Creature Comforts – Fiona Veikkanen

I highly recommend going to see Fiona Veikkanen’s exhibition Creature Comforts if you can make it and haven’t already. Creature Comforts opened at CCAS Manuka on Thursday evening and closes this Sunday at 5pm. Fiona is an incredibly talented and conceptual artist who makes work about craft and functional objects (‘about’ being the key word here). She is rightly coming to be acknowledged as a force to be reckoned with, including by Yolande Norris at Useless Lines, and her successes are steadily accruing despite the responsibilities of a young family. In fact, her work is influenced by her home life in a way that really sets it apart from the kind of work made in a studio- it is not separate from life, but made around it and intrinsically part of it.

Fiona asked me to write something about her work in the show, so here it is below, but it looks much nicer in the catalogue Fiona had printed!  I’ll try to get some photos up soon but you can see some of it lurking in the backgrounds of David’s photos as well as his write-up at the CCAS Social Pages. You might want to visit Fiona’s blog too!

CREATURE COMFORTS

In her solo exhibition Creature Comforts, Fiona Veikkanen engages with the multifaceted concept of craft. Craft is interesting for so many reasons. It is accessible and invites the participation of others; it involves familiar, repetitive processes; it provides tactility and a sense of comfort and care and homeliness. Veikkanen explores all of these general aspects of craft, but she goes many steps further.

For Veikkanen, craft really gets interesting when it gets personal. Most crafts involve rigid patterns and rules, but a person’s individual choices and mistakes can make something really beautiful and personal. Better yet, when someone throws out the rulebook and starts with a technique or idea, the results can be startling. African-American quilt-makers in centuries past made quilts from irregular shaped and sized fabric scraps. Made using no measurements, templates or designs, these functional quilts are extremely unique and personal. A certain aesthetic comes out of this emphatic one-of-a-kind-ness, all the more beautiful for its imperfection. This aesthetic is present in Veikkanen’s works, but the one-of-a-kind-ness is derived from her idiosyncratic ideas about craft and specific objects- sleeping bags, jumpers, pompoms. Her works become embodiments of these ideas rather than ordinary, functional objects.

Craft is usually preoccupied with functional objects and masterful techniques, but art exists on a much more hypothetical and imaginative plane where ideas about craft and craft objects can be interrogated. In many of her works, Veikkanen actively detaches the object from its function. In her unravelled and remade Available In works, the knit garment is no longer wearable. Pompoms are interesting to Veikkanen because they don’t have a particular function- they are an afterthought to a beanie or other object, or an amusement or decoration in their own right. In Veikkanen’s A Case for Sleep works, function is almost a contrary consideration.

Sleeping bags are normally vaguely rectangular, and made using a pattern that accommodates the human body. But Veikkanen’s A Case for Sleep works start with a small circle of irregular triangles of fabric cut from sleeping bags, and work outwards, forming a homely, quilted effect. Each irregular concentric circle informs the next, growing organically. Veikkanen often uses circular forms in her work, and this makes a lot of sense- working outwards in a circle seems almost natural if there isn’t a function in mind; if no corners are needed to spread over a bed or floor or table.

Veikkanen brings the unique and personal effects of craft to objects that are typically man-made, industrial and impersonal. When objects have a function, we think about them primarily in the terms of that function. But when function is removed, we experience the object in all its glory. A Case for Sleep becomes about the experience of sleeping outdoors- the cool touch of sleeping bag material that warms up quickly on cool nights spent by the smoky campfire and then curled up in the tent. Feeling at home when not at home.

As well as the personal nature of craft, Veikkanen is fascinated by its social and collaborative possibilities. Have A Ball is a collaborative work that brought Veikkanen’s family and friends together to learn a craft (pompom making) and contribute towards a communal project. It amazed Veikkanen to observe that when two different people are given the same materials and instructions, they may end up with two very different results. The pompoms cluster together in the gallery space and disperse again as exhibition viewers take them home. Viewers are invited to choose a pompom that appeals to them, snip it from the cluster, and take it home as a unique and precious object in a perfect brown box. This clever experiment demonstrates how craft can be intensely personal and communal at the same time.

Veikkanen has continued to explore these ideas through her craft kits, Manageable Packageables, which are available for purchase. Each kit provides the materials, tools and instructions to make a second-hand jumper into an art object by unravelling the jumper and French-knitting or making pompoms out of the unravelled yarn. Veikkanen poses fascinating questions about whether these works, made by someone else, are art objects… and if so, is Veikkanen the artist or is the maker the artist?

