Exhibition: ‘Colour my world: handcoloured Australian photography’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 30th September, 2015

Co-curators: Anne O’Hehir, Curator of Photography and Dr. Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia

Micky Allan (Australian, b. 1944)
The prime of life no.7 (man wearing sun glasses)
1979
From a series of 12 hand coloured photographs Mountain Lagoon, Sydney Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1979
Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured in pencil, colour pencils, watercolour and gouache
32.0 x 42.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981
© Micky Allan

There has always been a history of hand colouring in photography since its very early days – from daguerreotypes, through ambrotypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards and on to commercial portrait photography from the 1920s-1960s. But I don’t believe there has ever been, in the history of photography, such a concentration of artists (mainly female) hand colouring photographs as in Australia in the 1970s-80s. If I know my history of photography, I would say that this phenomena is unique in its history. It did not occur in Japan, Europe or America at the same time.

The reasons for this explosion of hand colouring in Australia are many and varied. Most of the artist’s knew each other, or knew of each other’s work on the East coast of Australia, and it was a small, tight circle of artists that produced these beautiful photographs. Not many artists were “doing” traditional colour photography, basically because of the instability of the materials (you only have to look at the faded colour photographs of John Cato in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection) and the cost of the process. Of course feminism was a big influence in Australia at this time but these photographs, represented in this posting by the work of Micky Allan and Ruth Maddison, are so much more than photographs about female emancipation.

Photography in Australia was moving away from commercial studios such as that of Athol Shmith and into art schools and university courses, where there was a cross-over between different disciplines. Most artists had darkrooms in their bathroom or outhouses, or darkrooms were in basements of university buildings.

Speaking to artist Micky Allan, she said that these were exciting times. Allan had trained as a painter and brought these skills to the processes of photography. She observes, “There was an affinity to what you were doing, an immediacy of engagement. Taking photographs, the physicality of the print, their magnificent tonal range – which painting could not match – and then hand colouring the resultant prints, a hands on process that turned the images into something else, something different.”

There was a cavalier approach to the process but also a learning atmosphere as well. So it was about doing anything that you wanted, you just had to do it.

Sue Ford was a big influence, in that she started working in series of work, not just the monolithic, singular fine art print. Perhaps as a reaction against the Americanisation of photography, these artists used vernacular photographs of people and places to investigate ways of being in the world.

As Micky Allan observes, “My photography of babies and old people were more than being about domesticity, they were about what babies know when they arrive in the world, and how people react to ageing.” (For examples of Allan’s babies and old people photographs please see the exhibition Photography meets Feminism: Australian Women Photographer 1970s-80s).

There was a connection to the print through the physicality of the process of printing and then hand colouring – a double dealing if you like – that emphasised the ordinary can be extraordinary, a process that changed one representation into another. And the results could be subtle (as in the delicate work of Janina Green) or they could be surreal, such as Allan’s The prime of life no.7 (man wearing sun glasses) (1979, below), or they could be both. But they were always stunningly beautiful.

This was a very hands on process, an observation confirmed by artist Ruth Maddison. “The process was like hand watering your garden, an intense exchange and engagement with the object. When I started I was completely untrained, but I loved the process. I just experimented in order to understand what medium does what on what paper surface. There was the beauty of its object and its physicality. I just loved the object.”

Her series Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland (1977/78, below), photographed over Christmas Day and several days afterwards, evidences this magical transformation. Vernacular photographs of a typical Australia Christmas holiday become something else, transformed into beautiful, atypical representations of family, friendship, celebration and life.

So there we have it: domesticity, family, friends, place, being in the world, feminism, craft, experimentation, surrealism, physicality of the object, beauty, representation, series of work and difference… a communion (is that the right word?) of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially on a spiritual level (although the artists would probably deny it) that changed how the they saw, and we see the world. Can you imagine how fresh and alive these images would have been in 1970s Australia?

That they still retain that wonder is testament to the sensitivity of the artists, the tactility of the process and our responsiveness to that sense of touch.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Micky Allan (Australian, b. 1944) 'The prime of life no.3 (blond woman wearing sun glasses)' 1979 from the exhibition 'Colour my world: handcoloured Australian photography' at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, April - Sept, 2015

Micky Allan (Australian, b. 1944)
The prime of life no.3 (blond woman wearing sun glasses)
1979
From a series of 12 hand coloured photographs Mountain Lagoon, Sydney Blue Mountains, New South Wales 1979
Gelatin silver photograph, hand-coloured in pencil and watercolour
National Gallery of Aus

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) 'Christmas holiday with Bob's family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland' 1977/78 from the exhibition 'Colour my world: handcoloured Australian photography' at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, April - Sept, 2015

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland
1977-1978
Gelatin silver photographs, colour dyes, hand-coloured
10.6 x 16.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1988

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945) 'Christmas holiday with Bob's family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland' 1977/78

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Christmas holiday with Bob’s family, Mermaid Beach, Queensland
1977-1978
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pencils, fibre-tipped pen
10.6 x 16.2cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1988

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Jesse and Roger
1983
From the series Some men
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pigments, hand-coloured
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Jim and Gerry
1983
From the series Some men
Gelatin silver photograph, colour pigments, hand-coloured
39.6 x 26.5cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983

Colour my world

Introduction

This is the first exhibition dedicated to a significant aspect of recent Australian art: the handcoloured photograph. It draws together new acquisitions and rarely seen works from the collection by Micky Allan, Ruth Maddison, Warren Breninger, Julie Rrap, Janina Green, Christine Barry, Fiona Hall, Miriam Stannage, Robyn Stacey, Nici Cumpston, Lyndell Brown, Charles Green and Jon Cattapan.

The handcolouring of images has a long history in photography. During the infancy of the medium in the mid nineteenth century, the practice of applying paint, dye or other media to a photograph added both lifelike colour to black-and-white pictures and longevity to images that faded quickly. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, handcolouring added economic value and artistic sensibility or corrected photographic mistakes. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, the practice had gone into decline, as photographers sought to maintain and fortify the virtuosity and technical purity of the modernist photographic print.

The 1970s saw a revival of handcolouring among a number of Australian photographers and it remains a significant aspect of contemporary practice. The artists included in this exhibition seek to create a direct connection between their experience and that of the viewer. They challenge the medium’s technical sameness by personalising the print and imbuing it with individuality and uniqueness as well as an intimacy, warmth and fallibility.

Challenging conventions

During much of the twentieth century, photography tended to engage with the medium’s technical integrity. Rhetoric about black-and-white photography’s very particular, direct relationship to the world, its technological origins and its highly idiosyncratic capacity to see the world in new ways positioned it in a conceptual space distinct from other kinds of pictures. With notable exceptions, those who dominated the scene worked in black and white. Colour photography (which was expensive) tended to belong to and be associated with the commercial realms of advertising and fashion.

In this climate, to bring colour into the image through handcolouring was an act of resistance. Anyone who took to their prints with colour pencils and brushes, in effect, disputed the so-called authority of black-and-white photography. And many did just this. For feminist photographers, handcolouring acknowledged the under-recognised history of women’s photographic work by remembering the women who were historically employed by studios as handcolourists.

Colouring by hand personalised the print, itself the product of technological processes, arcane knowledge and chemistry. The handcoloured photograph also created community: it engaged a direct connection between the photographer and his or her subjects, the sensual surface of the print and the viewer, a set of relationships staged and made manifest in the experience of the work itself.

Aesthetics of handcoloured photography

While the disrupted surface of the handcoloured photograph may well have challenged the conventions of ‘classic’ photography during the 1970s, it became one of a set of tools used by artists during the 1980s to explore the medium as a studio practice and to interrogate the conventions of authorship and photographic transparency that had supported modernist photographic practice.

Artists such as Julie Rrap, Fiona Hall and Robyn Stacey created handmade work that presented highly personalised responses to some of the grand themes of Western art and culture. Hall tackled one of Western mythology’s points of origin, the Garden of Eden, in a series of hand-toned pictures that replaced pathos and grand narrative with irony and, through daubs of sepia, the patina of historical significance. Rrap took on art history’s archetypes of femininity and made them her own, while Stacey handcoloured photographs to modify many of the myths of popular culture and Australian history. Rrap’s and Stacey’s handcoloured originals were then rephotographed and printed in colour. By doing so, the works shifted from being unique prints – with references to the handmade, the artist’s studio and the careful rendering of places and times – to being images that resembled those found in the mass media.

Reconnecting with history and objects

Associated with the rapidly expanding use of digital photography in the 1990s and perhaps in response to the immateriality of photography today (images are now mostly taken, stored and shared electronically), we have seen a reconnection with the medium’s history and a return to the photographic object in contemporary practice. Handcolouring draws our attention to materiality and re-introduces tactility to the photographic experience. It also engages community in a very particular way, establishing social ties between makers and between artists and viewers. Handcolouring demonstrates that even though digitisation has impacted significantly on the accessibility and scale of contemporary practice, many of photography’s rituals, motivations and pleasures remain the same.

For the artists included in this exhibition, handcolouring connects them to the history of photography in strategic ways. Nici Cumpston handcolours large-scale landscapes of the Murray-Darling river system as a way of documenting traces of Indigenous occupation and use and of bringing to our attention the decline of the area’s delicately balanced ecosystems. The handcoloured works of collaborators Charles Green, Lyndell Brown and Jon Cattapan remind us that an essential part of the experience of photography has always been the embodied, social experience of it. For Janina Green, the act of handcolouring prints allows her to engage with and remember the medium’s history of cross-cultural innovation.

Wall text (same text on the website)

Julie Rrap (born Lismore, New South Wales 1950; lives and works Sydney)
Puberty
1984
From the series Persona and shadow
Direct positive colour photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Kodak (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund 1984

This photograph is from the series of nine works titled Persona and shadow. Julie Rrap produced this series after visiting a major survey of contemporary art in Berlin (Zeitgeist, 1982) which only included one woman among the 45 artists participating in the exhibition. Rrap responded to this curatorial sexism with a series of self-portraits in which she mimics stereotypical images of women painted by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Each pose refers to a female stereotype employed by Munch: the innocent girl, the mother, the whore, the Madonna, the sister, and so on.

Appropriating the work of other artists is one of the strategies that characterises the work of so-called ‘postmodern’ artists active during the 1980s. The practice of borrowing, quoting and mimicking famous artworks was employed as a way of questioning notions of authenticity. Feminist artists tended to use appropriation to specifically question the authenticity of male representations of females. In more straightforward terms, Rrap reclaims Munch’s clichéd images of women and makes them her own. Rrap ultimately becomes an imposter, stealing her way into these masterpieces of art history, but the remarkable thing about these works is the way that the artist foregrounds the process of reappropriation itself. The procedure of restaging, collage, overpainting, and rephotographing becomes part of the final image, testifying to a do-it-herself politic.

Miriam Stannage (Australian, 1939-2016)
The flood from the series News from the street
1984
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1990
© Miriam Stannage

Miriam Stannage (Australian, 1939-2016)
War from the series News from the street
1984
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
40.6 x 50.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1990
© Miriam Stannage

Miriam Stannage (Australian, 1939-2016)

Miriam Stannage (1939-2016) was an Australian conceptual artist. She was known for her work in painting, printmaking and photography, and participated in many group and solo exhibitions, receiving several awards over her career. Her work was also featured in two Biennales and two major retrospective exhibitions. …

Throughout her almost 50-year career, Stannage produced a varied and eclectic body of work, encompassing collage, photography, print-making, and text-based works. Stannage first rose to prominence through the 1982 Sydney Biennale and the 1992 Adelaide Biennale, as well as her solo shows at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Curtin University, as well as being declared a ‘State Living Treasure’ in Western Australia. Over the course of her career, Stannage received several awards including the Albany Art Prize, the Georges Invitation Art Prize for drawing and the Power Institute residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Seven of Stannage’s works have been featured in the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

Stannage favoured simple structure and minimal use of form in her works, opting instead for text and collaged tableaux. She has been described as having ‘minimalist sensibilities.’

Her subject matter was engaged with contemporary events and news reportage, often utilising and subverting the visual language of newspapers and magazines. While her body of work is extensive, Stannage’s works always maintained their collage aesthetic, and were always founded upon her ongoing exploration of existential themes such as mortality, the spiritual and a quest for the meaning of life. Her work often centres the uncomfortable and emotive, in particular the heightened emotional impacts of conflict, destruction and disasters.

In 2001, following the September 11 attacks, Stannage shifted her focus strictly to the event, making works which spoke to the random nature of terrorist attacks and the interplay of monotony and death. In response to the attacks, she produced a collection of postage stamps which centred on concepts of stilled time, such as a clock face frozen at the moment of impact.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949) 'Untitled' 1988

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Untitled [Washing in basket]
1988
Gelatin silver photograph, photo oils
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Untitled [White cup on tray]
1988
Gelatin silver photograph, photo oils
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989

Nici Cumpston. (Barkindji/Paakintji peoples) 'Scar tree, Fowler's Creek' 2011

Nici Cumpston (Australian, b. 1963)
Barkindji/Paakintji peoples
Scar tree, Fowler’s Creek
2011
From the series having-been-there
Archival inkjet print hand coloured with synthetic polymer paint
98 x 177cm
Collection of the artist/Courtesy of the artist

Nici Cumpston (Barkindji/Paakintji peoples) 'Campsite V, Nookamka Lake' 2008

Nici Cumpston (Australian, b. 1963)
Barkindji/Paakintji peoples
Campsite V, Nookamka Lake
2008
Inkjet print on canvas, hand-coloured with pencil and watercolour
77 x 206cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2011

The once rich and thriving environment of the Murray and Darling River system with its clear waterways, lush flora and abundant fauna was home to the Barkindji, Muthi Muthi and Nyampa peoples.

The shallow Nookamka Lake (Lake Bonney), which connects to the Murray River in South Australia, is the subject of Nici Cumpston’s recent photographic series. However, the series is not of a lush utopia but of the degradation and erosion that has consumed the lake since the forced irrigation flooding of the waterways in the early 1900s.

When damming ceased in 2007, the water began to subside, slowly revealing the original landscape and the history of human occupation. Cumpston beautifully documents this stark landscape and the demise that salinisation and destructive water management practices have wrought on the people and their lands. Today, the landscape is desolate, scattered with twisted and broken trees stripped of their foliage like majestic sentinels in deathly poses. The trees still bare the scars – although obscured by dark tidelines – where canoes, containers and shields were cut from their trunks.

Cumpston highlights these clues to the area’s original inhabitants through the delicate and precise hand-watercolouring of the printed black-and-white photographs on canvas. She does not aim to replicate the original colours of the landscape, as a colour photograph would, but to interpret it, re-introducing the Aboriginal presence within the landscape – a subtle reconnection to Country and reminder of past cultural practices and knowledge. As the artist says, “I am finding ways to talk about connections to country and to allow people to understand the ongoing connections that Aboriginal people maintain with their traditional lands.”

Tina Baum
Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Art Gallery of New South Wales

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.3]
1978
Gelatin silver photograph, chinagraph, decal lettering gelatin silver photograph
49.7 x 36.7cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.12]
1978
Type C colour photograph, ink, crayon
49.8 x 37cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

Warren Breninger (Australian, b. 1948)
Expulsion of Eve [No.15]
1978
Photograph, gum arabic print, acrylic paint, crayon, pencil
49.8 x 37cm
Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

The Expulsion of Eve series is in essence a single work which the artist returns to continually to develop and re-work the same image. ‘Number 16’, highly indicative of the series, is a photographic image of a young woman, the print having undergone many transformative processes including being cut out, reapplied, incised, worn back, applied with colour, stripped of colour and re-drawn. Interrogating notions of reality, Breninger expresses his personal and artistic concerns relating to ‘the rift between appearances and what is real’; ideas informed by his deep Christian faith.1

His subject, Eve, is not chosen symbolically as a female archetype; rather, the artist reasons, “because I believe in her historically and all humanity is her descendents”.2 Breninger’s Eve, in her features and expression, suggests a presence caught between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and intent, the temporal and corporeal. While there is a Christ-like surrender in the pose, Breninger’s Eve also has a strong correlation with Edvard Munch’s ‘Madonna’, both visually and in terms of the obsessive process by which the artist revisits the image.

The artist’s belief that ‘cameras create an appetite for ghosts, for vapour, for beings of steam that we can never embrace, that will elude us like every photo does’,3 explains his intrigue with photography’s abilities and limitations in recording the subjective. He continued to develop the work with series III produced in 1990, followed in 1993-94 by series IV, comprising male and female faces.

