ERASED (contemporary Australian drawing)

Erased contemporary Australian drawing

Vernon Ah Kee Christian Capurro Simryn Gill Jonathan Jones Tom Nicholson Raquel Ormella

Erased

An Asialink and Art Gallery of New South Wales touring exhibition

Contents

Foreword Edmund Capon, director, Art Gallery of New South Wales

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You pass through an ever present past‌

by Natasha Bullock

8

Vernon Ah Kee

by Anthony Gardner

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Christian Capurro

by Justin Paton

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Simryn Gill

by Gail Jones

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Jonathan Jones

by Jacqueline Millner

28

Tom Nicholson

by Reuben Keehan

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Raquel Ormella

by Anthony Gardner

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List of works

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Artist biographies

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Acknowledgements

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Tom Nicholson Flag time: Marat at his last breath 2005–06 photographs, installation view, Ocular Lab, Melbourne, Australia Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia *artwork not touring

Foreword

In her essay for this catalogue the curator, Natasha Bullock, introduces the notion of hidden, layered meaning, of instinct and sensibility past and present that may be inscribed and withheld within the work of art, and most especially drawings.

The concept of the palimpsest is particularly apt, for drawings do indeed conceal a latent sensibility that new encounters and fresh experiences may reveal. The drawing, whether in the form of visual note-taking or experiment or finite work achieves, through the visible and perceived marks and traces of pen, pencil and graphite, an intimacy of touch that somehow defies the passage of time.

Drawings retain their immediacy and thus too their subtle revelations of process; those ‘hidden’ moments which may betray the sensibilities, emotions, experiences that shaped the artist’s instincts are held in some mysterious form in those marks on the paper.

There is in the pantheon of Chinese ceramics a rare and refined type of porcelain known as an-hua, made principally in the Ming (1368-1644) and early Qing dynasties (late 17th-early 18th centuries). These wares are distinguished by their decoration which was finely incised into the still wet body of delicate porcelain, or less frequently rendered in low relief, and which became more or less obscured under the subsequently applied clear glaze. Thus their ‘secret’ designs could only be visible when seen against the light. Of a distant continent and another era this esoteric type of Chinese porcelain with its subtle insights and hidden patterns is, it seems to me, the perfect synonym for works in this exhibition.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is delighted to be working with Asialink in bringing this exhibition of contemporary Australian art to tour in Asia. We have much in common; sharing a resolute belief in art as a rich and edifying communicator across geographic and cultural borders and an equally strong belief in the need for our relations with our Asian neighbours to be constantly nourished and refreshed. Asialink has been in the vanguard of building these cultural bridges between Australia and Asia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales has a similarly committed program to build its Asian art collections and to bring to our shores great exhibitions of the arts of Asia. In that quest the Gallery is wonderfully supported by the VisAsia Council whose support ensures our continuing Asian exhibition, education, lecture and publication programs; and now VisAsia is lending its support to this exhibition of Australian art in Asia. We are grateful to both Asialink and to the VisAsia Council of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the vital roles they play in fostering and enhancing relations between Australia and Asia.

I would like to express my thanks to Alison Carroll, director, and Sarah Bond, visual arts manager of Asialink for suggesting this fruitful partnership; and the Gallery’s curator of contemporary art, Natasha Bullock, for conceiving and realising the exhibition. Finally I would like to express my thanks to the staff of both organisations for their co-operation in bringing this exhibition and its Asian tour to fulfilment.

Edmund Capon, director, Art Gallery New South Wales

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You pass through an ever present past…

Lou Reed from the album Magic and loss (1992)

Lou Reed’s lyrics are an unlikely beginning for an essay considering the abstract aspects of erasure, but they reveal an idea that resonates with many of the artworks in the exhibition Erased: they function as a kind of palimpsest. A palimpsest is traditionally understood as a manuscript upon which a text has been incompletely or wholly erased to make space for another text. However, the word has developed a number of meanings across different fields. In historical/archaeological terms, it can refer to prehistoric cave drawings where animals or objects appear to be drawn over one another. The word is also used in literature to describe layers of meaning. More broadly, it can refer to any object or place that reflects its history – the traces of buildings in ruins are a prime example – the past physically embodied in the present. In each definition, a palimpsest is a densely articulated practice of marking, erasing and rewriting, layering moments in time, one over the other, producing a complicated texture of spatiality and temporality – an ever present past.

As an idea, the palimpsest has been applied broadly in contemporary art discourse since around the middle of the current decade.1 American art historian Rosalind Krauss acknowledges the widespread use of the term with contemporary drawing.2 As a mode of expression, the palimpsest includes both erasure and layering, and it is in the overlapping space of these states or actions that a further paradigm is created, which Krauss has defined as ‘the emblematic form of the temporal’, in which the past and present coexist.3 Interpreted in this way, one can posit that, of the works in this exhibition, Christian Capurro’s function more literally as a palimpsest while Tom Nicholson’s and Raquel Ormella’s employ it as a mode of expression, referencing the past by way of visual fragments, and in the work of Vernon Ah Kee, Simryn Gill and Jonathan Jones, erasure and layering suggest other productive dimensions of meaning and transformation.

The methodology of Christian Capurro can be likened to the earliest forms of graphic art: new content is created by the removal of past detail. In Compress (pit of doublivores) 2006–07, Capurro uses layering, rubbing, ink and correction fluid to erase, transpose and correct images from the pages of lifestyle, fashion, sport and pornographic magazines. The seductive remains are a physical trace or residue, which, coupled with the works seeming invisibility on the gallery wall, registers a space of contradiction about the hyper-visibility of imagery in contemporary culture. Indeed, there is a stilling sense of interiority to these works that belies their found origins. In making the work there is also a direct relationship between the artist’s bodily action and the remainders left on the delicate paper, which could be described as a fusion between representation and gestural abstraction, but as stoic denial rather than heroic creation. Although the sheets comprising the Compress works began as instantly readable or ‘positive’ images their final incarnation is more abstracted. To decipher the ‘negative’ remains encourages a bodily experience from the viewer; a sleight of the eye to read the white against white, the skin on/of paper. In this way Capurro’s palimpsests embody both absence and presence: ghosts of human activity appear on the pages yet they resist total comprehension.

In palimpsests, this layering of one mark over another not only renders time abstract but also dissipates narrative intent into abstraction or a loss of contingency. Layering creates an internal illusionary structure that changes as time passes; hence deciphering the past can only ever be partially successful.