Creature Comforts further establishes Veikkanen as a most interesting artist who illuminates our experience of the environments that we make ourselves at home in, and in particular the objects that facilitate our comfort in these environments. Her work considers and defines the relationship between art and craft and between the personal and the shared, proving there’s a lot more to objects than their functionality.

The best blog I’ve ever read

Yesterday I went to the funeral of an old friend- Jerome Pink. I knew him best when we were 18 to 20, then saw him less and less after I broke up with one of his best friends (who I’m still friends with, and is the reason why I knew Jerome in the first place) and he went on exchange to Canada (where he met his amazing wife Amelia).

My fiance ran into Sam (the ex-boyfriend/friend) in the hospital on the day Jerome was diagnosed with cancer. It was difficult to imagine someone so full of life and energy having such a disease. But Jerome still rock-climbed for as long as he could and he put a lot of energy into expressing his thoughts, experiences, feelings and wisdom on his blog, Lifestyle Over Cancer.

Blogs can be trivial, but Jerome’s was anything but. It is an honest, sometimes raw, account of Jerome’s will to live and passion for life. It is full of emotion and insight and courage. As well as the obvious courage with which Jerome faced his disease, it was courageous to put such honesty and emotion in words and for all to see. I, for one, and I know there are many more, hope that people will read it and get a sense of what life is all about, and what an amazing young man Jerome was.

You can read Jerome’s blog here. RIP Jerome. My most heartfelt sympathies to his wife, Amelia, and to all his family and friends.  I’ll finish this post with one of my favourite memories of Jerome (Owen, in his eloquent eulogy, requested that everyone share their memories of Jerome with everyone possible), and a couple of my favourite passages of writing of his.

Mollymook, NSW, November 2004. We’re all at the coast, renting a house for one heady, joyful week. No uni work, no work work, just good friends and good times. Beach cricket, boozy walks along the beach at night, and a game of kings no one will ever forget (especially Charles). I remember waking up one morning to the sound of Jerome’s voice bantering in the living room. We’d all been up late the night before and I could have slept for hours longer. How could Jerome be so incredibly awake? Eventually the lively voice won, against the grumpy hungoverness, and so started a particularly good day, chatting in the lounge room with all the other half-asleep people and Jerome. A bit of a mundane memory, really, but the point is that he had so much energy for life and for his friends that you couldn’t help but be inspired and affected by it, and that stuck with me.

“Life is hard and short. But it is so for everybody. In the end the fear of dying is just an extension of our confusion about why we are here. Religion puts a neat solution into the hands of many but anybody who thinks hard quickly realises that any one of the religions is unlikely to be right in every detail although they may be correct in the spirit. The question of what is the meaning of life haunts us as we die as equations haunt the dreams of a student who knows a test is too close to study for. What happens to us after death? I have no idea. In truth I suspect that nothing happens although I no longer hold that to be the absolute truth I did when I was younger. Perhaps this possibility is just the desperate wish of a man with not long to live. Perhaps I am older and wiser. In the end nobody can know what we are here for or what happens after we die and anybody who claims to know for sure is a simpleton or a fraud. Indeed the mystery in life is one if its greatest draw cards. So as we face death a million unanswerable questions swell in the mind. These questions are not unique but still deeply personable and profoundly emotional. I do not know the answers but the questions themselves are beautiful beyond description.” (Jerome Pink, Life 2, September 21 2011)

“I just want to leave everything behind and start walking. Just see what happens. I would give everything to live in the back of a van at a cliff and climb. Such simple things and so readily available to everybody. What is wrong with this world. How is it that so few spend their lives doing things they love and so many do that that they hate for something they do not need. I want to shout to the masses but do few would listen. I would not have listened.

This is it. Do it now. You will not be here again.” (Jerome Pink, Sick, January 9 2012)

Blazin’

Blaze 6 is opening in one week at CCAS Gorman House! I’m a co-curator along with Alexander Boynes. This is the second Blaze exhibition we’ve curated, and this time around we have been a lot more thoughtful about the show as a whole and we wrote the catalogue essay together (I did the last one, which you can read here). It has been a great exhibition to work on, and I’m super excited to see it all come together in the gallery next week.

Please come along to the opening at 6pm Friday 17th February. You can catch the show until the 24th of March.

