Blackfriars off Broadway
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ACH
11 November - 22 December 2009 Brian Blanchflower Robert Boynes John Citizen Domenico de Clario Mikala Dwyer Kim Yong Hun Janet Laurence Ruark Lewis Anne MacDonald Eva Marosy-Weide Arone Meeks Tracey Moffatt Michael Nelson Tjakamarra Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
We would like to thank
Bronwyn Bancroft, Merilyn Fairskye and Gary Sangster for curating the show Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Co-operative John Buckley Gallery Melbourne Greenaway Gallery Adelaide Leeuwin Estate Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney Joyce Parszos Anthony Wallis
and all the exhibiting artists who made Cache possible.
Blackfriars off Broadway Viscopy is Australasia’s rights management organisation for the visual arts. Viscopy provides copyright licensing services in Australia and New Zealand for a wide and varied customer base on behalf of our members. We represent over 7,000 Australian and New Zealand artists and their beneficiaries. Our membership includes many famous names as well as up and coming artists. Indigenous artists account for almost half of our membership. Viscopy represents approximately 43% of all artists in Australia and New Zealand. We also represent some 40,000 international artists and beneficiaries of artists’ estates in the Australasian territory through reciprocal agreements with 45 visual arts rights management agencies around the world.
Blackfriars off Broadway is Viscopy’s new exhibition space for artists located at our premises in Chippendale, Sydney. An annual exhibition program is planned which aims to showcase the quality, beauty and diversity of the visual art created by our members, providing opportunities to stimulate new licensing ideas amongst our customers. We are delighted to launch this new space with our inaugural exhibition, Cache which features artists from every state and territory in Australia. We should like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Gary Sangster who wrote the essay for this catalogue and helped curate Cache. Currently a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, Gary Sangster has international experience as an art educator, curator, writer, and museums director in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the USA. He has organised more than 100 museums exhibitions, including several groundbreaking, collaborative projects. For more information about Blackfriars off Broadway, please telephone 02 9310 2018.
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Cache Art and nothing but Art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life... Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
One question we could ask is what does a jet-black canvas painting tell us? What do we see? How can we respond to it? What do we know by looking at it? Or what can we say of a circular black and white photograph of a tightly arranged bouquet of artificial flowers? Or what do we see in the ghosts and shadows of deep night paintings of French city architecture, or looking through an image of a giant lens trained on an indeterminate landscape. In a large painting, a figure turned away from us almost obliterated by intrusive, splotched paint is one half of a diptych. In the other half of the picture, the representation is entirely indistinguishable. Then there is a costumed child, posing, stock-still for the camera, situated in a backyard with nondescript backdrop of a prosaic shed. Is it a snapshot of a child cast member of Planet of the Apes, or a strange and sad party document, or a weird projection of animistic substitution? Combined in the ensemble exhibition Cache that launches Viscopy’s new gallery space, Blackfriars off Broadway, we see a varied collation of different kinds of fictive, imaginative, and discursive visual art. It is a group exhibition with diffident reservations about the status of the group. There is, self-consciously, little alignment and indistinct correlations. But there are particular statements, precise alternations, and there is a unified sense of dexterous presence, delicate lines, seductive surfaces, visual constructions and inferences, and distinct and indistinct material pleasures. While there is no underlying premise or specific thematic embedded in Cache that does not mean it is not a highly constructed and precise experience. The curatorial strategy behind the exhibition provides an opportunity to animate the discussions surrounding the nature of implied narrative and emergent meaning in any range of collocated visual art. The inherent quality and success of this exhibition depends exactly on the logic and history of the artists on display. The production of meaning and narrative intent is an emergent process in which form, gesture, and material artifact operate semiotically to conjure memories, suggest associations, or stimulate visual pleasure.
