Emit

EMIT Chapel off Chapel 14 – 24 August 2014 12a Little Chapel St, Prahran chapeloffchapel.com.au Curated by Cash Brown

An exhibition of contemporary art that emits shines and glows with distinguished luminaries Adam Cullen, Howard Arkley, Cara- Ann Simpson, Erica Seccombe, Elvis Richardson, Yenny Huber, Warren Armstrong, David Griggs and Joan Ross.

EMIT I have always felt that the most interesting art is art that is a verb, an active thing, a thing that does something. This may seem like a strange value to place on objects that are largely inanimate. But it is when art does something, in my opinion, it becomes elevated from plastic, paint, data or ink, into something of value and use beyond its material worth.

The title Emit holds multiple meanings. Artists emit, they produce, and they transform materials into meaning. They, give out/off, pour out, send forth, throw out, void, effuse, vent and issue ideas. The artist’s materials themselves are selected for properties, which best express those emissions, and in turn, emit meaning. Some artists use materials that emit light, radiation, gas and sound, all rely upon emissions to be seen.

The urban setting for this exhibition, in the heartland of the City of Stonnington, provides a rich basis for selecting works, which not only fit the curatorial theme, but relate also to the broader cultural landscape of urban Australia. Themes of privacy, surveillance, privilege, equality, identity in relation to the built environment run through the selected works.

The young people, whose work has been created especially for this exhibition, worked with the concept of making material choices in order to express their ideas about identity and place. Under the guidance of an experienced artist facilitator, they addressed the expanded thematic relationships presented in unique ways. This provides the participants with new skills and therefore opportunities to creatively express themselves and develop life tools, which hopefully contribute to their personal growth.

By mixing the work of young people new to art making practice, with more experienced practitioners, audiences have the opportunity to engage with new and familiar works in a different way. Engaging young people, who would not ordinarily access contemporary art, develops extends and transmits the cultural messages. These messages are then carried and shared, through the process of viewing and making personal connections or associations between the artworks and individual memories. This egalitarian approach to curating is aimed at equalising social, economic and educational disparities.

Aspects of surveillance, individuality, privacy and giving form to the unseen elements of the landscape, links all of the works in EMIT. However, the associations go much deeper and further than the texts within this paper permit. By presenting a variety of works, by artists with radically different practices with common threads, it is hoped EMIT will stimulate dialogue about what art is, what art does and possibilities about what art can be.

Cash Brown 2014

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ADAM CULLEN b. 1965 d. 2012

Adam Cullen Lady Luck 2002 acrylic and spray enamel on canvas Private Collection, Melbourne

Adam Cullen has been the subject of many texts between the performance artwork of dragging a pigs head chained to his ankle for days while a student at the City Art Institute, University of New South Wales, and his death in his Blue Mountains home in 2012.

I knew Adam well, and it was during time spent with him at home and in his studio that we spoke at length about his practice, the artists he admired, his influences, experiences and motives. While he eschewed painting during art school and the early part of his career, and claimed he took it up as a joke in 1997 when he entered the Archibald prize, he was a gifted painter at an early age, and two small but accomplished impressionistic paintings now in his father’s collection attest to that.

Adams work appears to be thematically highly varied, however I feel that the current running through all of his works is a concern with the fallibility of humans. He often claimed that all society was a ‘veneer’, and that ‘you only need to scratch the surface’ to expose a dysfunctional core, where everyone is ultimately corrupt.

He combined motifs skilfully, often figurative with text and fluorescent paint, into lurid dripping paintings. His use of spray paint was borrowed as much from his friend Howard Arkley, as it was from street culture.

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I feel Cullen’s work emits a concern for the false morality of Western suburban life, and a frustration in that it is not articulated as freely, as say discussing the weather. This frustration resulted in a rich body of work including sculptures, films, installations, drawings, prints and collaborations.

