Giving voice to Kirsten Coelho’s quiet forms

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A new Wakefield Press monograph on Kirsten Coelho by author Wendy Walker brings well-deserved attention to the work of this Adelaide-based ceramic artist. Spanning 30 years, Coelho’s practice is grounded in research and draws on the lineage of studio potters, the history of painting, and the myriad artefacts of human history. Walker has successfully summarised these concerns, along with other key influences, to present a book that provides an enjoyable insight into Coelho’s enduring oeuvre. 

Around half the publication is dedicated to a gallery of full-colour images that document Coelho’s ceramic compositions and which successfully capture the qualities of the glazes and subtlety of the forms. These photographs (the vast majority of which were taken by Adelaide’s Grant Hancock over the past 20 years) ground Walker’s investigation of Coelho’s life and practice in the vessels themselves.

The book’s design by Liz Nicholson also draws on Coelho’s iconic palette: pale eggshell blue, rust red and a spectrum of whites. Walker’s text is further interspersed with photographs of Coelho’s studio space, personal object collections and the artworks that inspire her. These reiterate visually what Walker writes of Coelho: that her practice is borne of a strong interest in the historic vessel forms found in museum collections and represented in painting. 

In the foreword, Glenn Barkley sets the tone for the value of Coelho’s practice within both a craft and art context. He writes of the tension between ceramics as functional objects to be used and ceramics as art in a gallery. He situates Coelho’s work at this junction and reflects on her innovation within the historical lineage of craft.  

Elsewhere, Walker charts the progression of Coelho’s work in a loose chronology, focusing on its characteristic traits (the compositions of vessels, the play of light and shadow, and the glaze), and bringing together the ‘trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary references’ that are central to the artist’s practice.

Within this structure, too, Walker captures the complexity that underpins Coelho’s work. She weaves together previous scholarship, as well as her conversations with Coelho and those close to her, to provide a deeper glimpse into a multifaceted artist. The connections Walker draws between Coelho’s conceptual concerns and that of her husband, the jazz saxophonist Derek Pascoe, are particularly perceptive. 

The latest in a series of monographs focused on local artists initiated by the South Australian Living Artists Festival, Kirsten Coelho was produced to coincide with the artist’s solo exhibition ‘Ithaca’ at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, in late 2020. The final chapter of the publication focuses on this most recent work as the culmination of Coelho’s longstanding studio practice. Enduring beyond the exhibition itself, the book gives meaning and shape to the important trajectory of Coelho’s continuing career.

Saskia Scott

Wendy Walker, Kirsten Coelho, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2020, 168 pages, AU$54.95

Transcendence of the benign: ‘Hardenvale’ at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

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The ongoing travelling installation Hardenvale – our home in Absurdia (2019) by Todd Fuller, Kellie O’Dempsey and Catherine O’Donnell emphasises the pervading universality of the Australian suburban experience. Inviting us along the metaphorical garden path, and inadvertently down an immersive rabbit hole, the artists take us on an upended journey through collective memories of suburbia that elicit mixed emotions of disquiet and delight.

A project more than two years in the making, Fuller, O’Dempsey and O’Donnell have created a three-dimensional full-scale reconstruction of a typical 1960s family home replete with formica furniture and a Hills hoist out the back. Drawing from three generations of experience, Hardenvale is imbued with myriad dualities. For some it may hold the memories of adolescence, dreams and family; for others it is marred with recollections of boredom, pain and loss. Here the artists have created a mise en scène for our personal reminiscences and moments of reflection to play out within the corridors.

Standing at the facade we are greeted by family familiars – a sculpted tyre swan and the projection of ambling dogs – as lamplight emanating through sets of venetian blinds beckons us inside. A soundscape of barking, rain, sweeping brooms and railway-crossing bells conjures the ambient noise of suburban life. The physical form of the building falls away at the periphery, first as bare stud walls and gauzy partitions, then into three-dimensional drawings. Through the threshold lies semi-barren rooms furnished with objects, drawings and moving images heady with nostalgia, marking the spaces as reliquaries of past memories. Lace doilies adorn side tables and a leather armchair takes pride of place alongside a framed collage of prized racing greyhounds. Light switches, blinds and lamps appear countless times throughout the installation – as the physical object, a drawing, an image within a photo frame or as a film projection. Playing with scale, these recurring images become motifs of the altered suburban experience, transforming the ordinary and mundane.

In the final room, domestic objects are overlaid with animated drawings to create a surreal space of alternate reality – a dreamscape of domestic life. Here 1970s desk lights are piled high atop towers of cardboard boxes, and projections of sink drains and snags on the barbie play as a humorous yet disquieting rendition of suburbia. Occupying this ambivalent shadow land of feeling and memory, Hardenvale forces us to interrogate the benign and find wonder in the everyday.

Rebecca Blake, Wagga Wagga

Having premiered at Sydney’s National Art School as part of the 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, ‘Hardenvale – our home in Absurdia’ is currently on view at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until 31 January 2021 before touring to Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (10 April – 30 May 2021) and Tamworth Regional Gallery (2 October – 28 November 2021).

Declaring presence: ‘Ngaliya Diyam’ at Granville Centre Art Gallery

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In a year of precarity and isolation, artists and organisations alike have demonstrated that cultural resilience is forged through locality and communal solidarity. Indeed, American academic Susan Healey has defined cultural resilience as the capacity of a distinct cultural system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change so as to retain key elements of structure and identity.

In Western Sydney, Granville Centre Art Gallery’s inaugural exhibition ‘Ngaliya Diyam’ co-curated by Dennis Golding and Rebekah Raymond celebrates the cultural resilience of First Nations Australians. The title ‘we are here’ in the Darug language itself poses as a declarative defiance of the disturbances of violence and genocide brought by the settler-colonial state. The rejuvenation of language actively resists the monocultural, monolithic and monolingual institutions and policies of White Australia. It heralds the ongoing and indefatigable creativity and innovation of the works of Nadeena Dixon, Jannawi Dance Clan, Aunty Marilyn Russell, Lucy Simpson, Aunty Esme Timbery, Shay Tobin and Kirra Weingarth (on display until 24 January 2021).

Timbery’s renowned sculptures see her covering miniature models of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and two baby velvet slippers in shells collected from her home in La Perouse. Her intricate handiwork is part of a tradition of shellwork carried through her matrilineal heritage. Such techniques demonstrate a deep knowledge of the waterways, the tides and the shores to find the particular shells Timbery uses. Since the 1800s Indigenous women have often sold shell baskets to tourists in La Perouse and, within this historical context, it is also possible to see Timbery’s work as a reflection on an industry that continues to exploit and appropriate Indigenous culture. These souvenirs often take the form of Australian architectural icons that themselves, as architectural feats based on imitations of Euro-American design, are reminders of the erasure of Indigenous histories and cultures as part of the colonial project. By reclaiming these icons by covering them in shells, the works are a critical interrogation of this project. These darker histories are also embodied by Timbery’s baby shoes, intended as a memorial for the lost children of the Stolen Generations. Simultaneously, however, the painstaking handiwork is testament to a flourishing tradition that endures despite centuries of imposition and theft. Timbery reveals that these traditions continue not only in and with the land, but in and with waterways and airways.

Trans-generational sharing of knowledge is further evoked in Lucy Simpson’s installation Necklace for a Boy (2016), in which a large photographic print on the back wall depicts a young boy tenderly looking down at a necklace he wears. White ceramic shards modelled after stone fragments found on Yuwaalaraay country cascade from the ceiling, casting shadows onto the photograph behind and posing as a reminder of ancestral presences. By doing so, the shards and their shadows represent intangible systems and modes of knowledge that will continue from generation to generation. This embodied knowledge is further displayed in the 12-minute performance by Jannawi Dance Clan filmed and displayed on a video screen in the corner of the gallery space.

If the aim of the colonial project, in particular the concept of terra nullius, lies in total erasure and denial, then Weingarth’s globes and orbs in Connections Reignited (2020) are a reminder that the flame of cultural resilience has not been extinguished. Weingarth’s use of light may be seen as a corrective to the persistent absentmindedness of mainstream Australia.

There are motifs of continuity throughout the exhibition space in the form of concentric shapes, ties, bonds, threading and weaving. Dixon’s installation of coconut fibre and twine creates a woven portal. A projection of blue circles onto the gallery ceiling speaks again to attachment and continuation, a motif mirrored in the exhibition design by April Phillips that features chains of links to symbolise continuity but also togetherness and solidarity among First Nations curators, artists and cultural leaders, capturing a moment of profound and radical hope moving forwards.