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The world of art and the world of images exist in a complex and fertile moment that is held in tension by unprecedented changes in access to and exchange of knowledge. In our technology-driven society which disputes empathy, values, and meaning in favor of reductive systems, functionalism, and instrumentality, social exchange is surprisingly and compulsively interpretative, reiterating forms of discussion and twisting words and meanings to classify, codify, and quantify human spirit and emotive interactions. Art, at least since the advent of Modernism, has been split along various axes that create seemingly irreconcilable differences. At least three kinds of division can be identified, the first being the division between the perceptual and the conceptual. A later, more subtle variety, exemplified by the ground-breaking work of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, divides along an axis of the spiritual and the material. A more recent bifurcation exists between notions of the expressive or the gestural, and the artificial or the technologized. In this context art is no longer just a representation or visualization of the world, it is a witness and evidentiary-based statement of fact, connected causally to a maker, a creator, an artist. The instrumental value of art is circuitously connected, through provenance of transitional ownership, to the originating gesture of the hand, body, and neurology of the artist. This is the palpable fact that makes art and the control and operation of images so significant. Cache is an exhibition that presents a range of both emerging and established artists whose work is characterized by a sophisticated and nuanced accomplishment in traditional and new media. The exhibition is both a cache of form and style, and an evocative display of the artists’ commitment to their professional role within the arts economy through their membership of Viscopy, Australia’s not-for-profit rights management organisation committed to preserving and guaranteeing their rights as creative practitioners and producers of materially and economically significant objects, images, and artifacts.
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Gordon Bennett has been recognized as one of the foremost Australian artists of his generation. He has constrained the force of identity politics and identity aesthetics in his work. By deploying strategies of deflection, concealment, and containment in constructing his images he has resisted the descriptor of Aboriginal artist, while never denying his Indigenous identity.
In a stylized and bland “IKEA” interior, Bennett has presented
the ordered inhabitable space of his assumed and precisely defined persona; the unremarkable, undistinguished morality and socially repressed sensibility of John Citizen.
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John Citizen, Interior (Stacking Chairs) 2005, acrylic on linen, 101 x 101 cm. Photography John O’Brien. Courtesy Greenaway Gallery Adelaide. © John Citizen, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Robert Boynes is a painter and print-maker, whose work engages with the narrativity of cinematic forms in a deliberate and precisely expressive manner. His work acknowledges the inevitability of the narrative inherent in all painting, where a picture is a single selection from an infinite range of possible configurations of elements in time and space. But Boynes double-downs on the contemporary experience of media-driven perceptions of time, space, and story-lines, allowing figures in motion to be arrested in a vibrant and present urban landscape, and creating a taut, tense vision that invites reflection within the cryptic, crowded physicality of contemporary life.
Robert Boynes, Next Exit, 2009, acrylic on canvas - diptych, 120 x 164 cm. Courtesy Brenda May Gallery Sydney. Photography Robert Boynes. Š Robert Boynes, licensed by Viscopy 2009
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Brian Blanchflower is a painter who explores color and form in a reductive system of painting that creates meaning by implication and visual effect. A black painting is never entirely black, can never be entirely dark, as no defined quality of blackness can ever be achieved. And what can be said through a black painting as hardly constrained; the notion of darkness, death, nocturne, heaviness, depth, density, invisibility, danger, morbidity can all retain efficacy in front of an abstract black canvas painting. In conversation, Blanchflower has suggested “that black is the most substantial colour, yet it is the colour of space itself.”
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Brian Blanchflower, UNNAM(E)ABLE (black on red), July/August 2005, oils, acrylic, pumice powder, silica powder, on cotton/ linen canvas, 61.25 x 41 x 3.5 cm. Photography Brian Blanchflower. © Brian Blanchflower, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Domenico de Clario’s work is an inviting meditation on memory and evocation of melancholy through paintings of place. Beginning with the intimate architectural and cityscape paintings of Montmartre by Maurice Utrillo, and connecting those conceptually to his own birthplace of Trieste, de Clario arrives at system of producing a “shadow-trace” which is a negative imprint of a positive image. It is an attempt to turn down the light of a visible painterly representation of space, to discard readily available information, and to create, through deep, dark shadows, a world of more tangible substance, an ethereal world of structural essence permeated with psychological and visceral longing.
