Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography by Centre for Contemporary Photography

Sculpture through Photography

Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography

Paul Adair Fleur van Dodewaard Andrew Hazewinkel Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng Stéphanie Lagarde Stein Rønning Curated by Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall

Publication Sponsor

Fleur van Dodewaard From the series 131 Variations 2013 inkjet print 30 × 25 cm

Fleur van Dodewaard, Paul Adair, StĂŠphanie Lagarde and Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

Foreword

Naomi Cass Director

In reading the illuminating introduction to this exhibition by curators, Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall, I am reminded how interesting and challenging is the curatorial process: one of looking and listening, reading and returning to look again and again. How deftly the curators have engaged a wonderful selection of Australian and international artists in an exploration of the relationship between sculpture and photography. I acknowledge and thank the artists, Paul Adair, Fleur van Dodewaard, Stein Rønning, Andrew Hazewinkel, Stéphanie Lagarde and Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng. At its best, curating is a deeply intuitive and iterative process, which seeks to draw a miraculous thread from the heart of an artist’s work to that of a notional visitor to the exhibition. CCP’s guest curators have done well in this as well as in the myriad of more prosaic tasks that constitute this curious profession, such as negotiating skills, contractual work, scheduling, and raising funds, to name a few. Karra Rees, CCP Managing Curator, has journeyed with Lantieri and Wall to ensure a significant outcome for artists and visitors. With generous support from the Gordon Darling Foundation, the exhibition’s thread now extends into history through this catalogue, designed by Joseph Johnson, CCP Designer. CCP is grateful to all who have supported Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography. I acknowledge lenders to the exhibition, the artists and The University of Queensland Art Museum and thank them for their faith in lending work from the Collection to a contemporary art space. Many individuals and companies have enabled the work to be printed and I gratefully acknowledge Ilford and PICTO, Paris. Financial assistance has been given by the Gordon Darling Foundation; the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway; the French Government through the Consulat Général de France; NAVA through The Australian Artists’ Grant; and the City of Yarra. CCP is grateful for this critical support without which the exhibition would not have been possible. Raking light refers to the use of light from an oblique, almost parallel source in the examination and photography of an object, a term used primarily in the conservation of works of art. A memorable curated exhibition is one where the curator’s theme casts a gentle raking light, enabling both artists and visitors to see in a new light, as it does in this exhibition.

Stéphanie Lagarde Stare 2013 1 from a series of 6 photographs latex ink print on paper 230 × 164.3 cm

Introduction

Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall

The photography of sculpture produces a fundamental cognitive and spatial shift. The transformation of sculpture to image, from a three-dimensional form which can be circumnavigated to a two-dimensional plane, brings a different set of conditions under which we encounter an artwork. It directs our attention to inside the frame, to scrutinise the configurations that lie within. These altered terms of engagement also invite a tactile imagination, to visualise something beyond the parameters of the image – to the maker’s hands, the materials and their handling, whether it is to cast, build, drape, cut or fold. Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography started out as an investigation into how artists seek to present sculpture through the medium of photography, and how photography, in turn, shapes the way we perceive sculpture. As the exhibition developed, it naturally gravitated towards a consideration of the ‘photographic object’; how the photographic image can be pushed beyond the picture to move between the two mediums and simultaneously occupy both. The exhibition brings together a group of artists who work across sculptural and photographic practices, to reflect on how they mediate and reimagine each discipline through the prism of the other – from sculptures re-presented as photographs, to photographs rendered as sculpture. Since its emergence in the early-nineteenth century photography has captivated artists working in a variety of mediums, with the sculptor in particular often adopting the photograph as a means to record their work in the environment of the studio. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s, however, when conceptual artists turned to photography that the medium came into its own. As artists during these decades began conceiving time-based, performative and site-specific projects, they increasingly incorporated photography within their practice as a way to document ephemeral works of art.1

1 A number of publications have focused on sculpture’s (and sculptors’) relationship to photography, particularly since the late 1990s. Amongst the focus of such publications have been the artists Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi and Medardo Rosso. See, for example, Geraldine Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and the catalogue, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), accompanying the exhibition of the same name.

