In Tandem - curated by Olivia Welch

In

+andem

TODD FULLER AL MUNRO LESLIE OLIVER

+ MYLYN NGUYEN + WARATAH LAHY + MELINDA LE GUAY

In

+andem Curated by Olivia Welch 22 April to 17 May 2014

B R E N D A M AY

GALLERY

TODD FULLER + MYLYN NGUYEN AL MUNRO + WARATAH LAHY LESLIE OLIVER + MELINDA LE GUAY

In Tandem meetings, February 2014, pictured left to right: Emma Conroy filming Mylyn Nguyen and Todd Fuller; Waratah Lahy, Al Munro; Leslie Oliver, Brenda May and Melinda Le Guay

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IN TANDEM Forward: Although artistic partnerships are abundant in the artworld, not all are alike. In Tandem, curated by Olivia Welch, began with the pairing of six of Brenda May Gallery’s represented artists to form three duos who have interpreted this brief of collective creation in differing ways. Where Mylyn Nguyen and Todd Fuller have collaborated to create joint narratives of whimsy and curiosity through sculpture, Al Munro and Waratah Lahy have worked in conversation with one another, using aesthetic and thematic crossovers as a point of departure to realise individual bodies of work. Leslie Oliver and Melinda Le Guay have demonstrated another type of artistic relationship; collecting and swapping items that will compose works reflective of their mutual obsession with rescuing materials.

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition In Tandem, curated by Olivia Welch at Brenda May Gallery, Sydney.

Exhibition Dates: 22 April to 17 May 2014 Curator + Writer - Olivia Welch Editor - Sophia Somerville Design - Megan Fizell, Olivia Welch Project team - Megan Fizell, Brenda May, Judith Torzillo, Olivia Welch Artists - Todd Fuller, Waratah Lahy, Melinda Le Guay, Al Munro, Mylyn Nguyen, Leslie Oliver Published by Brenda May Gallery and Olivia Welch, March 2014 © The authors and artists. No material, whether written or photographic, may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher or artists.

Curator: Olivia Welch graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, with an Honours Degree in Art History and Theory, centering her studies on Australian Indigenous contemporary art and the politico-legal issue of Indigenous sovereignty.

She is the senior gallery assistant at Brenda May Gallery where she previously co-curated Mighty Small in 2013.

A special thank you to the Artists, Brenda May Gallery and Hillscroft Printing Service Pty Ltd.

Cover image: Melinda Le Guay, ‘untitled’ 2013, ink on paper, 14 x 9.5cm

B R E N D A M AY

G A L L E R Y

2 D a n k s S t r e e t Wa t e r l o o N S W A u s t r a l i a 2 0 1 7 www.brendamaygallery.com.au info@brendamaygallery.com.au tuesday - friday 11-6 saturday 10-6 t. 02 9318 1122 f. 02 9318 1007

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TODD FULLER + MYLYN NGUYEN MYLYN NGUYEN (b. 1982. Adelaide, SA, Australia) Mylyn Nguyen’s work explores her fertile imagination, harking back to childhood curiosities. She received a Master of Visual Arts in 2006 at Sydney College of the Arts, where she spent her time in the glass studio making works combining blown glass with various unlikely materials. In 2006 her sculpture shown in an exhibition titled Utility at the Sydney College of the Arts Gallery received an award, marking the pivotal point in the development and direction of her work. Notably since then, Mylyn has exhibited internationally twice with Brenda May Gallery at Art Stage, Singapore, taking a solo installation of 1,000 handcrafted bees in 2014. brendamaygallery.com.au

TODD FULLER (b. 1988. Branxton, NSW, Australia) Todd Fuller is a 25-year-old graduate of Sydney’s National Art School.

His practice integrates sculpture, animation, drawing, performance and painting to construct narratives drawn from his personal history. Fuller has exhibited across the country at venues including Canberra’s National Portraiture Gallery and Deakin University.

He has also exhibited in New York, Rome, Seoul and Nottingham and has undertaken a residency to the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Fuller was awarded an honourable mention at the 15th Asian Art Biennale.

In 2013, he was appointed Art Fellow at Sydney Grammar School and in the same year was awarded the William Fletcher Traveling Fellowship to the British School at Rome. toddfuller.com.au Todd Fuller + Mylyn Nguyen, ‘The day pigeons taught bear to fly’ 2013 bronze, oil + pigment on terracotta, twig, Coir-peat, watercolour + ink on paper, 36 x 19 x 18cm, (Private Collection)

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FOUR HANDS, TWO MINDS Over the past four years as a gallery assistant, I have seen my fair share of creative minds simultaneously besotted with and broken by the fruits of their tireless and often underappreciated labour. This relationship an artist has with their work is idiosyncratic and deeply personal, exposing inner thoughts and ideas for audiences to ogle and judge. Observing such consuming artistic tendencies has led to a personal fascination with artists who allow uncontrollable elements within the creation and reception of their works. Collaborations are one such occurrence in which creative people are forced to let go and compromise, allowing the visions of another to compete, clash and concur with their own.