Hot Press

This is an article I wrote for BMA in December. The amazing exhibitions the article is about are still on at CCAS Gorman House until this Saturday, 4pm.

Dirty Water (2010), by Alison Alder, animation film still, screen-print on Awigami paper

Print is everywhere- books, newspapers, magazines (like this fine one you’re reading), posters, stamps, fingerprints, shoe-prints. Three artists exhibiting at CCAS Gorman House this summer prove how exciting and experimental print can be when they exploit its everyday, pop-culture pervasion.

Alison Alder uses screen-printing to make large-scale video projections about nuclear activity in Australia, pushing print into another dimension. Alder is the Artistic Director and CEO of Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, an organization that really puts Canberra on the map as a print powerhouse. She has been making political posters since the 1980s, but her work in Dirty Water also references vintage magazines and postcards, and old films. As well as the video projections, this exhibition includes a series of poster-sized prints based on old magazine covers, with the titles ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Half Life’. Dirty Water’s message is less strident than political posters past, but there is still plenty of political fodder to chew on.

Rather than using print to develop his work, Clem Baker-Finch uses found print as a starting point. For Self Titled he takes clippings from covers of trashy magazines and uses a computer program he devised to weave text into the image. The results are undeniably humourous, but also a little unsettling. Baker-Finch’s large digital prints boldly point out our trust in photography and print journalism, even of the tabloid variety. They also illustrate the extremely tragic nature of celebrity, writ large with text from the articles the cover image refers to, and also more highbrow tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

U.K Frederick engages with print differently again, printing directly from found objects: old vinyl records. In the tiny concentric grooves of the record, white paper between the black lines, we can see where the music has been stamped into the vinyl. We can also see all the scratches and irregularities that have occurred over the life of the record; proof that someone has bought, played and loved it. In Frederick’s exhibition Lament, you will be able to not only see the prints of the records, but also hear music digitised from the same records. In the small Cube space, it is a complete experience that may take you to a different time and place, via powerfully moving rock songs from artists who were taken from the world too soon.

The different ways these three artists engage with print make their work very fascinating and very contemporary. Print lends itself to work that has a strong sense of process and experimentation, leading to surprising results. Interesting things also happen when media collide, and print works brilliantly with video, photography, and the found object in these three exhibitions. Print may be everywhere, but these big, bold exhibitions will take it and you somewhere else.

Dirty Water- Alison Alder
Self Titled- Clem Baker-Finch
Lament- U.K. Frederick
CCAS Gorman House, 55 Ainslie Ave Braddon
Opening 6pm Friday 9 December, continuing until 11 February.

Belated Birthday

This blog had its first birthday on the 15th and it completely passed me by. Oops.

I’ve been quite busy working, painting and seeing lots of art. It’s almost time for a holiday (and probably more painting).

The news, in brief:

• Bone Idol- CCAS’ new performance art contest- was a pretty great success last Friday night, to our great relief. Doing new things in Canberra at this time of year can be a bit of a risk, but thanks to all the great performers who entered (and a killer panel of judges) it was an awesome night. Read more about it and see some pics and video at the CCAS Social Pages. Blaide Lallemand (performing as Esmerelda Cassandra Gibbs) was awarded the trophy and $500 prize, and the lovely Canadian duo EGOtrip productions came runner-up. Until next time…
• This week is all about the ANU School of Art’s grad show- patron’s day was today, and the grand opening is of course this Friday evening at 6pm.
• But don’t forget to see Elena Papanikolakis’ fantastic exhibition Error Machine at CCAS Manuka, which closes this Sunday.
• Then the final CCAS Gorman House opening of the year is next Friday night, the 9th. I’ve written the catalogue mini-essays for the three exhibitions: Dirty Water, by Alison Alder; Self Titled, by Clem Baker-Finch; and Lament by U.K. Frederick. Very interesting shows, indeed.
• I also have an article about the three next CCAS Gorman House shows in the next issue of BMA, the last issue for the year!

MONArama

View from the inside out.

Well I finally did it: I went to Hobart, and to MONA. Last Sunday I ate my breakfast at record speed and then bounded down to the beautiful wharves in Hobart with the enthusiasm of a giddy kid. I was not disappointed by either Hobart or MONA.

The ferry (a sleek catamaran, of course) provided the perfect touristy experience, cruising down the Derwent River enjoying the views of Mt Wellington and Hobart, and various ships and factories.

