Where: Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill
When: Monday 20 May 6-9pm
Joyce Evans photographer celebration… I hope many of you can attend.
A truly remarkable human being.
Marcus
If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.
If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.
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Joyce Evans
Michael Silver (Australian) Joyce Evans
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A Celebration of Joyce and her contribution to art, photography, women’s status, mentorship and philanthropy. At least 30 of her prints will be displayed. Celebrants will talk and recall in their own words experiences with Joyce and her passions. The event will be recorded and made available for non-attendees. Snacks and drinks will be available.
Please email Alfred Zerfas Facebook (to azerfas@gmail.com – her brother) about other friends of Joyce you have notified and whether you will come.
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
We have lost a pioneer and legend of Australian photography.
We were blessed to have known her. What a life. What an incredible human being.
A tribute to Joyce Evans will appear on this website in due time.
I am so so sad at her loss. All my love…
Marcus xx
Two new books will be published after Joyce’s passing: “We Had Such High Hopes: Student activism and the Peace Movement 1947-52” which features Joyce’s stories of going behind the Iron Curtain to photograph in 1949 and 1951, protests against the atom bomb, and the beginning of civil rights protests after the Second World War in Australia (published by Australian Scholarly Publishing edited by Jenny Zimmer); and a large publication of her own work written by Sasha Grishin.
A fitting tribute to a pioneer and legend of Australian photography.
Joyce Evans standing in front of Max Dupain’s Sunbaker 1937
EG: Just saw your most recent Art Blart and your work. It’s very beautiful. Congratulations. At first I didn’t know whose they were. Then I went through them one by one, and only after responding to them ‘unknown’ I saw it was your work. SO BEAUTIFUL, so potent and yet, within the ambivalence and questioning there was space for great stillness and contemplation. Powerful and so poetic. The one of the children, close up is dazzling, but so are the open fields, mountains, roadways and minute images of flight.
MB: Thank you so much Elizabeth. Yes, my work would you believe. I can now believe after 4 years hard work. A poem to the uncertainty of human dreams. It’s a conceptual series in the vein of my hero Minor White – contemplative, poetic as always with me, but with an edge under the poetry as you so correctly observe EG – you are caught in the dream in the end image, suspended in time and space, in your imagination. You are always so spot on with your observations.
EG: Your own tendency is also closely linked to language and ideas?
MB: This is very true. The basis for all my work is body, time, space, environment and their link to language and ideas… and how conceptual work can be spiritual as well.
EG: I’m with you on that one, and political as well.
MB: Indeed – all my work, including this series, is very anti-war.
EG: What is unseen, invisible in these images is definitely the dark quiet hole of hell that war is. Or at least those that invest in it.
MB: The key image in this regard is the one of the explosion.
EG: But the ones of the distant and misdirected aerial machines also…
MB: Indeed, and the second one, where all the men are looking away while the cloud expands in the background.
EG: Yes, the casual indifference and banality of it.
MB: You have it perfectly Elizabeth!
EG: But the children, oh those children, and the innocent implacability of the natural world.
MB: To find these images on Ebay and then spend four years of my life cleaning and saving them was an incredible experience. It was almost like I was breathing these images as I was saving them, looking into each one and being immersed in them. Thus, the art demands contemplation from the viewer in order to begin to understand its resonances.
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Many thankx to Elizabeth Gertsakis for her wisdom, knowledge, friendship and advice throughout the year. These observations of my work mean a great deal to me.
SEE THE FULL SEQUENCE INCLUDING SIZE AND SPACING OF IMAGES (ENLARGE AND USE SCROLL BAR)
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009
Digital colour photograph
A new body of work, There But For The Grace of You Go I (2009) is now online on my website.
There are twenty images in the series which can be viewed as a sequence, rising and falling like a piece of music. Below are a selection of images from the series. The work continues an exploration into the choices human beings make.
I hope you like the work but it is totally ok if you don’t!
I have always been creative from a very early age, starting as a child prodigy playing the piano at the age of five and going on to get my degree as a concert pianist at the Royal College of Music in London. I have always felt the music and being creative has helped me cope with life, living with bipolar.
These days as I reach my early 50’s ego is much less a concern – about being successful, about having exhibitions. I just make the work because I love making it and the process gives me happiness – in the thinking, in the making. I can loose myself in my work.
When Andrew Denton asked Clive James what brings him joy, James replies “The arts,“ and then qualified his answer. “What I mean is creativity. When I get lost in something that’s been made, it doesn’t matter who it is by. It could be Marvin Gaye singing ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’ or it could be the adagio of the Ninth Symphony …”
What a wise man.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I 2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series There But For The Grace of You Go I
2009
Digital colour photograph
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled from the series Momentum
2009
Digital colour photograph
Enjoy some of his images below and for more photographs please visit his website.
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Many thankx to The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward Burtynsky Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia 2007 2007
Edward Burtynsky Tanggu Port, Tianjin, China 2005 2005
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
Edward Burtynsky quoted on The Whyte Museum website.
Edward Burtynsky Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California 1999 1999
Edward Burtynsky Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996 1996
Edward Burtynsky
Nickel Tailings #31, Sudbury, Ontario 1996 1996
Edward Burtynsky Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002 2002
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear,” said Edward Burtynsky, photographer. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
Speaking of his “Quarries” series, Burtynsky has said, “The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.”
Text from The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
Edward Burtynsky
Shipbreaking #1, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000 2000
Edward Burtynsky
Bao Steel #2, Shanghai, China, 2005 2005
Edward Burtnysky
Iberia Quarries #3, Bencatel, Portugal, 2006 2006
Edward Burtnysky
China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, 2004 2004
Edward Burtynsky
Dam #6, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005 2005
Trailer for the film Manufactured Landscapes in which Jennifer Baichwal documents Edward Burtynsky doing what artists do – making art, in this case photographing Bangladesh and China as he observes the “manufacturer to the world”.
Edward Burtynsky Manufactured Landscapes
The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
111 Bear Street, Banff, Alberta
T1L 1A3 Canada Phone: 1 403 762 2291
Artist Tim Fleming on the ABC’s Sunday Arts program talks about his art practice, his Flatland work in plywood and laminex and how the work has taken on a life of its own. The work takes on a self-reflexive element with his use of mirrored surfaces forcing the viewer/maker to assess where they are going in life. Fleming notes that it is important to take time as an artist to gather the skills and lay the foundation for future work. Working slowly, laying the foundations, gathering the skills.
Personally I like the use of objects that are taken out of context to convey different metaphors for everyday life. As an artist Flemings semiotic language upsets accepted boundaries of how we look and interact with the world, forcing us to question what it is that makes us who we are.
“The artist does not turn time into money, the artist turns time into energy, time into intensity, time into vision. The exchange that art offers is an exchange in kind; energy for energy, intensity for intensity, vision for vision… Can we afford to live imaginatively, contemplatively?”
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Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. London: Vintage, 1996, p 139.
Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
