Holding in the hand

Holding in the hand

Scott Duncan Marta Oktaba Rachel Schenberg Michael Staniak Evan Whittington

To hold and be held

Notes to open the exhibition

Welcome everyone to the Deakin University Art Gallery and to the exhibition Holding in the hand. My name is James Lynch and I am the curator with the Deakin University Art Collection and Galleries team and I would like to formally begin this afternoon’s proceedings by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we are gathered today. We pay our respects to their Elders and Ancestors for allowing us to have our gathering on their land and acknowledge their continuing connection to this beautiful Country. I thank them for their care and custodianship over many thousands of years and I extend this respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today. Knowledge, education, creativity and culture have ancient and rich heritage on this continent, and we aim to honour and reflect this – in the ways we continue to teach and learn.

This afternoon I welcome you to celebrate this exhibition, a wonderful project featuring five emerging artists Scott Duncan, Marta Oktaba, Rachel Schenberg, Michael Staniak and Evan Whittington. Many of these artists are right at the beginnings of their creative careers so it’s wonderful to be able to encourage and support them at the Deakin University Art Gallery. And in relation to this, I acknowledge we are joined in our audience today by Professor Matthew Delbridge, Head of the School of Communications and Creative Arts; Michael Mangos, Special Advisor to the Vice Chancellor and Head of External and Government Relations; as well as, Leanne Willis, Senior Manager Art Collection and Galleries – thank you all for joining us on this occasion.

I also acknowledge artists Marta Oktaba, Michael Staniak and Evan Whittington and their families for joining us with a special mention to Rachel Schenberg and Scott Duncan who were not able to join us from Sydney. Thank you to the Schenberg family for representing and also I would like to thank Elisa Trufanoski and Aaron Fell Facasso, directors of Egg and Dart gallery who represent Scott Duncan and who made a special trip all the way from Wollongong to see this exhibition on behalf of their artist.

I am conscious not to talk for too long but wanted to provide some background information to the project and provide a few different points of entry into my thinking around the exhibition.

Holding in the hand is an auspicious exhibition in a few ways… in March 2020 we were just ten or so days out from installing this exhibition and unfortunately, we went into our first our first lockdown. As the COVID 19 pandemic began, the project was forced into a semi-permanent hiatus and holding pattern. And now in August 2022 over two years later, this exhibition is actually the final in a series of projects that have been postponed and rescheduled in different ways.

So, I am very grateful that we have finally seen this project to fruition, and I especially thank the artists for their patience and good will in working with me through the various challenges of rescheduling, and for loaning your wonderful artworks for this exhibition.

One of the original impetuses for this exhibition was to curate a project which featured two of our Deakin creative arts alumni and to place their practices in a context with their peers. And secondly, to present a discursive platform for a wider group of emerging artists who are really deserving our attentions and audience here at Deakin.

As the pandemic began and we learned about the virus, we all became especially conscious of the dangers of surface transmission and this development further pushed the ideas around this exhibition off our programming agenda. And it’s certainly taken quite a bit of time to pass before it was safe again to discuss ideas around the tactile. So the pandemic shaped our view of the project in a number of ways. And coming out of the various difficult periods of lockdown here in Victoria when direct touch and proximity to others has been avoided; sensations of tactility now have an added extra significance.

The first seeds of this exhibition were sewn back in 2019. After first seeing Scott Duncan’s ceramics on Instagram, I visited his studio behind the Glebe library that autumn. As we talked, it was a fortuitous coincidence that he mentioned that he was born in Geelong, grew up in Portland in regional Victoria and attended the newly formed Warrnambool campus of Deakin University where he studied ceramics. Before spending the greater bit of two decades surfing and doing odd jobs and retraining as a chef. His constant use of his hands as labour in various kitchens led in a circle back to his ceramics practice again and over a short few years, he has established himself a significant following.

Duncan has an experimental approach to ceramics and uses the legacies of the tradition to create materially complex collages with clay. The iconic stamped vessels of Bitossi and other 60s and 70s inspired molded ceramics are referenced and used as base sculptural forms. These are then collaged and built upon with exacting clay renditions of printed cardboard fruit and vegetable boxes inspired from his work life as a chef. In this process Duncan animates classical earthenware vessels into bewildering and charming comical characters.

