts the joys and hardships experienced in everyday life with a fresh and living memory. He successfully captures the vicarious essence of suburban life. His portrait of Melbourne includes the city, harbour and river banks – streets and trams, pavements, arcades and lanes, stations and bridges, billboards and facades and public sculpture. We see people going about their daily activities – commuting, shopping at leisure, trading, embracing, conversing, reading the newspaper and visiting the beach. Other works record the demolition and construction of building sites and the changing face of Melbourne, both in society and the urban landscape.”

Text from the exhibition flyer

“In these eloquent studies of light and shadow, Strizic finds beauty in the commonplace – Melbourne’s desolate lanes, street paving, derelict ferries – adopting interesting camera angles, viewpoints and cropping. Through his images, this visual humanist teaches us to observe, to see our surroundings, perhaps with the intention of stimulating us to a higher level of civilisation.”

Emma Matthews. Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern. Thames & Hudson in association with the State Library of Victoria, September, 2009.

“This magnificent collection of photographs arose from the creativity of a young photographer and his adoption of his new home town, Melbourne. His pictures were taken at a time when the Victorian elegance of the city once known as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was being punctuated by a wave of development and the modern architectural movement. Today Mark Strizic is renowned as a photographer. In the 1950s he was a young science student from Europe playing with the possibilities of the camera. As he gained work as a professional his commercial success was accompanied by the instincts and eye of an artist. His solid technicality was accompanied by the whimsy and wit that made him the ‘poet of the fleeting movement’. The versatility of his work shows us many aspects of Melbourne – its magnificent architectural heritage, its intimate and vibrant laneways, its grand arcades counter-posed against the sudden spaces of the wrecker, the brash intrusion of the glass and concrete skyscrapers, the poignancy of poverty in the rundown inner suburbs. We see the people, on grand occasions such as the 1954 Royal Visit, or just caught in their own world of travelling, shopping, resting, walking, working.”

Mark Strizic, Melbourne: Marvellous to Modern book cover

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
From Princes Bridge
1958, printed 2006
Silver gelatin photograph
58 x 39cm

Mark Strizic. 'Near Spencer Street - 1' 1950

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Near Spencer Street – 1
1950
Silver gelatin photograph
27.5 x 38.5cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
At St. Pauls (St Paul’s Cathedral steps)
1954, printed 1999
Silver gelatin photograph
17.8 × 24.5cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
St Paul’s Cathedral steps
1954, printed 1999
Silver gelatin photograph
17.8 × 24.5cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Collins Street at Russell Street
1957, printed 1997
Unique silver gelatin photograph
39 x 56cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
St Georges Road, Northcote at Summer Av.
1958, printed 1998
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
January 1967, printed 1998
Unique silver gelatin photograph
27 x 41cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012) 'Bourke Street from the Parliament' 1967

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Bourke Street from the Parliament – 2
1967, printed 1998
Silver gelatin photograph
38 x 27cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Russell Street Pawn Shop
1958
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Block Arcade
1967, printed February 2008
Unique silver gelatin photograph
53.5 x 37cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
From Princes Bridge (Winter moorings from Princes Bridge)
1955, printed 2006
Silver gelatin photograph
58 x 39cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Flinders Lane
1967, printed 1998
Unique silver gelatin photograph
41 x 41cm

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Swan Street, Richmond, at Church Street
1963
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Queensberry Street at Errol Street, North Melbourne
1963
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Swan Street at Church Street
1963, printed 1998
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Coates Building
1960, printed 1961
Vintage silver gelatin photograph
23.5 x 15cm

Mark Strizic. 'Macphersons Building -1' 1958

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
Macphersons Building – 1
1958
Silver gelatin photograph

Mark Strizic (Australian, 1908-2012)
On Princes Bridge
1959, printed 1996
Silver gelatin photograph
17 x 24cm

Gallery 101

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Opening: ‘Nicola Loder: Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11’ at Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 15th April – 2nd May, 2009

Installation photograph of the opening of Nicola Loder’s exhibition Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11 at Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne

A wonderful, social opening at Helen Gory Gallery of Nicola Loder’s latest work in her ongoing Tourist photographic series. As always Loder’s work looks superb, the mounting of the images at the back of thick perspex giving the images an almost holographic 3D effect. I still remember her exhibition of black and white children’s faces at the sadly closed Stop 22 Gallery in St Kilda many years ago: those images still impinge on the subconscious. This work continues those themes of instability in the mapping of identity, how we begin to see, to represent ourselves as an individual entity. Speaking of Stop 22 it was great to see Marianne, ex curator of that gallery at the opening with new bub in tow! There is an excellent catalogue essay by Stuart Koop (below).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Nicola Loder and Helen Gory Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photograph of the opening of Nicola Loder’s exhibition Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11 at Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne

“We might think of Loder’s work as ‘undoing’ visuality. She sets technology in reverse, working against the imperatives of photography to clarify, focus, refine and sharpen images, as if our eyes worked backwards, as if acuity worsened. The face is an obvious (originary) limit beyond which chaos prevails and other senses are engaged to interpret what looks like abstract static but which many now believe is an unstriated sensory realm, a liberated space of interrelated, undifferentiated holistic sensory experiences; the original synaesthesia from which perception emerges as a travesty according to 5 distinct categories.

