Four Elements: Water @ New North Gallery II

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

Four Elements: Water @ New North Gallery [Part II]

In the adjoining room, Alan Attwood presents his witty and humorous observations of water in Melbourne’s everyday life – whether it is a silhouette of a stranger seen through the National Gallery’s famous water wall window, or a pair of toes sticking out in the foreground of the colourful and iconic beach boxes. For Susan Henderson, the water is readily associated with Australia being ‘girt’ by sea – both its rocky beaches as well as salt water swimming pools, where the geometric patterns of white concrete are masterfully juxtaposed with the deep emerald of sea water. Emerald is also a key colour for Heather Peters, whose quietly contemplative Through the Looking Glass captures an image of a drowned tree, the whitish, sediment-coloured silhouette of which is showing through the reflective stillness of a forest lake.

As usual, Julie Millowick’s images are among the most poignant ones, especially her photograph of a drowned kangaroo, which reminds one of the devastating effect the floods had on Australia’s flora and fauna (one could not possibly think of a stronger contrast between this image, and the paintings of animal carcasses bleached-out by the drought in works of such artists as Russell Drysdale or Clifton Pugh). Carly Michael, on the other hand, presents a beautifully and carefully studied suite of photographs capturing the gentle colouring of the Lake Eyre, which for the first time after so many years once again is filling up with water. Printed on a beautifully textured paper, the subtle pink, blue, grey and white hues of Michael’s photographs create a sensation of a watercolour suite.

Michael Silver focuses his lenses on water and its effect on the built, urban environment. He creates an otherworldly, futuristic vision with his photograph of the Melbourne University’s flooded car park; while his photograph of Harlem Tango provides an interesting comparison to Joyce Evans’ photographs of Chapel Street, likewise showing the attitude of people caught in a downpour within an urban setting whether locally or on the other side of the world.

In fact, such unintended “dialogues” between works by various photographers occur throughout the exhibition. Greg Scullin and Geoff Strong, similarly to Susan Henderson and Alan Attwood, focus on Australia’s beach and surf culture; water as a ‘living space’ is addressed in the works of Kaye Dixon (floating turtle) and Margie McClelland (Japanese water pond); and similarly to Margie McClelland, George Mifsud also turns his camera to the cloud formations in the sky. Just like Alan Attwood with his pictures taken through the NGV’s water wall, Lynden Nicholls focuses on the intricate visual distortions of objects as seen through the running waters of the Tambo River. Nicholls is perhaps one of the very few photographers in the exhibition, who extends her interest and interpretation of water beyond the confines of the image: the frames are made from detritus found in the river, while the photographs are printed on hand-made paper, produced with Tambo river reeds and grasses.

Prior to the exhibition, Susanne Silver confided in me her concern about having an exhibition of homogenous images. Four Elements: Water shows that her concerns were unfounded due to the power of imagination of photographers within this exhibition, and the many interpretation a single subject of water can take within their creative vision and the ingenious focus of their camera lens.

www.newnorth.com.au

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

 

Four Elements: Water @ New North Gallery I

Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Four Elements: Water @ New North Gallery [Part I]

When Susanne Silver proposed in October 2010 that the theme for the next Four Elements exhibition at the New North Gallery should be water, there was no way one could have foreseen the devastating floods that the nature would unleash on the water-starved and drought-stricken Australia. The same sentiment was expressed at the opening of the exhibition last Sunday by ABC reporter Tim Lee, who mentioned that hitherto most of his stories for the Landline program were focused on the drought, and it is only recently that he had to switch his investigative reporting to interviewing people about the consequences of the floods in Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales.

The exhibition gathered together works by seventeen photographers, including Melissa Powell, Peter Casamento, Gary Streer, Lynden Nicholls, George Mifsud, Margie McClelland, Michael Norton, Greg Scullin, Geoff Strong, Joyce Evans, Kaye Dixon, Michael Silver, Alan Attwood, Susan Henderson, Heather Peters, Julie Millowick, and Carly Michael. The sheer variety and diversity of approach of these photographers to the subject matter of WATER in their works is astounding, both from the point of view of their interpretation of the subject as well as artistic, aesthetic, genre, and production point of view.