1/ Breninger W 1983, ‘Art & fulfilment’, self-published artist’s essay p. 1
2/ Warren Breninger in correspondence with Sue Smith, 24 Feb 1984, collection files, Warren Breninger, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
3/ Breninger W 1983, op cit p. 3

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954) 'Packaged Deal' 1986/96

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Packaged Deal
1986/1996
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
50cm x 50cm/127cm x 127cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The daughter of Polish immigrants, Barry explores the significance of place in defining identity in the series Displaced objects. She suggests disjunction and the pull of the past into the present: the picture plane is broken up through the use of collaged fragments of old family photographs, newspaper and magazine cuttings, postcards and flags. As Barry explains, ‘The medium of collage’ and ‘the ad-hoc splashes of paint and sharp diagonals, which reoccur spasmodically throughout the series, read like the effacements of graffiti, associated with “clash” and the “confusion of cultures”.’ Collage and over painting suggest reconstruction and the re-presentation of existing elements to tell a new story, and this is something that Barry reinforces through the strategy of rephotographing the original collage and presenting it as a uniform image.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Untitled (Patricia Marczak)
1986-1987
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
51.1 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Christine Barry (Australian, b. 1954)
Untitled (Self portrait)
1986
From the series Displaced Objects
Direct positive colour photograph/Type C photographic print
50.8 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Janina Green (Essen, Germany born 1944; Australia from 1949)
Maid in Hong Kong #11
2008
From the series Maid in Hong Kong
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dyes gelatin silver photograph
Image and sheet 76 x 60cm
Gift of Wilbow Group PTY LTD Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Catherine and Morgan
1985-1987
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Untitled
1985-1987
Gelatin silver photograph, colour dye
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory 2600
Phone: (02) 6240 6411

Opening hours:
Open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
(closed Christmas day)

National Gallery of Australia website

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Exhibition: ‘Storm in a Teacup’ at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington

Exhibition dates: 24th July – 27th September, 2015

Curator: Wendy Garden

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007) 'Dark tea' 2015 (installation view) from the exhibition 'Storm in a Teacup' at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington, July - Sept, 2015

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007)
Dark tea (installation view)
2015
Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This is the best thematic group exhibition I have seen in Melbourne and surrounds this year.

Every piece in the exhibition is visually stimulating and intelligently constructed, all works combining to make an engaging exhibition. Nothing is superfluous, every work having something interesting to say, whether it is about the ceremony of tea drinking, colonisation, global warming, Stolen Generations or social mores. Congratulations must go to the curators and artists for their efforts.

Particular favourites where the Hotham Street Ladies Dark Tea (2015, below) made of royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, and found objects; the many sculptural objects which form the backbone of the exhibition, especially the work of Sharon West and Penny Byrne; and the wonderful vintage photographs that are displayed in the foyer of the gallery.

Accompanying this exhibition is another excellent exhibition, Ways to draw: A selection from the permanent collection by Betty Churcher, on till 27th September as well. If you want a day out from Melbourne with lunch in Mornington, some seriously good art and a drive along the coast, you could do no better than visit the gallery in the next week. Highly recommended.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007) 'Dark tea' 2015 (installation view detail)

Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007)
Dark tea (installation view details)
2015
Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018) 'Feet beneath the table' 1956 from the exhibition 'Storm in a Teacup' at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington, July - Sept, 2015

Charles Blackman (Australian, 1928-2018)
Feet beneath the table
1956
Tempera and oil on composition board
106.5 x 121.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Barbara Blackman, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2005

Charles Blackman first encountered Lewis Caroll’s book, Alice in Wonderland, through a talking book for the blind which his wife, Barbara was listening to. Her developing blindness resulted in telescopic vision, spatial disorientation and a shrinking visual field. She was also pregnant with their first child and her distorted body image also had parallels with Alice’s experiences. By painting Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party Blackman could express his wife’s feeling of bewilderment and disorientation.

E. Phillips Fox (Australian, 1865-1915) 'The arbour' 1910 from the exhibition 'Storm in a Teacup' at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington, July - Sept, 2015

E. Phillips Fox (Australian, 1865-1915)
The arbour
1910
Oil on canvas
190.5 x 230.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest 1916

Melbourne born E. Phillips Fox, described as ‘one of the greatest of Australia’s Impressionist painters and the most gifted of her colourists’1 went to Paris in 1887 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he encountered the work of the French Impressionists. He remained in Paris for several years but made frequent trips back to Melbourne to visit his family. The Arbour was painted in Paris in Fox’s garden but is based upon observations of family life in his brother’s garden in Malvern. The depiction of an elegant family taking tea al fresco is a study of refined gentility. The Arbour was exhibited at both the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon exhibitions and was regarded by Fox as the finest thing he had done.2 At the time the painting was much admired for its ‘subtle lights ad shadow’3 and his exemplary ‘use of delicate colour and refined harmonies.’4

1/ Courier Mail, 12 May 1949
2/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913
3/ Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913
4/ Le Courrier Australien, Sydney, 15 April 1949

Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973)
Some things were out in the open
2007
Pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper (ed. 3/5)
63 x 62cm
Courtesy of the artist

Adam Hill (Blak Douglas) (Australian, b. 1970)
Not everyone’s cup of tea
2009
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
150 x 260cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009

Kendal Murray (Australian, b. 1958)
Exceed speed, mislead, concede
2011
Mixed media assemblage
18 x 24 x 14cm
Courtesy of the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
Tea for two in Tuvalu
2011
Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
15 x 19cm
Private Collection

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) 'Tea for two in Tuvalu' 2011 (installation view)

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
Tea for two in Tuvalu (installation view)
2011
Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
15 x 19cm
Private Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This piece was inspired by an underwater cabinet meeting held in 2009 by Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed in a campaign to raise awareness for activity on climate change. The thirty minute meeting was held six metres below sea level and was attended by eleven cabinet members calling upon all countries to cut their emissions to halt further temperature rises.

Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, experienced a severe drought in 2011. A state of emergency was declared and rationing of fresh-water took place which restricted households on some of the islands to two buckets of fresh water per day. Tuvalu is also especially susceptible to changes in sea level and it is estimated that a sea level rise of 20 to 40 centimetres in the next 100 years could make Tuvalu uninhabitable.

Kate Bergin (Australian, b. 1968)
The hunt for a room of one’s own
2012
Oil on canvas on board
75 x 101cm
Private Collection

Kate Bergin draws upon Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century tradition of still life painting to comment on our attitudes to animals. Bergin stages the scene on a crumpled white tablecloth upon which a large fox, based on a taxidermy fox she bought on eBay, regally sits centre stage. Meticulously rendered native birds, including a honeyeater, finch and triller, are based on photographs of specimens from the Melbourne Museum Collection. They flit about unperturbed by the introduced predator. Teaspoons, representing the impulse for collecting, entangle the fox and bird. Together with a teapot and cup, precariously placed, they contribute to the overarching sense of impending chaos.

Both afternoon tea and the fox represent English upper class social mores and were introduced into the colonies following British settlement. The fox arrived in 1855, brought in for recreational hunting, and has been a major cause of native bird extinctions. Fox numbers are increasing in some areas further threatening the precarious balance between wild life and introduced species.

Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963) 'Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists' 2014 (installation view)

Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963)
Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists (installation photo)
2014
Mixed media assemblage
15 x 46 x 30cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Heather Shimmen (Australian, b. 1957) 'Tip me up' 2005 (installation view)

Heather Shimmen (Australian, b. 1957)
Tip me up (installation view)
2005
Linocut on paper and organza (ed. 7/30)
56 x 76cm
Courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Trent Jansen (Australian, b. 1981) 'Briggs family tea service' 2011 (installation view)

Trent Jansen (Australian, b. 1981)
Briggs family tea service (installation view)
2011
Slip cast porcelain, bull kelp, wallaby pelt, copper and brass
George (teapot) 22.5 x 20.5 x 13cm; Woretermoeteyenner (sugar bowl) 16 x 13.5 x 9cm; Dolly (milk jug) 12.5 x 12.5 x 8.5cm; John (teacup) 7 x 8.5 x 8cm; Eliza (teacup) 7.5 x 10.5 x 8cm; Mary (teacup) 10 x 9 x 6.5cm
Courtesy of Broached Commissions, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The Briggs family tea service represents the marriage of George Briggs, a free settler, to Woretermoeteyenner of the Pairrebeenne people in Van Diemen’s Land and the four children they had together. Briggs arrived from Bedfordshire in 1791 and learned to speak the language of the local Pairrebeenne people, trading tea, flour and sugar fro kangaroo, wallaby and seal skins. It is understood that he became good friends with the leader of the Pairrebeenne people, Mannalargenna, and by 1810 he partnered his daughter Woretermoeteyenner. Their marriage meant she had to adapt to a way of life that merged her traditional cultural values with the ways of British settlers. The teapot and sugar bowl represent the parents while their first daughter, Doll Mountgarret Briggs is symbolised in the milk jug and the three cups each signify their other children John, Eliza and Mary.

The tea service is a hybrid design bringing together materials common to both cultures. To realise the set Jansen worked with Rod Bamford on the ceramic elements, Oliver Smith for the brass and copper and Vicki West, who uses the traditional methods of her Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors, worked with the bull kelp components.

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959) 'Blue (Bower-Bauer)' 1998-2000 (installation view)

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959)
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view)
1998-2000
Watercolour over black pencil on paper
114.0 x 152.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959) 'Blue (Bower-Bauer)' 1998-2000 (installation view detail)

eX de Medici (Australian, b. 1959)
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation view detail)
1998-2000
Watercolour over black pencil on paper
114.0 x 152.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A turning point in eX de Medici’s career came in 1998 when she saw an exhibition of watercolours by Ferdinand Bauer comprising 2,000 rarely seen images of native flora and fauna made when Bauer was official artist on Matthew Flinder’s historic circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-1803. Previously working with tattoo imagery, Medici found the intricate works so compelling she decided to change course and ‘retrograde’ herself and explore watercolour as a medium.1

Referencing Australia’s Bower bird that adorns its nest with anything blue, Medici entangles the history of vanitas painting with commentary about the desire to seek permanence and affirmation in the accumulation of things. The broken willow pattern platter, upturned jugs and cups, amassed with so many other decorative and functional objects, are juxtaposed with skulls, fruit and flowers – symbols of mortality. A reaction to what she considered John Howard’s regressive politics at the time, the work ‘is a kind of a backhanded discussion about colonising our minds with retroactive ideas’.2

1/ Ted Gott. ‘eX deMedici an epic journey on a Lilliputian scale’ Art and Australia Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 105
2/ eX deMedici in Paul Flynn. Artist Profile #5, March 2008, pp. 28-35.

Storm in a Teacup reflects upon tea drinking in Australia. Introduced by the British colonials, the afternoon tea party was an attempt to ‘civilise’ the land. Tea drinking became so popular in the colonies that by 1888 the amount of tea consumed per capita exceeded the amount consumed in England. Soon after, billy tea was to become an enduring symbol of the pioneering spirit, immortalised by Henry Lawson’s stories published under the title While the billy boils.

Beginning with elegant paintings of the afternoon tea table from E. Phillips Fox and Arthur Streeton, the exhibition goes on to explore the darker side of tea drinking and the social and environmental impacts of the humble cup of tea. Michael Cook’s Object (table), 2015, provides an alternative history to the narrative of colonialism while Sharon West and Adam Hill both use humour to subvert colonial understandings of the afternoon tea party as an occasion of refined gentility.

The humble cuppa has been around for thousands of years, but this exhibition explores how a popular beverage can impact on us culturally, socially, environmentally and politically. There is more to debate than just the proper way to make a cup of tea. Storm in a teacup explores far-reaching issues brewing from tea, including the imposition of one culture upon another – especially on the colonial frontier; the production of ceramics and the environmental impacts of porcelain and its production; gender stereotypes and socialisation through tea parties. The exhibition also reflects upon tea drinking ceremonies in Asia within a western Orientalist paradigm and tea drinking as an occasion for familial cohesiveness and disconnect.

Text from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery

Mark James Daniel (Australian, 1867-1949)
Verandah, “Harefield” – afternoon tea
Feb 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Michael J Drew (Australian, 1873-1943)
Group taking tea in a garden
between 1890 and 1900
Glass negative
12.2 x 16.5cm (half plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Rex Hazlewood (Australian, 1886-1968)
[Men drinking billy tea]
1911-1927
Silver gelatin print
Collection of the State Library of New South Wales

Anonymous photographer
Afternoon tea at “Vivaleigh”
1917
Gelatin silver print
12 x 16cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945)
Lawn, Arylie, Hobart
c. 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

James Fox Barnard (Australian, 1874-1945)
[Tea on the verandah]
c. 1900
Glass negative
8.5 x 11cm (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Installation photograph of the exhibition 'Storm in a Teacup' at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery

Installation photograph of the exhibition Storm in a Teacup at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Tea is the medium of many a complex and commonplace rituals. Adopted in a variety of ceremonies and customs across the globe, its unique and symbolic place in our lives is subtle and powerful. Whether a quick cuppa around the kitchen table or a lavish display of refined gentility; from billy tea to Asian tea-drinking ceremonies, tea has played an important role in international trade but more curiously in facilitating social cohesiveness.

Comprising approximately 50 works including painting, photography, sculpture and installation Storm in a Teacup features artists such as Chares Blackman, John Perceval, Emma Minnie Boyd, E. Phillips Fox and contemporary artists Stephen Bowers, Danie Mellor, Penny Byrne, Rosalie Gasgoigne, Matthew Sleeth, eX de Medici, Anne Zahalka, Polixeni Papapetrou and a mad tea party installation by Hotham Street Ladies.

Tea is said to have first been invented in China around 2700 BC, with the earliest records of tea consumption dating to 1000BC. Initially consumed as a medicinal drink, it became widely popular as a common beverage and traded across Asia and Europe during the 16th century. It was King Charles II’s wife Catherine of Portugal who is said to have brought the tea habit to Great Britain. Indeed, the afternoon tea party first became fashionable in the seventeenth century following Queen Catherine de Braganza’s fondness for serving the beverage at Whitehall in London. It wasn’t until the 18th century that it became widely consumed with tea smuggling bringing the tipple to the masses and later influenced the Boston Tea Party.

Tea drinking became a demonstration of social aspirations and grew in popularity giving rise to a subtle orchestration of manners, dress and serving paraphernalia which created new forms of commodity consumption. In the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria afternoon tea parties were a lavish display of settler understandings of refined gentility that were an attempt to signal allegiance to the values of the home country and ground the displaced community in their originating culture. In this respect the afternoon tea party expressed collective understandings of British identity and was a means of domesticating and civilising the alien terrain of the colonies.

Press release from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery

Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973) 'Family confection II' 2015 (installation view)

Clare Humphries (Australian, b. 1973)
Family confection II (installation views)
2015
Sugar cubes stained with coffee and tea
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Giuseppe Romeo (Australian, b. 1958) Subjective landscape, 'Of consequence rather than reason' 2015 (installation view)

Giuseppe Romeo (Australian, b. 1958)
Subjective landscape, ‘Of consequence rather than reason’ (installation views)
2015
Found discarded objects, bitumen, paint
80 x 100 x 60cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Guiseppe Rome asks the simple question: ‘What are you going to do with it all?’

Romeo recalls the tea sets his mother and aunts possessed and the ‘good set’ kept for special occasions that were rarely used. In this work a silver platter is the support for a silver cake stand upon which a teapot, creamer, sugar bowl and various serving implements jostle with items required to clean up the mess. The bat, ball and stumps are a reference to playing cricket which ‘became an excuse for a big afternoon tea party in England’. A ribbon of wire holds it all together ‘like a dream from Alice in Wonderland when nothing is as it seems’, while a tinkling melody from a music box is a lullaby that sends us in to a contented sleep.

Romeo coats the sculpture in bitumen then paints it entirely in white. The effect is reminiscent of excavated items from an ancient ruin, as if we are peering upon the remains from a modern day Pompeii – artefacts that have been covered in lava and buried. This work alludes to the ways in which we deceive ourselves and ‘attempt to keep it all together through consumption but ultimately we can’t’.

Samantha Everton (Australian, b. 1971)
Camellia
2009
From the series Vintage dolls 2009
Pigment print on rag paper (ed. AP2)
106 x 114cm
Courtesy of the artist and Anthea Polson Art, Queensland

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965) 'Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession' 2010-2015 (installation view)

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965)
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view)
2010-2015
Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer
240 x 122 x 42cm
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965) 'Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession' 2010-15 (installation view detail)

Robyn Phelan (Australian, b. 1965)
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation view detail)
2010-2015
Porcelain, paper, clay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer
240 x 122 x 42cm
Courtesy of the artist

Robyn Phelan undertook a residency at the Pottery Workshop and Experimental Sculptural Factory of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province in China in 2008. Jingdezhen is known as the porcelain capital because it has been the centre of China’s ceramic production, beginning in the fourteenth century Yuan Dynasty, where fine porcelain was first exported all over the world.

Deposits of kaolinite, a clay found at Mt Kaolin nearby which can sustain very high firing temperatures produced a superior white porcelain of increased strength and translucency. Items made from kaolinite were fired with cobalt landscape designs and were highly sought after by European collectors. Over the centuries, because of excessive mining, the mountain’s deposits have become depleted. Phelan’s work is a lament to the desecration of the mountain and a reminder of the potential destructiveness of consumer desire.

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) '‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’' 2010 (installation view)

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view)
2010
Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
80 x 33cm
Williams Sinclair Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965) '‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’' 2010 (installation view detail)

Penny Byrne (Australian, b. 1965)
‘Let’s forget about global warming’ said Alice ‘and have a cup of tea instead!’ (installation view detail)
2010
Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
80 x 33cm
Williams Sinclair Collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Penny Byrne’s reworked porcelain conversation piece was motivated by Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s cry to ‘drill, baby, drill’ during her campaign in 2008. A call for increase off-shore drilling of petroleum, including sites such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Palin claimed ‘that’s what we hear all across the country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into’.1

In Byrne’s piece the patriotic figures gorge themselves, blithely overindulging without care to the wastage. The new Disney production of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton had just been released and this led Byrne to reflect upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party in which tea was drunk all day because time stood still and was stuck at tea-time.