For Tom Nicholson, the face of the dead revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat – derived from Jacques-Louis David’s original 1793 painting The death of Marat – is reprised to symbolise a kind of contemporaneous death: a loss of liberties wrought upon Australian life. Nicholson employs Marat’s face 8

evolving through time and circumstance; layering the image of the dead man’s features with charcoal, photographing the image at different points, reworking and finally transposing the drawing into a photograph printed on fabric and made into flags, which were installed on the Victorian Trades Hall Council building in Melbourne, Australia. Like David’s painting of Marat, displayed outside the Louvre, Paris for the people of the revolution, Nicholson’s flags, on top of the Trades Hall building, behave in one sense as an emblematic form of propaganda.

Flags for a trades hall council 2005–06 has been exhibited in a number of contexts with different elements (drawing, video, photography), each permutation adding another layer of meaning and distancing the image further from its origin. In its making and material manifestation of flags blowing in the wind, the face of Nicholson’s flags remains incomplete: a visual fragment illustrating a beautiful, haunting abstraction of temporality and corporality – as the flags ripple in the wind, the face transforms into many forms.4 Even though tangential in its reading of one text through another, the work could be described in allegorical terms. In 1980, American art historian Craig Owens theorised such an impulse, and wrote: ‘In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be; the paradigm for the allegorical work is thus the palimpsest’.5 Folding the past into the present through a process of repetition and distillation, Nicholson’s work expresses the allegorical form of the palimpsest – to interpret means reading through the accumulating layers.

Raquel Ormella’s drawing installation reconfigures the past with a similar sense of social concern.

Comprising a series of whiteboards, 130 Davey Street 2005–09 is an ongoing project for the artist. The drawings on the boards are from photographs Ormella took when she frequented the Wilderness Society Campaign offices in Hobart, Tasmania – one of the oldest environmental organisations in Australia. The boards mirror the domestic realities the artist witnessed; among the filing cabinets and office detritus were photographs of the wilderness, including spiralling majestic gum trees and pristine landscapes. To this clustered collection of high-key images Ormella inserts a drawing of Rock Island Bend on the Franklin River by the late Australian wilderness photographer Peter Dombrovskis, regarded as a key element in the success of the Wilderness Society’s campaign to protect the river in the 1980s. By repositioning Dombrovskis’ pictures in the present moment, among the paraphernalia of office clutter, Ormella’s 130 Davey Street asks if these original works have lost their potency as images that can motivate change and preserve ideals? In a sense Ormella’s works operate as palimpsests, the methodology of drawing, erasing and layering literally played out in the drawing on the boards. This translates into the conceptual dimensions of the work too, where the tracing of past work is transformed into propositions about time and the nature of action; text on whiteboards can be wiped away and erased with the brush of a hand, much like the untouched environments the Wilderness Society fights to protect. Whiteboards are surfaces where ideas are worked out; therefore they represent knowledge, change and the desire to achieve goals.

Inserting this bureaucratic instrument into the equation, Ormella thoughtfully considers the future histories of environmental activism and wilderness photography.

The past weighs heavily on Vernon Ah Kee’s practice. From an Indigenous perspective, he elucidates and highlights this past and the history of Indigenous people, giving present voice to that which was silent. Along with text-based pieces and videos, Ah Kee draws portraits of his family and himself that are uncompromising statements about identity. His large and highly detailed drawings stare boldly at the viewer, asserting an air of strength and conviction. The series unwritten 2008 develops an idea 9

explored by the artist in an earlier work, Self portrait as a non person 2006. In that work, Ah Kee suggests the invisibility of Indigenous identity in society; his features, barely visible, disappear into the greywhite ground of the canvas. A similar concern pervades unwritten, but it is underscored by anger and frustration at a real event: the exasperation Ah Kee felt at the circumstances surrounding the death in custody of an Aboriginal man on Palm Island in 2004 and the subsequent inquest and trial of the police officer involved. The portraits are not disappearing into nothingness, or the multitude. They are faces smothered, struggling, figuratively fighting to push out of the work, the canvas like a sheet over the face.

Unlike his earlier naturalistic portraits, these drawings explode across the canvas, the lines wrapping in and out of the face, the nostrils and eye sockets. There is a palpable sense of energy and certitude to their rendition.

By referring to events of the recent past, and in the portraits of his family, Ah Kee’s drawings express a form of cultural memory or its potential loss. And as a trace of memories held in the present, this alludes to the palimpsest. These ideas have been examined by German literary critic Andreas Huyssen, who argues the palimpsest is a major concept for understanding a diverse range of artistic, literary and architectural practices that are founded upon historical trauma to create public memory.6 Even though Ah Kee tackles contemporary issues, such as the Palm Island riots, much of the meaning of his work is also derived from the historical trauma of Indigenous dispossession and its effects. The unwritten portraits highlight how he is able to vividly write this past into the present; in other words, his drawings will not let us forget.

Vernon Ah Kee Self portrait as a non person 2006 charcoal, crayon and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 177 x 240 cm The University of Queensland Art Museum collection, purchased 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia *artwork not touring 10

Using patterns and motifs drawn from his Indigenous ancestry, Jonathan Jones’ minimal drawings evolve from a desire to remember the past in the present. Similar to the notion that the sky and land are visually coextensive,7 his seemingly abstract graphite renderings achieve a synthesis of black and white – between the soft, densely applied graphite and the white strips torn from the surface of the paper.

His sculptural light installations transpose this idea into a three-dimensional experience that inverts the traditional hierarchy of figure over ground, which, by further extension, implicates the viewer in the midst of a conversation about black and white. In this sense, Jones’ work creates a space of sensation.

Light plays a determining role in his aesthetic, working as a structuring device that resonates with forms of late modernist art. The ‘light’ the work emits encourages the physical participation of the viewer: to traverse the length of the light installation, in the case of under the aegis 2006, or to read the embossed lines of the series of works on paper untitled (white poles) 2004, which is featured in this exhibition. This exchange is important because at the intersection of Jones’ conceptual concerns is the idea of communal relations, or in his words ‘the operations of the community and the individual, in the interests of a national community’.8 The whiteness of his work speaks of its blackness; the erased white lines of the graphite drawings mutually dependent on the blackness from which they emerge. In its graphic unification Jones’ art is ultimately optimistic – he illuminates a different way of seeing, translating past symbols into allegories of hope about future possibilities.