Contemporary Australian artists Mylyn Nguyen and Todd Fuller both create artworks that are semi-autobiographical.

Nguyen relives her childhood fascinations, revealing how they still exist within her adult life. Fuller’s figures, whether drawn, sculpted or brought to life through animation,

may not resemble the artist in appearance, but embody feelings, anxieties and experiences he relates to. Both artists are also storytellers. Fuller’s sculptures usually stem from a narrative that is played out in the filmic side of his practice, and Nguyen’s works are often miniature tableaux with titles that shed light on these visually alluring scenarios. Similarly creating very personal and meaningful works, Fuller and Nguyen have endeavoured a collaborative partnership in which their narratives collide, actualising a boy, a bear and a tiny paper girl.

Rather than sitting side-by-side, Nguyen and Fuller realised the first sculpture of their collaborative relationship, ‘The day pigeons taught bear to fly’, by working in a creative dialogue with one another. Fuller moulded the terracotta bear, with its furrowed brow and hunched, pot-bellied physique. Nguyen then embellished the expressive sculpture with its own world, sprouting out of its shoulder and head, to house a small hand-drawn water-coloured

Mylyn Nguyen, ‘Dirt (Parade)’ 2012, clay, Coir-Peat, pebble, twig, fibre, watercolour + ink on paper, dimensions variable

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girl in a bear suit being lifted by a flock of miniscule pigeons. Each artist claimed the work with their signature aesthetic, as if to present the timely meeting of two separate stories.

Entranced by the whimsy, engaged by the miniature scale and captivated by the technical sophistication, interacting with the work of Nguyen is to glimpse into her fertile imagination, enchantingly actualised into sculptural narratives. Creating hand-drawn animations and ceramic sculptures that illustrate vulnerable protagonists with heavy hearts and bloated bellies, Fuller’s figures embody loneliness and overburden, personifying the obstacles of everyday life. In 2012 Nguyen and Fuller had concurrent solo exhibitions at Brenda May Gallery entitled, respectively, An owl flew into my office and told me to look for Bear and Somewhere in Between.

‘The day pigeons taught bear to fly’ is aesthetically and conceptually the love child of these two exhibitions.

The title of Fuller’s 2012 show comes from his animation of the same name, which sees a lonesome man grapple

Todd Fuller, ‘Tethered’ 2012, white earthenware, wire, oil, pigment, balloon, pva and timber, 74 x 40 x 90cm (Collection of Jeff Hinch)

with the desire and difficulty of wanting to let go of that which both traps and comforts him. Nguyen’s exhibition featured pint-sized animals crafted out of “dirt” with trees burgeoning from rocks sitting atop the creature’s heads. Fuller’s bear in ‘The day pigeons taught bear to fly’ is not unlike his protagonist in the film ‘Somewhere in Between’, as there is a sadness in the creature’s hollow eyes and vulnerability in his pose, however, Nguyen’s contribution to this sculpture has given the figure hope.

Her visualisation of childhood wonder has provided the seemingly trapped bear with a friend who, with the help of a flock of pigeons, has allowed an escape for the bear in the form of a flying lesson - a metaphor for giving into freedom and the possibility of experiencing unconstrained joy.

- Olivia Welch

Todd Fuller, Somewhere in between Brenda May Gallery, installation view, 2012

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Opposite: Todd Fuller + Mylyn Nguyen ‘The day pigeons taught bear to fly’ (detail) 2013 bronze, oil + pigment on terracotta, twig, Coir-peat, watercolour + ink on paper 36 x 19 x 18cm, (Private Collection)

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AL MUNRO + WARATAH LAHY

AL MUNRO (b. 1964. Canberra, ACT, Australia) Receiving her Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Arts) from the Australian National University in 2013, Al Munro has since undergone the CAPO residency to Chiang Mai University in Thailand (2013) and has been awarded a forthcoming Australia Council residency to research and create in Tokyo, Japan. Previously Munro has participated in the Australia Council London Studio Residency at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (2003) and the Megalo Print Studio residency (2002, 2008). Often engaging with scientific data as a starting point, Munro uses various and often unlikely materials to reinterpret these codes, formulas and systems into visually interesting artworks, in both sculptural and twodimensional mediums. brendamaygallery.com.au 7

Al Munro, ‘Molecular Measures’ series, 2014, balsa wood, acrylic paint, glue, glitter, dimensions variable