So it’s not blindness after all that the work references, not the failing of vision, but the first moments of looking, when ‘seeing’ begins to separate from the other senses and consolidates into a face, a percept, then into a code, a genre, a representation.”

Stuart Koop

I don’t know who the lady and the bub are but thank you for the wonderful photograph – children upon children!

Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) 'Tourist #3 sighted children 1-11' 2009

Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964)
Tourist #3 sighted child 1-11
2009
1200mm x 900mm,
lambda digital prints,10mm acrylic

The radiant Nicola Loder in front of one of her works

Helen Gory Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Nicola Loder website

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Review: ‘New 09’ at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th March – 17th May, 2009

Curator: Charlotte Day

ACCA’s annual commissions exhibition – this year curated by Charlotte Day with new works from eight contemporary Australian artists including Justine Khamara, Brodie Ellis, Marco Fusinato, Simon Yates, Matthew Griffin, Benjamin Armstrong and Pat Foster and Jen Berean.

Simon Yates (Australian, b. 1973) 'Rhabdomancy' 2009 from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Simon Yates (Australian, b. 1973)
Rhabdomancy
Tissue paper, wood, fishing rods, tape, string, electrical components, helium balloons dimensions variable
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s the only thing that really is particular and personal. It’s the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story … The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realise. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realise that’s a lie.”

From the story “Dentist” from the book ‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño1

“A work of art reminds you of who you are now”

Kepesh from the film ‘Elegy’

The curator Charlotte Day has assembled an interesting selection of artists for New 09 at ACCA, Melbourne. It is an exhibition whose ‘presences’ challenge through dark and light, sound and light, contemplation and silence. The journey is one of here and now moments that transport the viewer to states of being that address the fabric of the particular: doubt, anxiety and enlightenment crowd every corner. The particularities of the experience (material, social, psychological and imaginative) impinge on the viewers interior states of being transcending the very physicality and symbolic realism of the works.2

On entering the gallery you are greeted by Simon Yates self-propelled figures that make up the work Rhabdomancy (2009, above). Suspended, tethered, floating just above the floor the figures move eerily about the entrance to the gallery, startling people who have not seen them move before. They stand silent witness, a simulation of self in tissue paper searching for meaning by using a dowsing rod. The word rhabdomancy has as one of it’s meanings ‘the art or gift of prophecy (or the pretence of prophecy) by supernatural means’. Here the figures are divining and divination rolled into one: grounded they seek release through the balloons but through augury they become an omen or portent from which the future is foretold.

“… cutting and slicing in order to see them better, willing them into three dimensions; an attempt to cheat death, or rather, to ward off forgetting of them as they are/were and as I was when the work was made.”

~ Justine Khamara

In the first gallery, a very minimal installation by Justine Khamara of two fractured faces stare out at you from the wall, my favourite work of the show. These are unsettling faces, protruding towards you like some topographical map, one eyes screwed shut the other beadily following you as you walk around the gallery space. Here the images of brother and sister presence anterior, already formed subjects not through memory (as photographs normally do) but through the insistence of the their multiple here and now planes of existence. Rather than ‘forgetting’ the images authenticate their identity through their ongoing presence in an ever renewing present.3 Their dissection of reality, the affirmation of their presence (not the photographic absence of a lost subject) embodies their secret story on the viewer told through psychological and imaginative processes: how do they make me feel – about my life, my death and being, here, now.

The pathos of the show is continued with the next work Noosphere (2008) by Brodie Ellis (the noosphere is best described as a sort of collective consciousness of human-beings).4 In this work a video above the clouds is projected onto a circular shape on the ceiling in a darkened room. The emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on the audience is again disorientating and immediate. The images look across the clouds to vistas of setting suns, look down on the clouds and the sea and land below. The images first move one way and then another, disorientating the viewer and changing their perspective of the earth; these are alien views of the earth accompanied by heart beat like ambient music. The perspective of the circle also changes depending on where the viewer stands like some anamorphic distortion of reality. On a stand a beaded yoke for a horse adds to the metaphorical allegory of the installation.

In the next gallery is the literal climax to the exhibition, Marco Fusinato’s Aetheric Plexus (2009). (Aether: medium through which light propagates; Plexus: in vertebrates, a plexus is an area where nerves branch and rejoin and is also a network of blood vessels).

Consisting of scaffolding that forms a cross and supports large numbers of silver spotlights with visible wiring and sound system the installation seems innocuous enough at first. Walking in front of the work produces no effect except to acknowledge the dull glow of red from the banks of dormant lights trained on the viewer. The interaction comes not in random fashion but when the viewer walks to the peripheries of the gallery corners triggering the work – suddenly you are are blasted with white light and the furious sound of white noise for about 15 seconds: I jumped half out of my skin! Totally disorientated as though one has been placed in a blast furnace or a heavenly irradiated crematorium one wonders what has just happened to you and it takes some time to reorientate oneself back in the afterlife of the here and now. Again the immediacy of the work, the particularities of the experience affect your interior states of being.