Hobart, Mt Wellington and gasp-inducing rainbow from the MONA ferry.

The boat driver had fun playing tour guide: ‘to get to Antarctica head off to the right there and keep going for about ten days’, ‘that’s the fourth-biggest (or something like that) Zinc refinery in the world’. Then someone else gave us a little talking to about MONA itself. It felt like we were going to Jurassic Park, with the thrilling guarantee of the unexpected and instructions for our high-tech navigation equipment (the ‘O’ device), and finally pulling up to the sandstone cliffs and seemingly timeless (yet very contemporary) MONA exterior.

Once inside we were given an ‘O’ device each and some headphones, and then off we went, deep into the sandstone belly of MONA. There was so much to see, and thanks to the ‘O’ device, so much to read and listen to and think about. As someone who has studied about museums and works in a gallery this was the first thing that impressed me. Getting rid of wall labels is common practice in art spaces (although older people sometimes complain about it), but labels are the norm in large museums and galleries. Removing this pesky visual distraction from MONA resulted in the seamless presentation of a collection that is impressively diverse- old Egyptian relics, Modern Australian paintings and conceptual contemporary art (just to name a few themes) all co-existing surprisingly comfortably.

For large institutions, a touch-screen device and headphones seems like the perfect solution- people already often listen to audio guides in galleries, and this is just an extension of that. You can dip in to all that extra information if you so please, and you can put more stuff on a device than on a wall label. AND you can enter your email address and have your tour SENT TO YOU, to be relived and continued anytime you want, complete with all the information and audio at your fingertips. This, people, is the way of the future. At MONA and since I have listened to music and interviews with artists, and read assorted quotes as well as commentary by David Walsh (the collector responsible for MONA) and a few of MONA’s curators.

The next thing that dawned on me whilst walking the dark, cavernous spaces of MONA, was how unusual the collection itself is. Normally, collections are put together by various curators for an institution with a public, sensible agenda. But David Walsh is not a curator (in the usual sense, anyway), and he is collecting things because he can, and because he likes them. You could criticize him as indulgent and egotistical, and his personal brand of irreverence sometimes walks a hair-thin line between hilarious and disrespectful. But there’s no denying he’s onto a good thing with the MONA collection- especially as it is so unusual and sometimes shocking- and it’s a great thing that the public can see it.

It helps that Walsh has truckloads of money to throw at expensive things that he likes, and so that he needn’t worry about boring logistics that would make curators at an average institution run screaming. Goldfish (in a work by Jannis Kounellis) and plants (in a work by Mikala Dwyer) to keep alive; a large knife (again Jannis Kounellis) that looks as if it would be easily grabbed by anyone; contemporary art that hasn’t stood the ‘test of time’ yet. All of these factors are what makes MONA so wonderful and different. Also, there’s the fact that Australia’s wealthy people are notoriously stingy when it comes to supporting the arts when compared to those overseas in the USA and Europe.

Another geeky gallery thing that impressed me was the lighting, and in particular some iPhone-4-shaped display-cases in which various relics and smaller objects were housed. The sleek black cases were beautifully simple, and they had built-in lights that perfectly lit their contents from the edges of the case. The most striking example of this was a bunch of neolithic flints suspended like a constellation, which I think was displayed more to show off the case than the flints, judging by the commentary on the ‘O’.

My highlights of MONA included:

Bit.Fall by Julius Popp

Kryptos by Brigita Ozolins

Cunts… and Other Conversations by Greg Taylor and Friends

Pulse Room by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

I will definitely go back when I’m next in Hobart, and here’s hoping that’s sooner rather than later.

The Secret Life of Canberra

This is a short piece I wrote for the NAVA Quarterly, for their ‘Focus on’ page. Two states/territories are featured on this page each quarter.

Focus on the ACT- The Secret Life of Canberra

Canberra has a reputation for being boring. It is thought to be a city (more like a country town, some say) full of bureaucrats, where little happens except for the occasional politician sighting or blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery. But underneath the cold, grey exterior, and amidst the understated eucalypts of the bush capital thrives an art scene that is truly a national treasure.

One of the top art schools in the country, the ANU School of Art, and a solid range of arts organisations develop and support some of the country’s most influential artists. These arts organisations include (but are definitely not limited to) Megalo, Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA), M16 Artspace, Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), Craft ACT, and the ANU School of Art Gallery.

