Rosslynd Piggott @ TarraWarra

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

Rosslynd Piggott @ TarraWarra Museum of Art

One of the advantages of being intimately involved with Australian art world for the last twenty years is an ability to follow, compare, contrast, analyse and consider the development of careers of Australian artists. I am writing this as I am looking at Rosslynd Piggott’s exhibition Dividing Infinity: A Room for Painting at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. I would readily describe Piggott as one of Australia’s most imaginative and thought-provoking conceptual and installation artists. Her solo exhibition, Suspended Breath, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998, is still indelibly imprinted in my memory as one of my major revelations in contemporary Australian art; and a concurrent realisation and confirmation that conceptual and installation art are legitimate forms of art and artistic expression in the pluralistic context of contemporary art.

Her current exhibition at the TWMA gives a glimpse, an echo of the works that so impressed me at that exhibition. Air of Flower Clouds of 2002 is an elegant glass vessel, with an etched inscription telling us that it contains air, collected under a cherry blossom tree in Japan. Whether or not this is indeed the fact is perhaps beyond the point, and this is virtually impossible to verify: the air would escape and evaporate the moment we open this delicate-looking vial. However, the very evocation, the very idea of preserving a scent of air (no doubt influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s efforts to bottle Parisian air for a French expatriate millionaire who claimed to have everything money could buy), is inspiring, thought-provoking, and strangely uplifting – as is the sublime idea itself of collecting air as a memory of sites and places you visited rather than more ubiquitous photo shots.

Piggott’s exhibition at the NGV was filled with imaginative and clever marvels of this kind. The current show at the TWMA, on the other hand, is dominated by recent painting. They are likewise sublime, meditative and beautiful, feminine even, covered with skeins upon skeins of delicate washes and glazes; their floating masses anchored by stronger compositional elements of design work. Although these paintings are perhaps interpretations in paint of the ‘bottled air’ concept (they are indeed breath-taking upon a closer and prolonged contemplation), I guess purely because they are paintings, such a traditional medium, they lacked for me the originality and inventiveness of her conceptual installations and three-dimensional objects.

Furthermore – and this sentiment recurs throughout these pages – it is a pity that an artist of such undoubted talent chose to exhibit in a public gallery space works that would be just as ‘at home’ on the walls of a commercial gallery. I always feel that when artists basically clear out their (or their galleries’) stock room in order to whip out a show in a public gallery, they miss out on a rare and privileged opportunity to create something unique, special, and non-commercial, that – like the amazing exhibition of 1998 – would stay in minds of gallery visitors forever, as opposed to blending in with any other countless exhibition the artist might have had in her respective commercial spaces.

http://twma.com.au/

http://www.rosslyndpiggott.com/

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

New11 @ ACCA, Melbourne

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

New11 @ ACCA, Melbourne

There’s an old Russian saying: everything new is well-forgotten old. This thought pulsated through my mind as I was walking through a recently opened exhibition at the ACCA. There was so much borrowing, so much recycling of old ideas, that I began questioning whether the exhibition’s title, New 11, was actually warranted.

It’s a worrying trend, especially since the artists that are profiled at these annual exhibitions are supposedly our youngest, brightest, and the most promising, guaranteed to become the favoured staple of contemporary art curators and collectors for at least the next five years. However, with one or two exceptions, there’s hardly a truly original idea among them. We have already seen so much of this earlier, beforehand, in other galleries, in other museums, in other artists’ spaces, that one begins to wonder whether there is an assumption that everyone suffers from some sort of a cultural amnesia, and that no one else, apart from curators and exhibiting artists, is supposed to know what happened in the history of art, whether in Australia or internationally, prior to entering the exhibition space.

For, indeed, once you leave all your prior acquired knowledge at the gallery’s threshold, you would actually end up experiencing an entertaining and enjoyable exhibition – as I had done in the end.

The visitor is met at the entrance to the ACCA – and once again at the entrance to the exhibition space – but Tim Coster’s Umbrella, a sound installation of amplified street noises. You then proceed into Shane Haseman’s installation Lanterne Rouge, with brightly-coloured walls and a bicycle suspended on brightly-coloured MDF shards. From this bright cacophony you emerge into a contrastingly understated, cool, white, minimal space with an installation by Brendan van Hek, The Person who cried a million tears, with three oval mirrors, five glass panels with circular cut outs, and variously sized mirror balls spray-painted uniform white, the only light source in the room being a Dan Flavin-style neon tubes.