Soo-Min Shim, Publication Manager  

‘Ngaliya Diyam’ is open at Granville Centre Art Gallery until 24 January 2021.

The possibilities of strangeness: Christian Thompson’s ‘Strange Flower’ at the Australian Embassy in Berlin

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Billie Holiday’s famous song ‘Strange Fruit’ was first recorded in 1939, written by Abel Meeropol as a metaphor for the brutality of racism in America. The haunting beauty of the lyrics creates an eerie contrast between the violence of racial intolerance and the incongruous allure of nature in the ‘scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh’. This paradox is reflected in the title of Christian Thompson’s new exhibition ‘Strange Flower’, opened in the atrium space of the Australian Embassy in Berlin (until March 2021), in cooperation with Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin. Much like Holiday’s song, ‘Strange Flower’ includes work that beguiles and deceives, that warrants a constant looking and un-looking as Thompson redefines so-called Australia for international audiences.

Thompson’s new large-scale photographic work Rule of Three (2020) is nearly three metres by three metres, immersing the visitor in a composition mainly composed of dense and overlapping depictions of Australian native flora. An abundance of banksia, waratah and eucalyptus leaves converge in a dizzying arrangement of red and yellow. In the centre of the work, however, the top half of Thompson’s eyes are visible as they stare back at the visitor. Three sets of hands with their palms facing out protrude from the wall of flowers, as if pressing onto the glass of the frame. There is an ambivalence whether Thompson recedes or emerges from the dense foliage, if the palms are a defiant gesture signalling cessation or a reaching for connection. This ambiguity provokes questions around the power structures that are embedded in the gaze itself. Considering the problematic representation of Indigenous Australians for centuries, the act of looking, gazing and watching pivots around central issues of agency and ownership, as well as passivity. Thompson looks out from the leaves to the viewer, in an act of self-representation as he has stated in conversation with the Australian Ambassador to Germany, Philip Green that ‘my body is my studio’.

 By contrast, in the three photographs displayed from Thompson’s 2012 series ‘We Bury Our Own’, the gaze is no longer present: crystals are placed over the artist’s eyes. Created in response to the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum’s Australian photographic collection and the difficult issues of repatriation that arise from ethnographic collections, Thompson envisioned the work as part of a methodology of ‘spiritual repatriation’, thereby activating the objects themselves. Here Thompson reinserts himself into the archive, revealing its objects as vessels for human relations. While archives have historically been part of an apparatus of silencing, Thompson’s photographs shift the focus to the spiritual elements and intangible cultural heritage of the objects.   

Thompson does not necessarily regard his photographic works as self-portraits. Rather, he has asserted in conversation with Green that: ‘when I look at my own work I don’t necessarily see myself; I see where I was living at the time, the ideas that I was gravitating towards.’  

In this distancing, Thompson illustrates the transcultural approach he embodies in his art, recognising the relationship between cultures and the diverse nonlinear and multidirectional processes of cultural-identity formation. This is best exemplified by the artist’s Untitled #6 (2010). The exhibition opens with this photograph from Thompson’s ‘King Billy’ series in which the artist’s skin is painted green. Almost in a foetal position, he cradles a bouquet of lilies, seemingly suspended in space. It may be argued that Thompson evokes literal and metaphoric concepts of the alien, the foreign and the unknown, thereby opening up a global discourse around dispossession more generally.

By doing so, Thompson utilises strangeness as tactic and strategy, understanding that this quality is productive, and that strangeness is a methodology for the non-normative. Only then is it possible to expose the paradigms of the mainstream that may insidiously normalise systems of attrition, dismissal and cruelty.

Soo-Min Shim, Publication Manager

Christian Thompson’s ‘Strange Flower’ is open at the Australian Embassy in Berlin until 1 March 2021. Currently the exhibition is only open by appointment and interest is registered via info.berlin@dfat.gov.au.

A singular vision: ‘COVENTRY’ at the New England Regional Art Museum

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The Coventry Collection was recently on show again at the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM) in Armidale. The new iteration, ably curated by Belinda Hungerford, revealed the great strength of the collection that Chandler Coventry (1924–1999) gave to the people of the region where he was born. As a gallerist and philanthropist, Channy collected paintings he liked and supported the artists he believed in. Thus, it was an exciting exhibition that combined some of Australia’s best-known names and some now almost unknown, but they all sat comfortably together and jostled for attention. 

The hang could have been described as ‘Salon Plus’, the complete opposite to how the works first appeared in the opening exhibition at NERAM in 1983. I helped hang that well-spaced show, but the new iteration was hardly a surprise: this was how Channy often displayed works in his homes, side-by-side, one atop another, leaning against the walls; he lived surrounded by the art he loved.

Albert Irvin’s giant Discoverer (1972) stood sentinel at the entrance to the show, and in quick succession major works by Peter Booth, Janet Dawson, Gunter Christmann and Dick Watkins came into view. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gene Davis and Charlotte Moorman played their part in the ensuing story, as did Max Miller, Robert Owen and Joe Szabo. The roll call of an era went on: Howard Arkley, Martin Sharp, Michael Taylor and Brett Whiteley, to name but a few. These were paintings all acquired not long after they were made, from solo shows and studios. Indeed, Channy supported many artists with astute early picks from their latest exhibition, often to the annoyance of his clients.

Coventry was undoubtedly eclectic in his taste – he wasn’t afraid to collect bold abstraction, figurative and narrative works simultaneously – but he had an eye, and it was this element that gave the show its real sense of energy and style. Hungerford gathered together a broad selection of works, passionately collected, and with a singular vision that bound it together.

Cannily included by Hungerford were a group of portraits of Channy: Nigel Thomson’s 1983 Archibald Prize-winning work of him alone in the middle of his gallery cuts close to the bone, but it is Angus Nivison’s 1990s series that digs deepest. These haunting works left the 1987 Judy Cassab portrait in the cold.

As a young country boy first touched by art, Channy’s appreciation never stopped growing, and this collection was his way of giving back to the region. How good to see Hungerford and NERAM’s dynamic Director Rachael Parsons celebrate this gift by encouraging a new generation of art lovers.

Christopher Hodges, Armidale

‘COVENTRY’ was on display at Armidale’s New England Regional Art Museum from 1 August until 18 October 2020.

Bringing colour to forgotten histories in Gary Carsley’s ‘Chromophilia’

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Cultural institutions dedicated to the preservation and presentation of significant collections have been irrevocably transformed by the social and economic impact of COVID-19. Yet the changes now taking place in such institutions across the world cannot be attributed solely to the pandemic. Many have been years, even decades in the making. The need to adapt to extraordinary circumstances has, however, uncovered hidden fault lines and revealed new solutions for old arguments. Digitisation of collections and updating of websites with user-friendly interfaces, for example, has been ongoing since the turn of the millennium, but has advanced much more rapidly in recent months, as cultural institutions find themselves competing for a global audience alongside a growing range of other digital content providers.

Even an institution as tied to tradition as New York’s Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) must adapt to survive in this rapidly evolving arts ecology. The ICAA has shown a readiness to embrace new avenues for communication and education with their online exhibition ‘Chromophilia’, an intervention into their historic plaster cast collection by Sydney artist and scholar Gary Carsley. Invited to respond, not to physical sculptures, but to the digital avatars of three casts gifted to the ICAA in 2004 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Discobolus, Sleeping Ariadne and Demeter Ludovisi, replicas of Roman statues based on earlier Greek models – Carsley has created a suite of animations using image overlay techniques that mimic popular social media filters.

The partial Sleeping Ariadne, for example, gently slumbers, her chest rising and falling as the dark background against which classical sculptures are customarily shown lightens and fades from black to various shades of blue. Ariadne herself, caught in a moment of repose from which she will awake to discover that her lover Theseus has deserted her, also takes on new hues. She is saturated at first with a palette of lilac, green, yellow and pink, a transfusion of vivid colour that revivifies petrified flesh and fabric, gaining intensity as Singaporean composer Louise Loh’s ambient score builds to a crescendo. Yet this gentle reinvigoration abruptly transitions into a succession of feverish hues, the breath of the sleeping figure quickening as the insistent chiming of a cymbal seems to mark the passage of anxious thoughts and irrational visions until, at last, figure and background alike fade to black, leaving only her hair, lips and luxurious garments visible in the darkness.