2 Photography into Sculpture, Curator: Peter C. Bunnell, MoMA (8 April – 5 July 1970).

The progressive hybridisation of the two mediums was encapsulated in the seminal 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which at the time was considered radical for openly challenging medium specificity and ‘purity’.2 In the decades since a continuous and marked shift has taken place, from a utilitarian, documentary view towards thinking about the photograph as a site for ‘sculptural activity’.3 Lit from the Top aims to extend this dialogue on the intersections of sculpture and photography in contemporary art. It charts a number of interrelating ideas, spanning object- and image-making, materiality, authorship, and the movement between two- and three-dimensional space. Taking its title from a sculptural-photographic study by Sol LeWitt,4 the exhibition includes recent work by seven Australian and international artists who similarly explore the intrinsic qualities of both photography and sculpture, and the creative possibilities that emerge between the two. Directly inspired by LeWitt’s serial investigations, Fleur van Dodewaard’s 131 Variations (2013) is a reinterpretation of his Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974).5 Configured in a vast grid, Lit from the Top marks only the second time this work has been installed in its entirety. In 131 Variations, the conceptual rigour of LeWitt’s objective is disrupted by van Dodewaard’s free appropriation. Embracing throwaway studio materials and the arbitrary as opposed to LeWitt’s own sleek white cubes and regulated method, van Dodewaard presents new translations of the original in moving from one medium to the other. Stein Rønning, who has explored tenets of conceptual minimalism since the early 1980s, similarly rejects the ‘sheen’ of the industrially fabricated in favour of the handmade. Motivated by ‘place, proportions and material’,6 his recent photographic 3 This shift has been a focus of a number of recent exhibitions, most prominently the aforementioned The Original Copy, MoMA, in 2010. Other exhibitions include Image into Sculpture at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013, and The Camera’s Blind Spot I and The Camera’s Blind Spot II, held at the Museo D’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro and the Kunsthal Antwerpen in 2013 and 2015 respectively. Chris Riley has written on new approaches towards and changing views of photography as a site for ‘sculptural activity’ in ‘Depth of Focus,’ Frieze, 143 (NovemberDecember 2011).

4 A Sphere Lit From the Top, Four Sides, and Their Combinations (2004). 5 An investigation LeWitt developed, incidentally, in part out of his interest in the serial photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge.

series Renient (2014) depicts delicately stacked blue boxes which he carefully crafted in wood, photographed and then digitally re-worked. The arresting, landscape-like arrangements engage the material and spatial concerns of sculpture, pointing to Rønning’s ‘aim to [manifest] the photograph as pure physical presence in front of the viewer.’7 The past and the present coalesce in the black-and-white photographs of Andrew Hazewinkel and Stéphanie Lagarde. Modelled on a Donatello bust of Niccolò da Uzzano, Andrew Hazewinkel’s photographic installation, 7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies in collective resilience (2015), continues his exploration into the relations between sculpture and photography, and the connections between memory, materials and perception. Displayed as a suite of seven lifesize portraits surrounded by a series of small dark vignettes, their striking lighting, close framing and facial nuances determine how we approach their personal topographies as viewers, highlighting the discursive quality of the photographic medium. Sharing Hazewinkel’s interest in memory and materiality, Stéphanie Lagarde’s 2013 series, Stare, also takes the Renaissance as its starting point. The three imposing wallpaper prints in Lit from the Top form tactile doorways into the artist’s studio, in which we find the Pietà, an icon of Renaissance art, restaged using wooden props and heavy silicone drapery. The play of surface textures and studio lighting dramatise the intense physicality of the sculptural works, which now appear before us as flattened, two-dimensional forms. Progressing from painting to sculpture to photography, what remains in Lagarde’s final iteration is a feeling of absence and presence, weight and resistance, and an underlying tension between image and object.

