NEW
CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2012
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN ART
Amy Baker Troy-Anthony Baylis Christine Collins Ariel Hassan Sam Howie Sue Kneebone Andrew Long James Marshall Nasim Nasr 1 – 26 August 2012 DuPlessis Building 203-205 North Terrace Adelaide
THE ARTISTS
THE ARTISTS
Andrew Long
James Marshall
Christine Collins
Ariel Hassan
Andrew Long’s Portrait and Template works represent ongoing experimentation with abstract portraiture and photographic presentation. Enclosed in compositions of timber, glass and aluminium; a private exchange occurs between a photographic print and a mirror. The distance needed to clearly identify the subject is contained, limiting the perspective to the outer edges of the reflected print. The resulting sculptural forms reference the aesthetics of timber furniture yet deny functionality, again failing to completely yield to the viewer.
Sarah Connor wakes from a nightmare and carves “NO FATE” into a park bench. She is bunking with a band of private militia stockpiling weapons for the possible machine invasion and take over. At this point Connor has a moment of enlightenment and sets out to change her own destiny and that of the entire human race.James Marshall uses filmic signifiers to explore the confluences between cinematic representation and real life. His work pares back complicated visual codes to examine issues including existence, reality, the uncanny and sublime. The works exhibited can be read in direct context to Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Marshall echoes Conners carvings questioning the worth of the individual’s actions in an uncertain future. Laser cut aluminum illuminates from the darkened architectural ruins of the dis-used space as a positive slogan for existence and possible change.
Andrew Long is a South Australian artist presently based in Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include Beween Two States, a two-person exhibition with Marc Hundley at Ed. Varie in New York; Public at Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide; Motion/Pictures at Gallery A.S in Sydney and Points of View at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. He is currently studying at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.
James Marshall graduated with a Master of Visual Art (Research), South Australian School of Art Architecture and Design in 2011. Through suggestive and psychological triggers Marshall’s practice re-interprets the visual language of cinema into the context of contemporary art. Marshall has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions within South Australia, National ARI’s, participated in art fairs in Stockholm and Los Angeles and presented his research in Oxford, England at the Fourth Global Conference of Fear, Horror and Terror. Marshall initiated the FILMCLVB program at RAID Projects (LA)/FELTspace and has curated/ facilitated various exhibitions focusing on international dialogue.
‘I promise I won’t sing’, is a sound work in the form of five stories, the voices being those of women from classic film noir played opposite the ‘hardboiled’ detective investigating murders, thefts, blackmails, kidnappings and conspiracies within convoluted plots. Various statements are combined and rearranged following a linguistic logic and narrative path; the act of assembling the five stories is, in itself, an exercise in storytelling. While there is a loose linear structure to the tales, the already circuitous, complex and confusing nature of the film plot is exaggerated when the stories are combined. The effect of aggregating the voices is not only the compression of several plots into a single plot line, but also the compression of multiple characters into one. Here, as several characters of the same character type, the femme fatale, are combined, the various voices join in an exaggerated game of begging, lies, deception, excuses, threats, pleas of innocence, declarations of guilt, confessions, manipulations, flirtation, drama and desperation. As the various voices waver, shout, stammer, preach, whisper and simper as a conglomerate character, the effect is one of concentration. Parody, however, is not the intention of the resultant exaggeration. Instead, the anthology of characters is perhaps a chance to engage with the character type, through her words and voices, while she is away from the cinematic structure of the film, it’s visual landscape, her physical form and her more dominant companions.