Canberra’s main issue, for the arts and more broadly, is its image. The Canberra Times, Art Collector and other publications insist on neglecting the bustle of the contemporary art scene in favour of commercial galleries and national institutions. These organisations are undoubtedly important but shouldn’t be rendered representative of Canberra at the expense of living Canberra artists and smaller non-collecting or non-commercial arts organisations that contribute to national and international discourses on contemporary art. To get a true picture of how exciting the Canberra art scene is, one must go to local street magazine BMA, Art Monthly’s Art Notes, and blogs including the CCAS Social Pages.

One unfortunate consequence of this image problem is that despite producing many incredible emerging artists, and supporting them to start their careers, many are lured away from the ACT by big city lights. Of course the positive side-effect of this is the national (and even global) network of artists who have called the ACT their home at some point, and many ex-Canberra artists are more than happy to return for a visit given any excuse. The ACT Government is working hard to support artists who do stay, giving them grants opportunities and funding the kinds of organisations that make Canberra a great place to be, and a great place for artists to make and exhibit work.

The future is looking crisp and bright for arts in the ACT. Recently, the ACT Government released the Kingston Arts Precinct Strategy, which outlines plans for an arts precinct close to all the national institutions. This precinct will bring many of Canberra’s exciting arts organisations out of the sleepy suburbs. The Glassworks is already there, and with the recent news that Megalo Print Studio and Gallery will be moving into the heritage Fitters Workshop at Kingston, the precinct is already starting to take shape. With this important development, and the upcoming arts-filled Canberra Centenary in 2013, Canberra’s best kept secret looks set to come out.

Painting Time

The past week has been all about painting. Last Thursday night, I went to two exhibition openings featuring paintings- Kate Barker’s new solo exhibition A Matter of Time; and 2 x 4, a group show curated by the ANU painting workshop. And then on Tuesday I went to a mini-symposium for 2 x 4, which aimed to explore issues of abstraction and representation. After the dominance of abstraction in Canberra over the last few years, these exhibitions have been wildly refreshing. Abstraction isn’t going anywhere (and nor would I want it to), but there seems to be a more relaxed exploration of the spectrum from abstraction through to representation going on.

Kate Barker is a fan of the photographic image and its painterly possibilities. Photographs are historic records, complete moments; aids for remembering a time, place, activity or person. But human memory is incomplete and compromised, sometimes even imagined. Barker uses painting to turn photographs into memories. For A Matter of Time she collected old photographs of life in Canberra, transforming them into contemporary paintings with enigmatic voids, fuzzy logic and delicious colours and textures.

It’s difficult to stop looking at these paintings, in much the same way as Mamma Andersson‘s work (and yes, Kate does admire Andersson too). There’s the same lovely sense of texture, and haunting enigma. But Kate’s painterly textures are her own- whether thick paint or transparent layers, the brush-mark is emphatic, rhythmic and satisfying-  and her colour palette in this body of work is very nicely refined. When your eye finally decides it wants a rest, the luminous plywood left bare in Barker’s compositions provides it, without being boring or jarring.

Something else I really liked about A Matter of Time was that it featured figures in action. Most of the activities being engaged in are nostalgic: sewing; ‘heads down’ in primary school; various playful childhood activities. This works so well with the idea of memory- not only are memories constructed, like garments or children’s play, but omissions from memory often occur when we’re doing things. When absorbed in a task (such as painting- there’s a nice synchronicity there), we easily forget peripheral things; and sometimes we might remember who we were with, where we were, but not what we were doing at a point in time.

Barker’s work is a case in point for figurative contemporary painting and its relevance in Canberra. There are abstract elements in the work; the subject matter is heavily abstracted as opposed to a straight depiction of the photographic source material. There is a devotion to paint and its properties that is the mark of a good painter, wherever they sit on the spectrum from abstraction to representation.

However, these concerns particular to the medium of paint work cooperatively with ideas from outside the realm of painting (but which nonetheless draw threads from painterly traditions, including depictions of the past and cultural mythologies, memory and everyday activities). On a personal level, these paintings depict aspects of our city’s history and a collective nostalgia for it, despite the broad gaps in our gleaned and invented memories.

Barker presents a fascinating alternative to the pervasive political and civic history of Canberra, as well as a much appreciated parallel to Canberra’s abstract painting phenomenon. It seems only ‘a matter of time’ before the focus on painting in Canberra stretches out to sit somewhere more middling on the spectrum from abstraction to representation- in the complex, many layered territory that Kate Barker explores so adeptly.