1/ Transcript: The Vice-Presidential Debate, 2 October 2008. Reprinted in the New York Times, 23 May 2012.

Sharon West (Australian, b. 1963)
Joseph Banks’ tea party for a Botany Bay tribesman is ruined by flies and spiders
2014
Digital print on paper (ed. 2/5)
66 x 57cm (sheet)
Courtesy of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sharon West’s recreation of an afternoon tea party is set in the early days of first contact. Joseph Banks was the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour on the first voyage of discovery which mapped the east coast of Australia between 1768 and 1771. While ashore he made an extensive collection of native flora and fauna which was sent back to natural history museums in England. Banks was also instrumental in the British government’s decision to colonise the New South Wales settlement.

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999) 'The tea party' 1980 (installation view)

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999)
The tea party (installation view)
1980
Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers
83 x 35 x 20cm
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999) 'The tea party' 1980 (installation view detail)

Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999)
The tea party (installation view detail)
1980
Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers
83 x 35 x 20cm
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rosalie Gascoigne found the kewpie dolls amongst a large number of discarded things from an abandoned sideshow at the Bungendore dump in the summer of 1976. ‘I thought “Oh, those dollies, they’re having a … very joyful … picnic. They’re … in the paddock, they’ve got all these old things … they’ve sat down on the teapots and waved their wings around.”

For Gascoigne beauty existed in the most humble of objects and the wear and tear from use only added to the appeal. The enamel teapots were also found at various dumps and were a particular focus of her collecting.

‘I had a thing about enamelware because I see it as being elegant. People see the holes in it. I was collecting brown and white at the same time. To me it had a sort of elegance that a Dalmatian dog has, spotty, very elegant’.1

1/ Rosalie Gascoigne, excerpts from her correspondence, email communication with Martin Gascoigne, 13 March 2015

Julie Dowling (Australian, b. 1969)
Badimaya people, Western Australia
White with one
2003
Synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas
121 x 100cm
Collection of Jane Kleimeyer and Anthony Stuart

Julie Dowling’s painting is a poignant reminder of the Stolen Generations and the plight of many young girls, forcibly removed from their families, who were brought up in government institutions and trained to be domestic servant to white families. Girls were targeted because women were considered the ‘uplifters’ or ‘civilisers’ of their communities and as future mothers their education into the values of white society was deemed essential to enable successful assimilation. Girls in service were supposed to receive a wage but often this was retained by their employer and not passed on. Dowling points out it is also a history of Stolen wages.

Michael Cook (Australian, b. 1968)
Bidjara people, south-west Queensland
Object (table)
2015
Inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag (ed. 2/4 + 2AP)
140 x 99cm
Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne

Michael Cook’s photographic tableau ‘turns the table’ on racism. By depicting the body of a white woman as a functional object in service to others, Cook considers the dehumanisation and objectification of one race of people by another in the history of slavery.

The double portrait on the back wall is by Johann Zoffany from 1778, and features Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) who was born into slavery in the West Indies. The daughter of an African mother, her father was an English naval officer who left her to the care of his uncle, Lord William Murray, where she was raised as an equal with Murray’s niece. Murray was instrumental in outlawing slavery in the United Kingdom in 1772. In the painting Zoffany depicts the two women standing together, the niece affectionately reaching out to Belle. Hence Cook’s afternoon tea is also a reminder that prejudice and racial inequality can be surmounted.

Yenny Huber (b. Austria 1980; arr. Australia 2000)
Room No. 14
2006
Digital print on aluminium panel (ed. 1/6)
27.2 x 27.2cm
Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria

Underpinned by the belief that any one person is comprised of diverse, fragmentary and often illusory selves, Yenny Huber explores the various ego states that reside within. This photograph is a self portrait taken in a hotel room, but it is also an impersonation of an identity available to women. Tea-drinking was once described as ‘an infallible sign of an old maid’1 and in this work Huber offers us an image of a good Catholic girl, knees together, elbows in, sitting demurely on the couch sipping tea. It is an image of femininity constrained by the dictates of religion and outdated socially sanctioned ideals of respectable female behaviour.

1/ The Horsham Times, Victoria, 26 April 1898

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Saturday 5.18 pm 1995
1995 (printed 1997)
Type C photograph (ed AP)
125 x 162cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Gift of the artist, 2011
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 4pm

Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget’ and ‘Impressions of Melbourne’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th July – 20th September, 2015

National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition

Curator of Impressions of Paris: Jane Kinsman, National Gallery of Australia’s Senior Curator of International Prints

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927) 'No title (Brocanteur)' c. 1898-1905 from the exhibition 'Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget' and 'Impressions of Melbourne' at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, July - Sept, 2015

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
No title (Brocanteur)
c. 1898-1905
Albumen silver photograph
17.8 x 21.9cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget is a particularly dry and uninspiring National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition, which was only enlivened for me by the enlightened presence of 20 or so vintage Eugène Atget photographs, specifically added for this showing at the Monash Gallery of Art, the home of Australian photography.

Atget’s photographs have an almost ether/real quality to them in their visual representation and, physically, an ephemeral feel to the quality of the paper – as though the images are about to dissolve into nothing – even as he photographs solid objects such as stairways, doors and door knockers. Observe the photographs Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives (c. 1898-1905), A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre (c. 1900) and Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal (c. 1901-1914), below, to witness this shimmering phenomenon. It is as if the emulsion of the plate is insufficient to capture the light of life.

In an accompanying exhibition in the smaller gallery, Impressions of Melbourne, photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones investigate the city of Melbourne… but it is the stunning photographs by Atget that make the long drive out to Wheeler’s Hill worth the visit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927) 'Versailles, Grand Trianon' c. 1901-1925 from the exhibition 'Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget' and 'Impressions of Melbourne' at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, July - Sept, 2015

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Versailles, Grand Trianon
c. 1901-1925
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
17.6 x 22cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives
c. 1898-1905
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
22 x 18.1cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France 1857-1927)
A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre
c. 1900
Printing out paper photograph
22 x 17.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1984

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal
c. 1901-1914
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
21.9 x 17.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Monash Gallery of Art is delighted to present its major international exhibition of 2015, Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget featuring over 120 prints, posters and photographs drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget examines the major contribution to French art made by key figures: Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and includes a selection of photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) specially conceived for Monash Gallery of Art.

Newly appointed Gallery Director Kallie Blauhorn states, “I’m thrilled that for my first exhibition at MGA we are able to present a major international show, Impressions of Paris. Residents of Monash and art lovers across Melbourne will experience the extraordinary works by household names, Toulouse Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Honore Daumier and the wonderful photographer Eugène Atget.”

“This is a first for MGA and a true testament to the reputation of the gallery that we can host this important and significant exhibition,” said Blauhorn.

A generation apart, Lautrec, Degas and Daumier were consummate draughtsmen whose innovative compositions and embrace of modern subject matter played a significant role in artistic developments in France over the nineteenth century. Atget, the only specialist photographer among these artists, spent much of his life documenting the streets of Paris as they underwent modernisation. His photographs show us how modern life was expressed in the architectural experience of France, giving us a glimpse of what modernity left behind.

The generation of French artists who followed Daumier in the nineteenth century were inspired by his critical observations, which became an extraordinary reservoir of ideas. Both Degas and then Lautrec were enthusiastic admirers of French caricature, delighting in its animated qualities, stylistic freedoms and contemporary themes. They were particularly enamoured of Daumier’s caricature.

Degas adopted themes of modern French life, the ballet, the race course, the café-concert and the demi-monde and played an important role in the rejection of mythological and historical subjects favoured by the Impressionists. Many of Degas’ ideas on composition and subjects were, in turn, drawn from Daumier. This French satirist was both extraordinarily gifted and prolific, making a name for himself by lampooning the affectations, stupidities and greed of members of the French bourgeois society in caricatures, which Degas avidly collected.

The youngest of the artists, Lautrec, who sadly dies before reaching 37, borrowed themes and compositions from Degas, an artist he much admired and emulated. Images of drinkers at a table, ballet and cabaret scenes and nudes reveal the powerful influence that Degas had on the younger artist, as well as Lautrec’s own considerable originality, particularly as a portrayer of individuals rather than the depiction of types often favoured by Degas.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of Old Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

These four artists captured the spirit of Paris in their prints, posters and photographs. Through the examination of this work, we find clues as to why dramatic changes took place in French art over the nineteenth century. They formed part of other generations of artists who admired Daumier and who adapted the caricaturist’s critical lithographic observations. In this way Daumier’s legacy was a brilliant journalistic record of the modern capital and contributed to an era in France ripe for a new art.

Press release from the MGA website

Eugène Atget: growth and decay in the great city

After an unspectacular career in the theatre, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) began to take photographs of Paris in 1892. By 1897 he had established a successful business photographing the spaces that remained of Old Paris. In all, Atget made over 10,000 images of Paris and its surrounds, each taken with a straightforward approach that laid the basis for much of the documentary photography that followed. Atget’s pictures were immensely popular: he sold thousands of prints, satisfying a strong demand for views of a city undergoing massive social and architectural transformation.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of pre-Revolutionary Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Street traders and other workers are seen selling their wares along old streets and laneways; ancient buildings stand in laneways and courtyards undergoing physical transformation; cafes and shops await bustling crowds. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

Impressions of Melbourne

17th July 2015 – 20th September 2015

In response to the photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) included in the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition, Impressions of Paris, this exhibition offers views of Melbourne’s streets, laneways and urban landscape. Drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection, this selection traverses a period from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Atget photographed Paris during a time when the French capital was undergoing significant transformation. From the 1850s through to the 1920s, the dark medieval neighbourhoods of the city were demolished to make way for the wide avenues and open public spaces that Paris is known for today. Atget’s ambition was to produce clear and detailed photographs that would document the heritage of Paris before it disappeared. Typically taking his photographs in the early morning when the streets were empty, Atget imbued the city with ghostly nostalgia.

The earliest photographs in Impressions of Melbourne, taken by Nicholas Caire and Charles Kerry in the late nineteenth century, are contemporary to those of Atget. While Atget focused longingly on the past, however, these Australian photographers celebrated the civic accomplishments of modern progress in the colonies. The portrayal of Melbourne as a civilised metropolis, attractive to both immigrants and tourists, persisted through the twentieth century. Max Dupain captured the city as a lively and enterprising place, while Mark Strizic lingered on the shimmering ambience of window shopping and city strolling.

Impressions of Melbourne showcases a range of photographic responses to our urban environment, revealing some of Melbourne’s many moods and highlighting the city as a rich photographic subject. The exhibition includes photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones.

Nicholas Caire

Nicolas Caire was born in Guernsey and arrived in Australia, settling in Adelaide, in 1858. He set up his first photographic studio in Adelaide in 1867. He moved to the Victorian goldmining town of Talbot in 1870 before relocating to Melbourne in 1876. At this time, Melbourne was the largest Australian city.

While Caire is best known for his picturesque landscape photographs of the Victorian countryside, he also produced photographs of major city thoroughfares, public buildings, parks and gardens. These subjects were common amongst photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century, conveying a sense of local pride and achievement. Caire’s photographs were often mounted in albums and accompanied by individual descriptive texts, a format that was popular amongst local and overseas visitors at the time.

Charles Kerry

Charles Kerry grew up in country New South Wales before moving to Sydney at the age of 17 to begin his photographic career. After a failed studio partnership, which left him with a lot of debt, Kerry rebuilt his business and by 1890 found himself running a successful studio that had a monopoly on the popular postcard market. By 1898 Kerry’s studio was the largest in Australia, housed in a three-storey building at 310 George Street, Sydney.

Throughout his career, Kerry photographed a broad range of subjects including social and sporting events, portraits of Indigenous people, city streets as well as the New South Wales countryside. He also spent a year documenting every station homestead in New South Wales. Kerry retired in 1913.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
View of Bourke Street, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series Views of Victoria
Albumen print
13.4 x 18.7cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: Bourke Street is the principal business thoroughfare in the great City of Melbourne. It is about a mile in length, extending from the Parliament House to the Spencer Street Railway Station. On the left hand side of the picture is the Post Office, and at the extreme end of the street can be seen the Parliament House.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Government Domain of Victoria
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Governor’s Residence is on an eminence near the Botanical Gardens, and occupies one of the best positions around the City of Melbourne. Looking westward from the front of the Domain, a splendid view is obtained of Hobson’s Bay, with the townships of St Kilda, Emerald Hill, Sandridge, and Williamstown on the coast. On the north side can be seen the City of Melbourne, with its busy suburban towns – Hotham, Carlton and Fitzroy. From the rear of the building towards the east, in the distance, the retired towns of Richmond, Hawthorn, and Toorak can be distinguished. The building, as seen in the illustration, was completed in the year 1876. Sir G F Bowen, GCMG, being the Resident Governor at the time.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Royal Mint, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Royal Mint of Victoria is situated in the north-easterly part of William Street, West Melbourne. This Government Building is not thrown open to the public for visitation at any time; but an inspection by visitors can be effected on an order from a Member of the Ministry, conditionally that there be no fewer than eight persons at each visitation; one of the number being required to become responsible for the conduct of the party.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Post Office, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: This imposing structure is erected at the junction of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, which may be considered perhaps the most central position in Melbourne. It is provided with a very long corridor for the posting and delivery of letters, & c. The Telegraph Department, as also the Post Office Savings Bank and Money Order Office, are all conducted in connection with the General Post office, Melbourne, of which the Hon. R Ramsay, MLA, is at present Postmaster-General.

Charles Kerry (Australia, 1858-1928)
Collins Street, looking south
c. 1890
Albumen print
14.5 x 17.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1984

Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992)
Melbourne with rain
1946
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Max Dupain

Max Dupain began his photographic career in 1930 as an apprentice in the studio of Cecil Bostock. In 1934 he established his own studio in Sydney and continued to produce a broad range of commercial work over the course of his life. Dupain was strongly influenced by modernist photographic principles and is renowned for his architectural photography as well as his iconic images of Australian beach culture.

While he primarily worked in Sydney, the photographs exhibited here are among several he took of otherAustralian cities. They highlight his interest in documenting city life as well as his use of light, shadow and aerial perspective. They were taken during the post war period; in the year that Dupain was commissioned by the Department of Information to photograph Australia’s way of life as part of a campaign to increase migration to Australia. This period marked a shift in Dupain’s practice, away from advertising and fashion toward social documentary.

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Near 101 Collins Street, Jan 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
36 x 53.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Collins Street at McPherson’s building – 1, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
53.8 x 36cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic

Mark Strizic was born in Berlin and migrated to Melbourne from Zagreb, Croatia in 1950. Strizic had no formal training in photography, but began taking photographs of Melbourne in the 1950s. He abandoned his studies in physics to become a full-time photographer in 1957, taking up subsequent commissions in architectural, industrial, interior design and portrait photography.

Among Strizic’s most widely recognised images are those he created of Melbourne between 1955 and 1970. Strizic documented the streets of Melbourne, showing many sides of the city, from derelict back alleyways to the grand arcades and buildings of Melbourne’s ‘Paris end’. Strizic’s photographs were produced during a period of dramatic change, a time when Melbourne’s Victorian-era buildings were being replaced by modern architectural developments. The images not only serve to document this change but also provide significant and important records of Melbourne pre-modernisation.

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘View from the Window’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 2nd – 19th July 2014

Curated by: Vivian Cooper Smith and Jason McQuoid

Artists include: Sean Barrett, Danica Chappell, Kim Demuth, Jackson Eaton, Mike Gray, Megan Jenkinson, Benjamin Lichtenstein, Phuong Ngo, Izabela Pluta, Kate Robertson, Jo Scicluna, Vivian Cooper Smith, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Justine Varga

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Photography can be anything your heart desires (or so they say)…

Another stimulating exhibition at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.

My personal favourites are the works of Jo Scicluna and the two large “sculptural” photographs by Kim Demuth, but every artist in the exhibition had something interesting to offer.

Marcus

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

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Morning from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
77 x 61cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Justine Varga (Australian, b. 1984)
Evening from the series Sounding Silence
2014
Type C print
47 x 38.5cm
Edition of 6 + 1AP
Images courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery, Sydney and Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012 (installation view)
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Izabela Pluta (Australian born Poland, b. 1979)
Left: Study for a sham ruin #7, pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Right: Study for a sham ruin #8, acrylic on pigment print, 50 x 50cm, 2012
Images courtesy of the artist, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne and Galerie pompom, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Promise – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
22.6 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Megan Jenkinson (New Zealand, b. 1958)
Solace – Morrell’s Islands
2009
Type lenticular
21.7 x 38cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

View from the Window presents current thinking around photography (if we can even talk of something called photography any more).