Stein Ronning Renient II 2014 inkjet print 41 x 30.3 cm

6 Stein Rønning, in conversation with the authors, March 2015. 7 Quoted from the exhibition website: Stein Rønning: Hierlieu, Curator: Ida Kierulf, Kunsternes Hus (14 March – 27 April 2014) (http:// www.kunstnerneshus.no/kunst/ stein-ronning-3/).

Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng map the fertile ground of the studio as a space for sculptural investigation in their two-part installation of the photographic print, Palaces (2014), and planar tableaux, Palaces II (2015). A new work created purposely for this exhibition, Palaces II marks the ultimate collaboration for the duo, who have worked together on still-life photography since 2012. Converting commonplace and cast-off materials into playful, painterly and abstract compositions, Hutchison and Byng’s photographic image-making places an emphasis on issues of material, form, colour and gesture, conceiving the photograph as a sculptural site. Interested in the photographic capacity of sculpture, Paul Adair departs from photographing objects to pulling them ‘out of the photograph and into the gallery space itself ’.8 For his hyper-real sculptural works, Light bulb and Wet Mirror (both 2011), Adair removed the domestic items from their everyday settings and refabricated them in different materials before introducing them into the gallery. Taking into account the two mediums’ corresponding processes – such as copying and reproduction – he moves beyond thinking about an image as a strictly two-dimensional entity. Proposing the three-dimensional

8 Paul Adair, in an interview with Laura Lantieri, ‘Deceptive Realities: On Convergence and Contradiction’, Excerpt Magazine, 30 September 2013.

Andrew Hazewinkel 7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies in collective resilience 2015 installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

StĂŠphanie Lagarde Stare 2013 installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

object as image, Adair challenges systems of cognition and recognition, and the ambivalent relationship between the real and its imitation. The artists in Lit from the Top variously highlight the productive interplay between sculpture and photography as complementary creative disciplines. Regardless of subject or support their works are connected by a shared interest in the materials, techniques and actions of both mediums. Whether looking at sculpture through photography or photography via sculpture, these artists negotiate a number of overlapping conceptual and formal concerns; from the original and the replica, object-hood, materiality and notions of (real or imagined) space, to processes of reinterpretation and displacement. Often with a nod to art history, each medium is here translated, revised and renewed by the other, as these artists communicate in a distinct and ever-evolving visual language within contemporary thinking and practice.

Stein RĂ¸nning and Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

Page 13: Paul Adair and Andrew Hazewinkel Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

Paul Adair

b. 1982, Gold Coast, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Whether beach balls, bar stools or coffee cups, quotidian objects have consistently formed the subjects of Paul Adair’s work across sculpture and photography. Employing unlikely yet immediately identifiable objects re-cast as art, Adair explores the tensions and slippages that occur between truth and artifice, object and image. Initially creating sculptures explicitly to photograph them, in recent years Adair has reversed his line of enquiry, beginning with a photographic logic (of copying, reproducing and multiplying) and ending with sculptural outcomes, typically in the form of hyper-real cast replicas. In Light bulb and Wet Mirror (both 2011), Adair takes and reproduces everyday items – quite literally a light bulb and a mirror – and repositions them in the gallery. Machined from aluminium, Light bulb suspends from the ceiling while Wet Mirror unassumingly rests on the floor. At first glance, these objects seem to be precisely what they appear; until we notice the globe shines of metal, not glass, and the ‘water droplets’ sprayed across the mirror’s surface are in fact resin-formed substitutes. Employing reflective materials of aluminum and mirrored glass, Adair activates these three-dimensional objects as sites that hold an image akin to the photographic print. Yet the image itself is in a constant state of flux. It shifts according to each viewer’s physical encounter with the object, effectively obfuscating the point at which an object becomes an image, and vice versa. Not concerned with his own hand in the creative process, Adair raises questions of appropriation and authorship in interrogating how we ascribe meaning to an object, and place value on an original versus its copy. Paul Adair received a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Circle Jerks, Bus Projects, Melbourne, Australia (2013); Let’s See What Happens, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2012); and A.S.S. (Artificial Spatial Systems), Stills Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2011). He has exhibited at Photo LA in association with QCP (2007/2009) and was awarded an Australia Council Studio Residency in Los Angeles, USA (2009). He was a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2013), and winner of the Artworkers Award (2006), and the Hobday and Hington Bursary, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2005).

