SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN | THE BEAUTIFUL AS FORCE | ONLINE CATALOGUE by MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY

SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN THE BEAUTIFUL AS FORCE

7 March - 31 March 2013

MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY 15 HAMPDEN STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021 TEL: 02 9331 7997 FAX: 02 9331 7050 info@martinbrownecontemporary.com www.martinbrownecontemporary.com GALLERY HOURS: TUESDAY - SUNDAY 10:30AM - 6PM

© Martin Browne Contemporary © All images copyright Savanhdary Vongpoothorn This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. COMPILER: Hilary Perrett PHOTOGRAPHER: Jenni Carter COLOUR SEPARATIONS: Spitting Image, Sydney PRINTING: Southern Colour, Sydney Cover Image: Dhuma, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm

LIST OF WORKS

Pathavi-voja, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm Appana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 61 x 61 cm Dhuma, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm Ruppana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 60 x 60 cm Addhana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm Abhikujita, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm Latsamy, 2012/2013, acrylic on perforated canvas, 150 x 180 cm Viriya, 2013, acrylic on perforated canvas, 150 x 180 cm

SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN | THE BEAUTIFUL AS FORCE The title for this exhibition comes from Beauty and the Beast (2012), Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig’s meditation on cosmetic surgery and the strange aesthetics of life and death in contemporary Colombia. With these words, Taussig wants to emphasise the idea of the aesthetic as a power in itself, and asks us to consider the beauty to be found in Colombia’s perverse landscape of narcotraficantes, black-clad paramilitaries and glamorous women who risk deformation and even death in the pursuit of surgically augmented perfection. While these themes are a world away from her own work, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn was drawn to this phrase for the way it resonates with her long-time engagement with beauty. She, like Taussing, sees beauty not simply as an aesthetic condition, but as a vital natural and spiritual force, an agency in itself. The motif for the works in this show comes from a figure of beauty in nature, the Australian scribbly gum. Vongpoothorn has long been enchanted by the cryptic scribblings found on these trees, and speaks of wanting to somehow “decipher” them. After first encountering them around Roy Jackson’s bush studio in Wedderburn, Vongpoothorn rediscovered the scribbly gum in Mt Irvine in the Blue Mountains, where she has a family home. Patrick White, who regularly visited Mt Wilson and neighbouring Mt Irvine as a child, opens The Tree of Man with the protagonist setting down his cart between two great stringy barks and contemplating the home he will build there. Vongpoothorn has taken up the motif of the scribbly gum tree as the symbol for the difficult and tenuous belonging White’s hero and his descendants forge in the Australian bush, finding resonance in it with Buddhist ideas about the transient nature of any belonging we might have in the world of suffering and desires. While working on this series of paintings, Vongpoothorn and poet Leon Trainor have drawn inspiration from each other’s exploration of Australian and Asian landscapes in their different disciplines. Ashley Carruthers Janurary 2013

SCRIBBLY GUMS for Savanhdary Lines tattooed on trunks and limbs, jagged zigzags, mystery scripts for the thin skin of eucalypts and nobody deciphers them. Their power crackles in each space between the clustered trunks of trees: there is a presence in the maze and a spirituality which it bestows. It dwells, too, in the moth-messages that migrate to your stretched, perforated cloth. Quite unafraid, you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t let go the scribbly line of twisted thread that guides us through the labyrinth.

Leon Trainor 2012

Pathavi-voja, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm

Appana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 61 x 61 cm

Dhuma, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm

Ruppana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 61 x 61 cm

Addhana, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm

ONCE, REMEMBERED Scribbly gums, found years before come back to worry at the edge of consciousness until they leak into your life and quickly take unexpected forms, like speech but in an unremembered tongue. The missing piece has been restored from when, seemingly unaware you changed the person who you were and they, encountered, stayed unsung. By hastening stages you retrace their pathways now the time has come in lyric form, with depth and grace. Embrace the person youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve become.

Leon Trainor 2013

Abhikujita, 2012, acrylic on perforated canvas, 120 x 150 cm

Latsamy, 2012/2013, acrylic on perforated canvas, 150 x 180 cm

Viriya, 2013, acrylic on perforated canvas, 150 x 180 cm

SAVANHDARY VONGPOOTHORN 1971 Born in Laos 1979 Arrived Australia 1990-92 B.A. Visual Arts. UWS Nepean, Sydney 1993 M.A. Visual Arts. UNSW College of Fine Arts, Sydney SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

SELECTED AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES

2011 Stone down a Well, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2008 Re-enchantment, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney 2005 Incantation, Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney 2004 A Certain Distance, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2003 Martin Browne Fine Art at The Yellow House, Sydney 2002 bindi dot tartan zen, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2000 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne 2000 King Street Gallery on Burton, Sydney 1998 King Street Gallery, Sydney 1998 Holy Threads - Lao Tradition and Inspiration, Campbelltown City Art Gallery, Sydney (exhibited with Lao textiles from 19th & 20th century) 1997 Tradition and Interpretation, King Street Gallery, Sydney

2013 2011 2005 2004 2003 2001 2000 2000 1997

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 Artist Artists, Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria 2010 Ephemeral but Eternal Words: Traces of Asia, ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra 2007 The Story of Australian Printmaking, National Gallery of Australia 2007 Smile of the Buddha, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National Gallery Canberra 2006 Zones of Contact, Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 2006 The Tallis Foundation 2006 National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery,Victoria 2006 Crossing Paths II, Martin Browne Fine Art at the Yellow House, Sydney 2005 Echoes of Home: Memory and Mobility in Recent Astral-Asian Art, Museum of Brisbane, Queensland (touring interstate galleries) 2005 This and Other Worlds: Contemporary Australian Drawing, National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria 2003 Crossing Paths (with Ildiko Kovacs and Roy Jackson), Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney 2003 Four, The Holmes à Court Gallery, Western Australia

Australia India Institute Artists’ retreat, Jaipur, India NAVA Janet Holmes a Court Artist’s Grant Artist in Residence, Print Media Workshop, Canberra School of Art, ANU Australia Council Grant, New Work Artist in Residence, Painting Workshop, Canberra School of Art, ANU Australia Council Grant- Tokyo studio residency Royal Over-Seas League travel scholarship Sceggs Redlands Westpac Art Prize 2000 Australia Council Grant - New Work

COLLECTIONS Allen, Allen and Hemsley, Sydney Art Gallery of New South Wales Artbank, Australia Atanaskovic Hartnell, Sydney Campbelltown City Art Gallery Holmes a Court collection Jackson Smith Solicitors, Sydney Jim Wolfensohn World Bank Lady Caruthers Collection, Western Australia Macquarie Group, Australia Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria Queensland Art Gallery SCEGGS Redlands University of Western Sydney, (Macarthur), NSW University of Western Sydney, (Nepean), NSW University of Wollongong, NSW Westfarmers collection Various private collections