Adam Cullen 2007 Turon carp Acrylic on canvas Private collection, Sydney

Turon Carp is a deliberately ugly painting of a much maligned feral pest, which infects Australia’s waterways and has a great impact upon native species. Adam loved nature, and the Australian bush in particular locations held a special fascination for him. One such place is the Turon River, near Hill End in the Great Dividing Range west of Sydney. Adam often said that he was happy to help animals, as they have no voice or choice, whereas humans can help themselves. Turon Carp therefore can be seen as a paradox, something to be killed and discarded through no fault of its own, or to be respected and preserved as a living thing, even at the expense of local fauna.

Auto portrait is one of the few literal self-portraits the Cullen ever made. This one, from 2005, was made without referencing a mirror or photograph. It was painted wet into wet, an almost frenzied application of paint mixed with slower, more deliberate marks, and given to me as a gesture of friendship. While it is a harsh image, in keeping with harsh aspects of his character, it also shows a kind of softness, which only those who knew Adam well could experience.

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Adam Cullen Auto Portrait 2005 Acrylic on canvas Private collection, Melbourne

The motifs in Lady Luck came from tattoo magazines. Tattoos, until quite recently have been associated with low-brow culture, with bikers, inmates and underdogs and it was with these types of characters Adam often sought to engage. In retrospect, I wonder if it was about trying to find authenticity, lives without the veneers and urbane pleasantries he so passionately disliked? Lady Luck illustrates misogyny as commonplace, but that women can defend themselves, while pointing out that it is the roll of a dice, a mathematical chance of what we are born into that determines who we are. It is an authentic work, in that Adam himself was guilty of harbouring misogynistic traits. In many respects, all of his works can be seen as self-portraits.

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HowaRd ARKLEy b. 1951 d.1999

Howard Arkley Sunshade home 1995 Spray enamel on paper Private collection, Sydney

It is hard to believe that an artist whose visual impact has loomed so large on the Australian art scene has been gone for so long. The iconic Melbourne based artist Howard Arkley is definitely not forgotten, and his work maintains a timeless relevance and resonance into the twenty first century.

While the artist often repeated motifs, and indeed there are many works which appear to have little distinguishing them from one another, we are fortunate to have two fine examples from the 1990’s.

Arkley’s works are conspicuously devoid of figuration, relying upon the imagination of the viewer to inhabit the world he reflects. It is a world of the mundane. Suburban homes with idiosyncratic features, like sunshades, which give no information as to the personality of the occupants, and freeways from angles where cars cannot be seen.

The images are static on one hand, but activated with optical treats of vivid colours and lurid patterns. The internal domestic patterns of wallpaper on many of his works are often imposed upon the otherwise bland exteriors. The use of spray paint as a medium reinforces the experience that you are looking at an artwork, not an illusion, but an idea.

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Howard Arkley Freeway Exit 1997 Spray enamel on paper Private collection, Sydney

I have included these works as a posthumous dialogue between Arkley and Cullen and between Melbourne and Sydney where the artists respectively resided. Arkley had a great influence on the younger artist, and not all of them positive. Both artists had well documented heroin addiction, but the point is that they both made art from a cultural perspective, which was outside the usual norms of politeness. In the eighties, Arkley appropriated motifs from old masters and tattoo works, combined them with graffiti and his obsession with patterns. Cullen was also obsessed with this type of theme, however he eschewed the pattern for the inverse approach of dead flat featureless backgrounds. It is interesting to me that these artists appear to have similar concerns, yet their output feels like polar opposites. Both artists addressed suburbia as a dystopian place, where surfaces reveal little of the true inner nature of what it is to be a creature of the concrete jungle.

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CaRa- ANN SIMPSON

Cara- Ann Simpson Horace Petty – Gumtree Grove 2014 inkjet on Chromajet metallic pearl paper Collection of the artist

Cara-Ann Simpson is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture, sound, space and the participant. She is concerned with modes of listening/hearing in social situations and how people interact with sound.

