Surface

Surface

POP Gallery 7 July - 24 July 2016

CURATED BY MARIAN DREW Featuring work by Louis Lim Amy Carkeek Christine Ko Damien O’Mara Kelly Hussey-Smith & Alan Hill

THE WORLD’S LOVER Essay by Beth Jackson The artist is no one’s lover. The artist is the world’s lover and art is the lover’s discourse – speaking in fragments, partial offerings, tenderly apologising for inadequacies that result from the knowledge that there is no total picture, no complete view, no full story. Perhaps this is never so felt as with the artist photographer with eyes full of evidence, wide for the world. The lover’s language is not one of explanation or justification or instruction. Art can’t tell us what to do. It mustn’t be boring in that way, treating you like an idiot or a child. It may tease and tickle, tug and twist ... inviting, always inviting … even in denial, the invitation to look elsewhere. The language of the tryst – meet me here!

The lover’s language is the way forward through difficulty … because the lover risks all, standing at the edge of abjection. And the artist knows this condition as an abstraction, not just a private abyss but the abysm of the world. The lover’s hand is the only thing that is really offered – the différance.

The photograph is the flimsiest and frailest of things, more pathetic than memory, just a tissue. For all the gadgetry and the technology, for all precision and control, the artist photographer may be the one with least recourse to skill. The artist offers us the world as part of a lover’s contract.

Louis Lim: During this period I felt numb with the fact that dad was in prison. It was not until he was released that I realised I had never written him a letter. I did not hate him; I did not feel betrayed; it was me, in denial, along with wishful thinking, imagining that everything was fine.

Behind the rigid tripod, the photographer trembles. The desire to look intolerable, to be looked at unbearable, so it must be mastered, managed, staged. And then the reveal, the phenomenal efflorescence – what no one saw in the exchange but that which appears as its photographic aftermath. From the recovered negatives of polaroid film, intimate details afloat in chemical swirls, crossing borders and continents, between generations and languages, unwritten.

Amy Carkeek: As we all continue to be seduced by the glossy and glittering surface of such artifice, our desire for the fantasy to continue means we are blind to the reality of what is occurring and what it is that remains.

These surreal effigies hover at the edge of the Anthropocene, offering glimpses of other living beings desperately declaring their inherent worth against their instrumental utility to human civilisation. The lover does not seek to gratify, as a servant to the appetites of consumption. Nor does the lover of the world. The lover’s attention cannot be bought but must be given freely. We may believe that art has been granted this license by modernity but perhaps this is capitalism’s own conjuring. Gifts are mysterious and surprising, not always what we want. The lover’s discourse is a mirror and we are touched with recognition on that reflective surface.

Christine Ko:The experience affected the way my parents’ viewed our family’s marginalised relationship with outside community groups and our own diaspora and this sense of shame and invisibility pervaded throughout my childhood. I also recalled how I used to receive a lot of compliments as a child on my shiny straight black

hair and ‘China doll face’ and as I entered adolescence I went through a phase where I refused to cut my fringe so that I could hide my eyes behind it.

The artist takes the world and finds it wanting, full of longing, with voids to be filled. Tenderly the artist’s eyes listen, stories falling from cracks and folds, slipping away into photographic afterthoughts. The artist’s photographs are veils for visual confessions, encryptions for those secrets that keep being given away, beyond ourselves, unable to be helped. For all pretended mastery, there is only disclosure, a cyclical back and forth that might be a dance and an ornate camouflage.

Damien O’Mara:The series includes several images of the structure, shot in an identical way at various times of the day and in varying weather conditions. As a series, the images suggest that the concrete form is inert only when the inevitabilities of place and time are negated.

The lover’s discourse is always present tense, out of the now. The world’s relentless turn compels care, dragging us around in time, precious time always running out. Photographs are hinges on a door frame, angles of incidence for a monumental passage. They pretend to give pause, supporting a weighty door in a frame, only to fling it open for infinite inscription. The lover traces solid form with melting fingertips, heightening sensations across the skin while the body breathes deeper.

Photography is that conjuring of solid form from thin air, just a play of light that can never be repeated.

Kelly Hussey-Smith/Alan Hill:The revelation of individual fingerprints dismantled our way of seeing the objects in our lives … They forced us to consider the repressed histories of these objects that appear (as if by magic) in our lives.

Photographs terrorise because they can be both evidence and imagination. The photographer is an alluring trickster, speaking the languages of the world with fluency. But the world’s lover is always lonely, needing to be needed, so images are made to serve … they beg us! Use your imagination to look for evidence, seek proof of your private flights of fancy in the world around you.

IMAGE CREDIT Cover / Kelly Hussey-Smith & Alan Hill, Wine Glass, 2016, archival inkjet print.

Inside Left / Christine Ko, Safe House (detail), 2015, site specific installation.

Inside Right (Left image) / Amy Carkeek, Waiting, 2016, archival inkjet print.

Inside Right (Right Image) / Damien O’Mara, Concrete Diptych 1, 2016, inkjet print on photo rag.

Back Cover / Louis Lim, Haircut for Dad, 2015, archival inkjet print.

Thursday 7th July – Sunday 24th July Opening night Saturday 9th July, 6pm – 8pm RSVP 07 3735 6106 or qcagalleries@griffith.edu.au POP Gallery Queensland College of Art Griffith University

griffith.edu.au/qcagalleries

27 Logan Road Woolloongabba Brisbane