The exhibition adapts its name from the oldest existing camera photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras by Nicéphore Niépce. Created with a cumbersome process using Bitumen of Judeah, it remains a trace of a day nearly two hundred years ago and a fragile, enigmatic object today. Since that time, photography has undergone continual seismic shifts in its short history. Given its technological foundations it was inevitable that as new processes and techniques were discovered they would influence current photographic practice. From daguerreotypes, cyanotypes through to Kodachrome, C-41, digital negatives and Photoshop just about everything has changed how we engage with the medium.

With the ubiquity of the modern photographic image View from the Window attempts to highlight the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of current photographic practices. The artists respond to this by considering what ‘photography’ is, and in doing so re-shape, re-imagine, expand and break it down. They explore new thinking with traditional techniques and invent new methods of image making. The work is digital and analogue, flat and sculptural, conceptual and experiential, whole and fragmented. Despite all this, the photographic ‘idea’ remains – reshaping the way we see the world.

Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition View from the Window at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where A Circle Meets A Line (#4) (installation view)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, victorian ash timber, tinted acrylic
37.5 x 37.5cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Jo Scicluna (Australian, b. 1969)
Where I Have Always Been (An Island) (detail)
2014
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag, Victorian Ash timber, acrylic
45 x 45cm
Edition of 5
Image courtesy of the artist

Extracts from the catalogue essay View from the Window

Over 180 years ago, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced View from the Window at Le Gras. Depicting the view over a series of buildings and the countryside surrounding a French estate, this fragile work was produced in a camera obscura by focusing light onto a pewter plate coated with Bitumen of Judea. Its archaic form and production seem far removed from the digitally-augmented, large-scale work of many contemporary artists, yet it still haunts photography. As well as recalling the origins of photography, it indicates a number of enduring polarities: analogue and digital; image and object; physical darkroom practices and digital post-production; personal and institutional or collective experiences; and duration and snapshot…

As these artists’ works demonstrate, the field of contemporary photography is fundamentally multifarious, constantly eluding attempts to delimit and define it. Despite the diversity of these practices, they share a sense of critical inquiry. Whether working with analogue photographs in darkrooms or digital images in post-production, building physical objects or emphasising the immaterial, these artists all foreground the capacity for photography to interrogate our understanding of the world. Consequently these practices recall art historian Bernd Stiegler’s vision of photography as a ‘reflective medium’.5 By this term Stiegler refers to the inextricable link between photography and realism, but importantly not a form of realism understood as naïve mimesis. Rather, for Stiegler, photography reflects upon the structures and assumptions through which we perceive the world, it ‘plumbs the conditions and limits of our understanding of reality’.6 More than a veridical document or hollow simulacrum, photography thus exists as image, object and process, potentially all simultaneously.

The complexity of these works signals a second common element: the investment of time. All these artists expend considerable time and effort in producing their work, as do any dedicated artists. However, the relevance of this observation is that this temporal investment differentiates such work from the overwhelming glut of photographic images that circulate through the electronic networks of globalised society. Although it would be disingenuous and insensitive to claim that tourist snaps of well-travelled monuments are only meaningless ephemera or signs of globalised homogeneity,7 the near ubiquity of photographic images highlights the need for considered reflection upon the place and value of photographic practices. Committed to extended periods of observation and experimentation, these artists display the patience and persistence to interrogate the problems and possibilities of photography. At their gentle request we repay this dedication through our own extended viewing, for without the time to look we might lose the time to think.

Christopher Williams-Wynn
2014

Christopher Williams-Wynn is an art history honours graduate of The University of Melbourne, and co-founder and co-editor of Dissect Journal.

5/ Bernd Stiegler, ‘Photography as the Medium of Reflection’ in Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (eds), The Meaning of Photography. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008, pp. 194-197.
6/ Ibid., p. 197.
7/ John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, London: SAGE Publications, 2011, pp. 155-187.

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
12.16am 18.02.2009
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 92 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Kim Demuth (Australian born England)
9.55am 11.06.2008
2012
Sculptural photography
110 x 88 x 6.5cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Cool Aether
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Bright Swarm
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Sean Barrett
Dual Aurora
2014
Duratrans on blackwood lightbox
80 x 60cm
Edition of 3
Image courtesy of the artist

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Text / review: ‘A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image’ from the exhibition ‘KHEM’ at Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 3rd May 2014

Curator: Linsey Gosper

Artists: Jane Brown, Ponch Hawkes, Siri Hayes, Ruth Maddison, Lloyd Stubber, David Tatnall, Claudia Terstappen

Emmet Gowin printing mask for The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy 1975 (below)

A Vocabulary of Printing and the Syntax of the Image

“No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.”

“One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.”

Minor White

As an artist who originally trained in the alchemical, analogue art of photography, the magic of this process will always hold sway in my heart. No matter how many excellent digital photographs I see, there is always a longing for silver – that indescribable feeling of looking at a master printers work, an image that literally takes your breath away. I hardly ever get that in a digital print. For me, it’s the difference between the fidelity of a CD and the aura of an LP, with all its scratches and pops, hisses and, yes, atmosphere.

Minor White, that guru of enlightenment, knew how difficult it was to capture spirit in a photograph. To make a connection between photographer and object, back through a glass lens and a metal box onto a piece of plastic or glass (completing a Zen circle), then printed onto a piece of paper. There are three ways it goes: you see something (you previsualise it) and you don’t capture it in the negative; you don’t see it, and the negative surprises you; but, best of all, you see it and you capture it – the object of your attention reveals itself to you. Then all you have to do is print it – easier said than done. Much testing and assessing, dodging and burning to balance the print knowing that, as MW says, each negative is like a dragon that an image has to be wrenched from.

No longer for ears …: sound
which like a deeper ear,
hears us, who only seem
to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.

Extract from Rainer Maria Rilke Gong 1925

When you do the analogue printing yourself (or when assessing a digital test print at a lab such as CPL Digital), the most important thing is to understand the vocabulary of printing. In both analogue and digital printing it all starts from the negative/file. If you don’t understand your negative or digital file, what hope have you of attaining a good end result? You must study the negative to understand its pushes and pulls, what needs to be held back, what other areas brought forward in the image. You have to feel the balance within the negative/file in the sensibility of the print. Darren from CPL observes that he has a lot of photographers and students come in and say, “I don’t want it to be like that,” but then they can’t explain what they do want it to be like or how they can get there. They have no vocabulary of printing or how to get the “feel” that they want from the print. I believe this is where training in the analogue darkroom can stand digital photographers in good stead.

What photographers need to understand is the syntax of an image, “the system of organization used in putting lines together to form pictures that can stand as representations of particular objects,”1 where they is a clear association between the structure of photographic prints and the linguistic structure that makes verbal communication possible. Photographers are the Keepers of Light and photography broke the boundaries of the visual field that had been delimited by etchings and prints, to allow human beings to see far beyond the physical field of view, to have photographic power over space and time which fundamentally changed the scope of human consciousness.2 Photography makes drawing unnecessary in the physical sense, but through previsualisation photography is predicated on mental drawing (with light) and through the physical form of the photograph, the print, photography has a syntactical basis – which comes from the languages of the photographer inherent in human consciousness and the chemical, optical and mechanical relationships that make photography possible. Both feeling and technology.

I believe that these two things go hand in hand and when photographers have no language, no vocabulary to describe what they want from a photographic print, then they are basically coming up against the limitations of their feelings, technologies and the machine. “Genius is constantly frustrated – and tempered – by the machine.”3 As William Crawford observes, “You simply cannot look at photographs as if they were ends without means. Each is the culmination of a process in which the photographer makes his decisions and discoveries within a technological framework.”4 “Each step in the photographic process plays a syntactical role to the degree that it affects the way the information, the sentiment, the surprises, and the frozen moments found in photographs actually meet the eye.”5 In the case of the photographic print, this means understanding the emotional linguistic vocabulary of printing through the syntax of the image.

With these thoughts in mind, the two standouts in this delightful group exhibition are Claudia Terstappen and Ponch Hawkes. Terstappen’s Brazilian rainforest photographs are as well seen and exquisitely printed as ever but this time they are slightly let down by the nearness of the frame and the colour of the moulding, both of which seen to limit the breathe of the image. Hawkes’ photographs are sublime (especially the two reproduced below), the best silver gelatin photographs that I have seen by an Australian artist in since Terstappen’s last solo exhibition In the Shadow of Change at Monash Gallery of Art. They have wonderful tonality and presence, and a quietness that really lets you contemplate the image through the beauty of the print – and a snip at only $800 each framed!

Other artists in the exhibition have singular images that are interesting (pictured below), but the major disappointment are the prints of Jane Brown. When I first saw the images of Brown’s Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce Gallery in 2012 I said that they were, “small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs… surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form.”6 This was again the feeling that I got when I saw the series at a later exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Not this time. The prints shown here are much darker and have become almost ungrammatical; where the syntax of the image has broken down so that the linguistic structure of the image makes communication nearly impossible. It is not enough just to make prints darker and darker, hoping for some mystery to magically appear in the image because it won’t. This is a case of overprinting the negative, forcing the vocabulary of the image through a wish to impart something emphatic, some condition of being from the negative that has been imperfectly understood. Is this because this is Edition 2 out of 7, a different printer and a different size? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but Brown really needs to go back to the negatives and reassess the results, especially as these nearly incomprehensible prints are selling for an overinflated $2,000 each framed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ Crawford, William. “Photographic Syntax,” in Crawford, William. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 2

2/ Ibid., p. 5

3/ Ibid., p. 6

4/ Ibid., p. 6

5/ Ibid., p. 7

6/ Bunyan, Marcus. Review: Jane Brown / Australian Gothic at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne, 6th May 2012 [Online] Cited 21st April 2014

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

Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941)
The Hint That Is a Garden: Siena, Italy
Dedicated to Frederick Sommer, 1975
Gelatin silver print
19.5 x 24.5cm (7 11/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
Gift of Mrs Saul Reinfeld

William Crawford. “Photographic Syntax,” in William Crawford. The Keepers of Light: A History and Working Guide to Early Photographic Processes. Morgan and Morgan, 1979, p. 6.

Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959)
Jungle I (Brazil)
1991
From the series Ghosts at the Jucurucu
Silver gelatin print
46 x 68cm

Lloyd Stubber (Australian)
Untitled
2012
Fibre-based silver gelatin print
11 x 14 inches

David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955)
Clifton Springs Jetty
2012
From the series Coastal Pinholes
Silver gelatin contact print
20 x 25cm

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Bellambi, NSW
1989
Hand coloured gelatin silver print
19.6 x 49cm
Vintage print, unique state

Ruth Maddison (Australian, b. 1945)
Self-portrait #2
2004
From the series Light touches
Sun print on black and white photographic paper
Vintage print, unique state

“The process of analogue photography is created through darkness and light. To celebrate the launch of the Strange Neighbour Darkroom this exhibition brings together a group of artists who pursue and extend the practice of analogue and darkroom photography. These artists work across many of the countless possibilities of the medium: 35mm, medium format and large format photography, and their diverse processes include pinhole photography, photograms, sun prints, fibre printing and hand colouring. Contemporary photographers are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography and Strange Neighbour is excited to be able to facilitate this irreplaceable art form. Darkroom practice is unique and magickal, alive and well.”

Press release from the Strange Neighbour website

Khem; a possible derivative of the word alchemy, the native name of Egypt, is thought to mean black. Some scholars maintain that Khem is derived from a root meaning wise.1

Alchemy is described as chemistry endowed with magic, and alchemists as those who work with metals and keep these operations secret.2 Apart from the obvious associations of working with metals (silver) and chemistry, there are more subtle and intimate parallels between the art and science of alchemy and darkroom practice.

It is common among darkroom practitioners to consider the process as ‘magic’. When most people encounter printing their first photograph in the darkroom, the simple sight of an image appearing on the paper in the developer tray seems ‘magical’. Even experienced darkroom practitioners never lose this special feeling. Exhibiting artist, Siri Hayes notes, “Watching images come up in developing tray is as mysterious and exciting as any magic show. Perhaps more so as there are no tricks except that the photographic product is the grandest of illusions.”

Distinct from many other forms of photography, darkroom based practice is now specialised, with few people having access to the knowledge, equipment and skills associated with the medium. Like a secret esoteric order, few share this wisdom, and even those willing to teach it may keep special recipes, techniques and discoveries to themselves or within a select dedicated group. Some of this information, although scientific, is not completely understood in rational terms of facts or calculations, but is more related to intuition and perception. It is technical and it is intuitive.

The complex rituals associated with the process allow practitioners to get into a headspace that is conducive to contemplation, bringing forth intuition, allowing space for chance and universal cause and effect. In this art and science there are so many variables with endless possibilities. Ruth Maddison‘s Sun prints are made without camera, film, enlarger or developer. She states, “the tonal range depends on variables like paper stock, length of time in sun or shade, whether the objects are wet or dry … and an unpredictable magic that happens when light sensitive paper is touched by light.”

In this unpredictable environment often mistakes lead to new ideas and create new methodologies. One of the charms of analogue processes is the discovery of beauty through error. Ponch Hawkes recalls this as disasters and wonderful happenstance. Claudia Terstappen remarks it is the number of variables in the darkroom that leaves the creative process wide open and it is often these inaccuracies caused by chemical reactions that lead to a new meaning. This is what makes analogue processes so valuable and irreplaceable. There are many effects in the analogue process that one can recreate with digital technologies, but not invent.

Imperfections caused by these variables or ‘mistakes’ may imbue the image with a ‘spirit’ and otherworldliness, as if the energy of a place or person has been captured. Black and white photography too has the ability to transcend time, memory and death. Jane Brown says, “I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.” Claudia Terstappen’s work, “is motivated by the stories, beliefs and histories of the people who live there. Here people spoke about the forest spirits that one should be aware of. B+W images suggest a kind of silence.” At a symbolic level, silence is part of most sacred traditions3, and it is part of darkroom practice.

Using analogue processes and working in the darkroom can be aligned to the slow movement, of valuing quality over quantity and returning to a feeling of connectedness. For the images in this exhibition David Tatnall has used an 8 x 10 inch pinhole camera and made contact prints. He expresses of this technology, “my reasons for using this slow, cumbersome and fickle means to make photographs is because I feel it conveys the interaction of the sky and water, the presence of wind and the pulse of nature. I am particularly interested in how the long exposures and lack of sharpness make these features merge into something else… (The) simplicity: no lens, shutter or batteries, no need to upgrade, no click or buzz, no flashing lights or mega pixels no viewfinder and no distortion.” For Ruth Maddision, “she says of working with hand colouring, the pleasure of it – I love working on the real object again, and away from the screen.”

Clearly there is belief and an element of trust in the medium. Lloyd Stubber‘s images in this exhibition are taken from a one-month round the world trip. On return he processed the 15 rolls of film in his laundry. Perhaps the potential fear of loss is overwhelmed by the sense of anticipation, surprise and the flood of memories that return on seeing the work at a later date, as compared to digital, which is immediate and holds none of the mystery.

Another important distinction of darkroom and analogue practice from other forms of photography is the presence of artist’s hand throughout the entire progression of creation to final outcome. In each step of the process, significant choices are made from the many possibilities, from exposing light sensitive film in the camera, developing the film, to printing and finishing the art object. The artist’s mark is therefore not only discernible but also inherently valuable. To Ponch Hawkes, being the maker is of significance. For Terstappen, The physicality of arriving at the ‘perfect’ Gelatin Silver print – with its deep tonal ranges – is something that I highly value.

Contemporary artists are driving the current resurgence in analogue photography. This is a treasured, magickal4 and irreplaceable art form. It is with great pleasure that I declare the Strange Neighbour Darkroom open, and may it provide the space and opportunity for the love of darkroom practice to be enjoyed, shared and fostered.”

Linsey Gosper, curator, darkroom lover, 2014

1/ Francis Melville. The Book of Alchemy. Quarto Publishing plc, 2002, p. 6
2/ Kurt Seligman. Magic, Supernaturalism and Religion. Pantheon Books, 1948, p. 84
3/ Ami Ronnberg (ed.,). The Book of Symbols. Taschen, 2010, p. 676
4/ Magick, in the context of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, is a term used to differentiate the occult from stage magic and is defined as the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will, including both mundane acts of will as well as ritual magic

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Decommissioned Art History Library, University of Melbourne
2012-2013
Fibre-based gelatin silver print
44 x 49.5cm
Edition 2 of 7

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Lathamstowe
2011- 2013
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print
46 x 44cm
Edition 2 of 7

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Silken Seam
2005
Silver gelatin print
34 x 34cm
Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis Gallery, Melbourne

Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946)
Rouleau
2005
Silver gelatin print
34 x 34cm
Courtesy of the artist and Chrysalis, Melbourne

Siri Hayes (Australian, b. 1977)
Aquatic listening device
2009
Silver gelatin print
39 x 45cm
Courtesy of the artist and M.33, Melbourne

Strange Neighbour

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Review: ‘Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck’ at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st February – 30th March 2014

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should be aware that the following posting may contain images of deceased persons.