I have selected Cara-Anne’s work as her unique perspective of listening, recording and integrating audio data into a purely visual form is fascinating. Like Arkley, Simpson’s work here is devoid of figuration as a theme, yet stamps the Australian urban landscape with an almost post-apocalyptic feel. The innovative technological aspects to her art-making processes are as fascinating as the outcomes, which to my mind resonate well from beyond the foundations of their local Melbourne context.

By recording sound spectra, and employing the device of economic and social diversity to draw attention to prevailing contemporary urban issues, Simpson’s work also implies a kind of surveillance.

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Cara- Ann Simpson Melbourne High School 2014 inkjet on Chromajet metallic pearl paper Collection of the artist

In her own words: ‘We surround ourselves in imposing architecture, a culture steeped in material, structure and rituals.

These two works compare and contrast two impressive, monolithic (in the systemic sense) buildings within a few kilometres of each other – the Horace Petty housing estate (now renamed Gumtree Grove) and Melbourne High School. The former is reminiscent of Soviet Russia or Stalinist lines and power with a colourful playground in front seemingly out of place but fading in the shadow of the structures glory. The latter revels in an almost religious fervour reaching towards the heavens.

Strangely, the sounds that accompany each site are strikingly different to the expected. Horace Petty is nearly peaceful with rhythmic bouncing balls, playing children and rustling leaves through trees.

Melbourne High School, on the other hand, is surrounded by construction, grating trains and constant streams of traffic, all of which is amplified by the nearby Yarra River. A visual spectral analysis of these sounds is overlaid over the photographs. This process often reveals a site’s beauty, however, these particular images become gothic, foreboding and oppressive’.

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ERICA SECCOMBE

Erica Seccombe Collective Unconscious (detail) 2013 gypsum powder and inkjet print and resin, multiple object installation under UV lamp

Erica Seccombe is also interested in making the unseen seen. The humble garden slater, the little grey insect which inhabits the most inhospitable places in urban environments, holds several places within this exhibition. The first is that they are largely invisible. We know they are there, but do we give them a second thought as to their purpose within ecosystems? Secondly, these art objects are the result of deeply creative thinking processes and critical skills combining art, science and digital technologies enabling scanning, scaling and replicating of minute details. Seccombe makes the invisible visible and drawing attention to larger and recurring thematic concerns turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. It is the transformation of ideas into data, then data into form appropriate to the artistic aim, which has generated these beautiful little pieces.

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Erica Seccombe Collective Unconscious (detail) 2013 Gypsum powder and inkjet print and resin, multiple object installation under UV lamp

In her own words: ‘Collective unconscious features four objects that replicate the very tip of a garden slater’s leg printed in various sizes. Slaters are a terrestrial crustacean or Isopoda and only grow up to 17mm in length so their legs are tiny. Imagine how big the creature would become if the whole body was printed to the scale of each tip.

I've created this work on a Z-Printer 650 which prints like a colour inkjet over thin layers of powder that are very slowly built up and bound together. These 3D objects are the enlarged virtual volumetric data of an actual garden slater, so the inside of the leg tip is printed as well. The volumetric data is acquired with a 3D Micro-CT X-ray of a real-life slater then visualised in Drishti, a scientific visualisation program. This work is part of a project I'm undertaking in the ANU Department of Applied Mathematics and in VizLab to investigate computer microscopy as an extension of vision.

The 3D printing technology allows me to replicate this object as many times and in as many sizes and colours as I like. However, the organic form becomes increasingly voxelated (3D pixels) as it increases in scale and pushes beyond the capacity of the data and the technology. Collective unconscious pays homage to both the possibilities and the limits of technology in Western culture, but it is also a play on the human drive to visualize and imitate nature in the pursuit to better understand life and, ultimately the meaning of existence.’