Light bulb 2011 machinist: Graeme Adair hand-machined aluminium overall 12 × 6 × 6 cm

Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2013 Photographer: Carl Werner Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Fleur van Dodewaard

b. 1983, Haarlem, the Netherlands Lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

‘I build a stage, create an object, take a picture, change the object, take a picture…’

Fleur van Dodewaard’s work revolves around her thinking about the relationship between an original and its translation, and ‘what happens when an original is translated into a new original’ through a different medium. Her photographs of highly-choreographed scenes are often serialised. Beginning with an existing work or image – sometimes an art historical term or cliché – she re-interprets the ‘original’, playing with materials, colour, proportions and position, before photographing the temporary arrangements. Central to this gradual generation and accumulation of images is the process of making, un-making and re-making. 131 Variations (2013) is a formal take on Sol LeWitt’s conceptual work, Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). Drawing on LeWitt’s logical, mathematical system of classification, van Dodewaard set out to replicate the project cube for cube. Along the way, however, she found some disappeared or doubled, and other, entirely new variants revealed themselves, resulting in 131 variations as opposed to LeWitt’s 122. Rejecting the formal and conceptual restraints of LeWitt’s original work, van Dodewaard’s personal re-creations are makeshift and provisional; her favouring of the arbitrary and handmade introducing a tactile quality to the photographic works. In van Dodewaard’s translation, LeWitt’s ‘original’ is now several-times removed. Despite their static nature as photographs, the subtle compositional shifts between the 131 prints arranged in a grid convey an almost staccato-like temporal element, and suggest the artist’s body moving the forms in the studio space. Fleur van Dodewaard studied Theatre at the University of Amsterdam and Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague, before going on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, (all the Netherlands) in 2010. Since then, she has exhibited widely internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Solo, Galerie van der Mieden, Brussels, Belgium (2015); 131 Variations, POST Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, FOAM, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Hauser Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland (all 2014); A Number of Angles, MACRO Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, Italy; and Sculptures Economiques, Subbacultcha HQ, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (both 2013).

From the series 131 Variations 2013 inkjet prints 30 × 25 cm each

Andrew Hazewinkel

b. 1965, Melbourne, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Andrew Hazewinkel’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, video, photography and installation. Drawing inspiration from archaeology, geology, and art history, Hazewinkel’s work is concerned with correspondences between photographic and sculptural practices, memory, materials and the body. He employs a variety of technologies and materials – chosen for their physical properties as well as their culturally-generated qualities – in pursuing his overarching interest in the capacity of materials to act as conduits for memory. Challenging conventional notions of photography as a consummate mnemonic device, he instead places an emphasis on the manner in which we approach and understand objects, the very stuff of which they are made, and past histories. For Lit from the Top, Hazewinkel presents a new installation of photographs, titled 7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies in collective resilience (2015). The works are the outcome of a multi-layered compositional and sculptural experiment in which Hazewinkel re-cast a nineteenth-century reproduction of the famous Donatello bust of Niccolò da Uzzano into a series of fractured multiples. In one respect, the antiquity-inspired Renaissance sculpture is a fine example of pre-photographic portraiture; Niccolò’s appearance is convincingly truthful, with the rough textures of his skin and hollow cheeks reinforcing the portrait’s immediacy. In Hazewinkel’s versions the sensation of reality begins to give way; each bust bears a physical imprint indicating the seams of the silicone mould from which it was cast. This consequence of a deliberately imprecise casting technique imparts a powerful sense of physical involvement and plasticity, and simultaneously loads the busts with suggestions of violence, rupture and uncertainty. Through this act of defacement, the portrait bust – itself a long-lived sculptural trope – takes on a new life. Previously displayed as a suite of 12 sculptures, here, transformed by the camera’s gaze, Niccolò looks out at the viewer in a dramatic portrayal of resilience. Andrew Hazewinkel has exhibited widely in Australia. Recently, his work has been included in Nature/Revelation, Ian Potter Museum of Art (2015); New 14, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; The Piranesi Effect, Ian Potter Museum of Art; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (all Melbourne, Australia, 2014). Hazewinkel was recently selected as one of two annual Australian participants at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, USA, 2015.