WARATAH LAHY (b. 1974. Sydney, NSW, Australia) Canberra-based artist Waratah Lahy’s works are concerned with the overlooked moments of the everyday and iconic cultural obsessions. In 2007 she completed her Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Arts) at the Australian National University, Canberra. Obtaining the ANU University medal for her first class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree, Lahy has since undergone residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts (2012), Megalo Print Studio (2011) and Schloss Haldenstein in Haldenstein, Switzerland (2005). Lahy also participated in an exchange to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University in Thailand (1997). waratahlahy.com

Waratah Lahy, ‘Untitled’ (detail) 2014 oil on canvas, 20 x 20cm

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IN CONVERSATION Working creatively with another person is not always an organic or immediate process, even when you hold them and their practice in the highest esteem. Canberra-based artists Al Munro and Waratah Lahy have endeavoured an artistic partnership that has not resulted in collaboration, but in conversation. Meeting regularly at the Australian National University, their shared workplace, Munro and Lahy very quickly found multiple, interesting intersections within their practices, locating an aesthetic similarity between Munro’s ‘fictitious mineral drawing’ series comprised of prismatic structures, and Lahy’s alluring paintings that peer through stained glass windows at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Using crossovers as a point of departure, Munro and Lahy have created independent bodies of work that pay homage to one another.

Independently employing diverse combinations of colours and lines, these two artists either enhance or distort plain sight within their works. In Munro’s interpretations of scientific data extracted using optical devices and Lahy’s imagery depicting overlooked places and obscure viewpoints, there is a consideration of what people cannot or do not see when looking. Attention is drawn to these under-sights and oversights

by either zooming in on invisible fragments or focusing on a single, stationary moment.

Enlarging information undetectable to the naked eye, Munro’s recent artworks employ the study and mapping of atom arrangements within crystalline solids, known as crystallography.

Her last two bodies of work imagine crystallographic data using glitter, cardboard, paint markers and crochet. Unfettered by medium in exploring her fascinations, Munro’s artworks have varied in form from coruscating wall-mounted clusters of pyramidic peaks, to thousands of concentric circles arranged as to create detailed charts, spilling from their canvases onto the surface of the wall.

Where Munro transcribes information into tangible forms, Lahy captures moments in time, most recently allowing the colours, shapes and deformities within the panes of windows or created through light and shadow obscure her vision. As opposed to elucidating the invisible, Lahy complicates a clear view. In earlier works she painted familiar scenes on the insides of glasses, essentially painting the resulting image in reverse. She has also used perspex as her canvas, leaving gaps or hidden

Al Munro, Crystallography, Brenda May Gallery, installation view, 2011

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Al Munro, ‘fictitious mineral drawing 9’ 2013 paint marker, glitter, paper, 14.5 x 14.5cm

components within each scene. Throughout her practice, Lahy has illuminated the way people look at things, whether that is showing tourists huddled to experience the ‘Mona Lisa’ through their camera’s viewfinder or capturing the unnoticed and therefore giving a profound presence to the peripheral.

Waratah Lahy, ‘Carnavelet 2’ 2012 oil on canvas, 30 x 30cm

Lahy’s decision to instead create pieces that take cues from mutual aesthetic and thematic tendencies displays one of many differing ways in which the brief of “working together” can be interpreted and executed with intriguing results.

- Olivia Welch

Using Lahy’s most recent body of work peering through windows and Munro’s ongoing engagement with the scientific lens as points of departure, both artists have adopted shapes and colours prominent in one another’s individual practices to create works that stem from a mutual fascination with human sight. Employing balsa wood and bright colours, Munro has mimicked the triangulated shapes in her own work and within Lahy’s patterned windows to create protruding clusters that mount directly onto the wall. Maintaining a fascination with the effect of observation through distortions, Lahy has produced a series of intimate paintings that similarly use the angular shapes apparent in both artists’ oeuvres.

Discovering via the prospect of collaboration that they work too differently to labour upon the same physical object, Munro and

Waratah Lahy, ‘Looking at the Mona Lisa’ 2010 acrylic on perspex, 40 x 50cm

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LESLIE OLIVER + MELINDA LE GUAY

MELINDA LE GUAY (b. 1949. Sydney, NSW, Australia) Melinda Le Guay’s oeuvre is varied in materials and themes, however her laborious attention to detail, repetitious techniques and delicate sensibility always remain salient. She received a Ceramics Certificate in 1970 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 2002 from the National Art School in Sydney. Le Guay has been collected by Artbank, the Crafts Council of Australia, Sydney and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as well as many corporate, public and private collections in Australia, America, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland. brendamaygallery.com.au