The next room is filled with Justene Williams’ She came over singing…, an eleven channel video installation. Once the eyes get used to the fast-moving, pulsating, and brightly-coloured visions that surround the viewer from all four sides of the room, you slowly begin to distinguish in the videos two completely masked figures, dressed head to toe in closely resembling outfits, one in a suit of newspaper and magazine clippings, another in a similar suit of brightly-coloured geometric designs; both are almost lost within interiors that completely match their outfits, wrecking havoc within their respective environments. It is only then that the menacing retinal and aural onslaught gives way to a harmless, humorous, and entertaining voyeurism.

The next room contains one of the cutest things in the exhibition – aquae profundo by Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn, moonlighting as a creative trio Greatest Hits: an ice carving of an alien displayed in a glass freezer, whose humorous, cartoon-like appearance and demeanour is worlds apart from Marc Quinn’s haunting ‘blood heads’.

There is also Dan Moynihan’s installation of a skeleton seated on a mound of sand under a plastic palm tree listening to a CD-player (how retro!) in a cylindrical enclosure with rainbow coloured walls; the artifice of the installation underscored by an adjacent fully equipped Ilya Kabakov-style utility closet.

This leads us to perhaps the most striking and original, as well as the most disturbing  and haunting sculpture by Mark Hilton (in the room which contains other works by the artist, including three sump oil paintings on paper, and an exquisitely carved human bone). Fashioned in a shape of a mark on the outfits of colonial convicts, and resembling a melted Cricifix, the wall sculpture presents a macabre rendition of Jacques Callot’s The Hanging from The Miseries of War suite, or Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War.  A tree is growing from the human DNA, on the branches of which the “undesirable” elements of society are hung: mentally and physically disabled; homeless, elderly, obese, and infirm; women in burkas and indigenous chieftains; prostitutes, drug addicts, and pregnant teens; paedophiles and their victims; and there’s even a statuette of a guy in a military uniform hung while choking with a rope another guy whom he is sodomising. The edge of the ‘Cross’ is etched with jokes and one-liners about women, obese, drug addicts, etc. To my mind, this is perhaps the strongest, most outstanding, accomplished, and most politically and socially aware work within the exhibition that shows it is possible to quote from other artists and yet create one’s own iconic ideas, and develop one’s own unique iconographic language.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Unnerved: Lisa Reihana

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

Unnerved: Lisa Reihana

Among the works in the Unnerved exhibition that left the most indelible impression or me are Lisa Reihana’s (1964-) photographs from Digital Marae series. The works display a photographic excellence in the area of digital photography, and present a combination of strong character studies of her sitters and models, which are at the same time composite portraits of cultural proto- and stereotypes.

The title of the series refers to marae, meeting houses that are central to Maori community life. The installation of the photographs in a separate, almost enclosed space creates a secluded setting and a temple-like atmosphere for the contemplation of these images.

Paralleling mythological traditions of other cultures, Maori ancestral deities do not occupy a definite time space and do not possess a fixed gender. Therefore, Reihana’s images of over-life-size figures represent a visual collision of historical narratives and contemporary reality, and feature iconographic signifiers of indigenous and colonial-cum-western societies. Traditional tools, elements of dress and body tattoos are placed side by side with a Le Corbusier chair, contemporary surf-board, or a historically-accurate eighteenth-Century costume.

Among the most striking works in this installation are the portrait of an elderly personage in Mahuika (2001), which is taken from a low view-point, emphasizing the pathos of the image and elevating its subject physically and psychologically above the viewer; the equally monumental Maui (2007), where the powerful figure of the mythical ancestral deity is placed at the point of psychological invasion of the viewer’s space; and the unforgettable and iconic Dandy (2007), used for the cover of the exhibition catalogue, where the relief Jacquard embroideries of the model’s costume echo the traditional tattoo designs on his face.

In a similar vein to the works of other artists in this exhibition, Lisa Reihana explores New Zealand’s historically and mythologically rich cultural traditions, probes her country’s post-colonial identity, and creates new iconography for the culturally-diverse society of today.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project

Monday, 10 January 2011

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project is the second region-specific exhibition from the Queensland Art Gallery, currently on view at the National Gallery of Victoria. It focuses on New Zealand’s contemporary art, and includes paintings, drawings, watercolours, sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance works by such New Zealand artists as Michael Parekowai, Mark Adams, Gavin Hipkins, Lisa Reihana, Duncan Cole, Greg Semu, Yvonne Todd, John Pule, Shane Cotton, Lorene Taurerewa, and numerous others.