Installation photographs of Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck at the Monash Gallery of Art
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

1/ stygian gloom
2/large grouping of 14 works by Wesley Stacey

Unknown photographer
Untitled
c. 1900
Cyanotype print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2012

vapid [vap-id]
adjective
lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavour

Origin:
1650-60; Latin vapidus; akin to va·por [vey-per]
noun
a visible exhalation, as fog, mist, steam, smoke diffused through or suspended in the air; particles of drugs that can be inhaled as a therapeutic agent

This is an unexceptional exhibition, one that lacks jouissance in the sense of a transgressive kind of enjoyment, an investigation of the subject that gives pleasure in taking you to unexpected places. At times I felt like a somnambulist walking around this exhibition of photographs from the Monash Gallery of Art collection curated by Bill Henson, pitched into stygian darkness and listening to somewhat monotonous music. It was a not too invidious an exercise but it left me with a VAPID feeling, as though I had inhaled some soporific drug: the motion of the journey apparently not confined by a story, but in reality that story is Henson’s mainly black and white self-portrait. The photographs on the wall, while solid enough, seemed to lack sparkle. There were a couple of knockout prints (such as David Moore’s Himalaya at dusk, Sydney, 1950 below; the Untitled cyanotype c. 1900, above; and Mark Hinderaker’s delicate portrait of Fiona Hall, 1984 below) and some real bombs (the large Norman Lindsay photographs, modern reproductions printed many times their original size were particularly nauseous). And one has to ask: were the images chosen for how they were balanced on the wall or were they chosen for content?

Henson states that there was no concept or agenda when picking the 88 photographs for this exhibition, simply his INTENSITY of feeling and intuition, his intuitive response to the images when he first saw them – to allow “their aesthetics to determine their presence… our whole bodies to experience these photographs – objects as pictures as photographs.”1 Henson responded as much as possible to the thing which then becomes an iconography (which appeals to his eye) as he asks himself, why is one brush stroke compelling, and not another? The viewer can then go on a journey in which MEANING comes from FEELING, and SENSATIONS are the primary stuff of life.

One of Henson’s preoccupations, “is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it.”2 He would like us to acknowledge the presence and aura (Walter Benjamin) of the photograph as we stand in front of it, responding with our whole bodies to the experience, not just our eyes. He wants us to have an intensity of feeling towards these works, responding to their presence and how he has hung the works in the exhibition. “There are no themes but rather images that appeal to the eye and, indeed, the whole body. Because photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape grouping and texture are as important as the images they’re recording.”3

Henson insists that there was no preconceived conceptual framework for picking these particular photographs but this is being disingenuous. Henson was invited to select images from the MGA collection with the specific idea of holding an exhibition, so this is the conceptual jumping off point; he then selected the images intuitively only to then group and arrange then intuitively/conceptually – by thinking long and hard about how these images would be grouped and hung on the wall of the gallery. I would like to believe that Henson was thinking about MUSIC when he hung this exhibition, not photography. Listen to Henson talk about the pairing of Leonie Reisberg’s Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania (c. 1976, below) and Beverley Veasey’s Study of a Calf, Bos taurus (2006, below) in this video, and you will get the idea about how he perceives these photographs relate to each other, how they transcend time and space.

This is one of the key elements of the exhibition: how Henson pushes and pulls at time and space itself through the placing of images of different eras together. The other two key elements are how the music rises and falls through the shape of the photographs themselves; and how the figures within the images are pulled towards or pushed away from you. With regard to the rise and fall, Henson manipulates the viewer through the embodiedness of both horizontal and vertical photographs, reminding me of a Japanese artist using a calligraphy brush (see the second installation image above, where the photographs move from the vertical to the square and then onto panoramic landscape). In relation to the content of the images, there seems to be a preoccupation (a story, a theme?) running through the exhibition with the body being consumed by the landscape or the body being isolated from the landscape but with the threat of being consumed by it. Evidence of this can be seen in Wesley Stacey’s Willie near Mallacoota (1979, below) where the body almost melts into the landscape and David Moore’s Newcastle steelworks (1963, below) where the kids on the bicycles are trying to escape the encroaching doom that hovers behind them.

One of the key images in the exhibition for me also reinforces this theme – a tiny Untitled Cyanotype (c. 1900, above) in which two Victorian children are perched on a bank near a stream with the bush beyond – but there are too many of this ilk to mention here: either the figures are pulled towards the front of the frame or pushed back into the encroaching danger, as though Henson is interrogating, evidencing un / occupied space. Overall, there is an element of control and lyrical balance in how he has grouped and hung these works together, the dark hue of the gallery walls allowing the photographs to exist as objects for themselves. Henson puts things next to each other in sequences and series to, allegedly, promote UNEXPECTED conversations and connections through a series of GESTURES.

As Henson notes,

“Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.”4

.
For me, there was little WONDER in this exhibition, something that you would go ‘oh, wow’ at, some way of looking at the world that is interesting and insightful and fractures the plaisir of cultural enjoyment and identity. While the photographs may have been chosen intuitively and then hung intuitively/conceptually, I simply got very little FEELING, no ICE/FIRE (as Minor White would say) – no frisson between his pairings, groupings and arrangements. It was all so predictable, so ho-hum. Everything I expected Henson to do… he did!

There were few unexpected gestures, no startling insight into the human and photographic condition. If as he says, “Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears,”5 and that photographs are first and foremost objects, their size, shape, grouping and texture as important as the images they’re recording THEN I wanted to be moved, I wanted to feel, to be immersed in a sensate world not a visible exhalation (of thought?), a vapor that this exhibition is. Henson might have painted an open-ended self-portrait but this does not make for a very engaging experience for the viewer. In this case, the sharing of a story has not meant the sharing of an emotion.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. No longer available online

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Fiona Gruber. “Review of Wildcards, Bill Henson Shuffles the Deck” on the Guardian website, Wednesday 12 February 2014 [Online] Cited 16/03/2014

4/ Fehily op. cit.,

5/ Fehily op. cit.,

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

MGA Collection: Bill Henson on Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey

Bill Henson talks about the photographs of Leonie Reisberg and Beverley Veasey from the MGA Collection in WILDCARDS: BILL HENSON SHUFFLES THE DECK, Monash Gallery of Art, 1 February to 30 March 2014.

John Eaton (born United Kingdom 1881; arrived Australia 1889; died 1967)
Sheep in clearing
c. 1920s
Gelatin silver print
15.6 x 23.8cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Fred Kruger (born Germany 1831; arrived Australia 1860; died 1888)
Queen Mary and King Billy outside their mia mia
c. 1880
Albumen print
13.4 x 20.8cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 2012

David Moore (Australia 1927-2003)
Himalaya at dusk, Sydney
1950
Gelatin silver print, printed 2005
24.5 x 34.25cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection donated by the Estate of David Moore 2006
Courtesy of the Estate of David Moore (Sydney)

Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941)
Willie near Mallacoota
1979
From the series Koorie set
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Christine Godden 2011

Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Newcastle steelworks
1963
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 1981

Published under fair use for the purpose of art criticism

One of those preoccupations is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it. Part of the reason for that is that photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original. A certain amount of photography is made with its ultimate intention being to be seen in a magazine or online, but most photography, historically, ended up in its final form as a print – a cyanotype, or a tin type or a daguerreotype or whatever it might be.”

Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. Used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism. No longer available online.

Leonie Reisberg (Australia, b. 1955)
Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Tasmania
c. 1976
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Beverley Veasey (Australia, b. 1968)
Study of a Calf, Bos taurus
2006
Chromogenic print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2006

I think when you look through any collection, you’re often struck by the kind of pointlessness and banality of photography. It doesn’t matter which museum in the world you look at. It’s like, “is there any need for this thing to exist at all?”. It probably comes back to the capacity of the object, the image to suggest things, the suggestive potential rather than the prescriptive, which is a given in photography of course, the evidential authority of the medium preceding any individual reading we have of particular pictures. Maybe it’s the fact that the photographs have the ability to suggest some other thing and that’s what draws you in – that’s that feeling, the thing that slips away from thought. These are really the same things that apply to our meetings with any work of art, whether it’s a piece of music or a sculpture or anything else. There’s something compelling, there’s something there that sort of animates your speculative capacity, causes you to wonder. Other times, or most of the time, that’s not the case. Certainly most of the time that’s not the case with photography.

Interview with Bill Henson by Toby Fehily posted 01 Feb 2014 on the Art Guide Australia website [Online] Cited 18/02/2014. Used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism. No longer available online.

Axel Poigant (born United Kingdom 1906; arrived Australia 1926; died 1986)
Jack and his family on the Canning Stock Route
1942
Gelatin silver print, printed 1986
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 1991

Tim Johson (Australia, b. 1947)
Light performances
1971-1972
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2011

Cherine Fahd (Australia, b. 1974)
Alicia
2003
From the series A woman runs
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2011

Wesley Stacey (Australia, b. 1941)
Untitled
1973
From the series Friends
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Bill Bowness 2013

That was one of the things that interested me and continues to interest me about photography: how these things inhabit the world as objects. And indeed we read them not just with our eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs. And that’s very much a thing that interests me in the way that I work. I feel sometimes that I only happen to make photographs myself and that it’s a means to an end… So there’s a sense in which I’m interested in these objects that happen to be photographs and the way that they inhabit the same space that our bodies inhabit. Everything comes to you through your whole body, not just through your eyes and ears – it’s a vast amount of information. Watching something get bigger as you draw closer to it, not just matters of proximity, but texture or the way objects sit in a space when they’re lit a certain way – all of this is very interesting to me, always has been.”

Mark Hinderaker (born United States of America 1946; arrived Australia 1970; died 2004)
Fiona Hall
1984
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Lionel Lindsay (Australia 1874-1961)
Norman Lindsay and Rose Soady, Bond Street studio
c. 1909
Gelatin silver print, printed 2000
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Katherine Littlewood 2000

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
BHP steel mill, Port Kembla, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver print, printed 1999
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Melbourne’s magnificent nine 2013

January 2014

Darron Davies (Australian)
Encased
2012
Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag
80 x 80cm / edition of 6

Here’s my pick of the nine best local exhibitions which featured on the Art Blart art and cultural memory archive in 2013 (plus a favourite of the year from Hobart). Enjoy!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Review: Terraria by Darron Davies at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

This is the first “magical” exhibition of photography that I have seen in Melbourne this year. Comprising just seven moderately large Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag images mounted in white frames, this exhibition swept me off my feet. The photographs are beautiful, subtle, nuanced evocations to the fragility and enduring nature of life…

A sense of day / dreaming is possible when looking at these images. Interior / exterior, size / scale, ego / self are not fixed but fluid, like the condensation that runs down the inside of these environments (much like blood circulates our body). This allows the viewer’s mind to roam at will, to ponder the mysteries of our short, improbable, joyous life. The poetic titles add to this introspective reflection. I came away from viewing these magical, self sustaining vessels with an incredibly happy glow, more aware of my own body and its relationship to the world than before I had entered Darron Davies enveloping, terrarium world.

Darron Davies (Australian)
The Red Shard
2012
Archival Pigment Print on Photo Rag
80 x 80cm / edition of 6

2/ Review: Confounding: Contemporary Photography at NGV International, Melbourne

Presently, contemporary photography is able to reveal intangible, constructed vistas that live outside the realm of the scientific. A photograph becomes a perspective on the world, an orientation to the world based on human agency. An image-maker takes resources for meaning (a visual language, how the image is made and what it is about), undertakes a design process (the process of image-making), and in so doing re-images the world in a way that it has never quite been seen before.

These ideas are what a fascinating exhibition titled Confounding: Contemporary Photography, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne investigates. In the confounding of contemporary photography we are no longer witnessing a lived reality but a break down of binaries such as sacred and profane, public and private, natural and artificial, real and dreamed environments as artists present their subjective visions of imagined, created worlds. Each image presents the viewer with a conundrum that investigates the relationship between photographs and the “real” world they supposedly record. How do these photographs make you feel about this constructed, confounding world? These fields of existence?

Thomas Demand (German b. 1964)
Public housing
2003
type C photograph
100.1 x 157cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by the Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2010
© Thomas Demand/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney

Eliza Hutchison (Australian, b. 1965)
The ancestors
2004
Light-jet print
95.4 x 72.9cm (image), 105.4 x 82.9cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2005
© Eliza Hutchison, courtesy Murray White Room

3/ Review: Louise Bourgeois: Late Works at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

Louise Bourgeois: Late Works installation view
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Photograph: John Gollings 2012

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-2010)
Untitled
2002
Tapestry and aluminium
43.2 x 30.5 x 30.5cm
Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Christopher Burke
© Louise Bourgeois Trust

This is a tough, stimulating exhibition of late works by Louise Bourgeois at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. All the main themes of the artist’s work explored over many years are represented in these late works: memory, emotion, anxiety, family, relationships, childhood, pain, desire and eroticism are all present as are female subjectivity and sexuality, expressed through the body…

Bourgeois’ work gives me an overall feeling of immersion in a world view, one that transcends the pain and speaks truth to power. Bourgeois confronted the emotion, memory or barrier to communication that generated her mood and the work. She observed, “My art is an exorcism. My sculpture allows me to re-experience fear, to give it a physicality, so that I am able to hack away at it.” By weaving, stitching and sewing Bourgeois threaded the past through the present and enacted, through artistic performance, a process of repair and reconstruction, giving meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. I have not been so lucky. My mother refuses to discuss the past, will not even come close to the subject for the pain is so great for her. I am left with a heaviness of heart, dealing with the demons of the past that constantly lurk in the memory of childhood, that insistently impinge on the man I am today. Louise Bourgeois’ sculptures brought it all flooding back as the work of only a great artist can, forcing me to become an ethical witness to her past, my past. A must see exhibition this summer in Melbourne.

4/ Exhibition: Petrina Hicks: Selected Photographs, 2013 at Helen Gory Galerie, Prahran, Melbourne

A stunning, eloquent and conceptually complex exhibition buy Petrina Hicks at Helen Gory Galerie…

I am just going to add that the photograph Venus (2013, below) is one of the most beautiful photographs that I have seen “in the flesh” (so to speak) for a long while. Hicks control over the ‘presence’ of the image, her control over the presence within the image is immaculate. To observe how she modulates the colour shift from blush of pink within the conch shell, to colour of skin, to colour of background is an absolute joy to behold. The pastel colours of skin and background only serve to illuminate the richness of the pink within the shell as a form of immaculate conception (an openness of the mind and of the body). I don’t really care who is looking at this photograph (not another sexualised male gaze!) the form is just beauty itself. I totally fell in love with this work.

Forget the neo-feminist readings, one string of text came to mind: The high fidelity of a fetishistic fecundity.

Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972)
Venus
2013
Pigment print, Edition of 8
100 x 100cm

Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972)
Enigma
2013
Pigment print, Edition of 8
100 x 100cm

5/ Exhibition: Density by Andrew Follows at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond

I include this in my list of magnificent photographic exhibitions for the year not because I curated it, but because of the conceptualisation, the unique quality of the images and the tenacity of a visually impaired artist to produce such memorable work.

A wonderful exhibition by vision impaired photographer Andrew Follows at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond. It has been a real pleasure to mentor Andrew over the past year and to see the fruits of our labour is incredibly satisfying. The images are strong, elemental, atmospheric, immersive. Due to the nature of Andrew’s tunnel vision there are hardly any traditional vanishing points within the images, instead the ‘plane of existence’ envelops you and draws you in.

Density n.

The degree of optical opacity of a medium or material, as of a photographic negative;

Thickness of consistency;

Complexity of structure or content.

Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019)
Number 31, Eltham
2013
Digital photograph on archival cotton rag
130 cm x 86.5cm

Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019
Green, Montsalvat
2013
Digital photograph on archival cotton rag
130 cm x 86.5 cm

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Mark and Flappers
1975
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
© Ken Jerrems and the Estate of Lance Jerrems

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Carol Jerrems, self-portrait with Esben Storm
c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of Mrs Joy Jerrems 1981
© Ken Jerrems and the Estate of Lance Jerrems

6/ Review: Carol Jerrems: photographic artist at the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

This is a fascinating National Gallery of Australia exhibition about the work of Australian photographer Carol Jerrems at Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill – in part both memorable, intimate, informative, beautiful, uplifting and disappointing…

The pity is that she died so young for what this exhibition brought home to me was that here was an artist still defining, refining her subject matter. She never had to time to develop a mature style, a mature narrative as an artist (1975-1976 seems to be the high point as far as this exhibition goes). This is the great regret about the work of Carol Jerrems. Yes, there is some mediocre work in this exhibition, stuff that really doesn’t work at all (such as the brothel photographs), experimental work, individual and collective images that really don’t impinge on your consciousness. But there are also the miraculous photographs (and for a young photographer she had a lot of those), the ones that stay with you forever. The right up there, knock you out of the ball park photographs and those you cannot simply take away from the world. They live on in the world forever.

Does Jerrems deserve to be promoted as a legend, a ‘premier’ of Australian photography as some people are doing? Probably not on the evidence of this exhibition but my god, those top dozen or so images are something truly special to behold. Their ‘presence’ alone – their physicality in the world, their impact on you as you stand before them – guarantees that Jerrems will forever remain in the very top echelons of Australian photographers of all time not as a legend, but as a women of incredible strength, intelligence, passion, determination and vision.