Jonathan Jones Under the aegis 2006 fluorescent tubes and fittings, installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia photo: Jenni Carter *artwork not touring 11

Simryn Gill’s work is often a form of erasure, resulting in the productive renewal of humble objects or places: from debris found on the side of roads made into small-wheeled objects, to words cut from books. In a recent work, 32 volumes 2006, Gill has removed the text from a series of Life magazines, divorcing the images left on the page from their semantic context. The effect not only describes the causal politics and veracity informing photographic representation, it also rejuvenates the remaining images with other possible dimensions of meaning, such as the ability of images to speak outside of language. For this exhibition, and employing a related sense of reinstatement, Four atlases of the world and one of stars 2009 performs a textual and textural spin – restoring the cartographic drawings of maps into three-dimensional spheres. The flat world is rendered whole yet reduced to a papier-mâché ball. This work, along with the drawings Sydney maps, reveals Gill’s adroitness at combining the universal with the specific, and her fascination with unassuming materials. Her work has always respected the fecundity and ever-present character of nature, incorporating its unruly aspects by capitalising on its ability to escape containment. In Sydney maps 1998, she rubbed wax onto paper placed over cracked Sydney pavements.

Here, the pavement acts as a sort of palimpsest on the earth’s surface, a concrete layer unable to restrain the shifting ground underneath, which we walk upon and mark daily. As much as the rubbings imply a disturbance, a fissure in our attempt at suppression, they also document a largely ignored aspect of the artist’s local environment. This can be read as part of an extensive, ongoing project in which Gill has been recording the history of places, from Malaysia to her home suburb of Marrickville in Sydney, Australia. Consequently, although at first glance a crack may be associated with negativity (as in a rupture or a cleft), these rubbings are beautiful and simple gestures on Gill’s part because they trace life.

They offer a different way of imagining place in the landscape.

Simryn Gill 32 volumes (detail) 2006 books, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Breenspace, Sydney, Australia and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York, USA photo: Jenni Carter *artwork not touring 12

Each artist’s work in Erased is socially engaged – from environmental awareness, identity politics and nationalism to more subtle statements about image-making in culture and the nature of place. Within their ongoing practices, these artists make work stemming from a sense of transformation or loss. In some cases, erasure acts as a mode of expression or it functions as an allegory layering the past with the present or as a proposition about action and trace. In each case, it operates as some kind of palimpsest. There are other surprising tensions and relationships that develop by bringing these artists’ works together, such as the role of photography and the impulse to bring into play historical sources, be they photographic or painterly. Drawing is another important facet of this exhibition. Among other synonyms, ‘to draw’ is to represent, sketch, portray, illustrate or depict something. This traditional and historical definition of drawing implies a means unto an end.

Erased includes examples of this approach but the exhibition’s aim is to expand such understandings to include erasure or removal, also an inherent albeit silent part of the creative methodology of drawing. The act of drawing also relates to the palimpsest because both embody and document time unfolding.

In Erased, layering and erasure are employed as process and subject to reveal ideas about history, the archive, the document, memory, time and drawing. To erase is to change, and as each work in this exhibition reveals, it is a generative strategy, one that proposes a future of political, social, environmental or aesthetic transformations.

Natasha Bullock is curator, contemporary art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

1. However, the strategy of erasure in art is not a recent development. Robert Rauschenberg’s often-cited erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing of 1953 is an important example.

2. Krauss develops the idea to explain the work of South African artist William Kentridge, whose animations have often been described as a form of erasure, arguing that the palimpsest is neither form nor content but a mode of expression. Rosalind Krauss, ‘The rock: William Kentridge’s drawings for projection’ in Chris Gehman & Steve Reinke (eds), The sharpest point: animation at the end of cinema, YYZ Books, Toronto 2005, p 112 3. Krauss 2005, p 114 4. See Tom Nicholson, artist statement, 2005, www.tomn.net/flagsartisttext 5. Craig Owens, ‘The allegorical impulse: towards a theory of postmodernism’, October, vol 12, spring 1980, pp 67–86. German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is important to Owens because of Benjamin’s effort to recuperate a theory of allegory from historicism. For Benjamin the fragment, death and the ruin are allegorical figures par excellence because they signify destruction and decay or the effect of nature upon history. More recently, American art historian Hal Foster has highlighted problems with Owen’s theory of allegory: see Hal Foster, The return of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, MIT Press, Massachusetts 1996, pp 86–88 6. Andreas Huyssen, Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory, Stanford University Press, California 2003. He cites Berlin, New York and Buenos Aires as palimpsest cities, informed, respectively, by the collapse of the Berlin wall, the destruction of the twin towers and disappearance of people in the dictatorships of Latin America.

7. Hetti Perkins, ‘Jonathan Jones in conversation’, Jonathan Jones: untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2008, pp 12–13 8. Jonathan Jones, artist statement, July 2003, np 13

Vernon Ah Kee

Although it is seldom acknowledged, a remarkable history exists of Australian Aboriginal artists’ drawings on paper and other materials. In the late 19th century, Tommy McRae (also known as Yakaduna) and William Barak (or Beruk) turned to the medium to record their memories of life before and during European settlement on Aboriginal lands. At roughly the same time, though in another part of the continent, Mickey of Ulladulla drew scenes crowded with flora, fauna and people dancing in ceremonies, while more recent artists such as Albert Namatjira used watercolour and pencil on paper to transform viewers’ perceptions of Australia’s desert landscapes.

This rich vein of art-making persists into the 21st century through the work of Brisbane-based artist Vernon Ah Kee. Since his university studies in the 1990s, Ah Kee has produced an ongoing series of portraits of past and present family members, with each image derived from photographs held in personal or public collections, and painstakingly rendered in pencil, crayon and charcoal on such materials as canvas or paper. For Ah Kee, these large, photo-realist drawings of people staring directly at the viewer served as monuments to his family and to their fortitude in the face of Australia’s long histories of racism, hostility and dispossession committed against Aboriginal people. More specifically, the drawings stood for his family’s defiant strength in surviving the often poverty-stricken and violent conditions in the Aboriginal reserve where they lived on Palm Island, off the northeast coast of Queensland.

Ah Kee’s suite of drawings on canvas from 2008, called unwritten, in part continues the artist’s interest in the monumental. Much like the earlier series, the oversized faces in unwritten stare out to the viewer in silent address, demanding recognition. However, rather than delineate every crease and wrinkle in the subject’s appearance,

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or the sharpness of their gaze, Ah Kee has used drawing to veil as much as demarcate the faces in unwritten. Tangled webs of line spurt from nostrils, mouths and eye sockets, transforming these orifices into darkened hives of activity and mystery. The lines shoot across the faces, at once tracing their soft edges and covering the subjects in something like a graphite death mask. As a consequence, these quasi-portraits pulse between coming into presence and being asphyxiated by the sticky carbon membrane that encases them. They simultaneously express individual characteristics and forms, yet are potentially reduced to the homogenised anonymity of the mask.