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ELVIS RICHARDSON Housing, architecture, surveillance, privacy, voyeurism and making art through what is essentially code – in this case, appropriated code are themes Elvis Richardson examines in her work. In The Invisible Hand, Melbourne based Richardson recontextualises surveillance imagery into an art video by editing and combining sound overlays by James Hayes. The work can be viewed freely on her website, and is included here as an example of innovation in the field of digital media art production within a fine art context. Richardson’s practice also includes installation and the re presentation of discarded imagery and ephemera, old videos, glass slides, photographs, trophies and the like. These are things which were once important documentations of milestones in personal lives. The Invisible Hand provides a contrast, by re-examining the everyday and making visible The Invisible Hand – the political theory of self-regulating behaviour, visible.

Elvis Richardson The Invisible Hand 2014 digital print on rag paper

In her own words: ‘I have an app on my tablet called World Live Cams Pro where the user can view live streams from security cameras located around the world. One of my favourite cameras to visit is located in a Russian village called Beloozerski. The camera is mounted on the side of a tall residential building with 180 degree views over a high rise housing estate situated in a semi-rural area 80 kms from Moscow. The app allows the user to control the high definition camera; pan left and right, up, down as well as zoom controls. Beloozerski is a popular camera and there is often a queue to take over its controls, which is of course interesting to see what other people are looking at.

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I chose the location because it is residential and I can view people in their local environment. It’s pretty every day stuff, kids, prams, supermarket, notice board, dogs, waiting, playground, talking, looking. Does occupation create an emotional relationship to architecture and landscape and fosters feelings of nostalgia and belonging. This highlighted my thoughts about housing within the context of Australia's obsession with property/land ownership that have informed previous works.

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 housing in Russia was fully state owned and while rents were very low apartment sizes were very small and based on an allocated sqm per person, also people didn't have any choice about where they lived. Since the 1990s all Russian's have been given the title of their rental properties for free. Following this process of individual privatisation, the private construction/housing/mortgage market has taken hold. Since I have been recording my visits to Beloozerski at least three new high rise buildings have been built.

My movement and control of the cameras singular heavenly view found another socio-economic reference in the term ‘The invisible hand’ conceived of by political economist Adam Smith in 1759. The invisible hand is used today by political-economists as a theory of the self regulating behaviour of the free market where acting in one’s self interest produces socially beneficial results (the term was most used during the ‘greed is good’ 1980s).

Still capture from The Invisible Hand 2014 with sound by James Hayes HD video 13: 41mins

The self regulating market is the basic precept of the Laissez-faire economy we are familiar with today. Smith's metaphor proposes that individual efforts for personal profit will positively affect society as the rich create a trickle down effect through employment and their own consumption creating demand. And the every day consumer exercising their choices will have the power to determine the success or failure of a product or service.

Observing Beloozerski Russia from my tablet screen in Melbourne Australia feels distant and insignificant but I find myself feeling a connection to this place. My research identifies that the building right below the camera is an art school, and the local Artist Union - organisations that were established during the Soviet era still operating today. While I can't fully understand the context of the lives people are living here, my next stage of this project is to establish more methods of communication.’

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WARREN ARMSTRONG Sydney based artist Warren Armstrong’s practice is based in code. Armstrong was a very early adopter of Augmented Reality as an artistic medium, creating works and curating virtual exhibitions in real time and space using layers of imagery through mobile apps.

These image layers can be interactive, and provide artists with the ability to locate their work anywhere in the world. All you need is a smartphone or tablet and the Layar app.

For EMIT, Warren has created a full-scale map of casualties of the current war in Gaza represented as virtual stars in the sky above southeastern Melbourne. This map of stars stretches from Coburg in the north to Cranbourne in the south, with Stonnington nestled beneath the suburbs of Gaza City.

Accompanying each of these stars is the name (where known), age, and brief details about the fate of the person it memorialises. The work is hidden from the naked eye, but visible to anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone or tablet, and an app called Layar that can be downloaded free from the App Store or Google Play Store.