In his more recent works, vase forms inspired from antiquity are adorned with clay versions of cut-out, cardboard face masks, like they are people. Recycled Prawns is collaged with a clay, koala shaped, cardboard, Cubist face and Sun sets on the congress has an iconic 90s smiley face. Through Duncan’s skillful manipulation of craft and multiple references to Pop culture, art history, modernity, classicism and the contemporary context, he creates playful objects full of wonder and appeal.

When I first envisaged a theme for the exhibition, Duncan’s works were at the fore, and I wanted to explore the ways a new generation of emerging artists consider the hand and the haptic as symbolic sites of interface and communication. And how they imbue the surfaces of objects so they are loaded with additional meanings, code and data, becoming ‘hyper’ surfaces.

Thinking of a context for Duncan’s works I was immediately reminded of Marta Oktaba’s drawings from her honours exhibition at Deakin at the end of 2018. This was an ambitious project where Oktaba used drone footage to capture herself drawing her iconic female figures and facial profiles onto various surfaces and across the industrial sites and landscapes around outer Melbourne. Coming from a street art background and beginnings, Oktaba’s designs offered an alternate perspective to this highly masculine culture.

Oktaba has a highly refined, stylistic and expansive approach to drawing. Her studies usually consist of simplified outlines and profiles of figures going about everyday activities and are in their own ways representations of deeper feelings and emotions. Interestingly, most of her drawings are produced with the purpose of becoming Instagram posts and if you follow her social media you would have little idea her images first begin as pencil studies, outlined and finished with black ink pen on paper.

In this exhibition Oktaba has produced a kind of coded alphabet with figures going about their daily activities and a series of drawings on found papers. Including pages from her fathers’ schoolbooks from back in Poland and a simple torn opened envelope. Oktaba uses these fragile textures as backdrops to her studies of everyday life where human needs, holding things, eating and drinking are given aesthetic treatment.

Around the same time as getting to understand Marta Oktaba’s work, there were a number of really exciting projects by fellow emerging artists which resonated with context. I was struck seeing Evan Whittington’s honours presentation at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2019 and his wonderful hand dancing videos which interpreted the very specific language of electronic music. Displayed without an audio track the movements and choreography of the dancers’ hands translates the deep sonic beats, pulses and rhythms in a kind of embodied language, entirely of their own making.

Popular culture has many examples of how our hands can have seemingly a life of their own. In the famous 80s psychological horror movie ‘The Hand’ Michael Caine plays a comic book maker who discovers that the carnage wreaked against all those who have wronged him, is in fact, the work of his own severed hand.i Or whether simply sending a text whilst also talking or constantly mindlessly scrolling whilst working at the computer – the hand is an ongoing symbol of human agency and ownership but is also part of ourselves that can seemingly escapes us.

Rachel Schenberg’s practice was key in developing the ideas for this exhibition. In 2019 she presented her first solo exhibition ‘hold said’ at Haydens gallery Melbourne. And from that exhibition she has loaned the incredible work ‘a silver’s worth of orange; a pepper’s worth of; (gold) ’.

Schenberg’s research interests looks at the hand as a site-specific location for making meaning. The artist uses copper and micro sized OLED displays taken from mobile devices to present a rumination on holding, sensing and transforming. Schenberg explores the potential for artworks to be portable and travel with people as extensions of them but also how the world is seemingly within us or virtually in the grasp of our hands.

Observation Station considers the weather and imagines her own finger as a weathervane. In this work she modulates the changing temperature and climate through the senses of her index finger.

Michael Staniak’s complex paintings occupy a liminal zone hovering somewhere between our digital, virtual and real worlds. He is represented by three painting artworks in this exhibition from differing time periods and approaches. They comprise of hand-made carefully modulated and textured surfaces that are then layered and printed with code and information, or are painted with holographicstyle gradients. In PNG 102 for example, Staniak has used the plastic film used by transport companies to pack and wrap artworks for international travel to create a finely detailed surface texture. Like rippled water marks that has in turn, been finely printed with data and coding using a UV printing process.

In his most recent paintings such as HDF_330 Staniak gives the surface texture of the painting primal markings. He uses the familiar upward, downward and left to right swipes markings so the work resembles the smudged and swiped surface of a mobile device in sleep mode.