After a video installation by Matt Griffin you wander into the next gallery where two works by Benjamin Armstrong inhabit the floor of the gallery. And I do mean inhabit. Made of blown glass forms and wax coated tree branches the works have a strange affect on the psyche, to me seemingly emanations from the deep subconscious. Twin glass hemispheres of what look like a brain are surrounded by clasping synaptic nerve endings that support an egg like glass protrusion – a thought bubble? a spirit emanation? These are wonderful contemplative but slightly disturbing objects that have coalesced into shape only in another form to melt and disappear: molten glass and melted wax dissipating the very form of our existence.

Finally we come to the three part installation by Pat Foster and Jen Berean (below). On the right of the photograph you can see three aluminium and glass doors, closed, sealed leading to another gallery. What you can’t see in the photograph is the three pieces of gaffer tape stretched across the glass doors, like they do on the building sites of new homes. No entry here. Above your head is a suspended matrix of aluminium and glass with some of the glass planes smashed. Clean, clinical, safe but smashed, secure but threatening the matrix presses down on the viewer. It reminded me of the vertical standing shards of the World Trade Centre set horizontal suspended overhead. Only the steel cable seemed to ruin the illusion and seemed out of place with the work. It would have been more successful if the matrix was somehow suspended with fewer tethers to increase the sense of downward pressure. Finally you sit on the aluminium benches and contemplate in silence all that has come before and wonder what just hit you in a tidal wave of feelings, immediacies and emotions. The Doing and Undoing of Things.

An interesting journey then, one to provoke thought and emotion.
The fabric of the particular. The pathos of the art-iculate.

My only reservations are about the presence, the immediacy, the surface of it all. How persistent will these stories be? Will the work sustain pertinent inquiry above and beyond the here and now, the shock and awe. Or will it be like a meal one eats and then finds one is full but empty at the same time. A journey of smoke and mirrors.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Bolano, Robert. Last Evenings on Earth. New Directions, 2007. Available on Amazon.

2/ Blair, French. The Artist, The Body. [Online] Cited on 12/04/2009. No longer available online

3/ Ibid.,

4/ “For Teilhard, the noosphere is best described as a sort of ‘collective consciousness’ of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organisation of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness.” From the concept of Nooshpere on Wikipedia.

Many thankx to ACCA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All Images © Dr Marcus Bunyan and ACCA.

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971) 'Dilated Concentrations' 2009 (detail) from the exhibition 'New 09' at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, March - May, 2009

Justine Khamara (Australian, b. 1971)
Dilated Concentrations
2009
UV print on laser cut stainless steel
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Benjamin Armstrong (Australian, b. 1975)
Hold Everything Dear I
2008
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981)
Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things
2009
Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981) 'Untitled’ from the series ‘The Doing and Undoing of Things’ 2009 (detail)

Pat Foster (Australian, b. 1981) and Jen Berean (Canadian, b. 1981)
Untitled from the series The Doing and Undoing of Things (detail)
2009
Aluminium, safety glass, steel cable
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Victoria 3006
Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Monday

ACCA website

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Review: ‘En Plein Air’ photographs by Siri Hayes at Gallerysmith, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 12th March – 18th April, 2009

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Gunnai man land
2008

A handsome group of large photographs in crisp white frames is displayed in the large space of Gallerysmith, Melbourne. Undoubtably they are well taken and printed photographs but conceptually their thematic development is confused. The photographs purport to investigate how industrialisation has changed the Gippsland landscape since colonisation whilst referencing human interactions that ‘are sometimes’ associated with Western art.

Gunnai land man (above) is very effective in this quest juxtaposing as it does an Indigenous Australian and fallen tree on a bare track with a smoke billowing power station (symbolic of the industrialisation of the area) looming in the background. Other photographs are less successful. What a man flying a kite has to do with the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape is beyond me and the juxtapositional incongruity sought by the artist simply does not work, despite the presence of the power station on the plains in the distance. The symbology has more to do with Japanese art than it has to do with Western art.

The conceptual narrative of the photograph Moe Madonna (below) works only partially as well. The destruction of the landscape has been caused by pastoralisation not industrialisation. In the image that Hayes is referencing the Madonna is front and centre set in an idyllic landscape. In the work by Hayes the incongruity has to be explained, has to be verbalised in text for the association to be didactically made. The interpretation leaves no room for personal reflection and when I looked at this image, the mother and child were so small in the landscape, the placement so obviously constructed that there incongruity turned to disbelief: namely that I simply did not believe the mise en scène being created.

Other narratives are equally confusing. In Paper bag lovers (below) I had to ask the gallery director what was going on in the photograph because the bodies where so small in the landscape (in fact it looks like one body) and you can’t really see the paper bags on their heads because the bodies are just an amorphous mass containing no detail at all (you can just see the body in the photograph below in the mid distance just below the large central tree). Why paper bags anyway? If something intentionally odd and incongruous is sought to be portrayed in the landscape perhaps Hayes should look at the work of Eugene Meatyard (see below) to see a real subversion of the body/landscape dichotomy.

The one standout photograph of the exhibition is Plein air explorers (below). This is confirmed in the sales of the show as all six prints of this photograph have been sold. One can see why!