Once the app is downloaded, follow the instructions in the gallery to access and view the work. The work itself, however, is best viewed not in the gallery but outside with the sky overhead. Because of its scale, it cannot all beInstructions viewed fromfor a single vantage point – the best the app can do is show the viewing are currently unavailable stars within a 20 km radius – so it will be necessary to travel to view this work in entirety.

Once the app is downloaded people can simply open it up, search for “Gaza”, select the layer set up for the show. Then, then hold up their phones or tablets at the designated locations, and they will see the map of Gaza in the night sky.

The map and instructions are available on site at the gallery.

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YENNY HUBER Melbourne based Austrian/Norwegian artist Yenny Huber explores themes of balance, light and more recently, social engagement.

Huber’s 2009 photographic series There is no light without darkness capture the vastness of Norwegian vistas diffused with ethereal light from daylight darkness, recorded while on residency there during the Arctic winter. The images float in transparent Perspex® boxes, often with more than one photograph in a shallow stack inside the box, and are lit with visible strips of light emitting diode (LED) lights. The images and chosen format of these works consciously allude to the unique character and fragility of our environment.

Yenny Huber 3.00 pm 2009 Type C Photograph, Perspex®, LED

Yenny Huber 12.30 pm 2009 Type C Photograph, Perspex®, LED

Yenny Huber 2.30 pm 2009 Type C Photograph, Perspex®, LED

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These works were selected as an illustration of diaspora. They provide a striking contrast with Australian urban and natural landscapes. They emit light through diodes, and reflect a cool calmness, of another land, which like Richardson’s The Invisible Hand, highlights the lifestyle chasm between Australia and far Northern Hemispheric environments.

Yenny Huber is also known for her large-scale photographic work, plus the facilitation and management of educational creative community arts projects.

Joel 2014 Digital print on paper and phosphorescent paint

For EMIT, Yenny engaged young people from the local community housing estate, also featured in Cara- Ann Simpson’s work. Over the weeks leading up the exhibition, five leaders of the Adventure Park Leadership Program were introduced to contemporary art practice through discussions of the artists included in the exhibition. Inspired by the artists’ methods and techniques, they captured images of their local surroundings, made drawings and digital collages, which reflect their sense of place and identity.

This type of artwork is called socially engaged art. In Yenny’s practice, her artwork is less focussed on the physical outcomes than on the processes, and potential for lasting change in the lives of the people involved. Most participants are ordinarily dislocated from examining the contribution contemporary art production makes to society. By engaging them, a two way process occurs with unpredictable outcomes. The work produced is part of a reflective process from both the artist and participants and was made possible through the generous support of the City of Stonnington.

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Bree 2014 Digital print on paper and phosphorescent paint

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DAVID GRIGGS

David Griggs The Circus in Barcelona was Fun 2008 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy Station , Melbourne

David Griggs is an expat Australian artist, residing in Manila after being based in Sydney for most of his life. Griggs has travelled extensively, making contact with communities that are facing repression, and who are witnessing the fabric of their societies being stripped of their cultural character due to increasing external forces.

At the age of 18 he worked for an underground newspaper, photographing poverty in North India and Nepal. In 1996, while travelling in China, he had a near death experience and has since devoted his life to producing paintings and photographic installations exploring the darker sides of humanity.

After being awarded the 2003 Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship, Griggs ventured to Mae Sot, a town on the border of Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). The town is close to three Burmese refugee camps policed by the Thai military that have detained Burmese exiles since the 1988 student uprising in Yangon (Rangoon). The artist drew inspiration from younger people in the camps who were having their creativity quashed by Thai authorities. They reacted by investigating alternative ways to express themselves and to engage in protest. Their stories formed the basis of Griggs’ exhibition Destination Disaster, held at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, in 2004 [1].

Griggs emits a palpable concern for humanity, and his work could be viewed as a kind of activism.