Domenico de Clario, Left: o (le sacre coeur and rue saint rustique), Right: i (place du tertre), 2008/09, oil and acrylic on primed linen, 50 x 30 cm. Photography Daniel Dorall. Courtesy John Buckley Gallery Melbourne © Domenico de Clario, licensed by Viscopy 2009
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Mikala Dwyer is a conceptual sculptor and installation artist. In her recent works she has adopted an approach of eclectic compilation, in which forms, objects, and symbols are collated and arranged, rearranged and reconfigured. Her work presents a lexicon of articles and references that compose the rituals and habits of daily experience. As much as the grammar of these systems can be opaque, yet at the same time playfully or meditatively sensuous, she creates variable kinds of mystical, cosmological survival guides.
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Mikala Dwyer, 31, 2009, couch, wood, wine, books, paint 260 × 170 × 70cm. Photography: Ivan Buljan. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. © Mikala Dwyer, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Kim Yong Hun is a younger artist whose work engages with new modes of communication and altered forms of expression available through accessing and manipulating distributive possibilities in developing technology. In his work Mobius, a series of infinitely repeated loops of animated GIF’s, the artist selects one apple from three to eat, ad infinitum. It is simplistic gesture, only enhanced by the looping repetition; performed for the camera to erase any sense of boundary between beginning and end, start to finish, of a gesture or experience. In this way he suggests links between binary opposites of such states as order and disorder, beauty and ugliness, or good and evil, which make the flow between, and transformation of, rigid states of being a potentially more fluid and productive encounter.
Kim Yong Hun, Tiburonia granrojo (Still), 2009, GIF animation (continuous loop). Photography Kim Yong Hun. Š Kim Yong Hun, licensed by Viscopy 2009
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Janet Laurence has developed work around imagery of the landscape that both suggests and frames notions of the fragility of the environment.
In this work, she has used
laboratory glass vessels to blur and smudge our vision of the Styx Forest in Tasmania. The subject matter, materials, and the technique combine to raise the questions of visibility, legibility and accountability. Laurence views the glass as a kind of scientific forensic lens, producing evidence and clarifying visual data. But in this case the effect is reversed, and the science, while accurate, is deeply flawed, producing an indistinct, inarticulate view of nature.
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Janet Laurence, THE LIE IN THE LENS ed 1 of 3, duraclear acrylic dibond mirror, 700 x 1000mm Photography Janet Laurence. Š Janet Laurence, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Ruark Lewis has entered an arena of socially conscious, linguistically constructed work that compresses several different ideas and reference points into single system, and in so doing triggers a wide variety of systematic inferences and visual possibilities and projects. So is an excerpt from a series of explorations in painting and graphics that expose all the possible words embedded in the letters for the term Homelessness. The letters, the words, the fragmented defining term, become modular and transportable, as the artist explores a system for redefining and reanimating attitudes and descriptions of homelessness.
Lewis’ work operates at the edge of paradox in pursuing non-didactic
poetic forms without effacing the painful realties of lived experience and contemporary dislocation.
Ruark Lewis, AN INDEX OF KINDNESS, 2009, from AN INDEX FOR THE HOMELESS, aerosol on canvas / stencil, 100 x 200 cm. Photography Ruark Lewis. Š Ruark Lewis licensed by Viscopy 2009
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Anne MacDonald frequently uses deep, rich colors and imagery of folded, draped fabrics, or delicate fragments of lace or fragile flower petals to evoke darker thoughts of desire, gentle memories of compassion, and most certainly the imaginary stories of lost love and elusive passion. MacDonald’s work has the capacity to both arrest the viewer, slowing them to a standstill, as well as being able to excite the deeper recesses of their imagination. Her work inevitably speaks to questions of identity, about who we are and what triggers and constitutes our compelling relationships to others.
