Past Exhibitions | 2008

Artist statement

Space is an essential element of everything I make. I came to Australia wanting to understnad weestern conceptions of space and how they were different from the Japanese approach. What I found in trying to incorporate these ideas into my work was that the gap was bigger than I had expected, and more difficult to define.

Japanese architects Arata Isozaki and Atsushi Ueda argue that the Japanese idea of space differs from the western perception because in Japan space is connected to the soul. Originally the idea of respect for the heavens did not exist. Japanese indigenous people thought that gods lived not in heaven, but beyond the ocean. In keeping with this, the Japanese sacred axis is drawn horizontally rather than vertically, and it is the earth and ocean that are revered.

With the opening up of Japan in the late 19th century, a wesern concept of space was introduced and a new word, kukan, began to be used to describe it. Today kukan is the most commonly used word for space but I wonder how confronting the change was, and how it influenced current Japanese understanding of the concept.

The contradiction between Japanese and western spatial concepts has become an important feature in the way I think about my work. Contemplating vertical and horizontal axes gave me the idea of using fixtures such as stairs and escalators, which suggest vertical movement, and modifying or presenting them in unusual ways. Distorting the space surrounding the objects allows me to incorporate horizontal movement in an ostensibly vertical form. Although no longer functional, I like to think the stairs or escalators retain a sense of human movement - I imagine people experiencing the particular freedoms, constraints and interpretations of gravity connected with each work.

Kensuke Todo 2008

ANDREW CHRISTOFIDES: NEW WORK, 2008

Andrew Christofides’s studio based research continues Modernism’s search for purity of process and form whilst being relevant and responsive to the concerns of ‘place’ and the artist’s role in the new millennium.

The work is informed by a deep regard for the substance and monumentality of Renaissance Painting and a continuing belief in the ideals of early 20th Century European Abstraction. The work has sought to incorporate aspects of each. Personal experience and cultural background inform the work through the use of titles, colour relationships and metaphoric nuance. The contrast and apparent contradiction of rigid geometric structure and the subtely expressive surface qualities, in the work, highlights the tension evoked between the predetermined and the intuitive. This tension creates what Christofides believes is a necessary duality – the balance between the concrete and the esoteric, the struggle between the rational and the romantic.
Christofides sees this duality as a metaphor for the way life forces one to take the limitations of the everyday, the mundane, and create something heroic – something that, in the end, transcends the everyday by becoming unique and beautiful.

Whilst these paintings may appear to have no overt visual relationship with the real world they are in fact absolutely linked to it through the very process of intuition, emotional response and, both past and present, experiences and through the way Christofides chooses to rationalize and quantify these experiences. While the works are in no way descriptions of specific memories and experience they nevertheless have roots in those events and carry subtle and indelible traces of them.
In the end these paintings are seen as primarily self-contained aesthetic entities and are meant to be experienced by the viewer for their visual values.

Andrew Christofides, 2008

JAYNE DYER

White Work

King Street Gallery on William



Press Release

What happens when the visual arts and mathematics conflate?
In White Work Jayne Dyer explores the scope and relationship of visual arts with systems usually associated with measurement.
In this ambitious exhibition, large wave-like arcs writhe through the gallery. Misshapen orbs, pyramids and cubes sit precariously on two metre high table like constructions, seeming to suspend in space and defy natural order and logic. Delicate ink and pencil drawings map chaos.
Paper, objects and architecture become one, meanings simultaneously appear, dissolve and reappear as systems of geometry concerned with questions on the relative positions of figures and properties of space are built and dismantled.
The exhibition operates an open-ended equation. Works are presented in a state of flux, pointing towards an understanding of a narrative, but speak as much about disconnection and secrecy as about transparency.

Biography
Australian artist Jayne Dyer is currently living in Beijing developing projects for Asia, Europe and Australia. Her practice is multi-disciplined with an installation focus, featuring photographs, wall works and sculptural objects that combine the ready-made and the hand-made.
Extensive national and international exhibitions and awards include regular participation in curated exhibitions and projects in Asia and Australia; Australia Council for the Arts established artist new work grant (2008), residencies in Taiwan (Asialink, 2008), Hong Kong (Lingnan University, 2007), Paris, Cite (NAS/FONAS, 2005; AGNSW, 1999), Beijing (Asialink, 1996), and Italy (Monash University, 1991/2). Dyer was the commissioned artist for the 2006 and 2007 Sydney Writers Festival. Her work is regularly reviewed in art journals and books and is in public and private collections in Australia, China, Japan and England. In 2005 she received a Commonwealth of Australia PSM for contributions to the arts & education. Qualifications include an MA (research) & BFA Hons, RMIT University, Melbourne. Dyer is represented by King Street Gallery on William, Sydney and Uber Gallery, Melbourne.