While it would be easy to relate his paintings visually and sometimes thematically to the work of Cullen, the angles are completely different. Griggs possesses a first-hand sincerity, and indeed faces poverty and inequality daily. It would be appropriate to align Grigg’s practice more with those of Yenny Huber, Cara Ann Simpson, Joan Ross and Warren Armstrong, whose works address inequities, voicelessness and oppression.

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David Griggs Untitled 2008 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy Station , Melbourne

[1] Text adapted from Gallery Ecosse website viewed 04.08.2014, <http://galleryecosse.com.au/david-griggs/>

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JOAN ROSS

Joan Ross The history of the other world 2013 digital pigment print on cotton rag paper hand painted Courtesy Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne

Joan Ross is a consummate manipulator. My first encounters with her frankly hilarious yet poignant works were a figurative series of collage and found objects on paper back in the mid 00s. Her ability to manipulate materials and meaning has evolved into a fascinating practice including mixed media installations using found and already made objects, costumes and appropriated paintings. Ross adds lurid touches of fluoro paint and Perspex速 creating psychedelic dystopian Australian dramas. Her animated paintings in the form of video works, like the rest of her oevre, simultaneously reference a number of themes. Imperialism, colonialism, diaspora, citizenship, national pride, civic responsibility, global warming, tagging, consumerism, appropriation and post-colonial hangovers fuel her creative output.

Interestingly, she often uses the paintings of Joseph Lycett as a point of departure. Lycett was an Australian painter active during the time that the British government colonized Australia. Ross disturbs his utopian landscapes, invading the pictorial space with garish motifs and colours associated with high-viz work-wear and warning signs. These interruptions disrupt Aboriginal residents and vandalise the landscape as a metaphor for the continuing destruction of Australian land and indigenous culture.

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In her own words: ‘As a child I was fascinated by the fact that the important colonial painter Joseph Lycett was a forger.

In a sense I am continuing his tradition of taking something and forging something new out of it.

One of the reasons for Lycett’s fame lay in the fact he was one of the first to depict the Aboriginal population engaged in traditional activities, and much of my work has on some level an element of the continuing dance of the races.

The mentality behind colonialism can manifest itself in many ways and the ongoing creep, nay, invasion of high vis yellow and fluoro orange are a modern-day example. I didn’t vote for these colours, yet they are everywhere!’

The fluoro colours appear to emit light, as they fluoresce when excited by the energy of light. This effect is fleeting, as oxygen reacts chemically with the dyes in the paint, the fluorescence will gradually diminish, as the artist hopes the destruction of the land and culture will diminish.

Joan Ross The VIP lounge 2014 Digital hand painted print on rag paper, hand painted, ed of 5 Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery Sydney

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EMIT Contemporary art that glows Chapel off Chapel Gallery 14 – 24 August 2014

Curated by Cash Brown as part of the City of Stonnington | Glow Winter Arts Festival Artists: Adam Cullen, Howard Arkley, Cara- Ann Simpson, Erica Seccombe, Elvis Richardson, Yenny Huber, Warren Armstrong, David Griggs and Joan Ross.

Adventure Park Leadership Program participants Bree, Joel, Brianna, Shania and Latisha.

Chapel off Chapel | Box Office 03 8290 7000 | Fax 03 9533 8517 12 Little Chapel Street, Prahran VIC 3181 | www.chapeloffchapel.com.au 10 am – 5 pm daily

Acknowledgements: The curator greatly acknowledges the support of private lenders Philip Streten and Ken McGgregor.

Thank you to the Melbourne based artist representatives Karen Woodbury Gallery and Station for wonderful support and artist liaison.

Special thanks to Dominik Mersch for alerting me to Erica Seccombe’s practice.

Claire Grech professional conservation services.

Natasha Faint for installing Staff at Chapel off Chapel Andrew Green from AG Framing, Prahran Artist Moving Artists and Segue Art for getting everything in and out on time Catalogue designed and published by Cash Brown | cashbrown.org

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STATION MICHAEL REID GALLERY

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