Carsley’s intervention breathes new life into the ICAA’s pristinely white plaster casts, yet his project is not driven only by a desire to recreate the past in living technicolour, but to restore these casts to the multicoloured splendour of their ancient models. In the classical world, visitors to the website are informed, sculpture and architecture were ‘host to an explosion of colour, called polychromy’. The aim of this exhibition is ‘to reimagine what they would look like if they had never lost their original chroma’. In his artist statement, Carsley sets his project apart from other interventions into institutional collections in which artists or curators juxtapose objects ‘from different cultures or periods to challenge sanctioned histories by proposing alternatives’. Instead, inspired by online gaming, he seeks to reveal that which is hidden ‘in plain sight, [but] must be discovered, uncovered and interpreted’.

As such, ‘Chromophilia’ also draws attention to another development in cultural institutions that has been accelerated by the impact of the global pandemic. Plaster casts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although they appear aesthetically pure, are indelibly coloured by the ideologies and histories of European colonialism. The idealised forms of these whitewashed figures, and the veneration for a comparably idealised classical past that they represent, are inextricably tied to scientific and institutional rationalisations of racial prejudice. For Carsley, the project offered an opportunity to shed light on this history, and to remind contemporary audiences that ‘there is no such thing as a special group of people who can uniquely claim to be entirely without colour’.

In this, Carsley could be compared with English art historian Alice Procter, whose ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ of major museums and galleries are likewise intended to ‘unravel the role colonialism played in the broader material history of celebrated works … and [their] ideological aesthetics’. Inaugurated in 2017, Procter’s tours predate the pandemic and played a crucial part in a subsequent decision made by several of the institutions involved to introduce greater transparency in their labelling of artefacts stolen, looted or otherwise acquired in unethical circumstances. The closure of cultural institutions has not put an end to such calls for accountability. Rather, as in ‘Chromophilia’, the revelation of forgotten or hidden histories has gained greater visibility and accessibility as artists, curators and educators realise the full potential of online and digital resources.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

Gary Carsley’s ‘Chromophilia’ can be visited on the ICAA’s website through January 2021. The artist’s concurrent exhibition ‘ARBOUR ARDOUR’ is on display at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery until 28 November 2020.

A studied elegance: Margaret Woodward at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery

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Margaret Woodward (born 1938) has enjoyed a lifetime career as an artist, achieving both commercial and critical success. Her work has been awarded major prizes and is included in important public collections. But, as many of her female colleagues have found, the road to success is neither straightforward nor forgiving. She excelled as a student at the National Art School and worked with many of the big names in Sydney – Douglas Dundas, Peter Laverty, Godfrey Miller and John Passmore – in the late 1950s, when women teachers were few and far between. Her early life was not easy, instilling a determination to succeed and an undaunted work ethic. She understood that art was a serious business and that to succeed, discipline and concentration on the task at hand were essentials.

Woodward made drawing central and, as ‘From the Studio’ (her survey exhibition at Wahroonga’s Grace Cossington Smith Gallery at Abbotsleigh) attests, line has been at the heart of her paintings and drawings. Despite her studious and dedicated approach, her work has never been tight or formulaic, with a freedom and liveliness that is key to her appeal. Her figure work, animal studies, still life and landscapes all have a studied elegance of composition, no matter what the mood. That seriousness of approach becomes evident in her subject matter, creating images that can have a dark intensity, making large and powerful works from what some might see as eccentric subject matter. The inclusion of individuals with disabilities, often depicted with a Goyaesque darkness, are studies in difference and power, not pity.

The fact that the exhibition is drawn from the works in Woodward’s studio means that the curators Mary Faith and Lisa Jones have been given the chance to present a personal, more intimate side of the artist’s character, showing, sometimes for the first time, works of a less popular style and subject matter. The physical studio was fundamental to Woodward’s view of her art – there was to be no pottering around on the kitchen table; as soon as she could afford it, she built a large two-storied space some distance from her Hornsby home. Its style echoes her approach to art – modern and contemporary, but with subtle overtones of times past. Like the artist herself, the studio is ordered and efficient, with works carefully framed and stored, props artfully arranged ready for use, and all the materials one could need laid out, ready for the next creative outing.

Woodward’s works have made the short journey to Abbotsleigh to be displayed in the perfect environment – a space that is domestic in scale, but open and airy – where they have the chance to be studied in quiet contemplation. Her own links with the school, in a gallery named for the area’s most notable artist, help make for an art experience of the highest order.

Gavin Fry, Sydney

The author of Margaret Woodward: Paintings 1950 – 2007 (Beagle Press, 2008), Gavin Fry will be holding a gallery talk on 11 December to coincide with ‘Margaret Woodward: From the Studio’, which will reopen at Sydney’s Grace Cossington Smith Gallery from 14 November until 12 December 2020.

Material limits: Prue Venables’s ‘impossible’ porcelain and elusive forms

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The Australian Design Centre’s touring exhibition ‘Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft / Prue Venables’ is the ninth in a series of major solo exhibitions celebrating the skill and innovation of significant Australian craftspeople. The exhibition presents a cohesive body of Venables’s recent work, showing both her technical accomplishments in the ceramic medium, and her commitment to pushing its boundaries into new territories.  

Venables’s porcelain pieces – in satin blacks, soft whites, bright red, pale yellow and glossy celadon – repeat throughout the exhibition. The solid and satin surface of the glazes are subtle and almost invisible, leaving the focus squarely on the nuances of the porcelain forms. While they frequently reference the domestic and the functional, these objects often defy easy use.

Venables employs the pottery wheel, a process paradoxically associated with symmetry and the cylindrical form, to create her distinctive oval, asymmetrical or oblong works. The process for creating these shapes is revealing. First cutting the circular foot off the thrown porcelain, Venables reattaches the retained vessel walls to a new triangular or oval base. The result is a subtle contradiction: a form that carries with it the qualities of the thrown vessel, yet one that could never have been created by the wheel alone.

Through her sustained practice and careful attention, Venables works with the properties and processes to create works that test the boundaries of what porcelain can support before it collapses, warps or cracks. Arriving at this material limit, Venables also introduces elements in timber and metal, often as handles, to extend her works beyond what is possible with porcelain alone.

Venables’s works reveal a problem-solving mind, strongly influenced by a tradition of craft: moving each of her pieces ever closer towards the materially elusive – impossible to fire, to glaze, to throw, to make. For those familiar with the medium, you are left looking closer, hunting for clues to unravel how the work was made. Sieve (2017), for example, is reminiscent of a sieved ladle, or perhaps a large tea strainer. It is thrown and altered in Limoges porcelain with a handle that gently tapers toward a deep basket filled with precise circular holes. A tiny iron spot near the end of the handle, which would have emerged from the clay body in the firing, is the only blemish on the cool white surface. There is the barest whisper of unglazed porcelain ringing the lip of the sieve where it must have rested in the kiln. The form is perfectly balanced.

None of this is to say, of course, that the exhibition is without flaw. Venables’s body of work, shown in Canberra on uniform display cases, would certainly have benefited from variation in the presentation height to allow the viewer to see inside the shapes or reflect on the symmetry of the forms and the translucency of the porcelains. Yet the abiding sense one gets, in viewing the exhibition, is that Prue Venables understands her medium – both its possibilities and limitations – in a way that few others do.

Saskia Scott, Canberra

Presented by the Australian Design Centre, ‘Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft / Prue Venables’ was on display at the Canberra Potters Society, Watson Arts Centre from 13 August until 11 October 2020, before continuing on to Bendigo Art Gallery (31 October 2020 – 7 February 2021) and seven more venues nationally. Saskia Scott is a 2020 Critic-in-Residence at ANCA, Canberra, in a special project partnership with Art Monthly Australasia supported by artsACT.

Catharsis and clairvoyance: ‘If the future is to be worth anything’ at ACE Open

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After six months of COVID-related closure, Adelaide’s ACE Open reopened its doors this September with one of its most ambitious exhibitions to date: ‘If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey’ (until 12 December). Curator-in-Residence Rayleen Forester and Artistic Director Patrice Sharkey couldn’t have anticipated the waves of crises that would define 2020 amid their early imaginings of such an exhibition. And yet, its premise is prescient.