The title is perfect, the construction of the image faultless. The naked white man stands proudly surveying his conquered domain, the land, whilst around him artists (reminding me of the dilettantes of the Victorian age going on day trips), hunker down into the ground with their easels oblivious to the desiccated trees around them. Here the photographer just observes, doesn’t construct, the incongruity of it all. The artists draw the white man based on direct observation of him and not on their conceptions or conventional images or memories of him while ignoring their surroundings. Here is the paradox, the ironic perfect storm that the artist was conceptually seeking: the representation of landscape based upon direct observation “in the open air” ignored for a perfect white arse while on the horizon smoke stacks of a power station stand in silent witness to the present and imminent destruction of the world. What a photograph! Can I have one now please?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Gallerysmith for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Moe Madonna
2008

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Kite
2008

Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520)
Madonna of the Goldfinch
1505-1506
Oil on panel
107 x 77cm
Galleria degli Uffizi

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Paper Bag Lovers
2008

Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972)
Lucybelle Crater & her 15-year-old son’s friend, Lucybelle Crater
1970-1971

I have predominantly focused on the parts of the Gippsland landscape that have been impacted by white settlement. I have composed various human interactions that are sometimes associated with Western art and its construction. For example, Moe Madonna references Raphael’s Goldfinch Madonna. The narratives are intentionally odd and incongruous with the surrounding location. My son and I seem out-of-place in a barren paddock while the autumn mist shrouds distant gum trees and electricity pylons. The soil here has been compacted beyond repair by cattle hooves – an inappropriate animal in Australia’s delicate ecosystems. As we sit on this barren plain, I read to Oliver from a European pre-schooler book titled Autumn, creating an interesting juxtaposition with the antipodean equivalent season.

The work in this exhibition considers the pre-colonial Gippsland landscape and how industrial ‘progress’ has altered it. Hopefully it provides pause for thought.

Siri Hayes exhibition notes. March 2009

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Plein air explorers
2008

Gallerysmith
170-174 Abbotsford St,
North Melbourne,
Victoria, 3051 Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 5pm

Gallerysmith website

Siri Hayes website

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Around the galleries: Derek O’Connor at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Peter Cole ‘Elements + Memories’ at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

April 2009

In a mad dash around town I managed to see the Derek O’Connor and Peter Cole exhibitions before they finished and also the Siri Hayes En Plein Air exhibition of photographs at Gallerysmith (see next post).

Marcus

Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.

Derek O’Connor paintings at Karen Woodbury Gallery

An intense show of small oil paintings that really draw you into their composition. They are paintings of tremendous energy and layering, the surface being in a constant state of flux. The paintings become metaphors for the bodies existence in space, corporeal landscapes full of sensation ‘neither rational nor cerebral’. They become a mediation and a meditation upon life itself – complex, convulsive, concentrated energy that focuses the viewers attention so that they cannot look away.

Derek O’Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959)
Horizontal
2008

“Working with his tools of palette knives and brushes, he sets into motion a train of repetitions, of speeds and slowness1 applying and scrapping paint away in an attempt to move from a position of not knowing towards knowing. He brings … an intense physical and mental awareness to the rhythms of his own movements, his own body. At such moments time seems to expand – to become infinite.

In erasing from his project the world of appearances, Derek O’Connor embraces something else – the realm of ‘sensation’. Sensation is an open painterly expression which resists definition. The Modernist painter Paul Cezanne described sensation as a “logic of the senses” which is neither rational nor cerebral2 … For Derek, the subject of his painting appears to be the act of making itself. Here subject and object collapse (folding into itself) so that sensation is experienced through the materiality of paint, via the movements of the artists’ body to affect the bodies of others.”

Paul Uhlmann from the catalogue essay

1/ Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 1987, pp. 292-300
2/ Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2003, p. 42

Derek O’Connor (Australian born England, b. 1959)
Irregular
2008

Karen Woodbury Gallery

This gallery has closed.

Peter Cole ‘Elements + Memories’ at John Buckley Gallery 18th March – 9th April 2009

A decidedly underwhelming show by Peter Cole at John Buckley Gallery only redeemed by the amazing Elemental Landscape series of 64 small sculptural pieces displayed as a frieze (see below). The large free standing sculptural works fail to impress with their minimalist Ikea-esque cut out style – especially when viewed from the rear of the work. One would have thought that a sculptor, making several free standing pieces that are going to be walked around in a gallery space, would have designed the work to be viewed ‘in the round’. As it is all the perfection of the clinical front of the works is undone by brackets and screws holding the whole thing together when viewed from the flattened rump. This is pretty, surface work that lacks substance and insight, pretty shapes and cut outs and targets that allude to memory but are just stylised glossy magazine representations of it.

On the other hand the Elemental Landscape series of sculptures is just magical – playful, ever inventive, wonderfully contemporary, beautifully resolved in concept and manufacture, in their use and bending of geometric shapes, the sculptures really are fantastic when seen ‘in situ’ as a whole. Visit the exhibition just to see this work – buy some pieces and make your own elemental landscape!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947)
Elements + Memories installation views at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne (first and second image)
Bar 4 – Shibuya 2009 (third image)
Garden – Yoyogi 2009 (fourth image)

In Peter D Cole’s stunning and ambitious exhibition Elements + Memories he creates a playful interactive work titled Elemental Landscape. Utilising his highly stylised modernist and reductionist technique – influenced at an early age by studies of Miro and Calder – Cole presents 64 small sculptural pieces of varying colour and shape of which the audience is encouraged to create their own compositions. Cole also presents three large-scale sculptures drawing on memories of his times in Japan.