7/ Exhibition: Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion at NGV International, Melbourne

What a gorgeous exhibition. It’s about time Melbourne had a bit of style put back into the National Gallery of Victoria, and this exhibition hits it out of the park. Not only are the photographs absolutely fabulous but the frocks are absolutely frocking as well. Well done to the NGV for teaming the photographs with the fashion and for a great install (makes a change to see 2D and 3D done so well together). Elegant, sophisticated and oozing quality, this is a sure fire winner….

Installation photograph of the exhibition Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion at NGV International

Edward Steichen (American 1879-1973, emigrated to United States 1881, worked in France 1906-1923)
Marlene Dietrich
1934
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy Condé Nast Archive
© 1924 Condé Nast Publications

8/ Exhibition: Reinventing the Wheel: the Readymade Century at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne

Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) is generating an enviable reputation for holding vibrant, intellectually stimulating group exhibitions on specific ideas, concepts and topics. This exhibition is no exception. It is one of the best exhibitions I have seen in Melbourne this year. Accompanied by a strong catalogue with three excellent essays by Thierry de Duve, Dr Rex Butler and Patrice Sharkey, this is a must see exhibition for any Melbourne art aficionado before it closes.

“This transition is a flash, a boundary where this becomes that, not then, not that – falling in love, jumping of a bridge. Alive : dead; presence : absence; purpose : play; mastery : exhaustion; logos : silence; worldly : transcendent. Not this, not that. It is an impossible presence, present – a moment of unalienated production that we know exists but we cannot define it, place it. How can we know love? We can speak of it in a before and after sense but it is always a past moment that we recognise.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan. Made Ready: A Philosophy of Moments. December 2013

Jeff Koons (American, b. 1955)
Balloon dog (Red)
1995 designed
Porcelain, ed. 1113/2300
11.3 x 26.3 cm diameter
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Andrew Liversidge (Australian, b. 1979)
IN MY MIND I KNOW WHAT I THINK BUT THAT’S ONLY BASED ON MY EXPERIENCE
2009
10,000 $1 coins (AUD)
30 x 30 x 30cm
Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney

9/ Review: Claudia Terstappen: In The Shadow Of Change at the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959)
Cabbage trees (Queensland, Australia)
2002
from the series Our ancestors 1990-
Gelatin silver print
29 x 29cm
Courtesy of the artist

Claudia Terstappen (Australian born Germany, b. 1959)
Zion Park (USA)
1996
from the series Sacred land of the Navajo Indians 1990-
Gelatin silver print
37 x 37cm
Courtesy of the artist

Without doubt this is the best pure photography exhibition I have seen this year in Melbourne. The exhibition is stimulating and enervating, the image making of the highest order in its aesthetic beauty and visual complexity. The artist explores intangible spaces which define our physical and spiritual relationship with the un/known world…

In Terstappen’s work there is no fixed image and no single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence that the images propose. They transcend claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world. As the artist visualises, records the feeling of the facts, such complex and balanced images let the mind of the viewer wander in the landscape. In their fecundity the viewer is enveloped in that situation of not knowing. There is the feeling of the landscape, a sensitivity to being “lost” in the landscape, in the shadow of ‘Other’, enhanced through the modality of the printing. Dreamworld vs analytical / descriptive, there is the enigma of the landscape and its spiritual places. Yes, the sublime, but more an invocation, a plea to the gods for understanding. This phenomenological prayer allows the artist to envelop herself and the viewer in the profundity – the great depth, intensity and emotion – of the landscape. To be ‘present’ in the the untrammelled places of the world as (divine) experience…

I say to you that this is the most sophisticated reading of the landscape that I have seen in a long time – not just in Australia but from around the world. This is such a joy of an exhibition to see that you leave feeling engaged and uplifted. Being in the gallery on your own is a privilege that is hard to describe: to see (and feel!) landscape photography of the highest order and by an Australian artist as well.

10/ Exhibition: Joan Ross: Touching Other People’s Shopping at Bett Gallery, Hobart

The claiming of things
The touching of things
The digging of land
The tagging of place
The taking over of the world

Tag and capture.
Tag and capture.
Shop, dig, spray, destroy.

An ironic critique of the pastoral, neo/colonial world, tagged and captured in the 21st century.

Excellent work. The construction, sensibility and humour of the videos is outstanding. I also responded to the two works Tag and capture and Shopping for butterfly (both 2013, below).

Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961)
Tag and capture
2013
hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper
50 x 47cm (image size)
edition of 3

Joan Ross (Australian, b. 1961)
Shopping for butterfly
2013
hand painted pigment print on cotton rag paper
51.5 x 50cm (image size)
edition of 3

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Exhibition: ‘Melbourne Now’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Part 2

Exhibition dates: 22nd November – 23rd March 2014

Stephen Benwell (Australian, b. 1953)
Statue (installation view)
2012
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Throughout his career a major preoccupation of Benwell’s work has been the depiction of the male figure. In 2006 he commenced a series of figurative sculptural works that explore issues relating to masculinity, naked beauty and sensuality. These works, initially inspired by eighteenth century figurines and Greco-Roman statuary, have become a significant aspect of Benwell’s recent practice. The artist contributes a group of these evocative male figures for Melbourne Now.

This is the second of a two-part posting on the huge Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The photographs in this posting are from NGV Australia at Federation Square. The first part of the posting featured work from NGV International venue in St Kilda Road. Melbourne Now celebrates the latest art, architecture, design, performance and cultural practice to reflect the complex cultural landscape of creative Melbourne.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All photographs © Dr Marcus Bunyan unless otherwise stated. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Please note: All text below the images is from the guide book.

“Melbourne is a microcosm of the global art world. This is evident not only in its possession of world-class infrastructure, but also in the multitude of tendencies, styles and modes of practice that circulate in its midst. I doubt that there is an underlying formal unity, or even a hierarchy of movements, that holds together and directs the global art world. This then begs the question: does the teeming multitude of art forms in Melbourne suggest that the local scene is an isomorph [a substance or organism that exactly corresponds in form with another] of global chaos, or a unique fragment that coexists with other entities?

The answer is paradoxical. It is our haunted and resistant sense of place that allows for both a form of belonging that is forever seeking to be elsewhere, and a unique aesthetic that anticipates the many returns of a repressed past.”

Nikos Papastergiadis. “As Melbourne in the world.” 2013

“What the show delivers in spades is a sense of the city as a place of immense creativity and subtle exploration. While non-Melburnians might be tempted to see this as an especially large example of the city’s enduring fascination with itself, when the theme is the city, the inclusion of architecture and design makes sense.

And the result is anything but narcissistic; a turn round the exhibition reveals that although Melbourne features strongly in some works, it is also curiously incidental; at the heart of the show is an examination of urban and suburban, and what it feels like to live in a rapidly changing world where old certainties no longer apply.”

Anonymous. “Melbourne Now: this exhibition changes the city’s arts landscape,” on The Guardian Australia Culture Blog, Thurs 28 November 2013 [Online] Cited 25/11/2013

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
Ocean Man
2013
From the series The Ghillies 2013
Pigment print
120 x 120cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
© Polixeni Papapetrou/Administered by VISCOPY, Sydney
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

Papapetrou’s contribution to Melbourne Now comprises three photographs from her 2013 series The Ghillies. Working with her children as models and using the extreme camouflage costumes that are employed by the military, Papapetrou reflects on the passing of childhood and the moment when children separate themselves from their mothers. Young men often assume the costumes and identities of masculine stereotypes, hiding themselves, and their true identity, from plain sight in the process.

Michelle Hamer (Australia, b. 1975)
Can’t
2013
Wool, plastic
52 x 67cm
Collection of the artist
© Michelle Hamer, courtesy Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

Hamer’s contribution to Melbourne Now pairs works referencing local signage, Blame and punish the individual, 2013, and Can’t, 2013, with three earlier tapestries from her American series I Send Mixed Messages, 2013. While the contrasting palettes and particular nuances of typography, built architecture and native vegetation point to specific times and places, when amplified and dislocated Hamer’s chosen texts suggest a more universal narrative of perplexity and turmoil. The artist describes these powerful distillations as ‘revealing the small in-between moments that characterise everyday life’.

Patricia Piccinini (born Sierra Leone 1965, lived in Italy 1968-1972, arrived Australia 1972)
The carrier (installation view detail)
2012
Silicone, fibreglass, human and animal hair, clothing
170 x 115 x 75cm
Collection of Corbett Lyon and Yueji Lyon, Lyon Housemuseum, Melbourne, proposed gift
© Patricia Piccinini, courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Supported by Corbett and Yueji Lyon
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Piccinini’s work for Melbourne Now is The carrier, 2012, a hyper-real sculpture of a bear-like figure holding an elderly woman. With his massive, hirsute and muscular physique, the creature is almost human; there is warmth and intimacy between the mismatched couple. The figures’ relationship is ambiguous. Are they mistress and servant, or simply unlikely friends, embarked on a journey together? It is nice to believe the latter, but hard to forget that humans rarely treat other animals equitably. The carrier investigates what we want from our creations, and wonders about unexpected emotional connections that might arise between us and them.

Georgia Metaxas (Australia, b. 1974)
Untitled 28
2011
From The Mourners series 2011
Type C photograph
60 x 50 x 7cm
Collection of the artist
© Georgia Metaxas, courtesy of Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

Metaxas’s contribution to Melbourne Now comprises five photographs from The Mourners series, 2011, which was first exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, in 2011. These stately portraits show women who have adopted the traditional practice of wearing black, symbolising perpetual mourning, following the death of their husbands. Photographed against plain black backdrops, dressed in their widows’ weeds, these women form an austere and mournful frieze.

Stuart Ringholt (Australia, b. 1971)
Nudes
2013
Collage (1-52)
29 x 30cm (each)
Collection of the artist
© Stuart Ringholt, courtesy Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

Expanding the artist’s greater naturist project, Nudes, 2013, is a series of collages featuring images of twentieth-century modernist art objects and nudes taken from soft porn references. In these works, Ringholt complicates the original function of the images as the spectator considers the relationship between the nude and the work of art. Interested in how images can be transformed by simple interventions, Ringholt opens possibilities for new narratives to emerge between the nude, the object and the audience.

Richard Lewer (born New Zealand 1970, arrived Australia 2000)
Northside Boxing Gym (installation view details)
2013
Charcoal on existing wall, boxing bag, 5.1 sound system
550 x 480 x 480cm (installation)
Collection of the artist
© Richard Lewer, courtesy Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

Since challenging fellow artist Luke Sinclair to a boxing match at Melbourne’s Northside Boxing Gym in 2001 (as a performance), Lewer has remained interested in the site, training there regularly and making art about it. For Melbourne Now Lewer presents an immersive recreation of the gymnasium, featuring a large-scale charcoal wall-drawing accompanied by mirrors, sound and a sweaty boxing bag.

Hotham Street Ladies (Australia, est. 2007)
At home with the Hotham Street Ladies (installation view)
2013
Royal and buttercream icing, modelling paste, confectionary, furniture, plinths, pot plants, colour DVD, television, light fittings, heater, icing, video, chandelier, lampshade, fireplace, furniture, television, crockery, cutlery, glassware, fabric dimensions variable (installation)
NGV commission Supported by Melbourne Now Champions the Dewhurst Family
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

The collective’s members are Cassandra Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Parkes, Caroline Price and Lyndal Walker. Their practice embraces themes of home life, feminism and craft and explores how collaborative participation in, and contemporising of, these activities creates a distinct cultural community. Their work’s innovative combination of humour and contemporary critique with nostalgic or familiar elements makes it appealing to a wide audience. Often thought of in terms of dysfunction, the share house in their hands becomes a site of creativity, cooperation and overindulgence.

Food is a constant presence in HSL’s work, from recipe swap meets, street art and public art commissions to controversial cake entries in the Royal Melbourne Show. For Melbourne Now the group take baking and icing to a whole new level. Their installation At home with the Hotham Street Ladies, 2013, transforms the foyer of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia into an icing-bombed domestic wonderland. Their commission for kids invites children and families to photograph themselves within one of the scenes from HSL’s icing- and lolly encrusted share house.

Lucy Irvine (Australian born Scotland, b. 1980)
Before the after (installation view)
2013
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

For Melbourne Now Irvine has constructed a large site-specific work at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Before the after, 2013, which establishes a dialogue with the gallery building, its architecture and the temporality of the exhibition. Spilling out across the floor, the serpentine form is an interruption of the order of things, a writhing obsidian mass that clings to the interior of the building. At the same time the work is a nuanced meditation on the nature of surfaces and skin. Irvine’s iterative practice argues for value in the gestural, and proposes the act of making as a form of knowledge.

Knight’s recent folded photographic works extend his interest in notions of authorship, photographic agency, the relationships between observer and observed, and ideas of intimacy and love. Each scene captures a couple lying together, bodies entwined, in bed – the artist privy to an intense, personal scene of absorption. There is an evident trust between Knight and his subjects, who sleep gently, seemingly unaware of, or perhaps complicit in, his presence. The illusion is ruptured by the folding of the photographic print, which has the effect of sometimes forcing the couples closer together, other times slicing them apart. The fold intensifies the sense of intimacy and draws attention to the physical state of the photograph.

Installation view of the series Milk Bars of Melbourne, 2010-2013 by David Wadelton at the exhibition Melbourne Now
Photo: © David Wadelton

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Milk Bar, Jenkens Avenue Frankston North
2012
From the series Milk Bars of Melbourne, 2010-13
Photo: © David Wadelton

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Milk Bar, Napier Street, Essendon
2012
From the series Milk Bars of Melbourne, 2010-13
Photo: © David Wadelton

For Melbourne Now, Wadelton contributes a series of recent photographs of suburban milk bars selected from his vast personal cache. Whereas these shots of corner-store facades – windows jammed with ice-cream, soft drink and newspaper logos, hand-painted typography and scrawled graffiti – echo the Pop paintings that made his name, insofar as they combine ready-made commercial symbols on the same flat, pictorial plane, the photographs’ grey-scale palette and documentary presentation differ from the futuristic aesthetic of Wadelton’s canvases. While the paintings delight in global commercial imagery, Milk Bars of Melbourne, 2010-2013, shows a local culture in terminal decline.

While at first iProtest, 2012-2013, resembles a display of endearing souvenir-style figurines hanging on a wall, its potency is revealed on closer inspection. Each figurine is personalised with details relating to one of the many conflicts driven by mass protests around the world. Nationalism is referenced by faces painted with flags; acts of violence leave bodies dismembered and bloodied; and the cutest figurines are in fact riot police, wielding guns and dressed as clowns. The omnipresent symbol of Facebook is also ingeniously added to the work. Byrne’s crowd of modified figurines explores the way social media has become a significant tool for coordinating protests around the world.

Informed by a fascination with death, memento mori and Victorian jewellery design, deVille’s work relies on traditional techniques and involves a broad range of animals, precious and semiprecious metals and gems. The artist is a vegan and passionate advocate for the fair and just treatment of animals, and only uses animals that have died of natural causes in her work. By examining death in this distinctive way, deVille urges us to consider our own mortality and the beauty of death and remembrance. For Melbourne Now she has created an installation titled Degustation, 2013, which evokes an ornate Victorian-style dining room, filled with her sculptural pieces and works from the NGV collection.

Mira Gojak (Australian, b. 1963)
Transfer station 2 (foreground) (installation view)
2011
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

With Transfer station 2, 2011, Gojak creates a sculptural work of unfurling, freewheeling loops, shaky erratic lines and clusters of blossoming tangles that appears like a drawing suspended in space. A high-keyed palette of cobalt blues, soft pinks and fluorescent yellows activates heavier blackened thickets that punctuate perspectives of uninterrupted space. Suspended from the ceiling by a single line, Gojak’s sculpture is a not-quite-settled upon Venn diagram. Its openness is held still in a moment, together with all the scribbled-out mistakes, digressions and exclusions, stalling or directing the movement and exchange circulating around the forms.

Installation view of Daniel von Sturmer’s Paradise park 2013 (detail, foreground) with Elizabeth Gower’s 150 rotations 2013 on the wall behind (detail, left)
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

The first version of 150 rotations was displayed recently in an exhibition, curated by Gower, that explored the appropriation and use of urban detritus as a visual art strategy by a variety of Melbourne artists. Further developed for Melbourne Now, Gower’s contribution now comprises 150 circular components, each made up of tea-bag tags, price tags and elements cut from junk mail catalogues, which colonise the wall like a galaxy of vibrant constellations. Akin to the light from long-dead stars, the familiar ephemera, which is usually thrown out, recycled or composted, now serves a new purpose and takes on a mesmeric, formal beauty.

Von Sturmer’s Melbourne Now commission for kids, Paradox park, 2013, creates a space for enquiry and interaction with art, conceived with a child’s innate sense of curiosity and wonder. Paradox park comprises a large tilted plane with small circular apertures through which a child (or adventurous adult) can push their head in order to view small projections of animated objects atop and below the surface. By placing the viewer’s point of reference inside the work, von Sturmer posits experience itself as a creative act – a unique interplay between viewer and viewed.