The survey exhibition, generally speaking, is inherently historiographic in its quest to capture a distant or more recent past for posterity. It is often a proof of record, ensuring an artist or a sociopolitical moment doesn’t slip between the paragraphs of history. ‘If the future is to be worth anything’, however, is more akin to divination. It is a call into the blank space of the future, a sounding out of new and possible artistic forms and practices – a task that feels doubly difficult amid so much political, ecological and social uncertainty, when the future looks anything but blank.

Sundari Carmody, one of the ten South Australian artists and collectives represented, performs powerfully under this kind of echolocation. Her quasi-architectural maquettes Stepwell I and Lightwell I (both 2020), each cast in light-absorbing black concrete, act as inverted monuments – anti-monuments – to a year of grief and dark energy. Their mass is counterweighted by the levity of Yusuf Ali Hayat’s Baab-al-Salaam (2020), a maze-like installation of semi-transparent and semi-reflective planes of refracting perspex. Navigating the apertures between Hayat’s surfaces (which, along with the work’s title, reference one of the gates to enter the Great Mosque of Mecca) produces an illusory experience, where reality is seen to ceaselessly transform.

A more sinister futility emanates from Kate Bohunnis’s edges of excess (2020). A large-scale, highly polished stainless-steel pendulum swings noiselessly just millimetres above a sagging strap of flesh-coloured silicone. The pendulum itself is guillotine-like, a muted blade that not only hints at notions of body horror but captures the nihilism of time. James Kurtze, of Tutti Arts, takes on a similar theme in The Kooky Time Machine (2020). Whirring analogue clocks, digital watches and a collection of defunct iPods are assembled into a cardboard cuckoo clock meets Rube Goldberg machine. Despite its happy LED lights and DIY aesthetic, Kurtze’s clock upsets the idea that time, and life more broadly, is an easy sequence of logical events.            

The inclusion of senior Ngarrindjeri artist and activist Sandra Saunders ensures the future is not solely the dominion of the young. Saunders’s painting Museum of Sorrow (2020) recasts the museum collection as a record of ecological loss – a response to the Black Summer bushfires. It sits alongside Carly Tarkari Dodd’s Sticks and Stones (2020), a series of reflective photographic portraits rejecting imposed categories of Aboriginality that celebrates leading Indigenous figures in South Australia. Together, they remind us that intergenerational knowledge is fundamental to any future-forming process.

At the time of writing, South Australia has only just reopened its borders to New South Wales having spent the past six months looking geographically and economically inward. In this sense, ‘If the future is to be worth anything’ is sentient in its internal focus, in its half-question, half-statement. It offers catharsis and clairvoyance, possible pathways out of hibernation, and highlights the calibre of artists currently practising across the state.

Belinda Howden, Adelaide

The writer also contributed to the exhibition catalogue that accompanied ‘If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey’, which continues at Adelaide’s ACE Open until 12 December. 

Winners announced for the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize and 18th Meroogal Women’s Art Prize

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The top spot in arts columns across Australia this past week has been claimed, quite rightly, by the news that not only the coveted Archibald Prize but also the equally esteemed Wynne, Roberts Family and Packing Room Prizes have been awarded this year to Aboriginal artists. The naming of Vincent Namatjira as the first and only Aboriginal artist to receive an Archibald since the inauguration of the award almost a century ago in 1921, for a self-portrait with Australian Football League icon and ardent campaigner for racial justice Adam Goodes, has been justifiably celebrated as a crucial step toward a greater institutional recognition of Indigenous artists.

Followers of the art world could be forgiven, then, for overlooking the announcement of two other prizes of comparable prestige and financial reward for those lucky few chosen to receive them. On 17 September, the JamFactory in Adelaide named New South Wales-based artist Cobi Cockburn as the recipient of the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize for her monumental Murmuration (Light) (2019), while ACT-based Madisyn Zabel took home the David Henshall Emerging Artist Prize for her luminous assemblage of geometric forms, Illuminate III (2020). Inaugurated in 2016, the biennial prize represents the culmination of an ongoing dialogue between the JamFactory and prominent collectors and patrons Jim and Helen Carreker, offering established and emerging glass artists an opportunity to expand their practice in new directions as well as a platform to foster broader public awareness of their work, and of contemporary glass art in general.

Cockburn describes Murmuration (Light) as an exploration of ‘the silence in synchronicity and the beauty of unspoken energy’, harnessing the power of colour and abstract form to arouse a new awareness of the spaces between the geometric and divine. The work is founded on a linear grid, ‘a matrix of material and immaterial elements’ with which Cockburn sought to evoke ‘a blending of the physical and spiritual … uniform and woven together, generating a vibration of matter’. Zabel has also drawn inspiration from the transcendence of geometric form, translating the famous optical illusion of a cube that appears to exist simultaneously in two spatial planes, first devised by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker in the early nineteenth century, into a series of three-dimensional billets of coloured glass. Like Necker’s cube, the dimensions of these billets appear to shift when seen from different points of view. Both works will take pride of place alongside those of the other 18 finalists in the 2020 FUSE Glass Prize exhibition at the Australian Design Centre, Sydney, from 9 October.

Hot on the heels of Cockburn’s and Zabel’s success in Adelaide, the recipients of yet another highly regarded prize were announced on 23 September in Nowra on the NSW coast, at the handsome estate of the Meroogal house museum. Now in its eighteenth iteration, the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize was created to amplify the voices of women in the arts, inviting submissions of work in any medium from artists across NSW, with the one condition that they must respond to the history of Meroogal and the rich collections amassed by the four generations of women who called the estate their home over the past 100 years.

From a pool of 40 finalists, selected from over 300 submissions, the panel of judges for this year’s award selected Sarah Goffman as the recipient of the grand prize of AU$7000, a Sydney Living Museums membership and a Bundanon Trust artist-in-residence scholarship, in honour of her work Blue willow, and Sassy Park as recipient of the second prize for her work Garden play set, while Julie Paterson gained a high commendation for A dozen modest fancies and a solo exhibition opportunity at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, Nowra. Drawing inspiration, respectively, from the Willow Pattern crockery used by the women of the Thorburn and Macgregor families who once lived at Meroogal, the wooden Erzgebirge toys with which their children played and the Staffordshire porcelain figurines ornamenting their cabinets, and the memories contained within the upholstery of a ‘generous’ armchair, Goffman, Park and Paterson bring the stories of the house and its former occupants to life with evident warmth and artistic rigour.

The FUSE Glass Prize and Meroogal Women’s Art Prize are animated by different aims and draw from two very distinct facets of Australia’s arts ecology. Yet the artists chosen to receive these awards in 2020 are, notably, united by their shared gender and their focus on media long considered less worthy of serious art-historical attention than the disciplines of painting and sculpture upheld by the Archibald, Wynne, Roberts Family and Packing Room Prizes, among many others. These awards are a fitting reminder of the very real need for initiatives like the National Gallery of Australia’s ongoing #KnowMyName campaign, while the stories of the women named as recipients offer a timely counterpart to those of the women occupying the pages of our current issue, #OurNamesAmongstOthers, guest-edited by Canberra-based artist Raquel Ormella. Above all, the support and visibility that these and other prizes offer serve as further evidence of the strength and regional diversity of our nationwide artistic community.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

The art of lockdown

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The number of coronavirus infections diagnosed every 24 hours in Victoria is now comfortably within double digits and has been decreasing daily, offering hope that Australia may soon regain the flattened curve that made us the envy of countries struggling with far higher rates of infection and death. The reduction in case numbers also shows that the Stage 4 lockdown in metropolitan Melbourne since August has been effective, despite the barrage of criticism directed at Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Restrictions are set to ease but will remain in force with a moderation of severity until a return to ‘COVID normal’ in late November, assuming case numbers remain low.

Despite these restrictions and the horror of the pandemic, the rhythms of life in Melbourne have maintained their course, albeit with some adjustment. Artists figure prominently among those compelled to adapt to new constraints, and the need is more urgent than ever to support those who lack a devoted patron, institutional backing or a commercial outlet. Two recent video works by Camila Galaz and Laresa Kosloff, sponsored by a City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grant and Buxton Contemporary Light Source Commission, respectively, exemplify the extent to which such support can encourage creative inquiry in even the most adverse of circumstances. Working in a locked-down Melbourne, neither Galaz nor Kosloff have allowed restrictions on their movement to inhibit their artistic vision and have instead transformed constraint into a source of inspiration.