Cole’s distinct skill of distilling the landscape and architecture into separate elements and symbols is in itself evocative of traditional minimal Japanese aesthetic and he has created a series of works which draw upon Japanese interiors and streetscapes and the gardens of the Sakura Matsuri (Cherry Blossom festival).

Text from John Buckley Gallery website [Online] Cited 01/04/2009. No longer available online

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947) 'Elemental Landscape' 2009

Peter Cole (Australian, b. 1947)
Elemental Landscape
2009

John Buckley Gallery

This gallery has closed.

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Opening 2: ‘Colour, Time’ by David Thomas at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 2nd May, 2009

Opening: Thursday 2nd April 2009

Opening night crowd at 'Colour, Time' by David Thomas at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne, 2nd April, 2009

Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with from right to left Farbenfreude Series: Movement of Colour, Heart (Large) 2008; Farbenfreude Series: Amid Dark and Light (Dark Painting) 2008; and Farbenfreude Series: A Gentle Pasing (Large) 2008 on back wall
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“A photographed real space and an expanding undefinable painting space (the non-figurative form) confront each other. The result is a coexistence of various models of space, a coexistence and entanglement of inconsistent things.”

Christoph Dahlhausen. David Thomas EIKON nr 53, Vienna, Austria, 2006

A slow burn painting, photography and composites show at Nellie Castan Gallery. Minimalist grid paintings combine with squares of colour taken out of photographs (again! as at the recent Richard Grigg show at Block Projects). This supposedly imparts profundity to insubstantial and mundane photographs that aim to comment on the existential nature of our being through the presence / absence of the missing spatio-temporal slice. This exhibition just didn’t hit the spot for me. Nice to catch up with Jason Smith Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art who was in attendance.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Opening night crowd at Colour, Time by David Thomas with the series Length of Time 2009 on table
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951)
Length of Time Series: Blue tape on red monochrome
2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951) 'End of Summer: Homage a Tati (small splash) 2009

David Thomas (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1951)
End of Summer: Homage a Tati (small splash)
Enamel on photograph
2009

Opening night crowd in front of David Thomas’ Black Reflection Painting: For William Barak 2009
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nellie Castan Gallery

This gallery closed in 2013.

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Opening 1: ‘Territories’ at Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 1st May, 2009

Curator: Shane Hulbert
Opening: Thursday 2nd April, 2009

Group photography show with artists: Shane Hulbert (Aus), John Billan (Aus), So Hing Keung (HK), Stephanie Neoh (Aus), Darren Sylvester (Aus), Ming Tse Ching (HK), Kellyann Geurts (Aus), Andrew Guthrie (HK), Kim Lawler (Aus), Law Sum Po Jamsen (HK), and Lyndal Walker (Aus).

Sculptor Fredrick White in front of Lyndal Walker's 'The Time to Hesitate is Trough, no Time to Wallow in the Mire' 2009

Sculptor Fredrick White in front of Lyndal Walker’s The Time to Hesitate is Through, no Time to Wallow in the Mire 2009

Great to catch up again with John Billan, Shane Hulbert and Les Walkling!

Marcus

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lyndal Walker (Australian, b. 1973)
The Time to Hesitate is Through, no Time to Wallow in the Mire
2009

“The images in this show all reflect on an exploration of intersecting territories within Australia and the Chinese Special Administration Region [SAR] of Hong Kong. Central to this exploration are the cultural linkages between claimed and reclaimed territories, social territories and psychological territories and the way this in turn influences national identity. The claim is that these things of importance, and the way we respond to the notion of territory, have recurring similarities between different cultures.

Despite the broadness of the title, the notion of territories is becoming increasingly relevant in a global community, as the traditional borderlines and barriers that define who we are and what we stand for as a culture change in response to internal and external shifts.”

Shane Hulbert 2009

Territories opening night crowd at Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne

Ming Tse Chong (Chinese, b. 1960)
City Still Life II
2008

Project Space/Spare Room

PROJECT SPACE and SPARE ROOM closed in March 2022

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Review: ‘reENLIGHTENMENT’ exhibition by Peter James Smith at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 18th March – 4th April, 2009

Peter James Smith. 'reENLIGHTENMENT' installation view 2009

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
reENLIGHTENMENT installation views
2009

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”1

“Thus the claim is that texts themselves can actually be intrinsically ‘genuine’, but that authenticity is a ‘social construct’. In other words, a certain kind of authenticity is created through the interaction of the users, situations and the texts.”2

Peter James Smith links the culture of science and of human experience, bringing together mathematics and the power of nature in realist imagery that is balanced by strong mark making and text. Redolent still life and landscape images juxtapose with astronomical, poetic and historical observations in the painted images. Handwritten citations, notes, jottings, diagrams and erasures float on the loosely painted surfaces of stretched linen, paper collage and found pieces which bring a Beuysian sense of the charismatic object. A sunset, a violin, a book of verse, an installation of old bells or delicate Jasperware porcelain provide a resonant foil for the artist and viewer – and create a space for the imagination, for mathematical wonder and contemplation.