There is a haunting violence to this process of representation, a violence reinforced by the vicious strokes of Ah Kee’s pencil as he swipes it across the canvas like a sword. Among other things, this is a response to the ongoing brutality committed against the residents of Palm Island where, in 2004, a young man known as Mulrunji was killed while in police custody, leading to accusations of police cover-ups on the part of the state and riots by Palm Islanders in opposition to racial violence. Ah Kee’s attack of the canvas with his pencil provides one form of protest against such brutalities and the persistent de-individualisation of Aboriginal peoples, or refusal to acknowledge each person’s differences and idiosyncrasies, that lies at the heart of all forms of racism. Yet, Ah Kee’s overt references to one of his childhood heroes, the comic character of Spiderman, suggests that there remains a superhuman strength to the residents of Palm Island – and to histories of Aboriginal resistance in general – despite the recurring acts of violence committed against them.

Anthony Gardner is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, based in London, UK

above unwritten 2008 installation view, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia 15

overleaf unwritten #12 and #10 2008 charcoal on canvas, each 150 x 90 cm

Christian Capurro

They are not called ‘glossies’ for nothing.

Stacked up thickly in the lifestyle section of the bookstore, these are magazines that look as shiny and desirable as the bodies packed inside them.

The lushest of them immerse you in page after page of digitally perfected skin – throats, ankles, shining shoulders. And all this skin flows almost indistinguishably into the skin of the pages themselves, ink-rich and heavy with laminate.

When perfume samples are tucked inside them, the glossies even smell like perfectly groomed bodies.

These are documents that want us to want them.

What does Christian Capurro want from these magazines and their cascading pictures of bodies?

In a word, nothing. I don’t mean that he wants nothing to do with them, or that he doesn’t care about them. In fact he cares so excessively that he wants to strip them back to nothing – to rub them out, clean their clocks, wear them right off the page. For as many hours a day as he can physically tolerate, this artist labours fastidiously with an eraser, rubbing down through the glossy skin of the magazine page and into its layers of ink. He’s a kind of anti-photographer, a removals man, wiping images off the surface of the world stroke by painstaking stroke. Throats, gone.

Ankles, gone. Shining shoulders, all gone.

Gone, but not without a trace. From a distance, Capurro’s 2006–07 Compress works look like records of total refusal, the artist responding to the culture of ‘exposure’ with acts of complete erasure. Go closer, though, and you see that something has been growing in the shadow of all this removal. As he wears down the bright bodies on one side of the page, the sheer pressure of all that rubbing prints phantom bodies, in transferred ink, onto the page below. When we come right up to the Compress works, this is what we see – the lovers and posers of Playboy and Vogue reborn as strange stains and silhouettes. An arching back, a head dipped forward, the insinuating sway of

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a hip: the shapes are identifiable, but only just.

Released from the narratives of commercial desire that held them (perfume, pornography, take your pick), these body shapes start to suggest new and puzzling hybrids, creatures that seem to have passed through the magazine page and emerged overleaf in a world of whiteness and suggestive fluidity. The ‘other side’ of the story encountered in the glossies.

Do you remember, as a kid, putting a leaf under paper and then shading the entire page in pencil or crayon? I tried it again recently and recalled straight away the surprise it first delivered, the sense that, by obliterating the page, you’d made it yield up some knowledge about the secret structure of the world. For me, Capurro’s Compress works deliver a related surprise. The artist labours away with his eraser, obliterating images of commercial desire.

And in the same moment, in the same movement, he coaxes these unexpected, desirous after-images into the intimate space under the page.

The distance between first and final impressions is larger here than with almost any artworks I can think of. On first seeing Capurro’s row of white pages pinned unglamorously to a wall, I readied myself for a lesson. But what resembled a lesson soon revealed itself as an especially involving visual riddle, one concerning labour, intimacy, desire, images, and how to look at something without needing to possess it. You can catch the image of your desire, Capurro seems to be saying, but not if you try to stare at it directly, as you would an image in a magazine. Instead you have to work towards it as if from the other side – backwards, slowly, and blindly. A ‘compress’, after all, is a medical pad used to prevent swelling.

With this series, Capurro places his own white ‘compresses’ on our inflamed optic nerves.

Justin Paton is senior curator, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand

previous Compress (pit of doublivores) 2006–07 works-on-paper drawn under the pressure of erasing other images, then corrected; magazine pages with erasure, correction fluid, ink and pins, 30 x 22 cm each above installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

Simryn Gill

Four atlases of the world and one of stars 2009 reminds us of the peculiar ontology of the book – that every world is rendered flat, every object made paper-weight, every representation stretched out in a serial, sequential vision. The world atlas above all is radically flattening, since our being, surely, is gorgeously global. We are creatures of many places, but none are book-like. Indeed one of the marvels of the atlas is to see what is bumpy, watery, discontinuous and vast rendered sedate, solid, continuous and contained, the planet itself folded away with thousands of serious-sounding names. To return the atlas to a sphere, as Simryn Gill has, is to do violence to the book but it is also to retrieve in material form the oddity of the world and its representation.

Yet Gill’s world-atlas spheres are a kind of nonsense atlas, where the form is true, but the whole is unintelligible. Mashed in maché, every place is miserably indistinct and collapsed, every substance is intermingled. One might consider it a nightmare of erasure or, conversely, a utopia of combination. The term ‘globalisation’ carries exactly this range of political implication. So too, in this process, metropolises and peripheries cease to exist, powerful states and others are disregarded: all are uniformly – even brutally – without definition.

What is striking about these four globes are the variant colours of each. Ocean is scattered, giving all a faint bluish hue, but there are also minute texts existing somewhere inside continents and a muted palette of reds, oranges and greens. All the colour that there is has become a mish-mash of spectrums, all the words that we give to places have been lost in the substance that bears them.

And what of the star atlas? If to reduce countries to sameness is an offence against reason, how much more so the ‘globalisation’ of the stars? Star atlases are already a conceptual trick bolder than any earth-bound cartographer might conceive, since what is rendered close is impossibly distant and what is named and patterned is extraterrestrially strange. To attempt to put infinity into a book or a globe is surely the emblem of our hubris.