Ariel Hassan’s art is about ambiguity, and about the task of wresting meaning from its clutches. The most fundamental achievement of Hassan’s works is that they constantly achieve this aim with such elegance and grace, despite the seething complexities that lie just beneath their surface.The other key achievement of his work is to do so with a precise timeliness; an acute awareness of the historical period within which his works’ encounters with ambiguity take place. In considering Hassan’s work, ambiguity must therefore always be taken in its temporal sense, contingency. Hassan is truly an artist of the 21st century. His biography is a picture of globalized nomadism. Growing up in Argentina, he subsequently moved to Spain, where he held his first exhibition in 2003, and then to Australia, where he now lives half the year, living the other half in Berlin, Germany. Hassan works across multiple media: although principally a painter, he produces sculptures, photographs and installations, as well as works that mix all of these. Most significantly, Hassan marks his timeliness by situating himself as an artist, and most particularly as a painter, at the end of a long century of art, and at the beginning of a new century full of possibility. It is importantly from this unstable yet promising point in time that Hassan presents his attempts at meaning. Nicholas Croggon, About Madness, GAG Projects, 2011
Christine Collins is an Adelaide-based artist who completed her Masters of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art in 2003 and remained practicing in Glasgow until 2005, exhibiting in Glasgow International, Tramway, Intermedia and Market Gallery, Glasgow; Tent at Witte de Witte, Rotterdam; Bowieart Film Festival, London and National Centre of Culture, Mexico City. In Australia, she recently exhibited in CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW; Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide; 24HR Arts, Darwin and Linden Gallery Innovators program, Melbourne, 2009. Christine was awarded an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, a University of Sydney Postgraduate Scholarship, an Australia Council Grant for New Work and Arts SA Project Development Grants in 2007 and 2008. Her practice is a mixed-media (sound, sculpture, drawing, installation) exploration of relationships between popular film and art historical references, often examining a particular genre by isolating selected components of film in juxtaposition with high art forms. She has been employed as a sessional tutor/lecturer at the South Australian School of Art since 2005.
Ariel Hassan was born in Argentina in 1977, graduating from the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires in 2000 before moving to Madrid in 2001. He presently lives and works in Adelaide. In 2005, he completed an Honours Degree in Fine Arts majoring in painting at the SA School of Art, University SA. His first solo exhibition in Australia Internal Relationships was held at Greenaway Art Gallery, 2006, followed by the Melbourne Art Fair. In 2007, he exhibited at Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin; Uneasy, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, 2008; Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Scope Basel, Switzerland; World Expo, Shanghai and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide Festival of Arts, 2010; Art Stage Singapore, Singapore, Aura Gallery, Beijing, China, SH Contemporary (Aura Gallery and Greenaway Art Gallery), Shanghai, 2011; Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, Australia and Art Stage Singapore, Singapore (Greenaway Art Gallery), 2012. His work is represented in the French National Collection, Artbank, Shandong Provincial Government Collection, China, and the Veolia Collection. Ariel Hassan is represented by Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, Australia.
THE ARTISTS
THE ARTISTS
Amy Baker
Troy-Anthony Baylis
Nasim Nasr
My central artistic concerns exist in a space that is constructed upon the contemplative, the melancholy, the determination, the imperfect and the defeat. I am particularly interested in human endeavour and the fine ground that lies between success and failure, the struggle for this and the evidence of the fight. I explore the different places where this ground lies and the arbitrary lines that society and we draw to define what these may be and the significance they hold. I have used materials and methods associated with the domestically built form. Timber, wire, plaster and paint are employed using references to building and furniture making. The work has a feeling of being in transition, of being permanently under construction. This leaves room for growth or an imagined future. The work references known forms yet plays either with scale, materiality, abstraction or context. Despite being made of materials of strength, the methods of construction are clearly vulnerable and often ephemeral. The built world is a powerful literal representation of the triumph of the complex imagination. It could also be seen as a destructive force. In my work I seek to collide natural or biomorphic forms with known and commonly built structures and materials. Inspiration from natural forms and shapes is a concept employed by builders and architects since shelters were designed and is now best seen in the work of practitioners such as Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry. The language and concepts around the built form can provide us with a metaphorical tool to explore experience over adversity, for example building descriptions such as ‘true’ and ‘correct’. I like very much the idea that my work says less about built objects and architecture and much more about larger more intangible human concerns.
Postcard (2010-12) is a serial edition made from reconstructed glomesh and ‘faux-mesh’ metallic handbags, purses and key-wallets that have been sought from thrift stores and grandma’s drawers throughout Australia. They have been ‘skinned’, their lining and metal framing discarded. The ‘skins’ have been joined by unpicking and reconnecting the metal x-shaped latches on the underside of the material, enabling large and seamless surfaces to be created. The material shimmers and gleams because the individual ‘pixels’ refract light. The effect is similar to precious stones used for jewellery-making or small mirrors that are arranged to construct disco balls. The material of glomesh has a history of glamour, mostly attributed to the brand Oroton founded in Sydney in the late 1930s which produced luxury items for women. The name Oroton derives from the Latin “oro” (gold), and “ton” (an imperial weight measure). Metallic mesh is also a material associated with protective armour; as a cultural artefact, a glomesh bag represents prestigious feminine armour. The series design takes its cue from the crescentshaped ‘breastplates’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented to Aboriginal people considered honourable for a ‘badge of distinction’. These works herald communication between Australian places and personas, citing Alice Springs, Katherine Gorge, Bella Vista, Cherrybrook, Victoria Square, Sandy Gully, Crystal Brook, Nelly Bay, Mona Vale, and other towns, rivers and areas that have been dragged by name from distant locations. The mementos are private conversations between ‘sistas’ who are living throughout Australia, connecting and conversing with each other through glamorous artefacts.