From the series 7 portraits [after Niccolo]: studies in collective anxiety 2015 fibre based gelatin silver print 39.5 Ă&#x2014; 31 cm

Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng

b. 1986, Toowoomba, Australia b. 1987, Sydney, Australia Both live and work in Melbourne, Australia

Working entirely in the studio, Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng produce enigmatic, contemporary still-life photographs using a range of industrial materials and found objects. Removed from their original context and reassembled through a series of spontaneous yet controlled gestures, Hutchison and Byng’s playful, performative constructions bring to the fore concerns of space, form, framing, light and material juxtaposition. Within their delicately poised compositions, ‘geometric volumes are carefully placed to point a finger out of the land of sculpture and back towards painting, all the while directing our gaze through the medium of photography.’ 1 Hutchison and Byng’s recent works, Palaces (2014) and Palaces II (2015), continue to develop their visual lexicon. In Palaces, the artists approach the photographic still life in abstract, fluid and painterly terms. Their arrangements of torn, creased and cut-out papers are transformed by the camera, appearing as a collaged landscape of surfaces and textures. As the artists’ focus shifts from the object per se to their (choreographed) encounter with it, the image embodies a sense of movement, time and space, contesting the traditionallystatic composition of the still life and two-dimensional photograph. This departure from the ‘photograph of thing’ to the ‘photograph as thing’, repositions the medium as an object in and of itself. This is taken a step further in Palaces II, Hutchison and Byng’s latest and final collaborative venture created especially for this exhibition. Facemounted to architectural glass and installed as a planar tableaux, Palaces II presents a spatial reanimation of its two-dimensional predecessor. The 90-degree shift from image on the wall to object on the floor underscores the artists’ procession, which started with their compositional and sculptural ‘acts’ in the studio, followed by photographic re-presentation, and finally, a return to three-dimensional form. Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng have worked collaboratively since 2012. In 2011, Hutchison received a Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) from RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, and in 2013 Byng completed an Honours year at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, following a Bachelor of Fine Art (Photography) at the National Art School, Sydney, Australia, in 2010. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Adult Contemporary, Edmund Pearce, Melbourne, Australia (2014); Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (Book Launch, 2014); Product Placement, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; and their sold-out publication, Moved Objects, Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Australia (both 2013).

1 Matthew Hassell, ‘Moved Objects by Arini Byng and Georgia Hutchison’, NY Arts Magazine, 3 December 2013; see http://www. nyartsmagazine.com/?p=14416, accessed 1 March 2015.