Kate and Amy

CCAS Catalogue- Jacqueline Bradley / Andrzej Zieliński / Ash Keating

The following are my little catalogue essays for the exhibitions prior to the current ones at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. (Currently showing is Resurrection by John Johnson, Entrapment by Jenni Kemarre Martiniello and Ectopia by Yhonnie Scarce. Vanessa Wright wrote the fantastic catalogue essays for these exhibitions, showing until 1 October.)

JACQUELINE BRADLEY – THE OUTDOORS TYPE

Boat Dress- Jacqueline Bradley. Performance still by Tegan Payne.

The Australian landscape is full of paradox: colonised land and wild bush; droughts and flooding rains; serenity and danger. During a residency at Bundanon, Jacqueline Bradley started making sculptural objects that respond to these paradoxes and explore her own relationship with the land in a humorous and light-hearted way. Just like The Lemonheads’ song ‘Outdoors Type’ that the exhibition title alludes to, Bradley thinks an outdoors type is a great thing to be, but is under no illusions about her comfort or prowess in the wild.

Accordingly, The Outdoors Type features wearable art – in the truest sense of the words – that intends to help the wearer (and by proxy, the viewer) engage with the environment in novel ways. Boat Dress opens up the possibility of using rivers for transport and recreation, without fear of being swept away and drowned like a father and daughter in colonial times at Bundanon. Another of Bradley’s marvels, Ladder Shoes, intends to keep the wearer safe from snakes whilst traversing a grassy plain.

As Bradley’s materials attest, these are not new or high-tech interventions. With their weathered wood and vintage fabrics, they look as if they might have been made almost anytime during the 20^th century. The 20^th century was a time of great progress in many senses, yet the rift between Australians and their natural environment grew exponentially during this time.

Bradley’s found materials also make her objects inherently believable. No plastics to be seen, no high-tech components; Bradley’s sculptures are 100% authentic. They are hung on custom coat-hangers that make their display seem totally natural, as if they’re ready and waiting to be worn. Hand sewing provides proof that these objects are lovingly made, and hand-powered photographic flip machines present instructive moving images of the objects in use.

Bradley’s ‘outdoors type’ can see the humour and possibilities inherent in our relationship with the land, and beats their own wacky path through it aided by inventiveness, creativity and an inspiring sense of adventure.

With thanks to the Bundanon Trust Artist in Residence program.

ANDRZEJ ZIELINSKI – PROTOTYPE

Cash Point at Night- Andrzej Zielinski

Some of the most interesting contemporary painters walk the contentious line between abstraction and representation, and Andrzej Zieliński does it adeptly.

Zieliński makes paintings of electronic devices- laptops, ATMs, mobile phones, paper shredders- that we no longer know how to live without. For him, these objects have become part of a modern mythology, and he treats them with reverence.

In depicting these objects, painting’s long history comes into play and they become contemporary icons. Interference paint with pigment that reflects light differently at different angles echoes gold leaf in early Christian icon paintings, whilst also recalling how screens on electronic devices appear at different angles. Bright, gestural paint marks define the device whilst also acting as a halo.

Zieliński’s work also echoes Modernist painting with its flattening of space and use of bold, impasto paint. But he builds on all of this history, from pre-linear-perspective to Modernism, bringing his work definitively into the 21^st century. Flattened surfaces quiver with depth, more akin to the moving image on screen than a static, 2D work. Layers of paint add to this, and in places are applied to be 3D bas-relief, suggesting the solid, shapely subject matter.

Just as Zieliński did in the process of painting, the viewer must engage with the life-sized image of an electronic device, liberated from its function. It is abstracted, and thus made to seem all the more magical and important.

Like mythology or religion, technology is an abstract concept for most of us in that we don’t really know how it works. The colours and techniques Zieliński uses flaunt this. Even more than the technological subject matter itself, his paintings seem to depict abstract phenomena that we can’t see, let alone understand- the technological happenings inside the device, and the virtual realm outside the device.

The paintings in Prototype serve as icons for worship, but they run on painting’s latest operating system. Upgrades to the system ensure that painting is still a poignant mirror in a world of ever-expanding technology and media.