I have been asked frequently in Australia where do I come from? The answer is: Iran, which until the 1950s was always referred to as “Persia”. I don’t know therefore if I am Iranian or Persian. Why does a country with the name of “Iran” always identify itself as “Persia”? Why, when my legal Islamic name is “Fatemeh” does everyone call me since I was born “Nasim”? What does this name mean to us when “Persia” only exists historically (officially) but is repeatedly used in daily conversation? My work for this project is a two-channel video, with a hand flipping coins against a black background, adjacent to a 1890s (pre-European colonisation) map of Persia and surrounding ‘areas’ (as opposed to ‘countries’) upon which are thrown spinning coins. These coins each identify a period of time when “Iran” was “Persia”, and as it now is, “Iran”. The hand tosses coins into the air over this map, much like the universal practice of flipping “heads and tails”. One coin has the historical Persian lion (denoting king) on one side (from the time the map was made) and the other a contemporary coin, with a number with a line underneath. From this comes the coin game “Lion and line”, or “Sheer o khat”. The flipping of the coins within this context presents a dance (of terminology and classification) between past and present, of a name that has never disappeared from the memories of people, even if it does not officially exist in their daily lives. Notions of naming (country), value, power, language and memory are activated, as are power and disempowerment, of being named or with the naming of things.
Amy Baker began her formal artistic training at The National Art School, Sydney in 2002 while working in the film industry. After moving to Adelaide in 2003, she continued her education at Adelaide Central School of Art, graduating with a degree with Honours in 2008. Amy has exhibited regularly in South Australia since 2007, including exhibitions at Seedling Art Space, FELTspace, Adelaide Central School of Art and SASA Gallery, University SA. She has been a finalist in the Fleurieu Painting Prize and the Clifton’s Painting Prize, awarded The Adelaide City Council Prize, and two scholarships at Adelaide Central School of Art. In 2013 she will travel to Rome to study landscape painting with a scholarship awarded by the New York Studio School.
Troy-Anthony Baylis is a visual artist and lecturer in Social and Cultural studies, David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, and a PhD candidate at AAD Univeristy of SA. He is currently Chair of Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally including Intangibles In Terra Australis, Flinders University Art Museum, Adelaide 2011; Intangibles In Terra Australis, Kubo Kutxa, San Sebastian, Spain 2010; Heartlines, SASA Gallery, Adelaide 2010; Sunkiss/Landlove, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide, 2008; Warhola Trees, Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany, 2007; Rosafarbene Sonnenuntergange/Pink Sunsets, Ruhrlandmuseum, Essen, Germany, 2006
Nasim Nasr, born Tehran, Iran 1984, lives and works in Adelaide. Through her photographic practice Nasim explores and comments on both specific and universal cultural concerns in contemporary society. Her work has dealt with notions of self-censorship, the transience of identity, and issues that face the global community in the context of civil and social unrest. Nasr completed a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design, Art University of Tehran, Iran in 2006, and a Master of Visual Arts (Research), SA School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of SA, in 2011. Since graduating, she has featured in various exhibitions, festivals and publications in Australia and Iran. Australian exhibitions include: What To Do?, The Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 2012; Edge of Elsewhere, 4A Gallery, 2012 Sydney Festival; 2011 Boston Online Biennial Project, New York, which was further featured at the 54th Venice Biennial; the performance Women in Shadow, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide and Walker Street Gallery and Art Centre, Melbourne both 2011; CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW, Adelaide, and Border Crossings: Human Rights Adelaide Art and Film Festival, Adelaide, both 2010. Her forthcoming exhibition will be CCP Declares, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, August 2012. Publications featuring her work include The Huffington Post, Art & Australia, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet, Realtime, Eyeline and Artlink magazines.