The exploration of New Zealand’s contemporary culture and post-colonial identity is the common thread that unites the works of disparate genres and diverse media in the show. The majority of artists in this exhibition are of Maori, Samoan and other Pacific Islanders’ descent, which informs many of the works. Their “bi-cultural” concerns as well as the underlying psychological darkness can (perhaps) only be related in this country to the works of some of our urban indigenous artists.

New Zealand’s natural, breathtaking beauty provides a wonderful source of inspiration to such landscape photographers as Mark Adams (1949-), who poetically captures in Indian Island 360* Panorama (1998/2006) an important site of historic significance. The country’s people, places, and playgrounds allowed Gavin Hipkins (1968-) to explore the country’s composite cultural identity – from high to low and everything in-between – in a complex photographic installation The Homely (1997-2000) that spans the length of three walls.

Michael Parekowhai’s (1968-) giant rabbit greets the visitors as they enter the National Gallery; it’s Disney-like cuteness belies the artist’s concern about the impact of rabbits, introduced species, on New Zealand’s environment. In a similar vein is his Acts II, which disguises tools of colonisation as a DYI die-cast plastic toy set. His black seal balancing a giant piano on the tip of its nose in The Horn of Africa echo the topographical outlines of New Zealand and reference the reputation of the North Island as a business and cultural hub, and of the South Island as a tourist attraction.

Duncan Cole (1968-) and Shigeyuki Kihara (1975-) reprise in their works popular 19^th-Century photographs of New Zealand’s “ethnographic specimens”, replacing them with a cast of contemporary characters, which are representative of the “new tribes” within the present-day street culture. Greg Semu’s (1971-) self-portraits explore traditional Maori body tattoos, pe’a, in the context of the contemporary male nude photography.

Western European culture and traditional iconographies of Maori, Samoa, and other Pacific Island groups continue to collide in paintings by John Pule (1962-) and Shane Cotton (1964-); while the most exquisite ink drawings of Lorene Taurerewa (1961-), Psychopompe, pick up the dark psychological undertones which are prevalent throughout the exhibition, including Yvonne Todd’s (1973-) exquisite portrait photographs that ruminate about  the universality of America-centric dreams of ideal beauty and white weddings, or Anne Noble’s (1954-) “mutilations” of her daughter’s tongue.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Art & Ukraine (Part 3)

Monday, 16 August 2010

Dear Diary,

[... continued from Art & Ukraine (Part 1) and Art & Ukraine (Part 2)...]

Among the major developments on the Ukrainian (post-Soviet) art scene is the appearance of commercial art galleries. While further research is required to ascertain which was the first commercial gallery to open post-1992, in less than twenty years over fifty have sprung up around Kiev where there used to be none. Most of them are located around the older parts of Kiev, which are traditionally associated with art and history.

Just like on the Australian art scene, galleries divide between those who focus the avant-garde contemporary art, and those who represent contemporary artists working in a more traditional way. Interestingly – and unlike commercial galleries in Australia – the majority of the galleries (and especially more traditionally focused galleries) operate as multi-tasking, multi-purpose community art centres.

Apart from regular changing exhibitions and artist representation, they actively participate in art projects; offer studios to artists of various disciplines; run art classes for children and adults; host regular lectures and educational workshops; publish books, magazines, and catalogues; run their websites as e-zines and newsletters; offer framing and interior design, etc. This is perhaps a reflection of the small and developing art market that forces gallery owners and directors to rely financially on more than just art sales.

While the breakdown of the Soviet system has liberated the minds of Ukrainian artists, their art still remains predominantly figurative. As observed by Larissa Babij, ‘ young Ukrainian artists generally receive very traditional training that does not incorporate current art world trends’. It also reflects the predominant tastes of Ukrainian art collectors (as well as the gallery-going public in general), who are perhaps not versed as well as the Western European and American public in the visual and pictorial language of abstract and alternative art movements.

Of the commercial galleries currently operating in Kiev, the following stand out in terms of quality of art, artist representation, and gallery management: Bottega Gallery [www.bottega-gallery.com];  Collections Gallery [www.collectiongallery.com.ua]; Karas Gallery [www.karasgallery.com], perhaps among the first contemporary art galleries to opened in Kiev in 1995; Kyiv Fine Art Gallery [www.kyivfineartgallery.org];  Ya Gallery [www.yagallery.com.au]; and internationally renowned Zeh Contemporary Art Gallery [www.zeh.com.ua]. The Berlin-based Bereznitsky Gallery [www.bereznitsky-gallery.com], which specialises in contemporary Ukrainian art, has a branch in Kiev. There is also a specialist contemporary photography gallery, Brucie Collections [www.bruciecollections.com], and an art auction house, Korners Gallery [www.korners.com.ua] that broadly specialised in Ukrainian and as well as international fine and decorative art.