The renowned aerial photographer Melissa Powell presented four images of recent floods in central Victoria, one of which conceptualises the incongruous dichotomy of the current weather situation: it shows dead trees (their trunks bleached out by sun and drought) are standing amid the chocolate sludge of flood waters. For Peter Casamento, water is associated with swimming pools, exercise, and health, or with the rain, which gives a perfect chance to read and reflect. Margie McClelland travelled the width and breadth of the world to capture water in all of its three states – solid (Argentinean glaciers), liquid (Brazilian waterfalls), and gas (clouds over her property in New South Wales). She also took an fresh initiative to consider at water as living habitat for fish – either in a Cowra fish pond, or more imaginatively still as a “Nemo”- themed float in a Rio carnival. Michael Norton’s installation of six photographs is perhaps among the most “artistic” and poetic within this group. He used his craft to interpret water as a site of reflection (in both physical and psychological sense), or capture the physicality of its movement. The printing and production of his delicately-coloured circular images is more reminiscent of hand-painted watercolour tablets than photographs.

Joyce Evans used this opportunity to present within her recent works as well as her classic images. In a suite of four recent photographs, Evans captured the light-hearted attitude of Australians as they stroll and wade almost unperturbed through the neon jungle of the deluged Chapel Street. The timeless quality of her classic images is quite remarkable. The isolation of the solitary jogger in her Hamilton Island photograph is even more palpable for the sheer immensity of the landscape that surrounds him. The photograph of the flooded Nathan River, with green crowns of drowned trees sticking out from the pinkish water, is readily reminiscent of David Rankin’s immense abstracted landscape compositions. The last photograph of Menindee Lake at sunset is not only remarkable for its saturated colour effects, but also for the dialogue it creates with another work in this exhibition, Gary Steer’s Thirsty Meanders. His photograph, taken nearly fifteen years after that of Joyce Evans, shows the same lake dried out, with a tiny creak weaving its way through the dry river bed.

… to be continued …

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

 

Kallena Kucers @ New North Editions

Thursday, 5 August 2010

Dear Diary,

New North Editions is about to unveil a new exhibition by photographic artist Kallena Kucers.

Kallena’s works have featured in a number of group and prize exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. However, this is Kallena’s first solo exhibition at the New North Editions.

Kallena’s images are beautifully crafted and visually complex. However, they deal with the important subject of traumatic childhood experiences.

Kallena Kucers says of her photography: “All this work is very centrally grounded in the overall concept of child abuse – from personal experience, and from later academic study and professional practice.”

“The work comes directly from my feelings, emotions, and experiences that I remember and draw on to attempt to convey a sense of what they may be like.”

Many photographs feature limbs and body parts, appearing, ghost-like, from the background of the pictures. “This is a reflection of an emotional state, a partial disassociation,” explains the photographer.

However, each image is imbued with a glimmer of hope: “A child, who has been abused, no matter how severely, always has hope for a better life. The most essential thing to achieve is to find an environment where they can be safe from further abuse,” says the artist.

Kallena concludes: “I very much hope that my work will help to educate many. These experiences are caused by the direct result of abuse; they are most definitely not alone, and there is, usually, a way out.”

The exhibition opens  at the New North Editions, Fairfield, on Friday, 13 August, at 6pm, and will run until Saturday, 4 September 2010.

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

Sean O’Carroll @ New North Editions

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Dear Diary,

I became aware of Sean O’Carroll, whose exhibition of photography has opened on Thursday night at the New North Editions in Fairfield, late last year. Together with the two other judges, we have unanimously selected Sean’s work Viktor #1 as the winner of the New North Portraiture Prize 2009.