THE ARTISTS
THE ARTISTS
Sam Howie The idea of metamoderism is one of an “oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment”,1 that was first proposed by Timotheus Velmeulen and Robin van den Akker in 2010. Within this model I feel to have found some shared interests in my own practice on ways to read the work, despite Velmeulen and van den Akker focusing on citing figurative works. My approach is grounded heavily in the historical tradition of abstract painting that responds for and against past works and movements whilst being placed in and responding to a current climate. The modernist approach in my work could be seen as a search, an uncovering or opening, whilst the irony being that the essence of what it is that is searched for is, in fact, already right there, on the surface.
Sue Kneebone Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2 2010: 2, http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/ index.php/jac/article/view/5677/ 1
Sam Howie is an Adelaide-based visual artist working primarily with paint. He holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), University of SA (2010) and a Bachelor of Visual Arts and Applied Design, TAFESA (2008). His work was selected for inclusion in the Hatched 09 National Graduate Exhibition, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. His solo exhibitions include The Turnout, The Project Space, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 2009, Decomposition, Format, Adelaide, 2011 and Apainting, FELTspace, Adelaide, 2012. Group shows include Painthing, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2010, Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibitions 2009 and 2011, FELTspace and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Sam Howie was co-director of FELTspace in 2010 and was included in their FELTspace GOLD: A Survey of Emerging Contemporary Art Practice in South Australia publication, 2011.
This tableau evokes the hazy borders between nature and culture, dreams and consequences. Sir Thomas Elder, a philanthropic man of Empire has been spirited away from his North Terrace pedestal to witness a dystopian future. A solitary banquet scene serves up the remains of colonial ambition from his time.
Sue Kneebone has a PhD in Visual Arts, South Australian School of Art, University of SA (2010) and a Masters in Research, Victorian College of the Arts (2001). Central to Sue’s studio practice is the transformative process of assemblage and photomontage that allows for new associations to be made with the fragmented clues and mnemonic triggers made by working from archival material and found artefacts. Her intention is to draw the viewer in to consider more insidious subtexts such as disturbed ecologies from colonial incursions. A combination of field trips and archival research have fostered in her a deeper understanding of the inherited and ongoing legacies of colonial settler culture. Recent exhibitions include Aura: The Haunted Image, Victoria University, Melbourne, 2011 and CACSA CONTEMPORARY 2010: THE NEW NEW, 2010. In 2011 Sue was a recipient of the Qantas Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award and an Australia Council grant for new work.
Christine Collins
Amy Baker Ariel Hassan
Sue Kneebone
Nasim Nasr
Troy-Anthony Baylis
James Marshall
Christine Collins
Andrew Long
Sam Howie
Christine Collins
North Terrace Artist’s works: Amy Baker, The Lawn Below, 2012; mixed media; Said the Joker to the Fool, 2012; mixed media Troy-Anthony Baylis, Postcard (Bella and Cherry), 2010; Postcard (Crystal, Sandy and Alice), 2011; Postcard (Nelly and Mona), 2012 Christine Collins, I promise I won’t sing, 2012; archived audio Ariel Hassan, thecapacityforlossandthefragmentsthatremain, 2012; inkjet on vinyl Sam Howie, Non-covering, 2012; enamel on panels Sue Kneebone, Planning for Paradise, 2012, giclée print; Nature Morte, 2012, mixed media Andrew Long, Portrait, 2011; walnut, pigment print, mirror; Template III and IV, 2012; wood, glass, metal, c-print, mirror James Marshall, Untitled Monument, 2012; timber, chord, enamel, fluorescent light fixture and tube; Untitled (Aluminum Box), 2012; aluminum, chord, fluorescent light fixture and tube; Endless Summer #1 & #2, 2012, C-type photographs and acrylic Nasim Nasr, Lion and Line, 2011; two channel video, sound; coins and velvet on plinth, perspex The CACSA gratefully acknowledges project assistance from Arts SA; sponsorship from the Du Plessis Family and assistance from Theo Maras, The Maras Group, Adelaide; SPUD (Special Projects Under Development); curators Monte Masi (until July 2012) and Logan McDonald; the installation team Logan McDonald, Armin Nasr, Simon Tait and Katy Barber; and the contributions by the artists; Ariel Hassan is represented by Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
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