“Beyond painting, in the current work there is a sense of history allowing us to privilege its objects, their collecting and their housing on walls, in vitrines, on shelves and on plinths. Like any true collector I am keen to bring them to an audience, to show them in a revelatory way. If they are inflected by hand markings it is to personalise the revelation. There are no plastic imitations: the Jasperware vases are authentic collected Wedgwood; the small Greek Pelike is indeed a c 300 BC vase; the Roman glass is a c 300 AD; the collected Wollemi pine needles are indeed from this prehistoric plant. These and other antiquities have a long museological tradition. The narratives of Wedgwood blue and white Jasperware designs are of Greek antiquity – the firing of the white clay over a cobalt blue base (in around) 1772 was a triumph of chemistry over alchemy. With these objects, it is not a postmodernist kitsch that is revealed, but rather the resuscitated fabric of authenticity. I am re-enlightened by their tactile physical presence that has a timeless beauty. To render such things as a painted image is to engage in a different act, with different rules referring to different histories.”

~ Peter James Smith, 2009. Notes from the exhibition catalogue.

Enlightenment, Romanticism, reason, authenticity, revelation.

I am a collector like Peter James Smith. I display my collection of early 20th century English vases. I have a collection of 300 ties that span from the 1930s to the 1970s. I have eight rare 1940s suits, those suits that Humphrey Bogart used to wear with the wide wide lapels that nearly reach the seam of the sleeve.

Rare, fragile, beautiful, genuine.

In this exhibition Smith appeals not to the genuineness of the objects but to the authenticity of the objects he displays: “There are no plastic imitations … With these objects, it is not a postmodernist kitsch that is revealed, but rather the resuscitated fabric of authenticity.” He wants to show these objects in a revelatory way, for us to once more appreciate their authenticity. To make order out of disorder. But then Smith wants to personalise this revelation and overlays the objects with texts that re-order the taxonomy through a reinscription that is both a de-territorialization and re-territorialization of meaning, a loss of original meaning and the production of new meanings. This is the faint silver flicker of re-enlightenment the artist seeks. It is above all authentication as individual spectacle, as social construct.

“Authenticity is an issue for us today because of a widespread sense that there is something inauthentic in the way we experience the modern world.”3

In some of the works this process is effective and in other works it falls flat on it’s proverbial, intertextual backside. The process works well in the less cerebral works. The use of black paint in Paradise Lost IV (below) is particularly effective as the re-inscription of paint invades and threatens the motifs of the classical figures with the text and cross reinforcing the idea of a lost paradise. Cathedral (2009, below) is also a stunning installation of different bells hung at various heights within a locked cabinet, complicit in their silence as they would not be inside a cathedral. For me this was probably the best piece in the show for its simplicity of thought, eloquence of execution and understanding of how the installation re-enlightens the viewers socially constructed authenticity in a revelatory way. No double marking is needed – a zen balance is proposed and achieved in the quietness of the viewers mind.

Other pieces are less successful. Amphora in grey teracotta Han Dynasty c 100BC (2008), the amphora inscribed with text sitting on a painted black video recorder is particularly unengaging and unappealing – there is no revelatory experience to be had here. The Greek Pileke (see below) inscribed with lines from John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn seems an appropriate intervention but sometimes in this exhibition one just longs to appreciate the sanctity of the object, it’s presence, in silence without the personalising of the revelation by the hand of the artist. To see the object clearly for what it is.

The large installation reELIGHTENMENT (2009 below, and installation photo at top) falls into darkness. The use of the doors as metaphor is clumsy, book covers have been more successfully used by other artists and the black paint is heavy and oppressive. More interesting are some of the paintings, for example The slow dance of an astronomical twighlight (2009, below) where the poem of William Wordsworth

… a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

illuminates the poetry of the painting, adding an insightful double meaning to the universal revelation. A vibration of spirit is present both in the landscape and the markings upon the landscape. Unfortunately all too often in this exhibition access to the sublime is denied. Appeals to neo-authenticity fall on deaf ears. The motifs of this exhibition are universal, archetypal but the elements that go to make up this exhibition are too many and lack focus. Sometimes in art less in more and this exhibition is a classic example of this fact. There are some interesting elements but overall the whole is not the sum of its parts.

As John Donne observed

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated … No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”4

Our authentic place in the world, our spiritual space, our re-enlightenment needed to be better defined, more lucidly enunciated in this exhibition NOT IN CAPITAL LETTERS but in the quietness of our hearts.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations. English translation. London: Fontana, 1982, pp. 59-60

2/ Lee, W. “Authenticity revisited: text authenticity and learner authenticity,” in ELT Journal, 49(4). 1995, pp. 323-328 cited in Shomoossi, Nematullah and Ketabi, Saeed. “A Critical Look at the Concept of Authenticity,” in Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 2007, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 149-155 [Online] cited on 29th March, 2009 at http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v4n12007/shomoossi.pdf

3/ McClure, Christoper. The Concept of Authenticity in Charles Taylor and Martin Heidegger. [Online] cited on March 29th, 2009 (no longer available online)

4/ Donne, John. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris. 1624.