In Unwelcome Visitant, a 17-minute reflection on her experience of re-reading French author Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), Galaz captures the solipsism and anxiety of isolation with an understated yet captivating intensity. Divided into three parts, the non-consecutive and apparently arbitrary numbering of which implies that these are fragments of a larger narrative, her rhythmic monologue unfolds with a trance-like momentum, keeping time with a comparably mesmerising musical accompaniment. Alternating between day and night as the camera cuts to views of the changing sky, Galaz standing or seated in a suburban garden, and a fleeting glimpse of cutlery sterilised in boiling water, words and tones become increasingly difficult to discern. An animated chickpea making laps of the frame marks time, in a reference to the similar use of peas by a character in the novel, mirroring the pacing of the narrator as she unburdens herself of her thoughts as well as the obsessive twists and turns of these philosophical reflections.

Intimate and confessional, with frequent asides addressed to curator and creative collaborator Sabrina Baker, Unwelcome Visitant seems at times to be an extract from a salvaged video diary, a private memoir recorded to distract from the artist’s loneliness. The notes and emails compiled in the ‘Correspondence’ section of the work’s online platform, however, imply that authenticity and artifice are not so easy to discern in this complex web of intertextual citations. We are led to believe that the apparent sincerity of the artist may be a performance, a persona selected as a fitting counterpoint for her immersion in the world of the novel, much like the carefully repaired 1940s suit which Galaz introduces in the opening scenes of the video and wears throughout.

Unwelcome Visitant recalls the works by Natalie Bookchin and Daniel McKewen commissioned for UQ Art Museum’s ‘Conflict in My Outlook_We Met Online’, covered in a previous post for this blog, which likewise blur the boundary between fact and fiction in narratives of paranoia, intrigue and conspiracy. These works by Galaz, Bookchin, McKewen and other artists included in ‘Conflict in My Outlook’ share several characteristics that suggest a mutual ‘lockdown aesthetic’. Their density and complexity reward repeated engagement in the privacy of the home and seem calculated to provide as many hours of engagement as possible, inviting viewers not only to watch and rewatch but to trace the artists’ sources of inspiration, meticulously recorded by Galaz in an extensive bibliography.

Laresa Kosloff’s Radical Acts invites similar definition and provokes many of the same emotions. While Galaz and McKewen, however, create highly detailed collages of reference and reflection that seem too organic and comprehensive to be deceitful, Kosloff can be more closely compared with Bookchin in her juxtaposition of images and messages that viewers know to be prejudiced or untrue. Composed entirely using samples of corporate stock footage available online, Radical Acts outlines a dizzyingly convoluted tangle of conspiracy and pseudoscience that touches on some of the leading psychoses of our time. Environmental degradation, precarious employment, civil disobedience, managerial schemes for increasing worker efficiency, and the neoliberal ideal of a world driven by conspicuous consumption all play their part in a narrative of distraction and deceit, the alarmist tone of the narrator’s voice and crescendo of the melodramatic score mimicking a political scare campaign.

These two new videos from locked-down Melbourne appear at first to be radically distinct in conception, one making a show of sincerity and self-reflexive transparency while the other indulges in brazen deceit and obscurantist theory. Yet both artists expose the extent to which fact and fiction can be difficult to separate completely, especially during times of crisis and heightened emotion. Galaz and Kosloff also imply that the only possible passage beyond this crisis, as Galaz realised when she first read The Plague in high school, making notes in red ink in the margins, lies in a ‘radical rethinking [of the] priorities of life’. Prejudice, greed and paranoia brought us here; cooperation, selflessness and a renewed confidence in our ability to work together will help us cross the threshold into a new world.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

Love and conflict @ the National Portrait Gallery and UQ Art Museum

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When Andrew Stephens wrote in our Summer issue (#321) of the new vision that Karen Quinlan has brought as Director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), Canberra, neither he nor our readers could have predicted the crisis into which the world would be plunged by the time our next issue hit the shelves in March. Anticipating a year in which ‘her reinvigorated program for this young and popular institution’ would see the gallery reopen in style after its four-month closure for renovations in 2019, Quinlan noted the blockbuster show ‘Love Stories: Works from the National Portrait Gallery, London’ as a defining highlight for 2020. As the only Australian venue for this touring selection of key works from the English institution – one of several ambassadorial ventures planned during its own three-year closure for renovations – the NPG justifiably regarded this as a major coup. A media release published in December and subsequently removed from the NPG’s website promised an exhibition including ‘portraits of some of the world’s best-known couples from the sixteenth century … to the present’, celebrating what Quinlan termed ‘the multifaceted and often complex nature of love’.

Eight months after the publication of this optimistic vision for the future, however, we find ourselves faced with a more cynical and constricted arts ecology, in which those seemingly unassailable fixtures of the contemporary curatorial landscape – the blockbuster show and touring exhibition – must adapt or risk extinction. In this brave new world, the fate of ‘Love Stories’ is perhaps a sign of things to come: crossing international borders has become an extraordinarily difficult and costly process, so the much anticipated loans from London have been superseded by a more modest display of local faces from the NPG’s collection. The December media release reveals that this display was initially planned as a companion to the main show, addressing the universal themes of ‘passion, friendship, family, community and connection’, but Quinlan likely didn’t envisage an entirely online experience.

Visitors to the section of the NPG website that hosts this ‘amorous online adventure’ will find little trace, at first, of the themes noted above. After a brief introduction, we are invited to select one of five randomly selected ‘love stories’ with evocative and sometimes tongue-in-cheek titles like ‘When the stars align’ or ‘Right-hound man’. Each of these is linked to a page with an image and a short caption, followed by another list of five stories. The captions are refreshing, departing from the standard curatorial description to focus on the humanity of each work and the various forms of love revealed. Some audiovisual content, however, perhaps including recorded interviews with the curators, artists, subjects or gallery visitors, might have provided a more enriching experience. 

Greater attention to the guiding themes of the exhibition would also have been appreciated – these only surface when the visitor receives a personalised ‘love score’ generated by their choice of ten love stories and based on the coding of each story into one of five categories: ‘Devotion’, ‘It’s Complicated’, ‘Lust’, ‘Nearest & Dearest’ and ‘Passion’. Lacking curatorial framing, however, these categories seem little more than vestigial traces of the themes promised last year, while an invitation to share your ‘love score’ on Facebook or Twitter recalls the usual conclusion of clickbait quizzes popularised by websites like BuzzFeed.

The compulsive attraction (and frequent absurdity) of these quizzes is one of many facets of our online lives exposed to a more critical evaluation in another exhibition also conceived before the outbreak of the pandemic and subsequently adapted for web-based display: ‘Conflict in My Outlook_We Met Online’, hosted by UQ Art Museum, Brisbane. While an emphasis on the familiar, reassuring and sentimental in ‘Australian Love Stories’ draws attention to the new forms of connection and community that the internet has made possible, curator Anna Briers frames ‘Conflict in My Outlook’ as a shift away ‘from the utopian impulse of early internet culture to its current dystopian realities’. In the exhibition essay and media release, she asks us to consider the extent to which ‘algorithm-driven communications have exacerbated social division, stoking the fires of nationalism, fundamentalism and the rise of the alt-right’, and to bear in mind the need to guard against ‘fake news, post-truth politics and echo chambers of disinformation’.

Nevertheless, despite their different curatorial aims, the platforms through which we are invited to explore ‘Australian Love Stories’ and ‘Conflict in My Outlook’ are similar in design. Visitors to the ‘Conflict in My Outlook’ website are again faced with a brief introduction and a choice of links to artist pages that present an image, a caption or statement and a short biographic summary. There is once again a lack of audiovisual supporting material, yet the works – with the exception of watercolourist Kenneth Macqueen’s cloudscapes, rather tenuously included as a nod to Cloud data storage – more than make up for this in the overwhelming volume and theoretical density of their content. These are mainly video, digital or web-based projects that reward repeated, sustained viewing and are perhaps better suited for online than onsite display, inviting visitors/viewers/users to engage at their own pace, from the comfort of their homes.

The works cover a broad range of themes, from Xanthe Dobbie’s interactive parody of a clickbait quiz and Kate Geck’s ‘digital spa’ that promises ‘to combat social media anxiety and network fatigue’ through ‘meditative experiences and psychic cleansings’, while ironically using the same technology that causes this fatigue; to Natalie Bookchin’s unsettling but all-too-believable composite narrative compiled using excerpts from alt-right video blogs, and Daniel McKewen’s semi-fictional tale of intrigue and conspiracy told through Gumtree listings, SMS and Facebook messages, archived emails, videos and touched-up images.