Palaces 2014 archival inkjet print 120 × 80 cm

Stéphanie Lagarde

b. 1982, Toulouse, France Lives and works in Paris, France

‘I like to be able to escape from a medium, from a meaning, from a definition. Photography allows me to escape from the materiality of sculpture.’ Working across a variety of mediums, central to Stéphanie Lagarde’s practice is her ongoing engagement with the notion of displacement – of signs, images, words and languages – from their original contexts. Her processes of transformation and manipulation, such as cutting and pasting, assembling and collaging, are carried out across film, photography, performance and installation. A paradoxical vein runs through Lagarde’s work, as she adopts specific vocabularies while simultaneously doing away with their associated rules. Stare (from Latin, meaning ‘to stand’) is the title of Stéphanie Lagarde’s 2013 series of monumental black-and-white photographs – three of which are included in this exhibition. Showing large folds of heavy, cast-silicone sheets precariously draped on makeshift wooden structures, the photographs result from her close reading of the iconography of the Pietà in Renaissance painting. Lagarde’s fundamental concern was not with the paintings’ religious subject, but with sculptural properties of weight, gravity and balance, and their active resistance to collapse (effondrement). The large-scale photographs, presented here as wallpaper, produce an effect of trompe l’oeil – an illusionary three-dimensional space that momentarily suspends certainty over the work’s material and physical status. Lagarde’s Pietàs have undergone a series of displacements; from painting to sculpture, sculpture to photography. Dematerialised into a series of disembodied ‘impressions’, they have shaken off symbolic and historical associations. Stéphanie Lagarde is a graduate of the Art-Space section of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France (2008). She has exhibited in a number of exhibitions in France and internationally, including: La Légende des Origines, Galerie Maubert; Rancho Mirage, Galerie Perception Park (both Paris, France, 2014); AAA CC DD EE G H IIII J KK LLL M NN OOOO RRRR U, Lucerne, Switzerland; Mais je ne sais quel oeil par accidents nouveaux, Cargo Culte II, Jardin d’agronomie tropicale du bois de Vincennes, Paris, France; and Meltem, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (all 2013). Lagarde is currently a resident artist at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Stare 2013 1 from a series of 6 photographs latex ink print on paper 230 × 164.3 cm

Stein Rønning

b. 1953, Askim, Norway Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

For the past three decades Stein Rønning’s sculptural and photographic works have drawn certain vocabularies from Minimalism and the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s. Consisting of modular and monochrome geometric constructions, rather than using industrially-produced materials and processes, Rønning’s ongoing preoccupation lies with the handmade. In 1984 Rønning moved away from making photographs to concentrate on sculpture, only to return to photography some twenty years later, where he continued to employ the same basic morphologies. In both his photographs and handcrafted wooden forms, Rønning is concerned with issues of scale and relation, not only between his subjects, but also between the body and hand of the artist and those of our own as viewers. Renient (2014) is a recent series of photographs by Rønning depicting his carefully-considered arrangements of cubic forms. Their formal simplicity belies the level of labour and acute precision required in their making. The works are developed from a lengthy process which begins with Rønning making a paper study of torn, rectangular shapes, before handcrafting them in wood to a specific scale. Various arrangements are studied and photographed, then digitally reworked before being printed, the cubes’ three-dimensionality compressed into a two-dimensional space. The intricacy and intimacy of these cubes’ making, their configuration on a surface, placement and displacement, evokes the reciprocity between the eye and hand, sight and tactility. This reciprocity between the haptic and the optic is important for Rønning, who considers himself ‘more of a sculptor than a photographer, and definitely so in the photographic work’. In looking at Rønning’s photographs, one feels their way along and around the landscape of forms, alert to texture and variable surfaces, rhythms and movements. Stein Rønning has exhibited widely in Norway, and in Europe. His recent solo exhibitions include: esplaceant (unfinished business), Galleri Riis, Oslo; Hierlieu, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both Norway, 2014); and Méange, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Kristiansand, Norway (2013). His work has also been presented in a number of group exhibitions, most recently: Turtle, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris, France, and Winterstudio/Hansplassen, Kunstmuseet KUBE, Ålesund, Norway (both 2015); Post 6790, Innkjøp - del 1, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger, Norway; Queen´s gambit, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway (both 2014); Contract, Gallery D.O.R., The Armory Show, New York, USA; and Carnegie Art Award, Oslo, Norway; Stockholm, Sweden; Helsinki, Finland; and Copenhagen, Denmark (all 2012).

