Posted Away
Away, away, for I will fly to thee … on viewless wings…1 Violet Shum, Change and Flow 2018, Iron, 15 x 10 x 8.5 cm The Paddock: Posted to Hong Kong
Here is a travelling postcard exhibition, an art project as fragile and light as a drifting cloud. It started small and has been accumulating, its drifting course mapped by whimsy, charted by chance, and borne on bonds between artists. Here, the emphasis is on sustaining a moving art platform between those of us working in abstraction. Here, we lift off and away from the ground of seeing art in terms of commodity, or artists merely as authorial innovators. The overriding idea is of simplicity and lightness of connection. Making and sharing a compact visual work is as simple as posting a postcard or posting on social media to friends / followers - from anywhere. Recent world events like the global pandemic, lockout, lockdown, loss, fire, flood, fear, and war - have altered the ways in which we move, travel, and connect with others. And yet, these same world-altering events have us returning to consider what it is that we can do, especially as artists, to engage with the world and each other in a way that is meaningful and offers critique. ‘The Paddock: Posted to …’ is a participatory and collaborative art project, linking an expanding group of artists who make abstract art – a universal visual language perhaps? In a time where worldly travel is so challenging, ‘The Paddock: Posted to…’ project transcends borders, physically and virtually, through its web of artist networks.
1
From John Keats, poet, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) an attempt to allude poetically to the lightness of sending postcards and of the views they inevitably contain.
Samantha Stephenson, Chestnut 2017, Card and tape, 10 x 15 cm The Paddock: Posted to Sydney
Yannis Generalis, Posted on a sleeve 2018, Folded garment, 14 x 24 x 2 cm Posted to Johannesburg
Tomo Mori, Posted 2017, Canvas on canvas Posted to New York
For this week the project is at Gallery IN at 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo. Together with cocurator Tetsuya Chiba (an artist I first met over social media) we are presenting ‘The Paddock: Posted to Tokyo’, an exhibition of 77 artist postcards and the 6th iteration of a travelling postcard exhibition and expanding collaborative art project. The concept began in Sydney, Australia (2017) when a group of artists, The Paddock Group2, all working in abstraction3 sent postcard-sized works to an artist in New York City. It has been travelling ever since, as Posted to … Sydney, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Tokyo with about 15 artists joining from each city. The project has travelled across the world, appearing for exhibitions in these 6 cities and hibernating in between. So, while the movement has an outward-looking global appearance, its essential character remains local and coterie-based.
The Paddock: Posted to Tokyo 2022 (installation views)
2
The Paddock is a response to The Field, a landmark exhibition in 1968 Australia of colour-field, hard edged and geometric abstract painting and sculpture. It is both a reference to the bumpy terrain of contemporary art and an art historical lineage and discourse. 3 What is abstraction? So often defined as what it is not; non-representational, non-objective, non-figurative, non-mimetic, imageless, reductive. Abstraction is an artistic or intellectual stance, which operates free from and at a remove from mimesis, providing a contemplative space from which to observe, experiment and comment. Abstract art is a visual scale encompassing the gestural to the geometric. While the term is difficult to define, it has been observed that its elasticity in meaning is one of its advantages. (Wendy Kelly, 2020)
The Paddock: Posted to Sydney
The Paddock: Posted to New York
There were some initial requirements: thematically the show is about abstraction and nonrepresentational work. At once an homage to the origins of the Sydney group, it also explores the concept of abstraction as a universal visual language despite art historical, geopolitical, and cultural factors. As objects, postcards are light and portable; similarly, the number of participants is limited for ease of travel. Exhibition venues are often alternative, and ideally, free; the works are not for sale, it is non-profit and within each host city an artist acts as curator and custodian to arrange the show within a local art community. Appropriately, all these rules except the last few have to some extent been broken. And yet the global, travelling postcard show continues to drift on. Other aspects, not rules as such but exhibiting standards of professionalism, care and courtesy have been ongoing- the works always well looked after and presented (accidents happen), openings held, the project documented, packed up and stored until the next destination materialises. As the smell of wine and the clamour of opening receptions fade there has been a lot of goodwill and generosity among artists to help it along its way.