Variously

Wedgwood Jasperware, Roman glass, Greek Pileke, books, doors, texts, paintings, bells, video, video machine, wooden boxes, black paint, crosses, albatross, Wollemi Pine needles, Paradise Lost, astronomy, linen, stars, photography, Chinese porcelain, collage, mathematical equations, mirrors, Amphora from the Han Dynasty, a violin, a sunset, a book of verse, notes, shelves, jottings, citations.

Notes to myself

~ Golden ratio
~ The archive
~ Topographical markings, inscriptions and decodings
~ The ‘nature’ of authenticity
~ The ‘voice’ of revelation
~ Re-possession of clarity and logic
~ Re-production of mystery, tenderness and love
~ Reverence for the object itself
~ Referentiality between image and text
~ The colour black: transcendent, the depths of the night sky but also the closing in of darkness at the end of days
~ Never one truth but many truths
~ Less is more

Many thankx to Gallery 101 for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
The slow dance of an astronomical twighlight
2009

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Paradise Lost IV
2008

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Ode on a Grecian Urn
2008

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
Cathedral
2009

Peter James Smith (New Zealand, b. 1954)
reENLIGHTENMENT
2009

Gallery 101

This gallery is now closed.

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Review: ‘The Big Black Bubble’ exhibition by Dale Frank at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 12th March – 11th April, 2009

Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959) 'The Big Black Bubble' installation view at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2009

Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959)
The Big Black Bubble (installation view)
Left to right: Timothy Oliphant (2008), Ryan Gosling (2008/2009) and Matthew Macfadyen (2008)
2009

This is a brilliant exhibition by Dale Frank, one of my favourites so far this year in Melbourne.

Six large varnish on linen landscape paintings are presented in the beautiful Anna Schwartz gallery space in Melbourne. Photographs really do not do the paintings justice – they can only give an impression of the size and scale of the work but not of their intimacy or smell. The smell of varnish permeates the air. The serendipity of the natural convulsions of the varnish and the facilitations of the hand of the artist, his performance, have been caught like bugs in amber in the final molecular structure of the painting. Here are pendulous, globular goops of varnish, immersive heroic tone poems that form images in the mind of the viewer. Moving close to the paintings you are surrounded by flows and eddies, the macro and the micro; details become more apparent as you study the work.

While disagreeing that these paintings are the viewers to create (the viewer as author) what I can say is that the artist offers the viewer the ability to generate their own resonances with the painting, to use the imagination of ‘equivalence’ to suggest what these paintings stand for – and also what else they stand for. States of being, of transformation, wonder and joy emerge in the playfulness of these works. Perhaps this is where the titles of the paintings come from, referencing film actors in the pop tradition, but this is the only thing that did not ring true with the work, their titles. The use of this trope seems to me a bit facile given the nature of the work.

The hot pink painting Rupert Grint (2008/2009, above) is hotter and lighter than in the photograph below, the varnish more translucent, the effect altogether mesmeric. You are drawn into the work, the intensity of the colour, the thickness of the hanging varnish. Two cosmological galaxies (Timothy Oliphant (2008) and Matthew Macfadyen (2008)) surround the most complex painting in the exhibition, the darkness and light that is Ryan Gosling (2008/2009, below).

This painting is a tour de force. With the poetic structure of an oil spill, the varnish forms intricate slick upon slick contours that are almost topographical in their mapping. The black oozes light, becomes ‘plastic’ black before your eyes, like the black of Rembrandt’s backgrounds, illusive, illuminative and hard to pin down – perpetually hanging there in two dripping rows, fixed but fluid at one and the same time (you can just see the suspensions in the photograph above).

The painting reminds me of the black paintings of Mark Rothko that he undertook for The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas (see below). As with the Rothko paintings, this painting is not just black (physically there are swirls of purple as in the Rothko paintings), not about darkness at all. What both artists do is create a contemplative, transformative space – in Frank’s case for a world on the edge of oblivion. This is a post post-modern landscape: process and nature, performance and chance coalescing in the colour : black!

This painting is one of the most overwhelming syntheses of art and nature, of universal forces that I have seen in recent contemporary art. This exhibition is an electric pulsating universe of life, landscape and transformation. Magnificent!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959)
The Big Black Bubble (installation view)
Left to right: Daniel Radcliffe (2008/2009), Khan Chittenden (2009) and Rupert Grint (2008/2009)
2009

The immersive scale of these new paintings at Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne allows us to experience their inner qualities of landscape and of transformation. This is painting at fundamental authenticity. The paint is its own agent; it is allowed to act, to behave. The artist is the facilitator of these phenomena of nature and natural forces, whose residue is a metaphor for nature itself.

Black contains all colours, contours and depths. A pink monochrome is transformed by pure varnish into an expressionistic moment of process and performance. All colour is absent from elemental silver aluminium and form and gesture alone survive. New dynamics are possible through an innovative colouration: the emergence of colour through black, and its equivalent power.