Renient I 2014 inkjet print 42.5 Ă&#x2014; 42 cm

List of works

Paul Adair Light bulb 2011 machinist: Graeme Adair hand-machined aluminium overall 12 × 6 × 6 cm Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2013 Wet Mirror 2011 mirror, polyurethane resin 80 × 80 × 0.3 cm Fleur van Dodewaard 131 Variations 2013 inkjet prints 30 × 25 cm each edition of 5 + 2AP Andrew Hazewinkel 7 portraits [after Niccolo]: studies in collective resilience 2015 7 fibre based gelatin silver prints 39.5 × 31 cm each and 7 selenium toned fibre based gelatin silver prints 25 × 19.5 cm each overall dimensions variable edition of 3 Technical collaborator: Ben Stone Herbert Prints: Sandy Barnard, Sandyprints Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng Palaces 2014 archival inkjet print 120 × 80 cm edition of 5 Palaces II 2015 glass, archival inkjet print 35 × 100 × 66.6 cm Stéphanie Lagarde Stare 2013 3 from a series of 6 photographs latex ink prints on paper 230 × 164.3 cm each

Acknowledgements

Stein Rønning Renient I 2014 inkjet print 42.5 × 42 cm edition of 5 Renient II 2014 inkjet print 41 × 30.3 cm edition of 5 Renient III 2014 inkjet print 41 × 30.4 cm edition of 5 Renient IV 2014 inkjet print 41 × 33 cm edition of 5 All images courtesy of the artists unless otherwise stated.

The development of Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography has been greatly assisted by the CCP staff. We especially wish to thank Karra Rees, Missy Saleeba, Naomi Cass and Pippa Milne, whose constant hard work and infallible support have been invaluable. Our sincerest gratitude goes to Joseph Johnson, for his exceptional skill and expertise in designing this publication. For kindly making work available to the exhibition, we thank The University of Queensland Art Museum, and in particular their staff, Dr Campbell Gray, Kath Kerswell and Matt Malone. We also gratefully acknowledge the support, assistance and technical know-how of Marc Payet and Ross McLean of Ilford/C.R. Kennedy, Cassie and the team at Neo Frames, Sandy Barnard at Sandyprints, and Nicolas Brassuer and Sylvie Besnard at PICTO, Paris. Thanks are extended to all those who so generously supported the artists and the exhibition: the City of Yarra, NAVA through The Australian Artists’ Grant, the French Government through Consulat Général de France, the Mondriaan Fund, and the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway. For their support of this publication, we thank the Gordon Darling Foundation. Friends and colleagues have variously helped in the realisation of this exhibition, and we personally thank: Alanna Phillips, Nicola Camporeale, Amy Marjoram and Akira Akira. Finally, we would like to extend our warmest thanks to the artists involved, for their unwavering commitment to this project, encouragement and enthusiasm.

Andrew Hazewinkel 7 portraits [after NiccolĂ˛]: studies in collective resilience 2015 (detail) installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

Fleur van Dodewaard, Paul Adair, StĂŠphanie Lagarde, Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng and Stein RĂ¸nning Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography installation view, Centre for Contemporary Photography Photo: J Forsyth

IMPRINT

EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS

First published on the occasion of the exhibition Lit from the Top: Sculpture Through Photography Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne 24 April – 28 June 2015 Curators Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall CCP Managing Curator Karra Rees CCP Designer Joseph Johnson ISBN 978-0-9875976-4-9

Thank you to the generous supporters of this exhibition: The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.

Exhibited and published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from conversations with the artists.

Publication Sponsor

Centre for Contemporary Photography 404 George Street Fitzroy VIC 3065, Australia +613 9417 1549 www.ccp.org.au

Centre for Contemporary Photography is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body. Centre for Contemporary Photography is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, state and territory governments. CCP is a member of CAOs Contemporary Arts Organisations of Australia.