Turning our attention from the uncertainty of our current real-world circumstances to the no less anxiety-inducing digital platforms through which are lives are increasingly mediated, the provocative and highly erudite works that Briers has selected expose our reliance on these platforms as a Faustian bargain, with implications yet to be revealed. In return for the promise of online intimacy, community and almost limitless opportunities to indulge our most private fantasies or to create avatars of our ideal selves, we have consented to an amplifying of the voices of paranoia, prejudice and hatred. More insidiously, as Briers notes in her essay, we have also consented to the collection and monetisation of personal data, inaugurating the age of the algorithm, targeted advertisement and unsolicited mailing list. Perhaps this, in the end, will be the future of the exhibition: a clickbait narrative, tailored to our preferences, and readymade to share on social media.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

Altered states of consciousness in Mel O’Callaghan’s ‘Centre of the Centre’

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The current global pandemic has forced us to interrogate and transform many aspects of our daily lives that once seemed beyond question. The most significant philosophical and ethical lesson for a post-COVID world, however, is undoubtedly the extent to which the coronavirus has revealed just how closely the fate of the individual and the collective are intertwined. In our current issue, Paris-based curator and writer Anabelle Lacroix identifies this relationship between self and other as a central component of Mel O’Callaghan’s solo exhibition ‘Centre of the Centre’, on show at UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (until 16 January 2021 before continuing its Australian tour through Museums & Galleries of New South Wales): ‘Dealing with the origins of life and altered states of consciousness, O’Callaghan’s exhibition places experience at the core of the work’, exploring concepts of ‘movement, experience and duration … as well as that of ambience [as] a position that comes not from but through a field of multiple references’.

It is from this ambience, Lacroix explains, ‘a flattening of hierarchies … in which each part is equally important’, that the radical potential of the exhibition emerges. ‘In an age where our very thoughts and emotions have been invaded by the commodifying logic of capitalism, ideas of altered states of consciousness … have become political’, and the ambient fusion of experiences in O’Callaghan’s exhibition offers a transgressive template for a worldview ‘that celebrates all forms of life, known and unknown, of the ones close to us and those on the edge of consciousness’.

Isolated in our homes and barred from travelling beyond our immediate surroundings, our present state is undoubtedly one with the potential to profoundly alter our consciousness of the world, our neighbours and ourselves. As Lacroix suggests, we are faced with a choice: do we fall back now on our old habits of conspicuous consumption, taking what comfort we can in the material possessions with which we surround ourselves? Or should we use this as an opportunity to explore new modes of being together, and new forms of communication?

In Centre of the Centre (2019), a 20-minute video created over two years in collaboration with Daniel Fornari of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, and music psychotherapist Sabine Rittner of the University Hospital of Heidelberg in Germany, among others, O’Callaghan plumbs the depths of the Pacific Ocean, including the life cycle of the coco worm (Protula magnifica). Projected across the gallery wall, this tiny inhabitant of the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines, the ‘centre of the centre of all marine biodiversity’, assumes spectacular proportions, ‘glowing, vibrating and radiating with diffracted light [that] is truly hypnotic’. This meeting of microcosm and macrocosm is further reinforced by performances of ‘breath-induced trance’ that take place within the adjacent exhibition space, ‘the shaking movement of the performers, their endurance and the increased intensity of breath [offering] a reminder of our own physical limits, as well as invoking the creation of life’.

The message of O’Callaghan’s exhibition, as of the current global pandemic, seems clear: we are all connected, whether we like it or not. From our homes to our neighbourhoods, cities, countries, regions, even our shared species and global ecosystem, we can either continue on the destructive path we have set for ourselves or, following O’Callaghan’s example, we can seek an altered state that puts the origins of life in a broader philosophical perspective.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

‘The photos say they can’t breathe’: Barbara McGrady at Campbelltown

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A heavy yet upbeat heart pounds from the core of Campbelltown Arts Centre, host to Western Sydney’s iteration of ‘NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney’, where Ngiyaningy Maran Yaliwaunga Ngaara-li (Our Ancestors Are Always Watching) (2020) is fated to dislocate the dominant white gaze. In this work (created with John Janson-Moore), artist and proud Gomeroi/Murri/Yinah woman Barbara McGrady exposes her 30-year-strong photography practice in a jolting, symphonic, archival assemblage of text, photography and music, full of eye-opening contradictions and realities.

McGrady is ready to perform and to tell us how it is – how Indigenous Australia views the world – through her black lens. An immersive 360-degree kaleidoscopic multi-screen installation fuses imagery and text that pulsate in unison with Tasman Keith’s captivating and Indigenous reality-check hip-hop track, ‘My Pelopolees’ (2018). While McGrady’s powerful images do most of the talking, her byte-size texts, lifted from her regular social media posts and projected one word at a time to the beat of the music, sometimes rapid-fire, convey a feeling of being present at a protest rally, surrounded by placards, calling the audience to action. Each word. Each image. Each imbued with the reality of the human condition …

McGrady’s images conflate past and present events – both adverse and triumphant – deserving of commiseration or celebration. She shows Indigenous Australians at sporting events as well as Mardi Gras, traditional and contemporary performing arts, with family members and at protest events, drawing attention to issues of land rights, racism, connection to Country, Aboriginal pride, traditional customs and oppression …

Ngiyaningy can be likened to a shattered mirror or cubist painting, where shards of contemporary Indigenous Australian history, disjointed yet connected, project a singular subject from multiple angles. The design of the space reinforces this effect, as snippets of the same image slice the viewer’s peripheral vision, complementing an inescapable immersion of imagery, text and sound. McGrady’s black box within a predominantly white cube institution, highlights the intention for Ngiyaningy to disrupt audiences’ perspectives and preconceived belief systems …

Halfway through the work, Ngiyaningy re-routes into a less activist and more intimate personal journey. Witnessing a heartfelt conversation with her passed mother, to the tune of Electric Fields’s soulful song ‘Pukulpa’ (2016), the audience is reminded to remain strong and proud … As well as speaking intimately with her mother, McGrady communicates with former AFL star Adam Goodes, one powerful word at a time. The artist comforts Goodes with her declaration that she was there, supporting him during the darkest days of the controversial booing campaign, directed at Goodes for speaking out against racism …

Ngiyaningy needs to be experienced multiple times to appreciate its intricate web of stories, events, messages and emotions. McGrady’s images were not photographed with the intention of displaying them in the context of a contemporary art exhibition. Each image was destined for a newspaper, magazine, website, social media post or personal photo album. However, the power of their collective re-presentation in Ngiyaningy provides a forceful and creative narrative …

On entering Ngiyaningy I was stopped in my tracks. McGrady captured the first #BlackLivesMatter campaign in 2015 and declares that ‘THE PHOTOS SAY THEY CAN’T BREATHE’. Five years on and the photographs are alarmingly current. Selected as one of four images to be presented on a massive scale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales during ‘NIRIN’ (until 27 September), and incorporated into Ngiyaningy, the contemporaneity of McGrady’s Black Lives Matter, Martin Place (2015) is both uncanny and intolerable, given the recent death of George Floyd. As I reflect on the work, the unsettling realisation occurs to me that the loop of many unresolved issues, including Aboriginal deaths in custody, is on repeat. Again and again, they keep on happening: ‘OH YES JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE COLONY.’

Nicole Fiedler Wallace, Sydney

This is an edited excerpt of an essay written in partial fulfilment of a Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, responding to Barbara McGrady’s Ngiyaningy Maran Yaliwaunga Ngaara-li (Our Ancestors Are Always Watching) (2020), at Campbelltown Arts Centre for ‘NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney’ until 11 October 2020.

A blueprint for a brave new world at Carriageworks

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In the continuing uncertainty of our current situation, as a steady increase in cases of the coronavirus in some parts of the country reminds us that this pandemic is far from over, any good news is a cause for celebration. This is especially true for those of us who make a living in the arts, one of the most heavily impacted sectors of the economy. The doors of many cultural institutions remain closed, while those that have reopened face ongoing restrictions on the number of visitors they can admit and the amount of revenue they can expect to receive. The announcement on Monday that Carriageworks will reopen to the public on Friday 7 August therefore came as a welcome culmination to the saga of insecurity into which this landmark Sydney multi-arts centre has been plunged, offering a timely vindication of the positive change that can be achieved through community solidarity.