Melbourne Design Now
Simone LeAmon (curator, exhibition designer) (Australia, b. 1971)
Edmund Carter (exhibition designer) (Australia, b. 1983)
Design in everyday life (installation view)
2013
Supported by The Hugh D. T Williamson Foundation
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Melbourne Design Now is the first design exhibition of its kind to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria. A presentation of localised creative intelligence in the fields of industrial, product, furniture and object design, this project comprises more than ninety design projects from forty designers, design studios and companies. Melbourne Design Now celebrates design’s relationship to everyday life and how contemporary designers are embedding unique and serial design production with ideas, meaning and emotion to resonate with the city of Melbourne.

The breadth of design projects in this ‘exhibition within the exhibition’ intends to communicate to the public that the work of Melbourne designers is influencing discourses, future scenarios and markets both at home and around the world. Ranging from cinema cameras by Blackmagic Design to the Bolwell EDGE caravan, eco-design education tools by Leyla Acaroglu to Monash Vision Group’s direct-to-brain bionic eye, and furniture made with ancient Australian timber by Damien Wright to biodegradable lampshades by LAB DE STU, these design projects consolidate Melbourne as one of the great design cities in the world today.

Melbourne Design Now
Gregory Bonasera (Australian, b. 1965)
Palace table
Derby pendant light
2013
Kate Rohde (Australian, b. 1980)
Ornament is Crime vessels
2013
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

Gregory Bonasera is a ceramicist with an in depth understanding of the processes utilised in the production of ceramics; a methodical thinker who works more like an industrial designer than a potter to realise his creations and to advise and collaborate with other designers on their projects. Consistently adding new works to his range of innovative functional and sculptural ceramic wares, Gregory casts his creations in fine porcelain and bone china employing a hybrid of state of the art CAD technology with traditional 270 year old ceramic production methods. His works are strongly influenced by natural forms, science, biology, botany and geometry.

Kate Rohde’s jewellery and vessels are created in resin, a signature material that features extensively in her visual art practice. These pieces take a playful, decorative approach, often incorporating elements typical of Baroque and Rococo style, drawing particularly on the decorative arts and interior design of this era. The highly ornate nature reveals, on closer inspection, that much of the patterning is drawn from flora and fauna sources. The combination of the two intersecting interests creates a psychedelic supernature.

Text from the Pieces of Eight Gallery website [Online] Cited 25/11/2013

Johnson creates fantastic worlds in images that combine densely layered patterns, objects and figures within architectural settings. Cryptic words and phrases are part of her unique and idiosyncratic iconography. The artist’s drawing and installation practice is inspired by science fiction, mythological cosmology and comic books, and reflects a diverse interest in art, ranging from illuminated manuscripts to folk art traditions such as quilt making. Her contribution to Melbourne Now includes ten new drawings that depict the imagined formation of a future civilisation. These are displayed within a constructed environment featuring a raised podium, painted walls and patterned floor which, together with the drawings, offers an immersive experience.

Sampling the City: Architecture in Melbourne Now reveals the complex web of personalities, factions and trajectories that make up Melbourne’s vibrant contemporary architectural culture. This project asks: What are the ideas and themes that inform Melbourne’s design culture? Who are its agitators and protagonists? How are emerging architects driving new ways of thinking? The project is in four parts:

~ A ‘super graphic’ introduction sampling Melbourne’s contemporary architectural culture

~ A projection space with architectural imagery curated to five themes: representation and the city; craftsmanship and materiality; art-engaged practice; stitching the city; and bio-futures/advanced architecture

~ An incubator/studio environment providing insight into the processes of six leading Melbourne architects: Cassandra Fahey, Make Architecture, March Studio, Muir Mendes, Studio Bird and Studio Roland Snooks

~ An intimate screening room with a video artwork by Matthew Sleeth

Sampling the City is curated by Fleur Watson, with exhibition design by Amy Muir and Stuart Geddes, projection and soundscape design by Keith Deverall, introductory narrative by Watson and Michael Spooner and built environment imagery by Peter Bennetts.

For Melbourne Now, un Magazine presents un Retrospective – a selective history of artists, writers and art practice in Melbourne since 2004, as featured in the back catalogue of the magazine. Taking inspiration and content from past issues, un Retrospective assembles recent local works of art alongside correlating text – whether original essay, review or interview – from the pages of un Magazine, highlighting the relationships between criticism and practice, writers and artists, that have been fostered in the publication. un Retrospective celebrates ten years of un Magazine and contemporary art in Melbourne while providing a point of historical context within the newness of Melbourne Now.

Slave Pianos – a collaboration between artists, composers and musicians Rohan Drape, Neil Kelly, Danius Kesminas, Michael Stevenson and Dave Nelson – make historically grounded, research-based installations and performances utilising humour, immediacy and the conflation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ idioms to suggest connections and interrelations between the largely discrete fields of music, art and architecture.

For Melbourne Now Slave Pianos present Gamelan sisters, 2013, a self-governing electromechanical ‘slave’ gamelan, which allows audience members to select pieces from a repertoire of compositions arranged by Slave Pianos via a wall-mounted console alongside related scores. The Gamelan sisters instrument features in Slave Pianos’ space opera The Lepidopters, to be performed in Indonesia and Australia in 2014, which is based on a three part science fiction story set in Indonesia commissioned from American writer and art critic Mark von Schlegell. A comic depicting the first two parts of The Lepidopters, drawn by Yogyakarta-based artist ‘Iwank’ Erwan Hersi Susanto – a member, with Kesminas, of the Indonesian art-rock collective Punkasila – is also presented in the Melbourne Now Reading Room.

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Melbourne Now’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Part 1

Exhibition dates: 22nd November 2013 – 23rd March 2014

Ross Coulter (Australian, b. 1972)
10,000 paper planes – aftermath (1) (installation view)
2011
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

This is the first of a two-part posting on the huge Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The photographs in this posting are from the NGV International venue in St Kilda Road. The second part of the posting features photographs of work at NGV Australia: The Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square. Melbourne Now celebrates the latest art, architecture, design, performance and cultural practice to reflect the complex cultural landscape of creative Melbourne.

Keywords

Place, memory, anxiety, democracy, death, cultural identity, spatial relationships.

The best

Daniel Crooks An embroidery of voids 2013 video.

Highlights

Patricia Piccinini The Carrier 2012 sculpture; Mark Hilton dontworry 2013 sculpture.

Honourable mentions

Stephen Benwell Statues various dates sculpture; Rick Amor mobile call 2012 painting; Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser Melbourne Noir 2013 installation.

Disappointing

The weakness of the photography. With a couple of notable exceptions, I can hardly recall a memorable photographic image. Some of it was Year 12 standard.

Low points

~ The lack of visually interesting and beautiful art work – it was mostly all so ho hum in terms of pleasure for the eye
~ The preponderance of installation / design / architectural projects that took up huge areas of space with innumerable objects
~ The balance between craft, form and concept
~ Too much low-fi art
~ Too much collective art
~ Little glass art
~ Weak third floor at NGV International
~ Two terrible installations on the ground floor of NGVA

Verdict

As with any group exhibition there are highs and lows, successes and failures. Totally over this fad for participatory art spread throughout the galleries. Too much deconstructed / performance / collective design art that takes the viewer nowhere. Good effort by the NGV but the curators were, in some cases, far too clever for their own (and the exhibitions), good. 7/10

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please note: All text below the images is from the guide book.

“Although the word “new” recurs like an incantation in the catalogue essays many exhibits are variations on well-worn themes. The trump cards of Melbourne Now are bulk and variety… It’s astonishing that curators still seem to assume that art which proclaims its own radicality must be intrinsically superior to more personal expressions. Yet mediocrity recognises no such distinctions. Most of this show’s avant-garde gestures are no better than clichés.”

John Macdonald. “Review of Melbourne Now,” in the Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 11 January, 2014 [Online] Cited 03/10/2022

“A rich, inspiring critical context prevails within Melbourne’s contemporary art community, reflecting the complexity of multiple situations and the engaging reality of a culture that is always in the process of becoming. Local knowledge is of course specific and resists generalisation – communities are protean things, which elide neat definition and representation. Notwithstanding the inevitable sampling and partial account which large-scale survey exhibitions unavoidably present, we hope that Melbourne Now retains a sense of semantic density, sensory intensity and conceptual complexity, harnessing the vision and energy that lie within our midst. Perhaps most importantly, the contributors to Melbourne Now highlight the countless ways in which art is able to change, alter and invigorate the senses, adding new perspectives and modes of perceiving the world in which we live.”

Max Delany. “Metro-cosmo-polis: Melbourne now” 2013

Ross Coulter (Australian, b. 1972)
10,000 paper planes – aftermath (1)
2011
Type C photograph
156 x 200cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2012
© Ross Coulter
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan
Last photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

With 10,000 paper planes – aftermath (1), 2011, Coulter encountered Melbourne’s intellectual heart, the State Library of Victoria (SLV). Being awarded the Georges Mora Foundation Fellowship in 2010 allowed Coulter to realise a concept he had been developing since he worked at the SLV in the late 1990s. The result is a playful intervention into what is usually a serious place of contemplation. Coulter’s paper planes, launched by 165 volunteers into the volume of the Latrobe Reading Room, give physical form to the notion of ideas flying through the building and the mind. This astute work investigates the striking contrast between the strict discipline of the library space and its categorisation system and the free flow of creativity that its holdings inspire in the visitor.

Laith McGregor (Australian, b. 1977)
Pong ping paradise (installation view)
2011
Private collection, United States of America
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

The drawings OK and KO, both 2013, which decorate the horizontal surfaces of two table-tennis tables and contain four large self-portraits portraying unease and concern, are more restrained. The hirsute beards of McGregor’s earlier works have evolved into all enveloping geometric grids, their hand-drawn asymmetry creating a subtle sense of distortion that contradicts the inherently flat surface of the tables.

Rick Amor (Australian, b. 1948)
Mobile call (installation view)
2012
Private collection, Melbourne
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Best known for his brooding urban landscapes, Amor’s work in Melbourne Now, Mobile call, 2012, stays true to this theme. The painting speaks to the heart of urban living in its depiction of a darkened city alleyway, with dim, foreboding lighting. A security camera on the wall surveys the scene, a lone, austere figure just within its watch. The camera represents the omnipresent surveillance of our modern lives, and an uneasy air of suspicion permeates the painting’s subdued, grey landscape. Amor’s reflections on the urban landscape are solemn, restrained and often melancholic. Quietly powerful, his work alludes to a mystery in the banality of daily existence. Mobile call is a realistic portrayal of a metropolitan landscape that opens our eyes to a strange and complex world.

Steaphan Paton (Australian, Gunai and Monero Nations, b. 1985)
Cloaked combat (installation view detail)
2013
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Cloaked combat, 2013, is a visual exploration of the material and technological conflicts between cultures, and how these differences enable one culture to assert dominance over another. Five Aboriginal bark shields, customarily used in combat to deflect spears, repel psychedelic arrows shot from a foreign weapon. Fired by an unseen intruder cloaked in contemporary European camouflage, the psychedelic arrows rupture the bark shields and their diamond designs of identity and place, violating Aboriginal nationhood and traditional culture. The jarring clash of weapons not only illustrates a material conflict between these two cultures, but also suggests a deeper struggle between old and new. In its juxtaposition of prehistoric and modern technologies, Cloaked combat highlights an uneven match between Indigenous and European cultures and discloses the brutality of Australia’s colonisation.

Zoom project team
Curator: Ewan McEoin / Studio Propeller; Data visualisation: Greg More / OOM Creative; Graphic design: Matthew Angel; Exhibition design: Design Office; Sound installation: Marco Cher-Gibard; Data research: Serryn Eagleson / EDG Research; Digital survey design: Policy Booth
Zoom (installation view details)
2013
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

Anchored around a dynamic tapestry of data by Melbourne data artist Greg More, this exhibit offers a window into the ‘system of systems’ that makes up the modern city, peeling back the layers to reveal a sea of information beneath us. Data ebbs and flows, creating patterns normally inaccessible to the naked eye. Set against this morphing data field, an analogue human survey asks the audience to guide the future design of Melbourne through choice and opinion. ZOOM proposes that every citizen influences the future of the city, and that the city in turn influences everyone within it. Accepting this co-dependent relationship empowers us all to imagine the city we want to create together.

Installation view of Jon Campbell DUNNO (T. Towels) 2012 (left) and Reko Rennie Initiation, 2013 (right)
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Jon Campbell (Australian born Northern Ireland, b. 1961)
DUNNO (T. Towels) (installation view details)
2012
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

For Melbourne Now Campbell presents DUNNO (T. Towels), 2012, a work that continues his fascination with the vernacular culture of suburban Australia. Comprising eighty-five tea towels, some in their original condition and others that Campbell has modified through the addition of ‘choice’ snippets of Australian slang and cultural signifiers, this seemingly quotidian assortment of kitsch ‘kitchenalia’ is transformed into a mock heroic frieze in which we can discover the values and dramas of our present age.

Reko Rennie (Australian, Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) b. 1974)
Initiation (installation view)
2013
Synthetic polymer paint on plywood (1-40)
300.0 x 520.0cm (overall)
Collection of the artist
© Reko Rennie, courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
Supported by Esther and David Frenkiel
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Initiation, 2013, a mural-scale, multi-panelled hoarding that subverts the negative stereotyping of Indigenous people living in contemporary Australian cities. This declarative, renegade installation work is a psychedelic farrago of street art, native flora and fauna, Kamilaroi patterns, X-ray images and text that addresses what it means to be an urban Aboriginal person. By yoking together contrary elements of graffiti, advertising, bling, street slogans and Kamilaroi diamond geometry, Rennie creates a monumental spectacle of resistance.

Installation view of Reko Rennie Initiation, 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Janet Burchill (Australian, b. 1955)
Jennifer McCamley (Australian, b. 1957)
The Belief (installation view)
2004-2013
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Shields from Papua New Guinea held in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection provided an aesthetic catalyst for the artists to develop an open-ended series of their own ‘shields’. The Belief includes shields made by Burchill and McCamley between 2004 and 2013. In part, this installation meditates on the form and function of shields from the perspective of a type of reverse ethnography. As the artists explain:

“The shield is an emblematic form ghosted by the functions of attack and defence and characterised by the aggressive display of insignia … We treat the shield as a perverse type of modular unit. While working with repetition, each shield acts as a carrier or container for different types and registers of content, motifs, emblems and aesthetic strategies. The series as a whole, then, becomes a large sculptural collage which allows us to incorporate a wide range of responses to making art and being alive now.”

Janet Burchill (Australian, b. 1955)
Jennifer McCamley (Australian, b. 1957)
The Belief (detail)
2004-2013
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Melbourne Now is an exhibition unlike any other we have mounted at the National Gallery of Victoria. It takes as its premise the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work in its midst. With this in mind, we have set out to explore how Melbourne’s visual artists and creative practitioners contribute to the dynamic cultural identity of this city. The result is an exhibition that celebrates what is unique about Melbourne’s art, design and architecture communities.

When we began the process of creating Melbourne Now we envisaged using several gallery spaces within The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia; soon, however, we recognised that the number of outstanding Melbourne practitioners required us to greatly expand our commitment. Now spreading over both The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and NGV International, Melbourne Now encompasses more than 8000 square metres of exhibition space, making it the largest single show ever presented by the Gallery.

Melbourne Now represents a new way of working for the NGV. We have adopted a collaborative curatorial approach which has seen twenty of our curators work closely with both external design curators and many other members of the NGV team. Committing to this degree of research and development has provided a great opportunity to meet with artists in their studios and to engage with colleagues across the city as a platform not only for this exhibition, but also for long-term engagement.

A primary aim throughout the planning process has been to create an exhibition that offers dynamic engagement with our audiences. From the minute visitors enter NGV International they are invited to participate through the exhibition’s Community Hall project, which offers a diverse program of performances and displays that showcase a broad concept of creativity across all art forms, from egg decorating to choral performances. Entering the galleries, visitors discover that Melbourne Now includes ambitious and exciting contemporary art and design commissions in a wide range of media by emerging and established artists. We are especially proud of the design and architectural components of this exhibition which, for the first time, place these important areas of practice in the context of a wider survey of contemporary art. We have designed the exhibition in terms of a series of curated, interconnected installations and ‘exhibitions within the exhibition’ to offer an immersive, inclusive and sometimes participatory experience.

Viewers will find many new art commissions featured as keynote projects of Melbourne Now. One special element is a series of commissions developed specifically for children and young audiences – these works encourage participatory learning for kids and families. Artistic commissions extend from the visual arts to architecture, dance and choreography to reflect Melbourne’s diverse artistic expression. Many of the new visual arts and design commissions will be acquired for the Gallery’s permanent collections, leaving the people of Victoria a lasting legacy of Melbourne Now.

The intention of this exhibition is to encourage and inspire everyone to discover some of the best of Melbourne’s culture. To help achieve this, family-friendly activities, dance and music performances, inspiring talks from creative practitioners, city walks and ephemeral installations and events make up our public programs. Whatever your creative interests, there will be a lot to learn and enjoy in Melbourne Now. Melbourne Now is a major project for the NGV which we hope will have a profound and lasting impact on our audiences, our engagement with the art communities in our city and on the NGV collection. We invite you to join us in enjoying some of the best of Melbourne’s creative art, design and architecture in this landmark exhibition.