… to be continued …

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

Simon MacEwan @ West Space

Friday, 13 August 2010

West Space is a funky gallery on the north-western fringe of the CBD, which provides an important forum for young emerging multi-media and inter-disciplinary artists, reflective of the visual plurality of contemporary Australian art. An installation by Simon MacEwan, The Devil’s Mountain, occupies one of the exhibition spaces. It includes sculptures, furniture, lighting, and watercolours. The choice of the latter is interesting from the point of view that watercolour seems to be the preferred medium of the younger generation.

MacEwan’s technically superior abilities with this tricky and complex medium are quite astounding and are perhaps due to his background in jewellery-making, which requires precision and minute attention to detail. One set of watercolours features a dense autumnal park with large, mysterious hexagonal or octagonal objects, which are reminiscent of either alien space ships or architectural follies. Their incongruous placement within landscape setting seems to juxtapose (perhaps intentionally) the natural, physical world and analytical, geometry-based, man-made constructions. [$1,200 each]

Another remarkable work in this installation is a 6ft+ watercolour of a skeleton, completely overgrown with – and covered in – emerald-green moss, plants, sprouting wild flowers, and hoisting a bird on its left hand [$3,000]. As has been noted in these pages so many times before, we have witnessed an explosion in fascination with the symbolism of death in contemporary Australian art, especially among the younger artists. Partly it is an “in” thing to do right now, but I am certain it would be absolutely fascinating to investigate further this dark preoccupation.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

The Stony Rises Project @ RMIT

Thursday, 12 August 2010

The Stony Rises Project at the RMIT unites the works of multi-disciplinary artists and landscape designers, including Vicki Couzens, Lesley Duxbury, Ruth Johnstone, Seth Keen, Gini Lee, Jenny Lowe, Marion Manifold, Laurene Vaughan, Carmel Wallace, and Kit Wise. The exhibition shows that Australian artists in their majority are still influenced by the interpretation of and interaction with the landscape. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that – luckily for us – Australia (since at least the arrival of the First Fleet) has not been the site of wars, major upheavals, or religious-based conflicts.

Therefore, the artists are free to feign – and I stress the word feign – their concern with the issues of environment and climate change. I have observed in of the earlier posts how Christian Lock’s elegantly abstract paintings at the John Buckley Gallery were supposed to express the artist’s concerns with the water quality and other environmental issues affecting the Port Philip Bay, which only became apparent when one read the accompanying exhibition blurb. Likewise, in this exhibition, Gini Lee’s installation is an explorative and documentative exercise, arranged like a series of design ‘story’ boards. Carmel Wallace’s use of local volcanic rock is highly decorative, used literally as a prototype for book ends, rather than in any perceptible concern- or action-provoking way. Digital animation and video installations by Kit Wise and Seth Keen are quietly contemplative and meditative experiences, as is the installation by Ruth Johnstone (a highly skilful and imaginative artist and an influential pedagogue, who sadly seems to have fallen off the main commercial gallery circuit).

Works by Vicki Couzens are conspicuous by comparison in this exhibition. There is something disturbing, contentious, and thought-provoking to her larger-than-life possum-skin cloak, flayed and hung like the proverbial shroud. Her landscape photographs, which document sites of major armed conflicts between the colonists and the indigenous population, are as poignant as memorial sites of First and Second World War battles. The Honour Roll is another silent witness to these conflicts, uncomfortably reminiscent of such mourning monuments as Yad Vashem. In the current curatorial climate, where wall texts increasingly read like an apologia, striving to imbue exhibited works with depth and meaning which is not necessarily apparent, works by singular artists like Vicki Couzens clearly stand out in a class of their own.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Giles Ryder @ Block Projects

Thursday, 12 August 2010

In his current exhibition of paintings, installations, and neon light displays at the Block Projects, Giles Ryder reveals himself as a talented multi-disciplinary artist. His Tar paintings with sharp wedges of colour are somewhat reminiscent of Robert Jacks’s Metropolis series and Stephen Bram’s recent works, though with a bit of sparkle and iridescent paint thrown in. Painting and Glamour are more adventurous exercises in splattered and poured paint with diamantes and rhinestones sprinkled all over, imbuing the work with a sense of galactic mystery. In Black Sun, the artist returns to the minimalist, constructivist basics, revisited on these shores among others by Peter Booth in the 1970s. Ryder’s works similarly cover the entire expanse of the canvas in thickly applied, monochromatic textured pigments, be it in iridescent black or fashionably shocking pink [$2,800-$6,000]. Neon light displays unite the multitude of colours, shapes, and sparkles of the exhibition [$8,000-$8,500].