ASH KEATING – ACTIVATE 2750

Still from Activate 2750- Ash Keating

In Activate 2750 Ash Keating intercepted three truckloads of waste and used it to activate public spaces in intriguing and confronting ways. There was the installation of the strange waste-habitat, with its precarious layers and labyrinth fence; there were the processions by the eight trolley-men of the apocalypse, parading through town and the local Westfield cloaked in discarded fabric banners and pushing trolleys full of trash; and then there is the video itself, which brings this didactic public performance to the masses via the gallery space.

Although Activate 2750 is set in Penrith, it tells a story that has national and international gravity. It is a testament to the simple fact that the more we consume, the more waste we produce.

In making waste public, Keating went against the grain of how our society functions. This is telling in the making of the work, and also the public reaction to it. To make the work, Keating had to be at the waste facility at the obscene hour of 4am in order to intercept the waste. Then, due to public safety concerns, Keating had to erect a fence around the waste installation in Penrith city. This fence was incorporated into the work, and another fence was added to create a rat-run spiralling towards the pile of waste.

The community reaction to the work in progress was volatile at times, although the only evidence of this in the final video is a bit of sneering laughter and heckling. No one said the truth doesn’t hurt, especially when it’s spotlighting a powerful system of production, consumerism and waste in which we are all complicit to some degree.

The community also became involved in more positive ways, especially with two krumping performances by Darrio Phillips and three of his students. In their glorious reclaimed fabric waste costumes, the dynamism of these dancers symbolizes a hopeful shift in our relationship with waste.

Blaze 5- CCAS Catalogue

This is a piece of writing I did earlier this year, for Blaze 5- an exhibition of emerging artists’ work curated by Alexander Boynes and myself. I feel very privileged to have worked with and written about the Blaze 5 artists, some of whom were already dear friends, and some of whom I got to know better as the exhibition came together.

 

This is the fifth year Blaze has set CCAS alight. In what is fast becoming a tradition, not to mention a helpful platform for artists between just-finished-art-school and fully-fledged-artist, Blaze represents a quality sample of emerging artists working in Canberra. Blaze 5 includes work by Emma Beer, Chris Carmody, Tim Dwyer, Daniel Edwards, Natalie Mather, Suzanne Moss, and Daniel Vukovljak.

EMMA BEER
Emma Beer has a full-on, no-holds-barred relationship with paint. Her large abstract paintings subsequently command attention, and expertly seduce. Abstract painting has come alive in Canberra in recent years, evidenced by the impressive ‘This Way Up’ series of exhibitions last year in which Beer’s work hung alongside established and fellow emerging Canberra greats (including Blaze 5 artists Natalie Mather and Suzanne Moss). Beer’s recent paintings are dark and deliciously heavy, but these qualities are complemented and enriched by sensual subtleties of tone and texture; layering and detail; chaos and order. Through these formal tensions, the viewer can’t help but be drawn into the all-important construction process vital to Beer’s work: a practice that explores all that painting encompasses, paint’s properties as a substance and different ways of mixing and layering paint and colours. Beer’s paintings question the place of abstract painting in contemporary art, and contribute much to this ongoing dialogue. Like many Canberra artists, Beer uses simple materials and absorbing processes to create works that are complex, refreshing and surprising.

Emma Beer and 1.2 of her gorgeous paintings. Photo by Travis Heinrich.

 

CHRIS CARMODY
Once in a while an artist is able to give you an ‘aha!’ moment, in which the world and its possibilities open up before you. Chris Carmody is one such artist finding and exposing the sublime within the everyday. His series of pop-up books turned inside out reveal a perspective that has been heretofore closed to most of us, even as inquisitive and somewhat destructive children. The function of the book is removed, and what is left is a beautiful object that gives fleeting glimpses of illustration. Carmody reveals what we’ve been missing right before our eyes. With more than a touch of irony, ‘keep clear’ road markings are drawn into some of the blank pages of the inside-out pop-up books. Carmody’s obsession with these ‘keep clear’ markings, like the pop-up books themselves, lays bare a common signifier, a system of knowledge and participation, that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives: now that you’re thinking about them, you’ll see them everywhere.

TIM DWYER
An emerging master of sensory overload, Tim Dwyer’s work may make you feel simultaneously immersed and detached. The imagery he uses is often familiar- sometimes all too familiar- referencing any number of vintage and contemporary images and video excerpts. A video and a digital collage by Dwyer are featured in Blaze 5. The digital collage includes a rendered avatar, NASA imagery and a photograph Dwyer found of himself on an anonymous blog; the video includes various recognisable slivers of vintage VHS, self-made and found CGI, Google imagery and home video, added to by sound Dwyer produced using several digital and analogue techniques. Dwyer’s collage/mash-up aesthetic, plus his manipulation of imagery through technological processes such as coding, renders the context of all this visual information unclear. Dwyer thus highlights the psychedelic nature of digital and online overload, with its altered perceptions, confusion, danger, anonymity, and addictive ever-presence. Digital culture is both glorified and revealed as vulnerable; a complex glut of man-made activity that has the potential to decay, just as it has the potential to grow.