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Anne MacDonald, Ornament 8.2, 2008, Fine art ink-jet print , Image 83cm, framed 93cm diameter. Photography Anne MacDonald. Š Anne MacDonald, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Eva Marosy-Weide is a photographer and video artist, with training in psychology and art. A poetic narrative that reveals the undertow in our connection to place, identity and space underpins her visual work. Her video Sets Of Circumstance-Ferryman explores the act of beginning a journey. In slow-to-stalled motion, an unseen internal rhythm enacted by the water dragging backward and forward hinders visible progress, holding the audience in a kind of mesmerizing stasis. The oar pushes into the current and there is a sense of urgency, but the ferryman maintains a gentle pace. The result of the process is not entirely clarified and there is a hint of danger in this entropic enterprise.
Eva Marosy-Weide, Still from SETS OF CIRCUMSTANCE-FERRYMAN Š 2008, single channel video, stereo sound; 3 mins 10 secs, looped. Photography Eva Marosy-Weide. Š Eva Marosy-Weide, licensed by Viscopy 2009
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Arone Meeks’ work in the exhibition, The Healing Place, combines Aboriginal motifs and narrative forms with echoes of modernist form, especially post-war surrealism. The logic of connecting Indigenous interpretations of spirituality with modernist notions of physic interpretations of dream-space provides an evocative channel to connect traditional imagery with contemporary experience.
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Arone Meeks, This Healing Place, Screenprint (4 plate), Edition 45, 57 x 76 cm. Photography Kerry Colrain. Š Arone Meeks, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is one of Australia’s most acclaimed Indigenous artists. His graphic style exemplifies the Papunya Tula dot painting that has gained remarkable credibility for its capacity to negotiate a position within western aesthetic while maintaining a compelling representation of Indigenous identity. Tjapaltjarri’s work is grounded in the spiritual and cultural systems of belief that revolve around the notions of The Dreaming which constitutes Aboriginal law, history, and lore (dreaming stories.) The large tapestry work included in the exhibition, Bushfire Dreaming, narrates a natural, recurring, and regenerative environmental event in Australian and Aboriginal history, and as an artifact, is an interesting example of extending his imagery into an exquisite aesthetic/functional product.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Bushfire Dreaming, 1986, Tapestry, Atelier Pinton Aubusson France 2007, Private Collection, 170 x 253 cm © Clifford Possum Estate. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency & Viscopy 2009, Photography by Richard Glover.
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Tracey Moffatt is an internationally recognized artist working with video and photography, whose work has proved adept at negotiating the politics of race and class in subtle and evocative ways. Her work is emotional without being emotive, and she has imbued much of her best work with poignancy and sadness, without conflating the underlying savagery of social and cultural dislocation. This lifeless snapshot image of a child in a creepy Planet of the Apes costume, taken from her painfully wistful Backyard series of down market images, contains a redolent sense of sadness; of the inevitability of succumbing to the fictions of Hollywood-dreaming in an improbable, inhospitable environment.
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Tracey Moffatt, Planet of the Apes, 1973, Backyard Series, Off set print on Natural Snow Gum paper using light fast ink 44 × 35.5cm, Edition of 60. From the Boomalli Collection. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney, Photography Richard Glover Š Tracey Moffatt, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra’s astonishing visual skills and sense of form and color in constructing traditional Aboriginal narrative forms have ensured he is viewed as one of the finest traditional Indigenous artists. His work consistently explored visual fields and color planes that have readily extended and transcended the structured formal elements of traditional Aboriginal motifs and strategies. In this way he has opened up the language of Aboriginal painting for a far broader range of expert and casual audiences, curious to discover the elaborate spiritual and tribal messages embedded in the prosaic beauty of Aboriginal cultural forms. Š Gary Sangster 2009
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, New Country, 2002, acrylic on canvas 121 x 151cm. Courtesy Boomalli Collection. Photography Richard Glover. Š Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, licensed by AAA and Viscopy 2009
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CACHE
Viscopy
1 Blackfriars Street, Chippendale NSW 2008 ABN 98 069 759 922 Phone : 02 9310 2018 Fax 02 9310 3864 Email: Bob@viscopy.com