Tony Ellwood
Director, National Gallery of Victoria

Foreword from the Melbourne Now exhibition guide book

Destiny Deacon (Australian, K’ua K’ua and Erub/Mer peoples 1957-2024)
Virginia Fraser (Australian)
Melbourne Noir (installation view details)
2013
Installation comprising photography, video, sculptural diorama dimensions (variable) (installation)
Collection of the artists
© Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

Adapting the quotidian formats of snapshot photography, home videos, community TV and performance modes drawn from vaudeville and minstrel shows, Deacon’s artistic practice is marked by a wicked yet melancholy comedic and satirical disposition. In decidedly lo-fi vignettes, friends, family and members of Melbourne’s Indigenous community appear in mischievous narratives that amplify and deconstruct stereotypes of Indigenous identity and national history. For Melbourne Now, Deacon and Fraser present a trailer for a film noir that does not exist, a suite of photographs and a carnivalesque diorama. The pair’s playful political critiques underscore a prevailing sense of postcolonial unease, while connecting their work to wider global discourses concerned with racial struggle and cultural identity.

Darren Sylvester (Australian, b. 1974)
For you (installation view details)
2013
Based on Yves Saint Laurent Les Essentials rouge pur couture, La laque couture and Rouge pur couture range revolution lipsticks, Marrakesh sunset palette, Palette city drive, Ombres 5 lumiéres, Pure chromatic eyeshadows and Blush radiance
Illuminated dance floor, sound system
605 x 1500 x 198cm
Supported by VicHealth; assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

For Melbourne Now Sylvester presents For you, 2013, an illuminated dance floor utilising the current palette of colours of an international make-up brand. By tapping into commonly felt fears of embarrassment and the desire to show off in front of others, For you provides a gentle push onto a dance floor flush in colours already proven by market research to appear flattering on the widest cross-section of people. It is a work that plays on viewers’ vanity while acting as their support. In Sylvester’s own words, this work ‘will make you look good whilst enjoying it. It is for you’.

Assembling over 250 outstanding commissions, acquired and loaned works and installations, Melbourne Now explores the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers and architects who live and work in its midst. It reflects the complexity of Melbourne and its unique and dynamic cultural identity, considering a diverse range of creative practice as well as the cross-disciplinary work occurring in Melbourne today.

Melbourne Now is an ambitious project that represents a new direction for the National Gallery of Victoria in terms of its scope and its relationship with audiences. Drawing on the talents of more than 400 artists and designers from across a wide variety of art forms, Melbourne Now will offer an experience unprecedented in this city; from video, sound and light installations, to interactive community exhibitions and artworks, to gallery spaces housing working design and architectural practices. The exhibition will be an immersive, inclusive and participatory exhibition experience, providing a rich and compelling insight into Melbourne’s art, design and cultural practice at this moment. Melbourne Now aims to engage and reflect the inspiring range of activities that drive contemporary art and creative practice in Melbourne, and is the first of many steps to activate new models of art and interdisciplinary exhibition practice and participatory modes of audience engagement at the NGV.

The collaborative curatorial structure of Melbourne Now has seen more than twenty NGV curators working across disciplinary and departmental areas in collaboration with exhibition designers, public programs and education departments, among others. The project also involves a number of guest curators contributing to specific contexts, including architecture and design, performance and sound, as well as artist-curators invited to create ‘exhibitions within the exhibition’, develop off-site projects and to work with the NGV’s collection. Examples of these include Sampling the City: Architecture in Melbourne Now, curated by Fleur Watson; Drawing Now, curated by artist John Nixon, bringing together the work of forty-two artists; ZOOM, an immersive data visualisation of cultural demographics related to the future of the city, convened by Ewan McEoin; Melbourne Design Now, which explores creative intelligence in the fields of industrial, product, furniture and object design, curated by Simone LeAmon; and un Retrospective, curated by un Magazine. Other special projects present recent developments in jewellery design, choreography and sound.

Numerous special projects have been developed by NGV curators, including Designer Thinking, focusing on the culture of bespoke fashion design studios in Melbourne, and a suite of new commissions and works by Indigenous artists from across Victoria which reflect upon the history and legacies of colonial and postcolonial Melbourne. The NGV collection is also the subject of artistic reflection, reinterpretation and repositioning, with artists Arlo Mountford, Patrick Pound and The Telepathy Project and design practice MaterialByProduct bringing new insights to it through a suite of exhibitions, videos and performative installations.

In our Community Hall we will be hosting 600 events over the four months of Melbourne Now offering a daily rotating program of free workshops, talks, catwalks and show’n’tells run by leaders in their fields. And over summer, the NGV will present a range of programs and events, including a Children’s Festival, dance program, late-night music events and unique food and beverage offerings.

The exhibition covers 8000 square metres of space, covering much of the two campuses of the National Gallery of Victoria, and moves into the streets of Melbourne with initiatives such as the Flags for Melbourne project, ALLOURWALLS at Hosier Lane, walking and bike tours, open studios and other programs that will help to connect the wider community with the creative riches that Melbourne has to offer.

Melbourne Now Introduction

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956)
No title (teal SLR with flash)
2013
Earthenware
15.5 x 24 x 11cm
Collection of the artist
© Alan Constable, courtesy Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

A camera’s ability to act as an extension of our eyes and to capture and preserve images renders it a potent instrument. In the case of Constable, this power has particular resonance and added poignancy. The artist lives with profound vision impairment and his compelling, hand-modelled ceramic reinterpretations of the camera – itself sometimes referred to as the ‘invented eye’ – possess an altogether more moving presence. For Melbourne Now, Constable has created a special group of his very personal cameras.

Linda Marrinon (Australian, b. 1959)
Installation view of works including Debutante (centre)
2009
Tinted plaster, muslin
Collection of the artist
© Linda Marrinon, courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Supported by Fiona and Sidney Myer AM, Yulgilbar Foundation and the Myer Foundation
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Marrinon’s art lingers romantically somewhere between the past and present. Her figures engage with notions of formal classical sculpture, with references to Hellenistic and Roman periods, yet remain quietly contemporary in their poise, scale, adornments and subject matter. Each work has a sophisticated and nonchalant air of awareness, as if posing for the audience. Informed by feminism and a keen sense of humour, Marrinon’s work is anti-heroic and anti-monumental. The figures featured in Melbourne Now range from two young siblings, Twins with skipping rope, New York, 1973, 2013, and a young woman, Debutante, 2009, to a soldier, Patriot in uniform, 2013, presented as a pantheon of unlikely types.

Brook Andrew (Australian, b. 1970)
Vox: Beyond Tasmania (installation view)
2013
Wood, cardboard, paper, books, colour slides, glass slides, 8mm film, glass, stone, plastic, bone, gelatin silver photographs, metal, feather
267 x 370 x 271cm
Collection of the artist
© Brook Andrew, courtesy Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

Andrew’s Vox: Beyond Tasmania, 2013, renders palpable as contemporary art a central preoccupation of his humanist practice – the legacy of historical trauma on the present. Inspired by a rare volume of drawings of fifty-two Tasmanian Aboriginal crania, Andrew has created a vast wunderkammer containing a severed human skeleton, anthropological literature and artefacts. The focal point of this assemblage of decontextualised exotica is a skull, which lays bare the practice of desecrating sacred burial sites in order to snatch Aboriginal skeletal remains as scientific trophies, amassed as specimens to be studied in support of taxonomic theories of evolution and eugenics. Andrew’s profound and humbling memorial to genocide was supported in its first presentation by fifty-two portraits and a commissioned requiem by composer Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe.

Daniel Crooks (New Zealand, b. 1973)
An embroidery of voids (stills)
2013
Colour single-channel digital video, sound, looped
Collection of the artist
© Daniel Crooks, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney
Supported by Julie, Michael and Silvia Kantor
Photos: © National Gallery of Victoria

Commissioned for Melbourne Now, Crooks’s most recent video work focuses his ‘time-slice’ treatment on the city’s famous laneways. As the camera traces a direct, Hamiltonian pathway through these lanes, familiar surroundings are captured in seamless temporal shifts. Cobblestones, signs, concrete, street art, shadows and people gracefully pan, stretch and distort across our vision, swept up in what the artist describes as a ‘dance of energy’. Exposing the underlying kinetic rhythm of all we see, Crooks’s work highlights each moment once, gloriously, before moving on, always forward, transforming Melbourne’s gritty and often inhospitable laneways into hypnotic and alluring sites.

Jan Senbergs (Australian, 1939-2024)
Extended Melbourne labyrinth
2013
Oil stick, synthetic polymer paint wash (1-4)
158 x 120cm (each)
Collection of the artist
© Jan Senbergs, courtesy Niagara Galleries
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

Senbergs’s significance as a contemporary artist and his understanding of the places he depicts and their meanings make his contribution to Melbourne Now essential. Drawing inspiration from Scottish poet Edwin Muir’s collection The labyrinth (1949), Senbergs’s Extended Melbourne labyrinth, 2013, takes us on a journey through the myriad streets and topography that make up our sprawling city. His characteristic graphic style and closely cropped rendering of the city’s urban thoroughfares is at once enthralling and unsettling. While the artist neither overtly celebrates nor condemns his subject, there is a strong sense of Muir’s ‘roads that run and run and never reach an end’.

Patrick Pound (Australian, b. 1962)
The gallery of air (installation view details)
2013
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

For Melbourne Now Pound has created The gallery of air, 2013, a contemporary wunderkammer of works of art and objects from across the range of the NGV collection. There are Old Master paintings depicting the effect of the wind, and everything from an exquisite painted fan to an ancient flute and photographs of a woman sighing. When taken as a group these disparate objects hold the idea of air. Added to works from the Gallery’s collection is an intriguing array of objects and pictures from Pound’s personal collection. On entering his installation, visitors will be drawn into a game of thinking and rethinking about the significance of the objects and how they might be activated by air. Some are obvious, some are obscure, but all are interesting.

Marco Fusinato (Australian, b. 1964)
Aetheric plexus (Broken X) (installation view)
2013
Alloy tubing, lights, double couplers, Lanbox LCM DMX controller, dimmer rack, DMX MP3 player, powered speaker, sensor, extension leads, shot bags
880 x 410 x 230cm
Collection of the artist
© Marco Fusinato, courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney
Supported by Joan Clemenger and Peter Clemenger AM
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

For Melbourne Now, Fusinato presents Aetheric plexus (Broken X), 2013, a dispersed sculpture comprising deconstructed stage equipment that is activated by the presence of the viewer, triggering a sensory onslaught with a resonating orphic haze. The work responds to the wider context of galleries, in the artist’s words, ‘changing from places of reflection to palaces of entertainment’ by turning the engulfed audience member into a spectacle.

Installation view of Susan Jacobs Wood flour for pig iron (vessel for mixing metaphors) 2013 with Mark Hilton dontworry 2013 in the background
Photo: © Marcus Bunyan

In her most recent project, Jacobs fabricates a rudimentary version of the material Hemacite (also known as Bois Durci) – made from the blood of slaughtered animals and wood flour – which originated in the late nineteenth century and was moulded with hydraulic pressure and heat to form everyday objects, such as handles, buttons and small domestic and decorative items. The attempt to re-create this outmoded material highlights philosophical, economic and ethical implications of manufacturing and considers how elemental materials are reconstituted. Wood flour for pig iron (vessel for mixing metaphors), 2013, included in Melbourne Now, explores properties, physical forces and processes disparately linked across various periods of history.

Mark Hilton (Australian, b. 1976)
dontworry (installation view)
2013
Cast resin, powder
The Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne
© Mark Hilton, courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Photo: © National Gallery of Victoria

dontworry, 2013, included in Melbourne Now, is the most ambitious and personal work Hilton has made to date. A dark representation of events the artist witnessed growing up in suburban Melbourne, this wall-based installation presents an unnerving picture of adolescent mayhem and bad behaviour. Extending across nine intricately detailed panels, each corresponding to a formative event in the artist’s life, dontworry can be understood as a deeply personal memoir that explores the transition from childhood to adulthood, and all the complications of this experience. Detailing moments of violence committed by groups or mobs of people, the installation revolves around Hilton’s continuing fascination with the often indistinguishable divide between truth and myth.

Mark Hilton (Australian, b. 1976)
dontworry (installation view details)
2013
Cast resin, powder
The Michael Buxton Collection, Melbourne
© Mark Hilton, courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Photos: © Marcus Bunyan

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Exhibition: ‘Globelight ’13 [New Light Art + Design]’ at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 30th July – 24th August 2013

Curators: James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin

The Tam Projects (Tess Hamilton, Adriana Bernado, Melissa Acker)
Colour box (installation view)
2013
Lightbox, A3 print on cotton rag + film slides on acrylic
15 x 14 x 33cm

Although I could not get to the second part of the exhibition at Abbotsford Convent, what I saw of this exhibition of light-based art and design by Australian and international artists at Anita Traverso Gallery in Richmond was fascinating. I love interesting concepts and works constructed with light / space / images and this show is certainly exuberant and inventive.

Of particular interest were three artists who use multiple images and objects in boxes to form three-dimensional sculptures, the images inside resembling the spatiality of early stereographs (for- mid- and background). In the work by The Tam Projects the perspex slide at the front of the box with the topographic dots can be removed and replaced with another screen of dots, thus altering the mapping of the image. Catherine Johnstone’s work Grief Keeps Watch 7, 8 + 9 (2012, below) uses collections of bits and pieces, remnants, traces which enable the artist to hold onto the memory of her father who has passed away. Perran Costi’s beautifully made wooden boxes hold Sydney-based scenes in 3D printed on glass and were ravishing in their collective density. Ilan El’s ORA (2011, below) features three black knobs that control the Red, Green and Blue spectrum (RGB), enabling the viewer to create an endless rainbow of colours to match their shifting moods.

My favourite piece in the exhibition was George Angelovski’s light box LUKAS (2012, below), a portrait which cycles through various colours using remote controlled RGB LEDs which lends the portrait different characters such as threatening or placid, depending on the colour of the moment. This feeling of un/ease is increased because the eyes of LUKAS are white as in a supernova (probably red eye from a flash which has printed white in the black and white image), and in the right eye there is a black spot, an inclusion, a dark star that further disturbs the handsome features of the man. I really loved this beautiful, cerebral work.

Both curators (James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin) and artists are to be congratulated for this New Light Art + Design initiative. It’s a great idea to have a festival that exhibits a such a wide variety of works across both light art and design in Australia. Let’s hope it is even more successful next year.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Catherine Johnstone (Australian)
Grief Keeps Watch 7, 8 + 9 (installation view)
2012
Pigment on x-ray + found objects on acrylic, light boxes
25.5 x 23 x 17cm

Catherine Johnstone (Australian)
Grief Keeps Watch 8 (installation view detail)
2012
Pigment on x-ray + found objects on acrylic, light boxes
25.5 x 23 x 17cm

Perran Costi (Australian)
Autumn (nearest), Bird House, Sunset on King Street and Oasis (installation view)
2012
Glass, hardwood + light
Dimensions variable

Perran Costi (Australian)
Sunset on King Street (installation view)
2012
Glass, hardwood + light
16 x 16 x 8.7cm

Perran Costi (Australian)
Landgrab (installation view)
2012
Suitcase, glass, soil, acrylic + light
57 x 50 x 34cm

Kent Gration (Australian)
Leviathan 1 + 2 (installation view)
2013
Carbonised + natural bamboo, LED lighting
50 x 50 x 125cm each

Globelight ’13 is an exhibition of light-based art and design by Australian and international artists. Curated by James Tapscott and Sam Mitchell-Fin, this is the inaugural event of what is to become an annual festival-style event that aims to grow into a significant part of Victoria’s cultural calendar. An exciting cross-section of Australian and international artists and designers will occupy both spaces at Anita Traverso Gallery and the grounds of the Abbotsford Convent with light-based sculpture, installation, design objects and video art throughout the month of August.

The Festival aims to become an important inclusion on the local and international cultural calendar being the only festival of its kind that exhibits a such a wide variety of works across both light art and design in Australia. The festival has already attracted the attention of the lighting community and related industries, thus confirming the need for such an event that supports the growing number of artists and innovative designers working in this medium.”

Text from the Anita Traverso Gallery and Globelight website

Sam Mitchell-Fin (Australian)
Open infinity (blue) (installation view)
2013
Neon
Size variable

Sam Mitchell-Fin (Australian)
I Wish I could tell you, but I can’t find the words (installation view)
2013
Neon + timber
Size variable

Ilan El (Australian born Israel, b. 1971)
ORA (installation view)
2011
Zenolite front face, RGB LEDs + powder coated mild steel body
4 x 60cm (diameter)

James Tapscott (Australian, b. 1980)
Primaries and Secondaries (installation view)
2013
RGB LEDs, perspex, wood
65 x 65 x 65cm

George Angelovski (Australian, b. 1974)
LUKAS (installation view)
2012
Remote controlled RGB LEDs + mixed media
100 x 130cm

Laura Lay (Australian)
The Established Child Series (installation view)
2013
Acrylic panels with EL wire threads, 4 inverters + plug in adapters
4 x 30 x 30cm