Gill’s atlas spheres, however, seem melancholy rather than bold. This is due, in part, to their closedness, to the way they lock images and words away, but it is also a matter of scale: to see four world atlases and one star atlas – implying enormous and co-extensive space – reduced to these handmade balls and placed quietly together, already suggests a loss of some kind; whereas the form of the book, ironically, might imply a celebration. Atlases are often very large books: bigness is part of their connotation of importance.

Could all that august knowledge really be so small? Something that is held and moulded and baked in the oven? These globes are the wild world made domestic and ornamental.

But it is the mystery of art to return the world to us anew. Just as the making is here a form of erasure, so its reconfiguration is another kind of strange knowledge, a gift of imagination.

Unlike the fetish objects of Gill’s earlier work, the handiwork of organic substances or the photographs of lost time, these are items that have a bizarre autonomy. They are unrecognisable as our planet, but they also seem familiar. They are both world and not-world, text and not-text, and somewhere in this paradox lies the artistic ambition that greets us.

Gail Jones is professor, Writing and Society Research Group, College of Arts, University of Western Sydney, Australia

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previous (detail) and above Four atlases of the world and one of stars 2009 paper, glue, dimensions variable 26

Sydney maps 1998 wax on paper left to right, 141 x 74 cm approx 132 x 74 cm approx installation view Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia * different artworks from series touring 27

Jonathan Jones

The series untitled (graphite) 2005 and untitled (white poles) 2004 are delicate works on paper that capture many of the key themes interlaced through Jonathan Jones’ practice. These include Jones’ engagement with the late modernist avantgarde; the relationship between light and shadow and, by extension, between black and white more broadly; and the nature of the art-making process.

Aboriginal heritage. The motifs that structure his paper works as well as his light installations are often derived from the markings on traditional shields or other ceremonial objects, while Jones cites as an enduring concern the exploration of how light as a material can ‘pull things together’ and offer insights into negotiating novel forms of community.1

Jones is perhaps best known for his light installations comprised primarily of fluorescent tubes. Such works necessarily invoke both Dan Flavin (1933–96), the American artist who made the flouro tube his signature, and the concerns of minimalism, most notably the implication of the viewer in the work of art. Jones’ installations overload the viewer with light: the resulting waves of heat and blinding rays bring the viewer into a very distinct bodily awareness, in which the power of vision is momentarily disoriented. It is in such a context that the embossed paper work white poles was first exhibited, as a companion piece to a light sculpture featuring clusters of flouro tubes encased in blue perspex entitled blue poles 2004.

Jones’ blue poles makes explicit reference to the apex of 20th-century avant-gardism in abstract expressionism, but at the same time recalls the radical critique of that movement by minimalist and conceptual practices. The figurative elements of white poles are almost invisible; they compel the viewer to seek bodily a position that will allow reflected light to lure the image out, to catch an embossed edge and so reveal the contours of overlapping poles.

The interdependence of black and white is also evident in Jones’ graphite works, where the conventional drawing technique of black marks applied to white paper is inverted: what appear to be white lines (forming patterns that recall both Aboriginal motifs and geometric abstraction) emerge from those parts of the paper that remain untouched. That is, the condition of possibility of the white markings is the black background. Yet, the way that Jones has worked the graphite confounds the reading of the black areas as ‘background’. Close looking takes the viewer beyond the shimmering graphite surface to a complex weave of tight, hard-pressed pencil work. It is in these intense, tiny gestures merging to create a unified field that the aesthetic interest of the work lies. The untitled (graphite) series thus speaks about the labour-intensive, exploratory and meditative process that is drawing. Handcrafted and crosshatched, these drawings in turn connect to traditional ceremonial objects.

The viewer’s negotiation of their literal position in response to the play of light and shadow in order to ‘see’ is integral to Jones’ symbolic meanings. Light and shadow, black and white, are defined relative to one another; they are mutually dependent for their very existence. The reference to race relations is inescapable, underlined by the fact that Jones’ work, while engaging with the modernist tradition, is firmly grounded in his 28

Jones is adept at melding the disparate traditions that have informed his development as an artist, to create works whose formal elegance is perfectly pitched to capture complex social and cultural relations.

Dr Jacqueline Millner teaches art history and visual culture in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney, Australia 1. ‘Jonathan Jones in conversation’, Jonathan Jones: untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2008, p 14

previous untitled (graphite a) 2005 charcoal and graphite on paper, 101.5 x 64 cm sheet above untitled (white poles) 1, 2 and 3 2004 embossed paper, each 69 x 35 cm sheet 30

blue poles 2004 fluorescent lights, perspex, MDF, 169 x 35 x 35 cm courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia photo: Barry Keldoulis *artwork not touring 31

Tom Nicholson

Hoisted above the building that has served as the base for Melbourne’s labour movement for over a century, documented in photography and film, configured and reconfigured for subsequent gallery presentations, Tom Nicholson’s Flags for a trades hall council 2005–06 is a complex and enigmatic work, rich in poetic allusion and implications for the role of art in society. The face the flags frame is that of Jean-Paul Marat, central figure of the French Revolution, assassinated in his bath and immortalised in Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting, The death of Marat. Produced at the height of the revolution, this extraordinary work is highly significant to the canon of political art. As seductive as it is to romanticise David’s painting as an original moment in a history of points at which art and revolution became inseparable, Flags for a trades hall council suggests that the relationship between the two is more complex than the wild marriage of avant-gardist imaginings.

An important consideration for the account proposed by the flags is David’s preferred title for the painting, Marat at his last breath, which presents the work less as a monument to the revolutionary than as a specific account of his dying, suspended at the very threshold of his being. In this light we might see David responding to his commission to ‘give us back Marat whole’ by complying, not with a wholeness that might, however fleetingly, permit the fantasy that Marat might still be alive, but one inscribed with the reality of his death, living that can only be expressed as dying, a body animated not by a futile last breath, but by the pathos of that breath’s futility.

Nicholson closes in tightly on Marat’s face, softening the subject’s gentle features further, adding the slightest shadowy ellipse to the lips to emphasise their parting at that last breath. This is the point of suspension, the artist suggests, the locus of the Marat’s pathos. For the philosopher Giorgio Agamben the human face is at once a site of exposure and a space of concealment. In the Marat, the final breath signifies concealment’s 32

giving way to utter exposure; this is where Nicholson seems to be drawing our attention.

But in doing so he voids the face’s specificity, so that without accompanying information, the image might have been gleaned from any source, any face. The act of exposure through detailing becomes itself a gesture of concealment.