Rather than focusing on our alienation in the digital world I wanted to emphasize how working with our hands has always been a central human activity. Through the wonderful work of these five emerging artists, we can glimpse the ways we use our hands as interface to both connect and disconnect – as the world continually changes – helping us to locate and operate with the tensions and aggravations that inhabit us.ii

Before I finish, just a quick thank you again to the artists and their families for joining us tonight.

17 August 2022

James Lynch Curator, Art Collection and Galleries

i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hand_(1981_film) [Accessed 8 August 2022]

ii Darian Leader, Hands: what we do with them and why?, Penguin, United Kingdom, 2017. p.119

Scott Duncan

The Sun sets on the Congress 2022

Michael Staniak HDF_330 2017

Marta Oktaba Stuck on the internet 2020 pages 20-21: Marta Oktaba Untitled 2020 pages 22-23 Marta Oktaba Find the Sun and the Moon 2020 (detail)

Michael Staniak PNG_102 2015 pages 26-27: Evan Whittington Purple Hands (Radio Slave on Rinse FM) 2019

Scott Duncan

Scott Duncan Recycled Prawns 2021

Rachel Schenberg Observation Station

Scott Duncan

Michael Staniak

BMP_031 2015 pages 38-39: Rachel Schenberg a silver’s worth of orange a pepper’s worth of (gold) 2019 photo by Christo Crocker

List of works

Artworks are listed as they appeared in the exhibition. All images are copyright and reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photography by Ross Coulter unless otherwise stated.

Michael Staniak

HDF_330 2017 casting compound, acrylic on board and steel frame courtesy of the artist and Station Gallery, Australia

Marta Oktaba

Untitled 2020 Untitled 2020 Dance with me 2017 Untitled 2020 Stuck on the internet 2020 all works are ink on found paper courtesy of the artist

Marta Oktaba Find the Sun and the Moon 2020 ink on found paper and adhesive courtesy of the artist

Scott Duncan

The Sun sets on the Congress 2022 earthenware, under glaze and glazes courtesy of the artist and Egg and Dart Gallery, Sydney

Michael Staniak

PNG_102 2015 casting compound, digital UV print, acrylic on board and steel frame courtesy of the artist and Station Gallery, Australia

Evan Whittington

Purple Hands (Radio Slave on Rinse FM) 2019 two channel digital video without sound2 mins (looped) courtesy of the artist

Scott Duncan Recycled Prawns 2021 earthenware, under glaze and glazes courtesy of the artist and Egg and Dart Gallery, Sydney

Scott Duncan David 2020 earthenware, under glaze and glazes courtesy of the artist and Egg and Dart Gallery, Sydney

Rachel Schenberg Observation Station 2022 copper frame, bronze ring, miniature OLED display, HD video (Friday 12pm at Observatory Hill NSW, finger-to-thewind weathervane, westerly winds/due east, the sky opens up to a day) courtesy of the artist

Scott Duncan Saturn 2021 earthenware, under glaze and glazes courtesy of the artist and Egg and Dart Gallery, Sydney

Michael Staniak BMP_031 2015 casting compound, digital UV print, acrylic on board and steel frame courtesy of the artist and Station Gallery, Australia

Rachel Schenberg a silver’s worth of orange a pepper’s worth of (gold) 2019 3 copper frames, 3 miniature OLED displays, 3 HD videos courtesy of the artist

Biographies

Scott Duncan

Scott Duncan is an artist, living and working on Gadigal lands, Sydney.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Empty Vessels, Egg & Dart Gallery, Thirroul, New South Wales (2020); Mangoes Bananas, Welling Street Projects, Chippendale, New South Wales (2019) and Mind Trash, Space Junk , Manly, New South Wales (2006). Selected group exhibitions include: Kil.n.it Australian Ceramics Triennale, Apmere Mparntwe, Alice Springs, Northern Territory (2022); Now Showing, Egg & Dart, Wollongong, New South Wales (2021); Nick, Scott & Jock , Egg & Dart Gallery, Thirroul, New South Wales (2020); 1919 Salon, Galerie PomPom, Chippendale, New South Wales (2019); Meditation On A Bone: Albert Tucker, Beyond the Modern, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Victoria (2018); Familiar Intervention, Kudos Gallery, Paddington, New South Wales (2018) and Slice of Life, CRAFT, Melbourne (2017). Scott Duncan is represented by Egg & Dart Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales.