After ten weeks of voluntary administration, the benefaction of several private foundations and a commitment from the New South Wales Government to provide five years of funding and a new lease – the longest in the institution’s history – have allowed Carriageworks to emerge from what seemed an irrecoverably dire situation with a renewed hope for the future. The inspiration for these new arrangements derived in large part from what CEO Blair French has lauded as ‘a most extraordinary expression of community support that gave great heart to everyone involved’, a wave of encouragement that he views as a testament to the ‘sheer grit, determination and collaboration’ which inspired the founding of the industrial site over a century ago, ‘born out of resilience and innovation’.

Visitors to the reopened Carriageworks will be able to experience a range of new installations by leading voices in the Australian and international contemporary art scene, including Sydney artist Giselle Stanborough’s ‘Cinopticon’, installed in March 2020 and now set to be unveiled to the public for the first time. In our current issue, curator and writer Stephanie Berlangieri describes Stanborough’s installation – her first major solo exhibition – as a ‘disturbingly apt’ meditation on surveillance ‘and its interactions with commercial interests, psychology, selfhood and the internet’, at a time when the need to reduce the spread of the virus has given government agencies an unprecedented level of access to the details of our daily lives.

The title of the installation, as Berlangieri explains, draws inspiration from social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) notorious panopticon, ‘an architectural structure comprising a central tower surrounded by cells … [that] enables constant one-way surveillance’, as well as sociologist Thomas Mathiesen’s contemporary version of this, the synopticon, ‘a reciprocal mode of surveillance whereby the many watch the few’. For Stanborough, however, it is the ‘more insidious ways in which we are surveilled today … through biometrics, consumer behaviour and via our peers on social media’ that take precedence. 

‘Cinopticon’ comprises four interrelated works that explore various aspects of the exhibition theme. Cinopticon (Wall) serves as a backdrop for the installation, ‘a frenzied mind map of … words, phrases and diagrams from a range of sources, including Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, internet slang and the artist’s own conversations and musings’. Cinopticon (Voice), a six-channel audio work ‘broadcasting a cacophony of phrases mined from the artist’s online world and academic references’ provides a sonic counterpart to this ‘conceptual web’, while two video works – Cinopticon (Well) and Cinopticon (Mirror) – compel the viewer to confront the often uneasy relationship between self and self-image. As we are persuaded to shift an increasingly larger proportion of our daily lives online, generating not only entertainment and employment but also our connection with others and even our sense of self through digital platforms, Stanborough’s exploration of these issues assumes ever greater relevance.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

Where is home: Mavis Ngallametta at Queensland Art Gallery

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One of the most important questions an Australian can ask is: ‘Whose country am I in?’ For the late Aurukun artist and Putch clan elder Mavis Ngallametta (1944–2019), this question was central to her immense and intricate canvases as she painted her Country, and her adopted son’s Country in western Cape York, alongside people and moments of significance to her personal life. ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane surveys her relatively short but important career (she began painting in 2008), offering unique expressions of place from one of the state’s most remote and beautiful regions.

As the adoptive mother to a Wik man, Ngallametta had opportunities to access the dramatic red and white cliffs of Ikalath in north-east Aurukun, an important site for the Wik people and a source for the white ochre in her paintings. Ikalath #10 (2012) features the colourful rock faces abutting the water’s edge. It recalls a specific memory of a time when the artist and her son brought family and friends to collect clay at the bottom of the cliff shown towering above them in Ngallametta’s painting, standing by their small boat pulled to shore.

In his catalogue essay, lead curator Bruce Johnson McLean describes Ngallametta’s approach to landscape as a distinct view, ‘as if looking out from a coast-hugging, low-flying aircraft’ combined with ‘varying degrees of abstraction ... to unify macro and micro worlds’. Her works are also distinguished by her often-used bright blue acrylic undercoat, the inspiration for McLean’s choice of wall colours and catalogue design.

Bush Fire at Kutchendoopen (2014) is another grand, nearly three-metre-tall canvas in powerful charcoals and red and orange ochres, picturing the landscape during and after cultural burning practices carried out by Ngallametta’s family. The work, primed with her signature blue, simultaneously pictures the devastation of fires as well as the flourish of flora and fauna that follows. This greenery takes centre stage in her striking wet-season landscape End Swamp #2 (2017), in which the blue priming layer becomes a body of water covered in a network of soft pink, white and yellow flowers.

The title of the exhibition, lifted from the classic 1925 British song (with words and music by Irving King and Hal Swain), is also a nod to Ngallametta’s place between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures. Multilingual artist statements on the wall labels, provided in English, Kugu Uwanh and Wik-Mungkan, elevate a direct dialogue with her kin and community members. In ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’, Ngallametta’s singular perspective, both biographical and monumental, offers an opportunity for all audiences to take stock of the country in which we find ourselves.

Emily Wakeling, Brisbane

‘Mavis Ngallametta: Show Me the Way to Go Home’ brings major works from the late artist’s Ikalath, Kendall River, Pamp/Swamp, Wutan, Yalgamunken, intertidal estuary and bushfire series together for the first time at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, until 7 February 2021.

Destiny Deacon: Showing colour

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When I look at the works of Destiny Deacon I feel overwhelmed and elated, sickened and elevated. If I look deeper into those works, examine them more closely, I am lost in the narrative. Deeper into thought, into myself, with intense examination of the internal self and the external art, I think I can understand them. Deacon’s work is profound and often challenging to unpack …

Despite or perhaps because of their apolitical-seeming, bordering-on-superficial visual content – blak dollies and blacker comedy are frequent tools – the works of Destiny Deacon are intensely political. They speak strongly of dispossession, displacement, death and destruction, of the rape and torture of Indigenous women …

There is a lot to love and a lot to hate about Deacon’s work, and the love-hate dichotomy is so destabilised as to be useless as a tool for understanding. I love the body of work because of the power of the narrative in the works. I hate it because much of it is far from pleasant to look at. I love it because of the meaning I can extract …

Overall, because of the power of the work and because the unpleasantness plays a major role in the overall effect the work has, love defeats hate and the works of Deacon almost always touch me, make me think and enrich my life. The things I dislike are also the things I have passionate adoration for …

Deacon’s ancestry lies among the Kuku people from the far north of Queensland and the Erub/Mer people of the Eastern Torres Strait, and she was born in Queensland. However, she grew up in Melbourne and for the most part that metropolis is home. Politics, the light of the city, the life of the city, the colours and energy of Melbourne: they are all embedded within the work …

I am always struck by the colours Deacon creates in her work. None of the colours is quite what we expect; they are saturated or muted in ways that cannot be arbitrary, in ways that can only be genius. Yellows are never just yellow, reds are never simply red. The palette, coming as it does from photography, from film, from light itself, is surrealist and faintly disturbing …

Red, yellow and black are the colours of the Aboriginal flag, designed by Luritja man Harold Thomas in 1971. Deacon’s disturbed version of those colours suggests the watering down of our blood and culture, the destruction of our country, the legal systems that are pitched so often against us. Even Aboriginal flags, present in the art on clothing and scatterings elsewhere, are stripped back in saturation …

Deacon’s worldview is, to me, well represented by the slightly sick palette: the black not black enough, the red not quite red, the yellows perhaps intentionally unsettling. It could be argued that one role of art and of artists is to unsettle the viewer, and Deacon’s work does that perfectly. Her work unsettles the gaze of the white viewer just as the white people unsettled our people …

Sick diluted blood-red-pink, slick unpleasant yellow, faded black, the colours of our flag diluted, disturbed, distressed. The palette suggests Indigenous disadvantage and the long-term effects of fighting a culture war while in a permanent state of losing. Deacon, with little more than simple props and a camera, can teach us what Australia is, and how that challenges who we think Australians are.

Claire G. Coleman, Melbourne

This is an edited excerpt of the author’s essay commissioned for and published in the catalogue to accompany the (temporarily closed) exhibition ‘DESTINY’, at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Melbourne until 31 January 2021.

The seen and unseen in Tony Albert’s ‘Duty of Care’ at Canberra Glassworks

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Tony Albert’s solo show ‘Duty of Care’ is the culmination of a six-week residency at Canberra Glassworks. Glass is a new medium for Albert, known for his work in collage, painting, found material and photography. During his residency, Albert worked with a team of glass artists to produce works that explore the concept of care, the invisible forces that bind us, and the possibility that systemic racism might be shattered with the right force.