Apparently kids love psychedelic art- who knew? Tim Dwyer's video work had everyone entranced. Photo by Travis Heinrich.

DANIEL EDWARDS
It’s not often the case that a textile artist is one of the most promising emerging contemporary artists in town, let alone a male textile artist (a rare species indeed). In the past few years, Daniel Edwards has made tapestries and weavings that explore notions of masculinity and family heritage, popular culture and tradition. For Blaze, Edwards has contributed a large-scale wall hanging, titled ‘Empire’. ‘Empire’ draws inspiration from a quilt in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, titled ‘Military Quilt’, probably made by Private Francis Brayley around 1863-77. Private Brayley was an Englishman stationed in British India, and Edwards uses his quilt pattern as a motif for his own British Indian heritage and its blending of cultures and ideas. The geometric quilt pattern also has strong domestic meaning for Edwards, as it refers both to his cultural heritage as expressed in the family home, and to the diaspora of people with British Indian heritage, who now inhabit a ‘global home’. Edwards uses felt hexagons in bright colours to reinterpret a cultural legacy and domestic quilt pattern into a contemporary work of art that is at home in the gallery space.

NATALIE MATHER
Natalie Mather is yet another artist in this exhibition who uses simple materials to phenomenal effect. Her paintings possess a galactic meets geometric aesthetic, gleaned from science fiction films, spacecraft, architecture and geological formations. This aesthetic is a clever metaphor for Mather’s very real journey into (pictorial) space and the painting process. An important part of the construction of each painting is a battle between preciousness and abjection, the finished and the unfinished. Mather engages with ideas about ‘provisional painting’, allowing a raw and unfinished quality that speaks of both limits and possibilities, and enabling freedom of experimentation with different kinds of paint and the way the paint is applied. Mather’s paintings allow one to travel to and from the raw, plywood support through several thin skins of paint, metallic and reflective surfaces, and layers of celestial spray paint. You’ll cherish the precious, revel in the abject and ride the glorious gravitational pulls between ground and weightlessness.

Natalie Mather and Crystalline.

SUZANNE MOSS
Suzanne Moss’ paintings shimmer with almost imperceptible shifts. Her interests in colour field and optical effects, emanation and dynamism are immediately apparent, but these surface concerns give way to a bigger picture. Moss aims to create a contemplative sense of wonder about the universe and existence, the infinite and our relationship to it. These ambitious explorations formed the basis for Moss’ recent PhD studies. One of two large paintings in Blaze 5 is based on a grid of tiny squares, built up with layers of luminous paint. The process and the product give a sense of the infinite being made up of countless parts: molecules bouncing off each other; stars in the night sky. Out of this ‘luminous ground’ emerge concentric squares that suggest a larger force at work. Moss’ other painting featured in Blaze 5 is more simple, but no less affecting. Concentric squares of shimmering pale blue ripple through the picture plane over the white canvas. Through Moss’ work, the infinite is intimate and accessible.

Suzanne Moss and some of her beautiful paintings. Photo by Travis Heinrich.

DANIEL VUKOVLJAK
Daniel Vukovljak’s artistic superpower is the ability to merge two opposing forces: the graphic, nostalgic realm of comics and their superheros, and the history of Western painting. Low culture meets high culture in an epic battle, but the real winner here is contemporary art. Vukovljak’s recent work has stripped comic book pages back to abstract but nonetheless recognisable pieces, through cutting or tearing. His paintings of layered frames from comic book pages, sometimes complete with speech bubbles, give a nod to Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art paintings of the mid-twentieth century. Instead of parodying the comic medium, Vukovljak removes content and we’re left with gaps to fill. For Lichtenstein, comics were a part of the dominant American capitalist industrial culture. Vukovljak’s paintings are more open-ended, suggesting that cultural narratives are complex and layered. Where will the plot take us? Which superhero(s) will save the day?

Shenanigans- the Blaze crew. Photo by Travis Heinrich.