Dale Frank’s painting is one of poetry, performance and nature. It represents both the macro and micro. Huge universal forces pulsate with molecular, atomic activities. Imagination is gifted by the artist to the viewer. These are our paintings to create.

Anonymous text from the exhibition flyer.

Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959)
Ryan Gosling
2008/2009

The Rothko Chapel
Houston, Texas

Anna Schwartz Gallery
185 Flinders Lane
Melbourne 3000
Australia
Phone: +61 3 9654 6131

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 12 – 5pm
Saturday 1 – 5pm

Anna Schwartz Gallery website

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Opening 3: Review: ‘Show Court 3’ and ‘Mood Bomb’ by Louise Paramor at Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 5th March – 28th March, 2009

Opening: Thursday 5th March, 2009

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Show Court 3 (II)
2009

Boarding a train at Flinders Street we emerge at South Yarra station to stroll down to River Street for our third opening of the night at Nellie Castan Gallery. We are greeted by the ever gracious Nellie Castan who has just returned from an overseas trip to Europe where she was soaking up the wonders of Rome amongst other places. For the latest exhibition in the gallery Louise Paramor is presenting two bodies of work: Show Court 3 and Mood Bomb (both 2009). Lets look at Show Court 3 first as this work has older origins.

Originally exhibited in 2006 at Nellie Castan under the title Jam Session the sculptures from this exhibition and many more beside (75 in all) were then installed in 2007 on show court 3 at Melbourne & Olympic Parks, hence the title of the installation. In the smaller gallery in 2009 we have six Lambda photographic prints that are records of this installation plus a video of the installation and de-installation of the work.

While interesting as documentary evidence of the installation these photographs are thrice removed from the actual sculptures – the sculptures themselves, the installation of the sculptures on court and then the photographs of the installation of the sculptures. The photographs lose something in this process – the presence or link back to the referentiality of the object itself. There is no tactile suggestiveness here, no fresh visual connections to be made with the materials, no human interaction. The intertextual nature of the objects, the jamming together of found pieces of bright plastic to make seductive anthropomorphic creatures that ‘play’ off of each other has been lost.

What has been reinforced in the photographs is a phenomena that was observed in the actual installation.

“The sculptures created a jarring visual disruption when placed in a location normally associated with play and movement. The stadium seating surrounding the tennis court incited an expectation of entertainment; a number of viewers sat looking at the sculptures, as though waiting for them to spin and jump around. But mostly, the exhibition reversed the usual role of visitors to place where one sits and watches others move; here the objects on the tennis court were static and the spectators moved around.” (2007)1

In the photographs of these objects and in the installation itself what occurs is an inversion of perception, a concept noted by the urbanist Paul Virilio.2 Here the objects perceive us instead of us perceiving the object: they stare back with an oculocentric ‘suggestiveness’ which is advertising’s raison d’être (note the eye sculpture above). In particular this is what the photographs suggest – a high gloss surface, an advertising image that grabs our attention and forces us to look but is no longer a powerful image.

In the main gallery was the most interesting work of the whole night – experiments of abstraction in colour “inspired by the very substance of paint itself.” Made by pouring paint onto glass and then exhibiting the smooth reverse side, these paintings are not so much about the texture of the surface (as is Dale Frank’s work below) but a more ephemeral thing: the dreamscapes of the mind that they promote in the viewer, the imaginative connections that ask the viewer to make. Simpler and perhaps more refined than Frank’s work (because of the smooth surface, the lack of the physicality of the layering technique? because of the pooling of amoebic shapes produced, not the varnish that accumulates and recedes?) paint oozes, bleeds, swirls, drips upwards and blooms with a sensuality of intense love. They are dream states that allow the viewer to create their own narrative with the title of the works offering gentle guides along the way: Girl with Flowers, Lovers, Mood Bomb, Emerald God, Mama, and Animal Dreaming to name just a few. To me they also had connotations of melted plastic, almost as if the sculptures of Show Court 3 had dissolved into the glassy surface of a transparent tennis court.

These are wonderfully evocative paintings. I really enjoyed spending time with them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ O’Neill, Jane. Louise Paramor: Show Court 3. Melbourne: Nellie Castan Gallery, 2009

2/ Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. (trans. Julie Rose). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 62-63

Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Show Court 3 (VI)
2009

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) 'Show Court 3' 2009 (detail)

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Show Court 3 (detail)
2009

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Opening night crowd in front of Sky Pilot (left) and Mama (right)
2009
Paint on glass

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Opening night crowd in front of Green Eyed Monster (right) and Sky Pilot (right)
2009
Paint on glass

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Opening night crowd in front of Pineapple Express
2009
Paint on glass

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964) 'A Dog and His Master' 2009 (detail)

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
A Dog and His Master (detail)
2009
Paint on glass

Louise Paramor (Australian, b. 1964)
Lovers
2009
Paint on glass

Dale Frank (Australian, b. 1959)
2. One conversation gambit you hear these days: ‘Do you rotate?’ An interesting change of tack? No suck luck. ‘Do you rotate?’ simply fishes for information about the extent of your collection. Do you have enough paintings to hang a different one in your dining room every month?
2005