Sophia Halloway (SH): Devoid of pigment and inherently fragile, the clear glass used for many of your works in ‘Duty of Care’ makes for a particularly radical medium with which to discuss the polemics of colour. In one work, Uncodified (which way same way) (2020), you have etched the words ‘Invisible is my favourite colour’ into the glass. How has this idea of invisibility come to resonate so strongly in your practice?

Tony Albert (TA): The tension between visible and invisible has always been a core theme of my work. When I was invited to participate in the residency, it took quite a while to investigate how my practice could translate into glass. I had a vision, very early on, that if you looked through the window at the show, you couldn’t even see it. I wanted to somehow produce an invisible show. It was an amazing journey to work with the technicians at the glassworks and to discuss the possibilities of clear glass in exploring the seen and the unseen.

SH: Brother (The invisible prodigal son) II (2020) is a stained-glass window featuring the image of a proud young Aboriginal man with a target on his chest, a recurring motif in your work since the police shooting of two Aboriginal boys in Kings Cross in 2012. Recently, the killing of George Floyd in the United States has reignited discourse not only on police brutality but also monuments to contested histories. What do you think is the role of these images in reclaiming the histories of Indigenous Australians?

TA: Memorialisation is something I think about quite a bit. Not only do we live in a landscape that is so barren of Indigenous indicators, but there’s an abundance of memorials to dead white men. How might our mindsets change if our children walk into a park to find Aboriginal heroes represented, women represented? For me, it’s not so much about pulling things down but about historical truth being shared and opportunities for a more important discussion about history. Stained glass has been used to tell stories throughout history but was only ever afforded to rich institutions such as the church or the monarchy. You rarely see these images of people of colour, or women, so I think there’s a subversion in being able to do that.

SH: Language features heavily in your practice and in ‘Duty of Care’. Seemingly innocuous phrases become loaded with meaning once their histories come to light. What do you say to the symbolic power of language, and what is the relationship between language and care in your work?

TA: Vernon Ah Kee has always said: ‘English is my second language; I just don’t have access to my first.’ I think that’s a particularly poetic way of describing the impact of colonisation, but also how we need to consider language. Contemporary culture has seen language evolve with text and shorthand, with the way we translate symbols and images into a word or feeling. I’m fascinated with language and particularly the written word because we can use it in our favour to challenge ideas and ideals about power. For example, Destiny Deacon leaving the ‘c’ out of Blak, or the capitalisation of Black and White – it becomes a state of being, not just a colour. All of these plays become intrinsic to our understanding, a way we can protest every day just in how we converse with each other.

Sophia Halloway, Canberra

Curated by Sally Brand, ‘Duty of Care’ opened at Canberra Glassworks on 13 June for an extended run until 27 September. Sophia Halloway is a 2020 Critic-in-Residence at ANCA, Canberra, in a special project partnership with Art Monthly Australasia supported by artsACT.

Finding a post-internet self

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In our current issue, 2020 ANCA Critic-in-Residence Sophia Halloway reflects on the ever greater importance that online forms of communication have come to assume in the past few months, as ‘a lifeline to our loved ones and livelihoods’ and ‘a source of connection’ to a world from which we have been separated by quarantines and self-isolation. In this new environment for the arts, innovative digital platforms created by museums and galleries across Australia – like Griffith University Art Museum’s ‘Lockdown Studio’, the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s ‘Together in Art’, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s ‘Artist Voice’ series – have become a regular feature of the Art Monthly Australasia blog. Halloway, however, asks us to turn our attention to the new forms of expression that artists have used and developed to map this unexplored frontier for ‘post-internet’ art.

Halloway defines this as ‘art “since” the internet rather than art “on” the internet’, revealing ‘a state of mind characterised by the ubiquity of internet culture’. This category of practice has, of course, been an emergent feature of the creative landscape for some time, but, under current conditions, has gained renewed relevance. Among the many opportunities for broadening artistic horizons made possible by the internet, Halloway draws attention to the new platforms for sharing work ‘without the usual gatekeepers of an elitist art world’, the ability to ‘loan’ digital recreations of valuable or fragile works to galleries that lack the resources required to borrow the original piece, and the capacity ‘to reach audiences who ordinarily wouldn’t walk in the front door of a gallery’. Those artists who had already started to engage with these post-internet opportunities, she asserts, ‘are uniquely positioned to continue practising in a COVID-19 world’. As current restrictions on movement and public gatherings seem increasingly likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, many more will inevitably turn in this direction as they seek not only to maintain but to expand their artistic practice.

In her prescient summary of things to come, Halloway names Canberra-based artist and Australian National University PhD candidate Jess Herrington as a quintessential example of this new breed of post-internet artist. Herrington situates her practice primarily on social media, using her Instagram account (@jess.herrington) to share filters that augment the viewer’s (or user’s) reality by appending virtual objects to their face, looking back at them from the screen of their phone, laptop or tablet. Social media, Halloway writes, ‘has been criticised for distancing us from meaningful experiences in real life, with the sleek black mirror of our devices being like the glossy surface of Narcissus’s pool’. Herrington’s filters have transformed this ‘common expectation … that selfies are a form of self-commodification’ into an opportunity to ‘interrogate how we perceive ourselves on and offline’, to consider the limits of our identity and to construct new forms of selfhood. While museums and galleries seek to grow audiences and to foster public engagement with the works of art in their collections, artists like Herrington invite us to look within and to consider the personal role we can play in navigating safe passage beyond the current crisis.

Dr Alex Burchmore, Publication Manager

Anxiety and allure in the work of Barbara Dover and Robyn Glade-Wright

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It is an effective work of art that can engage our emotions and our intellect. But when there is dissonance between that which our emotions find loveable and alluring, and that which our intellect tells is us is abhorrent, then it is a very potent work of art indeed. Far North Queensland artists Barbara Dover and Robyn Glade-Wright’s touring exhibition ‘Disquiet: Ecological Anxieties and Transformations’ exploits this discordance to create a new emotional language for the challenging conversations we are having about our use of natural resources and the destruction caused by plastic pollutants.

Dover and Glade-Wright’s evident intention to highlight environmental issues and ethics has been the focus of their multidisciplinary art practices spanning the last two decades. Acknowledging that human beings don’t like to be told bad news, and that we lack what social scientists call ‘foresight intelligence’ – the ability to recognise and act on perils before it is too late – the artists are exploring the role of art in generating the motivation to act on our understanding of the environment.

On initial viewing of the sculptural and installation works in ‘Disquiet’, we experience sensations of wonder and delight, possibly the same feelings we might have when we are immersed in nature. Our emotions are engaged by the simple beauty of the objects, or because the artworks remind us of good things – thongs discarded on a beach to make the dash across hot sand for the water, a swimming race to a bobbing buoy, a turtle paddling underwater, a crab spotted in a rock pool. We understand and recognise the exhibition’s quirky urchins and quickly develop an affection for them. When our intellect takes its turn and assesses the artworks – takes in the materials used, reads the didactics, processes the ideas – we feel genuine alarm. This is the power of art at work. We can be told that by 2050, the weight of plastic in the ocean will be greater than the weight of all marine creatures, and we will chew our lip as we add the information to our mental store of doom data. But when something we love is threatened, our likelihood of retaining the information and possibly even acting on it is heightened.

Sculptures such as Dover’s ‘Decoy’ and Glade-Wright’s aptly titled ‘Choke’ series (both 2018) engage on aesthetic and emotional levels as we enjoy the pleasing arrangements and their connotations of jewellery and precious things. When we become aware that they are made of fishing detritus that is dumped by the tonne on our beloved beaches, the discord hits like a light coming on that is felt, not seen.

Through their heartfelt and intellectually rigorous approaches, Dover and Glade-Wright bring us highly resolved artworks with an elegant whammy of a message.  They have taken time, care and thought to generously produce for us these ‘treasures’ from the ocean that we can wonder at, think on and feel deeply about.  This year has shown us that the unthinkable can happen on a global scale. Perhaps now it is time to notice our feelings about the things we hold dear and act on them.

Andrea Huelin, Cairns

Supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, ‘Disquiet: Ecological Anxieties and Transformations’ premiered at Artspace Mackay in January this year and will tour to NorthSite Contemporary Arts in Cairns (6 August – 26 September 2020), Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts in Townsville (29 January – 28 February 2021), and Gatakers Artspace in Maryborough (7 May – 27 June 2021).