LESLIE OLIVER (b. 1954. Leeton, NSW, Australia) Having obtained both a Bachelor of Arts from Alexander Mackie College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts in Film & Television Directing from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Leslie Oliver’s interests have always been twofold. He worked as a film director, editor and consultant for many years, writing and directing ‘You Can’t Push The River’, an Australian Film Commission funded feature that was a finalist for the prestigious Mannheim/Heidelberg International Film Festival in Germany. In more recent times, Oliver established the Sydney Film School, where he is currently head of teaching and production. The other string to Oliver’s bow is his prolific sculptural practice, which has seen him exhibit nationally in Australia as well as in Los Angeles and London. brendamaygallery.com.au

A collection of objects from Melinda Le Guay to Leslie Oliver

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RESCUE, GATHER, COLLECT Characteristically, Melinda Le Guay was a little early and Leslie Oliver, a little late. Knowing that these two respected artists had only ever met briefly and informally, and that I had to therefore facilitate their meeting, was a tad daunting. Equipped with cold water, ginger biscuits and the attention of the Gallery’s Director Brenda May, who has represented and supported both artists for many years, it was time to get the ball rolling…

The pairing of Le Guay and Oliver to collectively create pieces for the exhibition In Tandem was cemented via May’s suggestion. Throughout their artistic practices both artists have successfully experimented with various materials in sculptural and two-dimensional mediums.

The two artists began referring to part of their respective processes as rescuing materials; saving battered paper for Le Guay and salvaging objects that would otherwise be landfill in Oliver’s case. A comparable affection for materials and objects revealed itself as common ground.

With the topic changing to both artists’ pending exhibitions also in 2014, images of work for Oliver’s Walking Sticks – Crooks, Staves and Scepters provoked a spirited reaction from Le Guay, who was instantly reminded of her work ‘Take Care’ from 2009. In both cases the artists similarly use thin wooden objects as a base, giving them a vertical presentation that allows for a play of shadow along the surface of the wall. Where Oliver uses stripes and geometric patterns of rich colour, Le Guay embellished her fronds with feathers and bound them with string. Discussing each other’s work, Le Guay remarked that there is a whimsicality present in Oliver’s sculptures that she finds appealing and he commented on the beauty of her stitch work. As his works are injected with life and animation through colour and her palette often pertains to muted tones, an obvious appreciation for one another’s differing aesthetic emerged.

Melinda Le Guay, ‘Take Care’ 2009 mixed media, found objects - five pieces, dimensions variable

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At this point in the conversation the seating was unconsciously rearranged so that Le Guay and Oliver faced one another, and I was outside the conversation looking in. I was no longer needed as the conversational compère and sunk comfortably into my role as curator.

With both artists continuing to chat until time caught up with them, they agreed to begin searching for materials

for each other, like a joint rescue mission.

With the discussion continuing over email, there have been mentions of weathered chicken wire, copper dish scourers, cellophane bags, curled apple green wrapping paper, sticks and iridescent thread among other things.

Having worked with both artists in the past, there will be no certainty until soon before the work is due to arrive at the Gallery as to whether all or any of these materials make an appearance in Le Guay and Oliver’s joint venture. However, this attentive process of gathering and collecting with each other in mind has revealed itself as an integral part of their artistic partnership and is one that will ultimately lead to the creation of artworks equally reflective of two distinctive and well-established practices.

- Olivia Welch

Leslie Oliver, ‘Lithe Friend’ (work in progress) 2013, painted wood, 116 x 40 x 16cm

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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

MELINDA LE GUAY Material Matters 22 April to 17 May 2014 Melinda Le Guay, ‘Natural Order’ (detail) 2013, dried leaves, perspex box, 40 x 60cm

MYLYN NGUYEN So bear folded me a paper boat, packed my lunch, pointed west and told me to go and learn something 12 August to 6 September 2014

Mylyn Nguyen, ‘So bear folded me a paper boat, packed my lunch, pointed west and told me to go and learn something’ 2013, watercolour + ink on paper, 4 x 6 x 2.5cm

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LESLIE OLIVER Walking Sticks - Crooks, Staves and Scepters 20 May to 14 June 2014 Leslie Oliver, ‘Lithe Friend’ (work in progress) 2013, painted wood 116 x 40 x 16cm

WARATAH LAHY Overlooked 15 July to 9 August 2014 Waratah Lahy, ‘Carnavalet 5’ (detail) 2013, oil on canvas 50 x 38cm

TODD FULLER The line we walk

AL MUNRO Systems of the Infinite

9 September to 8 October 2014

7 October to 1 November 2014

Todd Fuller, ‘augmented self portrait (detail) 2013, charcoal on paper 180 x 200cm

Al Munro, ‘Systems of the Infinite’ (detail) 2013, acrylic on canvas 50 x 50cm

B R E N D A M AY

G A L L E R Y

2 D a n k s S t r e e t Wa t e r l o o N S W A u s t r a l i a 2 0 1 7 www.brendamaygallery.com.au info@brendamaygallery.com.au tuesday - friday 11-6 saturday 10-6 t. 02 9318 1122 f. 02 9318 1007