Jayne Dyer
Exhibition Dates
26th August –20th September 2008

Jenny Sages

JULY 29 – AUGUST 23, 2008




For the past 24 years Jenny Sages has organized and taken regular trips to remote areas of the Northern Territory

Jenny travels with a small entourage – usually other artists and usually only women. Accompanied by the same two guides for over 18 years, and usually a guide from the Aboriginal community whose land she is on- the trip is rarely predetermined. It is travel in a rugged 4-wheel drive, swags, a small-netted tent and a GPS. There are no hotels, no hot showers, and no gourmet restaurants. There is the overwhelming ruggedness and beauty of the Australian bush; the awe of the spectacularly untouched gorges and the sense of solidarity and respect for the land.

It is this raw, unspoiled landscape that informs Jenny’s paintings of encaustic & pigment on board. Jenny digs, scratches, scraps and scarifies her encaustic surfaces applying layers of pigment along the way- while continually reworking the surface. The resulting works are multi layered abstract images that give us a very individual interpretation of the Australian landscape and expose the viewer to an exceptional artist’s vision.

James Jones graduated from The National Art School in 1991 and has since held 9 solo exhibitions and participated in over 30 group exhibitions. This is James 5th solo show with King Street Gallery on William and his first at the gallery’s new premises.
James’ studio ‘The Palace’ is an enormous vintage building in the heart of Sydney, where his painting and reading consume and sustain him. His studio practice reflects an expressionistic approach to the figure – a longstanding trademark of James’ work. A thick application of paint, characteristically disguises a drawing of an otherwise recognisable object.
‘Free’ embraces the boxing world as a metaphor for the emotional and physical repercussions of ‘the knocks of life.’ Everyday we deal with life’s upheavals – the good, the bad and what ever may fall in between. This body of work encompasses a palette rich in colour replacing the predominantly white veil seen in previous shows.
James’ paintings hang in the collections of Macquarie Bank; Allen, Arthur, Robinson; News Corporation; Windsor & Newton and the Establishment Hotel.

Catalogue Essay

by Courtney Kidd

Ah… Paris

Paris, France… "A tamed and familiar land, as comfortable as an old espadrille" or perhaps not, as Graham Robb suggests in his recently released history, Discovering France. At the heart of the locale exists a fundamental paradox where the place’s perceived appearance - formed by generations of tourists savouring cafes, charcuteries and connoisseurship - belies its rawness and grunt, the latter being the France of discovery by earlier explorers and travelers.

At what pont though does one shift from the stages of explorer, traveler and tourist to beyond, to become woven into a place’s fabric? It is a question underpinning Wendy Sharpe’s enquiry in her current body of paintings, Paris.

A regular traveler to hte city of lights, she recently spent three months over the European Autumn/Winter as a recipient of the AGNSW Denise Hickey Studio. Exactly 20 years earliers, Sharpe as a precocious emerging painter, had been awarded the same studio. This time, as a mid career artist, she notes,

"I was much more able to shift easily from the enclosure of the Cite, its comfortability and security to beyond, to where I could absorb the ambience, capture the moment, the strange juxtapositions of tourists in places, the gestures of Paris’s people, the ways all different types were all squashed in."

That said, the luxury of space and time, afforded in the provision of a studio, kick started arguably Sharpe’s finest painting to date.

It takes seconds to fall in love with her cluster of tiny canvases living and breathing every nuance of the city via relaxed, sensuous mark making. Surface scuffs and frissons of paint pulse with tthe city’s field of expressions while more extravagant conversations evolve with the four meter canvases. They stretch to an evocative survey of Parisian life where mood is delivered by swatches of moving colour. Distorting the real in a way not dissimilar to real estate ads, these panoramas survey then close in with a fish eye lens retaining their integrity as Sharpes’s signature expressive style whisks them into shape.

It is as if the whole of Paris, Sharpe’s Paris, were caught in a moment of suspended animation, as if she the onlooked were committed to being more than a tourist, more than a someone passing through who does this looking, this painting for pleasure. The viewer too shares this process. He or she becomes a person looking at an artist looking at someone. Sharpe, as the one looking and creating, captures then an aesthetic distance and herein lies the key to her work. It is grounded in a fundamental paradox, as if to mirror the paradox of Paris itself, the sacred end of culture and the profane end of an old espadrille.

Wendy Shapre, whether painting about artist’s studios, art schools, militia on missions, lovers in studios, cafes or tourists, is curious about the romance of art, the romanitc perceptions about its practice, its making, but never does she doubt it is work, seriously hard work. This is what affords this independent traveler an integrity over time and a well deserved success in the annals of Australian art.

*Graham Rob, The Discovery of France, Norton & Co, 2007

Courtney Kidd is a Sydney based art consultant and writer