O’Carroll was reticent then (as he is now) to talk about his photographs, preferring the works to speak for themselves. And speak they do. His earlier studies and ongoing interest in psychology provide an important key to the understanding of his works.

O’Carroll’s exhibition features two distinct bodies of work. Interspection series of 2009-2010, consists of six images, and includes the above-mentioned Viktor #1. Each photograph depicts people in a deeper stage of interspection, and visualise a confrontation between the outer and inner self. Sean fills the backgrounds of his photograph with enough detailed information to allow the construction of the narrative of each individual piece. His photographs are populated by protagonists that are seemingly at the end of their tether. Their imperfect, downtrodden, troubled outer self is confronted by their equally imperfect inner self; their troubled inner child; their pre-suicidal ghostly double. Finn #1 is perhaps among the strongest in this series. Not only does the work succeed in delivering a powerful, psychological, and deeply emotional message within the figure of the lone girl seated in the garden, it also successfully resolved as a composition, which is built along the strong diagonal axis of background details and the bold foreshortened limbs of the crouching figure.

Boys, Guns, Etc? series of 2009 feature images of children playing with toy weapons.  They perhaps continue O’Carroll’s theme of our own primeval inner child, the nascent masculinity within our pre-cognisant self. Images of children with weapons are frequently disturbing: not fully aware of the value of human existence yet wielding the power of other people’s lives, they haunt the photographs of the Hitlerjugend, Khmer Rouge, and African child warriors. In visual art, one can go as far back as the pre-pubescent David dwarfed by Goliath’s head in Old Master paintings or as recent as Steve Cox’s paintings of child murderers and thought-provoking mise-en-scènes by the Russian photography collective, AES+F. Untitled #7 is among the most disarming images, quite successful compositionally in its perfect balance between the negative and positive space, sheathed by a skein of an Old Master greenish hue. However, in subsequent photographs these innocent-looking cherubs, instead of acquiring bows and arrows, brandish toy weapons. The resulting imagery, such as Untitled #1, brings forth the multiple psychological dichotomies of boyhood versus masculinity, and the representation of weapons as symbols of violence and power versus them being the objects of play and innocence.

Sean O’Carroll’s background in professional photography must be mentioned. It is evident in his adroitness behind the camera lens as well as in front of the computer screen. The figures are properly lit; the uniformity of a single light source is well observed; the colour balance is professionally maintained. There is sharpness to his images, and lucidity to his compositions. Sean’s works should provide a valuable reference point to those working in the photographic medium as they combine the aesthetic appeal and deep intellectual content with the technical proficiency.

The exhibition is on view at the New North Editions in Fairfield until Saturday, 17 July 2010.

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

Julie Millowick @ New North Editions, Fairfield

Monday, 3 May 2010

Dear Diary,

Julie Millowick’s exhibition Close to Home at the New North Editions brings forth the incontestable evidence of the drought that has been affecting Central Victoria during the last decade.

The physical appearance and photographic processes of the works in this exhibition differ significantly from Millowick’s previous suites of photograms and cyanotypes. However, their narratives are linked semantically inasmuch as they reflect the artist’s continuous fascination, interest, and involvement with her region.

The changing local flora provides Millowick with the ongoing source of inspiration, as does the area’s history and folklore, which has been used so imaginatively by Julie in the suite of cyanotypes, Love Letters of a Chinese Lady, and brought to life in Close to Home through her documentation of mine shafts that pepper the landscape of the former gold-mining district of Central Victoria.

The effects of merciless weather conditions have been captured in this inspiring and thought-provoking body of work through the repetitive depiction of dry land, yellowing plants, and empty river beds. Millowick uses her camera as a divining rod to seek out water wherever she can, and in whichever state it may exist in nature – gas, liquid, or solid. It is abundantly present in such photographs as Crocodile Reservoir and Fryer’s Creek, but is only subtly conspicuous as the floating fog in Fryer’s Forest, droplets of dew in Bush Cut Mist, and the ice in Black Reeds.