egganddart.com.au

Marta Oktaba

Marta Oktaba is an artist, illustrator and designer, living and working in Naarm, Melbourne.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Find Me Where The Feelings Go, Off the Kerb Gallery, Melbourne (2017). Selected group exhibitions include: Encounter, Frankston City Centre, Melbourne (2021); Moss Deck Art Show, Magnet Galleries, Melbourne (2020); Prosthetic Reality, Space Gallery, Pasadena, California (2019); Matter Arts 1, Neon Parlour Gallery & Studios, Melbourne (2018) and Morning Light, In.cub8er Gallery, Melbourne (2017).

almostiris.com

Biographies

Rachel Schenberg

Rachel Schenberg is an artist and writer, living and working on Gadigal lands, Sydney. Schenberg is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of New South Wales.

Selected solo exhibitions include: like two pears, with Simon Bérard, KNULP, Sydney (2022); May-old hold, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne (2019) and hold said, HAYDENS, Brunswick, Melbourne (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Say it Again, curated by Alex Gawronski, new jörg, Vienna (2022); Cooking with John, curated by Amalia Lindo + Jacqueline Stojanović, HAYDENS, Melbourne (2021); A Word Project #1: curated by John Nixon, Reading Room, Melbourne (2019); Scratch Night, organised by Bobby Sayers, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2018); What the work tells about the tools, Sommerakademie, Salzburg (2017) and Feeling without touching, curated by Jacqueline Stojanovic, Bouverie Studios and Artmeet ARI, Melbourne (2015).

rachelschenberg.com

Michael Staniak

Michael Staniak is an artist, living and working on Wathaurong Country, Surf Coast, Victoria.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Natural Order, The Unit London, Mayfair (2020); Michael Staniak , Arts and Cultural Centre of Newfoundland, Newfoundland (2019); Michael Staniak , Station Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Michael Staniak , Galerie Clemens Gunzer, Kitzbuhel, Austria (2019); From Memory, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2017) and IMG_ , Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, (2015). Selected group exhibitions include: Flat Earth Society, Cement Fondu, Sydney (2019); Vis-A-Vis, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong (2018); Homeostase, Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo (2017) Antiques Roadshow, curated by Mark Feary, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2016) and The Future of Memory, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015). Michael Staniak is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne.

michaelstaniak.com

Evan Whittington

Evan Whittington is an artist, living and working in Naarm, Melbourne.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Beat, Back Back, Beat Back , Five Walls Projects, Melbourne (2022); Move Your Body and Dance to This!, Alternating Current Art Space, Melbourne (2022); Loop, Five Walls Projects, Melbourne (2021) and The Emission of a Succession of Repetitive Beats, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Victorian College of the Arts Graduate Exhibition, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2019); Union House Recent Acquisitions, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2019); Proud, Victorian College of the Arts Student Gallery, University of Melbourne (2018); We Are Not Ourselves, BSA Project Space, Mullumbimby, New South Wales (2016); Print Council of Australia Bookscapes 2, Southern Cross University Learning Center, Lismore, New South Wales (2016); and Demanding Narratives, Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales (2014). evan-whittington.com

Holding in the hand

Scott Duncan Marta Oktaba Rachel Schenberg Michael Staniak Evan Whittington

Deakin University Art Gallery 19 July to 26 August 2022

Exhibition Curator: James Lynch

All works are © copyright and courtesy of the artists

Photography is by Ross Coulter unless otherwise stated.

Image measurements are height x width x depth.

Published by Deakin University 978-0-6486747-6-4 digital publication only Catalogue design: Jasmin Tulk

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Deakin University acknowledges the Wadawurrung and the Wurrunderji people of the Kulin nation and the Gunditjmara people, who are the traditional custodians of the lands on which our campuses are based. We pay our respects to them for their care of the land.

cover image: Marta Oktaba Stuck on the internet 2020 ink on found paper image © copyright and courtesy of Marta Oktaba