The Paddock: Posted to Paris
The Paddock: Posted to Johannesburg
Paired with an Instagram account @the_paddock_group, another initial idea was to explore the evolving meaning of what it is to ‘post’ by posting actual postcards as well as posting on
social media. The format enables artists to explore the intersection - and power - of contemporary artmaking in terms of object, image, and platform. In abstraction, a long observed and often explored tension lies between object /image. This is also true of a postcard arriving, a ‘view’ from elsewhere, abstracted and concretised by its journey from sender to recipient. For this project though, that third element of platform takes on an increased significance in the age of social media. We live in a contemporaneity where increasingly we use our mobile devices to look at and engage with art. We see (arguably too briefly) and we comment. Artists can post directly without any intermediary. In terms of platform, this develops an increased accessibility – between artists and viewers but also between artists. It has long been a feature of the non-objective arts community (as I have experienced it) to foster and maintain connections between artist-coteries. This has provided a critical community who aim to exhibit their work, with or without the mechanisms of the contemporary art market. The increased facility of communication has transformed and accelerated the capacity for artist-run projects such as this one.
Roland Orépük, This is not a monochrome, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 10x15x2 cm, Posted to Paris
Takashi Kayama, 2021, 7, 1, 2021 Oil on panel, 15x10x3 cm, Posted to Tokyo
As it has continued to travel however, this has become its most impressive feature - the path made by artist networks and the journey itself arguably becoming an organic, evolving art form. ‘The Paddock: Posted to …’ is a space where, through the shared visual language of abstraction, artists connect and collaborate to exhibit, independent of commercial and gallery systems. As a result, there is a dissolution of boundaries between artist – artwork – platform. Neither assumes more importance than the other. It is a group of artists, not a solo reputation. The artworks are a collective visual vernacular rather than a singular vision. The platform is the expanding cultural current; the will of the artists involved.
The Paddock: Posted to Hong Kong
Nao Tanaka, Dyslexia, 2022, Paper pulp, 15x10cm, The Paddock: Posted in Tokyo
As for the postcard works themselves, beyond a static collection or exchange they are increasingly weighty in the cloud, and this may spell the end of this project, and yet they draw people in. As the Tokyo exhibition goes on, I talk with visitors about abstraction as visual language, mail art, fluxus, places, materials and characteristics, but the plain old I like this one lingers. There is a yearning for the object, the thing that a postcard is. Clearly, the rich variety of postcard works relate a myriad of personal and political experiences encompassing identity, history, music, nature, politics, materiality, and current events. It is the postcards themselves that provide immediate connection and engagement. So, for this Tokyo exhibition we plan to extend the collaboration to invite audience participation for the brief duration of the exhibition. Viewers, you are welcome to do more than look. Bring your postcard (abstract, 10x15 cm) to the exhibition and join us at “The Paddock: Posted in Tokyo” wall.
Lisa Pang Curator, writer, artist Elizabeth Briel, 三, 2022, paper cast, cotton and indigo, 10x15 cm Posted to Hong Kong
Tokyo, Japan, April 2022
Exhibition ‘The Paddock: Posted to Tokyo 2022’ 77 artists from 6 cities: Sydney, New York, Paris, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Tokyo Exhibition: 23 – 29 April 2022, 11:00 - 19:00 Opening reception: Saturday 23 April, 17:00 - 19:00 3331 Arts Chiyoda Gallery IN (B108) 6-11-14 Sotokanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0021 「ザ・パドック―東京への便り」展 6 都市から 77 人のアーティスト: ニューヨーク、パリ、ヨハネスブルグ、香港、東京 日時：4 月 23 日(土)〜29 日(金) 11 時〜19 時 オープニングレセプション：4 月 23 日（土）17 時〜19 時 アーツ千代田 3331 地下 1 階 B108 ギャラリーIN 101-0021 東京都千代田区外神田 6-11-14
Tokyo co-curators: Lisa Pang 彭 リサ + Tetsuya Chiba 千葉鉄也 Graphic design: Oliver Wagner