An underlying personal narrative, reflective perhaps of the artist’s own intimate world, can also be detected within these photographs. The vulvic outlines of mine shafts and water holes surrounded by the pubis of grasses and dry reeds, the figure of the lurking dog as a metaphor for a predatory male as well as conjugal fidelity, and the gushing foam of a forest creek speak of physical, sexual longing, which is imaginatively expressed in this suite of works through the visual vehicle of nature photography.

The works are most meticulously executed. The low vantage point of the photograph puts the viewer within the picture plane; the realistic sensation is heightened by the crystal clarity of the foreground details which dissipate into the foggy nothingness towards the background of the pictures. The clarity and precision of the images belies their conceptual and physical complexity. Each work is composed of numerous individual photographs, which have been painstakingly collaged and overlayed.  This creates – and explains – an unusual visual panorama, which adds to the feeling of the mysterious in every shot.

Close to Home has been previously shown at the Ballarat International Photo Biennale and the Adelaide Festival. This body of work is a testament to Millowick’s dual talents as a respected documentary photographer and a renowned photographic artist, and a  showcase of her superior skills and technical abilities within the varying aspects of the complex medium of photography.

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

Respect @ New North Gallery

Thursday, 11 February 2010

Dear Diary,

In a remarkable and inspiring show of support for their colleague, the renowned photographer and the Director of Ballarat International FOTO Biennale, Jeff Moorfoot, who has been recently diagnosed with cancer, more than one hundred photographers donated their works to the fundraising exhibition Respect, on view at the New North Gallery in Fairfield until February 28.

Among the photographers participating in the Fundraiser for Jeff Moorfoot are such heavyweights of professional photography as Julie Bowyer, David Callow, Andrew Chapman, Joyce Evans, Samantha Everton, Ponch Hawkes, Robert Imhoff, David Johns, Brent Luckey, Neil McLeod, Julie Millowick, Michael Silver, Matthew Sleeth, Alex Syndikas, Tobias Titz, and many other photographers of Australian and International renown.

The participating photographers further put in $100 each to swap their works with each other at an exclusive Photographers’ Party on Sunday, February 7. Other editions of donated photographs are now available for sale at the New North Gallery at a flat rate of $250 each to the general public – regardless of the stature of the photographer or the size of their works. All proceeds are generously going to Moorfoot.

So far, in excess $15,000 has been raised towards the costs of Jeff Moorfoot’s medical expenses, with my own modest contribution, for I could not resist the temptation of acquiring two photographs from the exhibition at very modest, yet perhaps never to be repeated prices.

It has become almost customary for fundraisers and charitable organisations to turn to artists in order to orchestrate high profile fundraising art auctions. I am highly critical of most of these events, for the organisers assume artworks cost nothing to the artists, refusing to acknowledge the cost of materials and time it takes to create donated artworks. Furthermore, they also assume that artworks are worth nothing – letting them go at fundraising auctions for whatever someone is prepared to pay for them. Artworks are sold for a fraction of the price, frequently endangering the market value for the works by the very artists who have so generously donated to the event. In the end – and notwithstanding the very spirit of generosity in which the artworks had been donated –  artists are not rewarded in any way for their generosity, nor for the expense they may have incurred in producing the artworks – apart from a nefarious promise of “raising their profile” in the course of the fundraising event.

At the very least, the organisers of Jeff Moorfoot’s Respect Fundraiser, ensured that the participating photographers had the full control over the works they were donating and did not request for the photographs to be framed; agreed beforehand on the price point of the artworks (thus allowing some photographers to withdraw further editions of their works from general exhibition as opposed to the exclusive “swap-meet-style” Sunday event); and allowed each photographer to secure a work of their choice by their peers, so that at the very least they have not left the event empty-handed.

Full selection of available photographs can be viewed at http://map.noelb.com/jeff/gallery/index.html ; the photographs from the exclusive photographers’ event on Sunday, February 7, can be viewed at http://www.photonet.com.au/AA004.

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