Nicholson makes a second reference to the Marat through the mechanism of public display: David’s painting was unveiled at the culmination of an extravagant street parade as the altarpiece in a makeshift shrine to revolutionary martyrdom; Nicholson’s flags first appeared in place of those usually flown above the Victorian Trades Hall Council building in Melbourne. Both gestures constitute a reinsertion into the political, insofar as politics is already the content of the work.

Marat himself remains hidden, and as much as Nicholson’s political intervention is also an aesthetic one, the function of art maintains its aspect of concealment, even in the process of its exposure.

This concealment might be fundamental to art as it interfaces with politics, differentiating it from pure propaganda. This is what both artists give back to politics, precisely by withdrawing from it while preparing their work. Fluttering in the wind or hanging with quiet dignity in the gallery, Nicholson’s flags point to suspension before death, an endless dying frozen in time, introducing this figure of time into the equation of art and revolution. In time, the processes of withdrawal and presentation are sequential, and these are the moments of art and revolution as they unfold, in syncopation rather than synchronicity, within the space of a single life. It is in their socialisation, the point at which the expression of a life opens on others, that art and revolution achieve their unity, borne by the perfect, irreducible unity of exposure and concealment, embodied in the face.

Reuben Keehan is curator at Artspace, Sydney, Australia

Flags for a trades hall council 2005-06 previous flags, poles, two digital photographs, dimensions variable installation view, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia left digital photographs above flags, poles installation view, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne, Australia 35

Raquel Ormella

Over the course of two years in the early 2000s, Raquel Ormella became a frequent visitor to the gabled two-storey house at 130 Davey Street, in the heart of Tasmania’s capital city, Hobart. This was not for any domestic purpose, however; despite its tranquil appearance, this was no ordinary home. It was instead the local campaign headquarters for the Wilderness Society, one of Australia’s leading environmental organisations and a key player in the decades-long fight to protect Tasmania’s old-growth forests and stunning waterways. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Society was instrumental in saving Tasmania’s Franklin River from being dammed for hydro-electric power, an event that stands as one of the turning points in Australia’s history of environmentalism. By 2004, that activist will needed to be rekindled, for the Australian federal election that year had once again transformed Tasmania’s landscape into a major public battleground. The country’s two main political parties were at odds about whether to log or to preserve swathes of Tasmania’s forests; the Wilderness Society was frantically collecting signatures and strategising protests to protect the old-growth trees; and in the middle of the action, Ormella was busy taking photographs, carefully documenting the participants and their behaviour.

The result is an installation that both depicts and cannily mimics the interior of the Wilderness Society offices during the time Ormella was there. Whiteboards – familiar from brainstorming sessions in so many organisations – stand upright in the middle of the gallery, with others leaning as though discarded against its walls. Across these boards are images of the Society’s rooms after similar meetings (featuring the Society’s own data-clad whiteboards); outlines of desks, tables and chairs have been penned in permanent ink, as have representations of photographs from the Society’s past campaigns and calendars (such as Peter Dombrovskis’ renowned images of the Tasmanian wilderness). 130 Davey Street 2005–09 36

thus cleverly appears to trace an environmental activism in Australia, in the process returning to the work of German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86) and his use of blackboards, in the 1970s, to publicise his particular brand of politics.

Much like Beuys’ work, then, Ormella’s could be seen as a form of political propaganda, lionising the Wilderness Society’s campaigns to which Ormella volunteered her time and energy. This would only be partially correct, though, because her installation and drawings are more uncertain, questioning and precarious than propaganda invariably is. Despite the use of permanent marker, the whiteboards look as though a simple brush against them could erase the images or, at the very least, swivel a panel in its frame so as to hide an image from view. Uneasy tensions emerge as well between the pragmatics of the whiteboard and the romanticised perceptions of ‘untouchable’ art, or between socio-political activism and an artwork contained and silenced in a museum. This is not to say that art cannot wield political power; its potency is generally more fragile and allusive, however, than the urgent and overt politics of activism allow. Nonetheless, as 130 Davey Street suggests, activism and art do have a common bind: a need to operate between bureaucracy and idealism so as to make one’s image, one’s intention, as clear and persuasive as possible.

Anthony Gardner is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, based in London, UK

previous and above 130 Davey Street 2005–09 whiteboards, permanent texta markers, photocopies dimensions variable installation views, Mori Gallery, Sydney, Australia below and right installation views, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

List of Works

Vernon Ah Kee unwritten #6, #9, #10 and #12 2008 charcoal on canvas each 150 x 90 cm Private collections Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

Christian Capurro Compress (pit of doublivores) 2006–07 works-on-paper drawn under the pressure of erasing other images, then corrected; magazine pages with erasure, correction fluid, ink and pins each approx 30 x 22 cm sheet John Kaldor Family collection, Sydney, Australia; courtesy of the artist Originally commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne for NEW07

Simryn Gill Four atlases of the world and one of stars 2009 paper, glue dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Breenspace, Sydney, Australia and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York, USA Sydney maps 1998 wax on paper 141 x 74 cm approx 132 x 74 cm approx Courtesy of the artist and Breenspace, Sydney, Australia and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York, USA

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Jonathan Jones untitled (white poles) 1, 2 and 3 2004 embossed paper each 69 x 35 cm sheet Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia untitled (graphite a) 2005 charcoal and graphite on paper 101.5 x 64 cm sheet Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney, Australia untitled (graphite e) and untitled (graphite f) 2005 charcoal and graphite on paper each 101.5 x 64 cm sheet Casey Khik collection, Sydney, Australia

Tom Nicholson Flags for a trades hall council 2005–06 flags, poles, two framed digital photographs, DVD dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia

Raquel Ormella 130 Davey Street 2005–09 whiteboards, permanent texta markers, photocopies dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. Three boards purchased through New Social Commentaries as the recipient of the FJ Foundation Acquisitive Prize, 2006, Warrnambool Art Gallery collection, Victoria, Australia

Artist Biographies

Vernon Ah Kee Born 1967 in Innisfail, Australia, resides in Brisbane, Australia Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidindji, Koko Berrin, Gugu Yimithirr Vernon Ah Kee has exhibited consistently in national and international group and solo exhibitions since 2001. Solo exhibitions include becauseitisbitter, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2009; belief suspension, Artspace, Sydney, 2008; cantchant, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2007; unwritten, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2007; and mythunderstanding, Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2005.