This is the last exhibition for Block Projects in the former Tolarno Galleries space in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, before moving to their new premises in Stephenson Street, Richmond, most recently the site of NOTFair 2010.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Nick Mangan @ Sutton Gallery

Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Upon entry to Nick Mangan’s exhibition at the Sutton Gallery, the visitor is greeted with a mapping drawing of the outline of the Pacific island of Nauru [$2,200]. The adjacent room displays three coral lime stone tables, their tops polished though retaining indentations and inclusions of the fossilised marine life; their edges roughly hewn, giving each table top a shape that echoes the island’s coastal outline as captured in the aforementioned drawing [$33,000 ea]. The exhibition is completed by a DVD projection in the third space, which captures the demise Nauru’s industry and infrastructure [$10,000].

This group of works resulted from the artist’s residency on the island of Nauru, and Mangan’s focus on this tiny Pacific nation is especially poignant in our day and age, given Nauru’s prominence in the recent political debate about Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’. The artist’s ability to unite objects in three different media – drawing, sculpture, and DVD projection – under the umbrella of one coherently focused subject matter is also quite ingenious.

Mangan capitalises on our ability to attach intrinsic values, feelings, and emotions to inanimate objects. It is this perhaps irrational ability that makes us hold onto to disparate pieces of heirloom, and to pay premium prices for items of furniture and objet d’art with the alleged royal and celebrity provenance. Visual artists are at the forefront of capturing these emotional associations in their work as was profiled in Please be Seated exhibition at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2004, which focused on the image of the chair in art.

Likewise, Dowiyogo’s ancient coffee coral tables (so named after the President of the country) are examples of Mangan’s striking ability to create objects which are at once practical pieces of furniture and inanimate objects imbued with the sensation of history, narrative, and place, poised between Nauru’s past as a competitive industrial and financial hub and its future as a nation dependent on foreign trade, tourism, and production of souvenirs and decorative objects.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

NEW 010 @ ACCA, Melbourne

Sunday, 2 May 2010

Dear Diary,

In my recent reviews I have noted a disturbing trend among contemporary Australian artists towards becoming self-referential, self-centred, glorified interior decorators.

The new exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts is not just a confirmation of this trend, it is an open, proud even, celebration of it, produced in collaboration with Nexus, a leading interior design and decoration company. Knowing Juliana Engberg, one never quite knows how much of it is an expression of her personal aesthetics, and how much of it is purely tongue-in-cheek take on the various trends in contemporary art.

I guess what puzzled me most about this exhibition is the artists’ relentless pursuit to “re-invent the wheel”, to take something that exists already, whether in the mass-production or in the media, and try their hand in making it from scratch – though sadly stopping short of the genius, inventiveness, or psychological depth of Boltansky or Kabakov’s installations.

Raafat Ishak’s set of decorated cubes, situated in the middle of an empty gallery space, looks invitingly like an arrangement of seats, alarmingly reminiscent of the minimalist stools in the ACCA’s foyer. Mountford’s cubes in the adjoining space clearly ‘descend’ from Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, though the artist has decorated them with the designs, which have been borrowed from a whole gamut of contemporary and modern masters. The accompanying video shows the ACCA staff randomly interacting with boxes and other objects in Mountford’s installation in an ‘arty’ take on a generic children’s TV program.  Alicia Frankovich’s Medea is a reworking of a product which is available commercially, while Fiona Connor’s recreation of the staff’s bedroom windows is rather thin ideologically and intellectually… though it does allow the visitor an intriguing insight into the ACCA’s metallic armature.

Perhaps the only two artists that stand out in this exhibition are Agatha Goethe-Snape and Susan Jacobs. The former has designed T-Shirts, embellished with slogans that are to be worn by staff and changed every day in accordance with their choice of colour or the slogan. The T-Shirts are also available to the visitors. However, this kind of public interaction / participation project, though clever as it may be, is desperately mired in the 1960s. Susan Jacobs is the only artist who eschews being an interior decorator, adapting the space around her works to her own minimalist and conceptual aesthetic, echoing the wit and brevity of Beuys.

[© Eugene Barilo v. Reisberg 2010. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]