Group exhibition highlights include Once removed, Venice Biennale, Italy, 2009; Ignite, Object, Sydney, 2009; Avoiding myth and message and I walk the line, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009; Contemporary Australia: optimism, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2008; Halflight, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2009; In the space of elsewhere, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London, UK, 2008; Sunshine state, smart state, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2007; Power and beauty, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2007; Drawing Biennale, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 2006; Radical regionalism, Museum London, UK, 2006; Thick and fast, Brisbane Powerhouse, 2005; L’art urbain du Pacific, Saint Auvent Caslte, France, 2005; 2004: Australian culture now, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004; Spirit and vision, Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg, Austria, 2004; Story place, Queensland Art Gallery, 2003; and Place/Displace, QCA Gallery, Griffith University, Brisbane, 2001.

Ah Kee’s work is held in public and private collections in Australia. He is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

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Christian Capurro Born 1968 in Dampier, Australia, resides in Melbourne, Australia

Simryn Gill Born 1959 in Singapore, resides in Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia

Christian Capurro’s work has featured in many group exhibitions including More love hours than can ever be repaid, Feinkost, Berlin, Germany, 2009; Behind the image/The image behind, STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium, 2009; Lo sguardo di Giano, American Academy in Rome, Italy, 2009; Second hand, Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna, Austria, 2009; Think with the senses – feel with the mind, Venice Biennale, Italy, 2007; NEW07, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2007; Before the body – matter, Monash Museum of Art, Clayton, 2006–07; The body.

The ruin, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne University, 2005–06; A short ride in a fast machine, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces (GCAS) 2005; Cycle tracks will abound in utopia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004; Performance anxiety, Ocular Lab, Melbourne, 2004; and Raw Hin; Christian Capurro, Choi Sung Youn and Soyoug Kang, Gallery Kobo Chika, Tokyo, Japan 1999.

Simyrn Gill has exhibited extensively since the early nineties. Solo exhibitions include Simryn Gill: interiors, Tracy Williams Ltd, New York, USA, 2009; Simryn Gill: paper boats, Breenspace, Sydney, 2009; Simryn Gill: gathering, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008–09; Simryn Gill, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2006; Simryn Gill, Albion, London, UK; 32 volumes, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2006; Perspectives: Simryn Gill, Arthur M Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 2006– 07; RUN, Tracy Williams Ltd, 2006; Power station, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2004; Matrix 210: standing still, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive, USA, 2004; A small town at the turn of the century, Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, 2003; Simryn Gill: selected work, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2002; Dalam, Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2001; Roadkill, CCA Kitakyushu, Japan and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2000; Simryn Gill, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2000; and Natural resemblance, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2000.

He has had several solo exhibitions including Another misspent portrait of Etienne de Silhouette, multiple venues, Melbourne, 2004–05; Insufferable nebulae and other couplings, GCAS, Melbourne, 2004; Gorgonia, GCAS, 2003; White breath (bond), West Space, Melbourne, 2000; After the deluge, corrections, Temple Studios, Prahran, 1999; Works-off-paper, cityartpublicspace transport shelters, Melbourne, 1999; engorge(o)us, Stripp, Fitzroy, 1998; and Garnish (a suite of graftings), Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, 1997.

Capurro has been awarded numerous grants and residencies including an Australia Council Arts Development Grant (International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York Residency) in 2009 and New Work Grant in 2004–05; a City of Yarra Arts Development Grant in 2004; a GCAS Studio Residency in 2003; and a National Association for the Visual Arts’ Pat Corrigan Artist Grant in 1998. His work is represented in private and public collections both in Australia and internationally.

Her work has been included in numerous group shows both nationally and internationally, including Revolutions: forms the turn, Biennale of Sydney, 2008; The Wizard of Oz, Wattis Institute, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, 2008; Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, 2008; documenta, Kassel, Germany, 2007; Fashion accidentally, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, 2007; Living in the material world, National Art Centre, Tokyo, Japan, 2007; Singapore Biennale, 2006; Liverpool Biennial, UK, 2006; Contrabandistas de imágenes: selección 26 Bienal São Paulo, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile, 2005; 2004: Australian culture now, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004; São Paulo Biennial, Brazil, 2004; After image, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, 2003; Face up, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany, 2003; and Flight patterns, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, 2000.

Gill’s work is held in public and private collections in Australia and abroad. She is represented by Breenspace, Sydney and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York.

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Jonathan Jones Born 1978 in Sydney, Australia, resides in Sydney Kamilaroi, Wiradjuri

Tom Nicholson Born 1973 in Melbourne, Australia, resides in Melbourne

Jonathan Jones’ solo exhibitions include Jonathan Jones: untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2008; Jonathan Jones, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 2007; and Served chilled, Sherman Artbox, Sydney, 2002; as well as several solo exhibitions at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.

Exhibiting for more than a decade, Tom Nicholson has had numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions including Lines towards another century, with Andrew Byrne, featuring a performance with the Elysian Quartet and Oliver Langdon, Media Art Bath, Holburne Museum, Bath, UK, 2008; After action for another library, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts and Pakuranga Library, Auckland, New Zealand, 2007; Flag time: Marat at his last breath, Ocular Lab, Melbourne, 2006; Stills from an archive into five actions, Australia Centre, Berlin, Germany, 2003; Melancholia (Documents after five actions, Berlin), Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2003; Documents after five actions, Kapelle der Versöhnung, Berlin, 2002; and Collaborative project: a syntax into six landings, with John Abbate, Public Office, Melbourne, 1999.

Selected group exhibitions featuring Jones’ work include NEW08, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2008; The trouble with the weather, University of Technology Gallery, Sydney, 2007; Nguurramban: from where we are, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, 2007; Celebrating Aboriginal rights?, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, 2007; Adventures with form in space, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2006; Quiet, Aquaspace, Savannah, USA, 2004; Travelling light, Performance Space and Museum of Sydney, Sydney, 2004; Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003; Il palazzo delle libertà, Palazzo Della Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy, 2003; Dream trances, Brighton University, UK, 2003; conVerge, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, 2002; Colour is the battle between light and dark, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2001; What’s love got to do with it, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2001; and Art of place, Old Parliament House, Canberra, 2000.

Collaborative projects include Homelands illuminations, Performance Space, 2007, with Ruark Lewis; 2004: Australian culture now, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004, with Darren Dale and David Page; Red out, Contemporary Art Foundation of Auckland, New Zealand, with Jim Vivieaere, 2002; Reckonings, Performance Space, 2001, with Nuha Saad, Ruark Lewis and Romaine Morton.

Jones was the recipient of the Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award from the Queensland Art Gallery in 2006 as well as multiple grants from the NSW Ministry of the Arts and NSW Indigenous Artists Fellowship.

Jones’ work is held in private and public collections in Australia and abroad. He is represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.

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Selected group exhibitions include Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, Federation Square, Melbourne, 2008; Since we last spoke about monuments, Stroom, Hague, Netherlands, 2008; Regarding fear and hope, Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton, 2007; System error: war is a force that gives us meaning, SMS Contemporanea, Siena, Italy, 2007; Zones of contact, Biennale of Sydney, 2006; The body.

The ruin, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 2005–06; 2004: Australian culture now, National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2004; NEW04, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2004; Performance anxiety, Ocular Lab, Melbourne, 2004; Curiosity kills the gab, Artspace, Auckland, 2003; Feedback: art, social consciousness and resistance, Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton, 2003; Stolen Generations Memorial Competition, Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 2001; and Critical response, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2000.

Nicholson was awarded a Creative Fellowship from the State Library of Victoria in 2007; a Cultural Activity Grant from the City of Melbourne in 2003; grants from Arts Victoria’s International Export and Touring Fund in 2002 and the Foundation for Young Australians in 2000; and an Australia Council New Work Grant in 2000. His work is held in public and private collections in Australia. Nicholson is a member of Ocular Lab and is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia.

Raquel Ormella Born 1969 in Sydney, Australia, resides in Sydney Raquel Ormella has been exhibiting regularly in national and international exhibitions for over a decade. Her solo exhibitions include She went that way, Artspace, Sydney, 2009; Just left of the right lift, an Art Lifts project at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2005; and Living in other people’s houses, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, 2001 and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2002, as well as several solo exhibitions at the Mori Gallery, Sydney.

Ormella has participated in various group exhibitions including the forthcoming Making it new, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, 2009; Better places, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2008–09; Revolutions: forms that turn, Biennale of Sydney, 2008; New acquisitions, MCA, Sydney, 2008; Australian, Casula Powerhouse, 2008; The ecologies project, Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton, 2008; If you leave me, can I come too?, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney 2006; Trans versa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile, 2006; International geographic, Artists Space, New York, USA, 2005; Cycle tracks will abound in utopia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2004; City views, Museum of Brisbane, 2004; Poetic justice, Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, 2003; Home sweet home, National Gallery of Australia, 2003; Bittersweet, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2002; São Paulo Biennial, Brazil, 2002; New releases, Gallery 4A and Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2001; Sunburn, K3, Hamburg, Germany, 2001; and Sydney! Vienna!, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2000.

Ormella was awarded a New Work Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts ACT in 2007; Warrnambool Art Gallery’s New Social Commentaries Prize in 2006; an Australian Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the University of Western Sydney in 2003; a Western Sydney Artist Fellowship from the NSW Ministry for the Arts in 2000; an Australia Council Studio Residency in Barcelona, Spain in 1999; and a Dyason Bequest grant by the Art Gallery of NSW in 1996. She is currently completing a PhD at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Ormella’s work is held in public and private collections in Australia. She is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne.

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Photography credits Vernon Ah Kee: John O’Brien; Christian Capurro: Christian Capurro; Simryn Gill: Jenni Carter; Jonathan Jones: Richard Glover (untitled (white poles)) and Scott Strothers (untitled (graphite)); Tom Nicholson: Christian Capurro; Raquel Ormella: Christian Capurro.

Artist acknowledgements Tom Nicholson would like to acknowledge the support of the Victorian Trades Hall Executive and, in particular, Peter Marshall, Michelle O’Neil, Nathan Niven and Brian Boyd, as well as Adam Bandt, Christian Capurro, Clare Land, Bridget Crone, Joanna Bosse, Bala Starr, Chris McAuliffe, Shelley Marshall, Mary and Peter Nicholson, and Jacob Greck. Jonathan Jones would like to acknowledge Ruark Lewis and Sandra Bottrell.

Curator acknowledgements Natasha Bullock thanks the artists for their commitment to this exhibition. Thanks also to their gallery representatives, particularly Josh Milani and Hamish Sawyer, Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Barry Keldoulis and Mary Wenholz, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney; Ruth Bain, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; and to the private lenders who kindly allowed works from their collections to be included in the exhibition. Thanks to the authors for their scholarly and insightful essays. For providing comments or sharing ideas about my essay, I thank Lily Hibberd, Warwick Burton, Peter Raissis, and the Asialink team. Special thanks to Sarah Bond, visual arts program manager, Asialink, for the invitation to participate in the centre’s touring program, and whose resolve has greatly assisted in bringing this exhibition together; and to Alison Carroll, director, Asialink and Claire Watson, coordinator, visual arts program, Asialink. Thanks to Edmund Capon, director, Art Gallery of New South Wales, whose support made this exhibition a reality, and to colleagues Wayne Tunnicliffe and Tony Bond. Thanks to Analiese Tracey and Jochen Letsch for coordinating the conservation and framing aspects of the exhibition; Amanda Green; Akaash Yao; Alison Guthrie; Jenni Carter; Charlotte Davy; Cara Hickman; Rose Peel; Jackie Menzies; Karen Hall and Megan Williams from Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Brenda O’Connor from Warrnambool Art Gallery; Melissa Hill; Richard Matthews; Kirsten Tilgals for her thoughtful editing of the catalogue texts; and Darren Sylvester for his sensitive catalogue design.

cover Vernon Ah Kee unwritten #10 (detail) 2008 charcoal on canvas, 150 x 90 cm

Erased: contemporary Australian drawing An Asialink/Art Gallery of New South Wales touring exhibition featuring Vernon Ah Kee, Christian Capurro, Simryn Gill, Jonathan Jones, Tom Nicholson and Raquel Ormella First published 2009 Edition of 2000 Asialink 4th Floor Sidney Myer Asia Centre The University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010 Australia T: 61 3 8344 4800 F: 61 3 9347 1768 www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au © 2009 Asialink and Art Gallery of New South Wales Images and text copyright © the authors and artists.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Cataloguing-in-publication Bullock, Natasha Erased: contemporary Australian drawing / Natasha Bullock ISBN 9780734040978 This exhibition has been organised by Asialink at The University of Melbourne in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body, through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments, and the Australian Government through the Australian Visual Arts Touring Program of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Curator and commissioning editor: Natasha Bullock Exhibition coordination: Sarah Bond Exhibition assistance: Claire Watson Conservation and framing: Analiese Tracey and Jochen Letsch Biographies: Kelly McDonald and Sarah Bond Research assistance: Kelly McDonald Text editing: Kirsten Tilgals Catalogue design: Darren Sylvester Pre-press and printing: Design & Print International Pte Ltd, Singapore