Past Exhibitions | 2009

Tom Carment (Courtesy Damien Minton Gallery)

Elisabeth Cummings

Rachel Ellis

Jenny Sages

Wendy Sharpe

Kevin Lincoln (Courtesy Niagara Gallery)

"A drawing always goes into another drawing and another until it needs to go somewhere else but I don’t know how… then it becomes an experience in itself."

Jenny Sages 2009

Full colour catalogue available $10

Most life on earth is invisible to the naked eye.

‘Macroscope’ brings focus to the microscopic organisms known as Diatoms. Diatoms are a sub group of planktons - the most abundant life form and food source in our oceans. Magnified, these wondrous structures reveal universal patterns and forms which are seen in cross cultural indigenous imagery and new scientific theory. In this sense these organisms are metaphors for the building blocks of life itself - appearing like the skeletal remains or fossils of some imagined past or future.

‘Diatom’ comes from the Greek for wanderer or drifter, unable to swim against the ambient flow but using wind upon the water surface to keep themselves suspended, they are totally subject to their external environment. Each work embodies a piece of found beach plastic magnifying a disturbing discovery. Recent research shows that plastic has infiltrated planktons. This is a marker for our far reaching interruption into the natural order.

‘Macroscope’ exposes and questions how we affect and morph the natural world at its ‘unseen’ levels.

Shona Wilson

April 2009

Full colour catalogue available $5

Catalogue Essay, 2009

People come to Tasmania seeking solace in its pristine wilderness. In shady valleys just off the highways or on walking tracks across mountains reserved especially for the purpose, they think they find it. Yet their joy in ‘untouched nature’ depends upon their ability to bracket it off from all those parts of the world that are not untouched, to pretend for a moment that this is all there is. Similarly, the understanding of the scientist depends on bracketing nature as a rational system, and the wealth of the industrialist on bracketing it as an impersonal store of raw materials for the taking. In order to see the world in one way, we must discount other ways.

What Richard Wastell wants to do is not necessarily to remove te brackets, nor even to recommend one approach over another, but to encourage us to step outside the brackets for a time so as to understand their meaning, and therefore our place in the broader scheme of things. Only by transcending our habitual ways of thinking can we break out of our isolation.

As a consequence, these paintings might be confusing (even confronting) to those expecting an easy environmental polemic. Burnt-out tree trunks (which may or may not be casualties of Tasmania’s rapacious woodchippers) appear as eerily beautiful as piles of mussel shells by a river (which, he has cautioned, are not necessarily Aboriginal middens). Withering she-oaks stand side-by-side with trhiving ones; abalone shells are artificially arranged into rhythmic conga-lines on a stylised seashore; spring butterflies assume a menacing monumentality; campfires burning in the distance migth signal innocent family picnics or the start of a conflagration. Death and life, destruction and creation, succeeding one another in a never-ending cycle.

While such equivalences might thwart those who demand a firm moral stance, the artist does not assume to tell us how to think, but to suggest the right questions to ask ourselves.

So these paintings are not just landscapes. They are about culture, imagination and memory, seamlessly blending the private and autobiographical into the public and social. While not promising salvation, they hold out hope for survival. Although no people intrude, the human footprint is everywhere suggested, marking the land with relics and traces, for, as the philospoher Erazim Kohák writes, ‘what is at issue is… whether we shall conceive of ourselves as integrally continuous with the world about us or as contingently thrown into it as strangers into an alien medium.’*

Step up close, and the whole picture dissolves into a myriad of tiny elements, like teaming molecules, jostling and crowding, forming themselves into shell, treetrunk, water or bare earth, then just as quickly dispersing again. Richard’s surfaces are constantly alive. Step back, and everything coheres into a solid, monumental classicism, stylised and slightly unreal, as in a children’s storybook.

It is this lively interplay between the agitated and the static, between the miniature and the monolithic, that suggests wholeness, continuity and regeneration, putting these beautiful, meditative pictures into a state of nature.

Peter Timms, June 2009.

* Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: a philosophical enquiry into the moral sense of nature, University of Chicago Press, 1987

This exhibition includes five visiting printmakers that have joined with Salvatore Gerardi to make this new body of work called Dialogue

Print Collaborators:

• Paul Smith master printer eStudio Editions

• Brenda Tye

• Michelle Watts

• Sussie Heymans

• Peter Sharp courtesy Liverpool Street Gallery Sydney

When looking back and considering the ‘influences’ on my work, several artists and writers come to mind; these may be more or less influential at any given time. There are though, certain connections that hold and seem to be continuing. Martin Buber has been one of these connections; often encountered in quotes by other writers. Buber’s articulation of how we respond to the world has been seminal to my way of seeing and therefore how I ‘see’ my paintings. The Martin Buber connection (exemplified by McMahon’s Painting __I-Thou__) added to my interest in the work of Colin McMahon; in particular the way in which he depicted land. In quoting here at length from Bubers book __I-Thou__, it is hoped it will elucidate not only his approach, but also how this may be useful when considering encounters of the land and of paintings. As the difference between the truth of a painting and the truth about a painting are significant. Buber’s writings have for me been a way of continuing my assessment of western paradigms in painting and have added to my encounter with indigenous art.

Idris Murphy 2009

Full colour catalogue $10 available please visit the gallery.

The paintings in this exhibition were inspired by the landscape surrounding my studio in Oberon.

Whilst making the work, I was interested in the tension created by the juxtaposition of shapes against the wider field and the placement on these forms within the picture plain. By doing away with extraneous detail, my hope is that a kind of distillation might take place, where the essence of this landscape hums softly through.

Joanna Logue 2009

Exhibition dates: July 14 -26 2009
Opening: Thursday 16th July

Atrium
Federation Square
Crn Flinders & Swanson Streets
Melbourne 300

Inside 2009, the first body of paintings conceived since his move from inner-western Sydney to the old coal mining township of Bulli, John Bokor has created paintings more densely worked in subject matter and in palette, moodier.

It is a curious shift given the nineteenth century township of tree lined timber cottages is by comparison spacious in scale yet Bokor surveys with a visual interrogation that works t intensify every nuance of his new environment stretching from the Illawara Escarpment to the Pacific Ocean.

Fleeting impressions of familiar still life objects - bottles, chairs and books, jostle for space with organic matter from the outside world - birds, cliffs and water. In past paintings trees punctuated a cityscape, they now dominate a landscape. Signature compression of Bokor’s mark making,that once reflected urban static, is now at work vigorously conveying the landscape of his studio and its windows where light feeds in and colour triumphs over subject matter.

But while the geographical shift is catalyst for even more charged emotional currents pulsing on moody surfaces, it also affords Bokor a chance for his frenetic Expressionist brush strokes to play rough with variations in perspective. Two and three dimensional picture planes topple into the viewer’s space while wonky cropping and angles of perspective hint at an impressionist interpretation of a world that has its source in the nineteenth century. It is perhaps the most fitting acknowledgement to this precocious painter’s Bulli environs.

Courtney Kidd, 2009

The images for this show were begun last year before the recent fires in victoria.

However one of the underlying meanings i wanted to embed in the work is the tragic irony of the Australian landscape is the paradox of fire and water.

The silhouettes of the denuded trees in my works is an image of a tree that has been drowned by flooding, an abundance of water.

Prophetically they look like burnt trees and the title of some of the works ‘Burnt Creek Offering’ actually alludes to the irony and the inevitable in this harsh landscape, that watercourses which at times can become inundated with water can at other times provide the elements and conditions for infernos.

The nature of bushfire in Australia is equally as paradoxical, where wild fire ravages the landscape merciless on plant and animal life, whilst at the same time generating the necessary conditions for re-growth and germination.

I was aware of the implications and impressions that the blackened silhouetted trees and birds might suggest in the light of subsequent bushfire events in February.

The decision to continue with the imagery for this show given the tragedy of the fires, was made because I had embarked upon this series and the underpinning ideas were about the harsh paradoxes in the Australian Landscape, but to portray these paradoxes with a sense of mystery and hopefully beauty.

I have titled some of the work ‘the way the land lies’ and another ‘prophet and loss’ which alludes to the mystery and unpredictability of nature.

King Street Gallery (on William) is proud to present an exhibition of New Paintings by Peter O’Doherty. This exhibition is O’Doherty’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery and will showcase his vibrant, individualistic paintings produced over the past 18 months.

The exhibition will showcase the quirky, familiar and nostalgic images from O’Dohertys childhood for which he is best known. Images from a time, in the ’50s and ’60s, when fibro homes, patios, wrought iron and the beach were the stuff of dreams and the dream of owning your own home was a reality. Through his earliest experiences growing up in New Zealand and on the northern beaches of Sydney, he has captured the essence of that time and thrown forward to today images of fibro beach houses and blocks of flats locked in time, providing us with a very personal, retro reality.

Few of us have grown up oblivious to these images and places. After more than 20 solo exhibitions and numerous awards and group shows, O’Doherty gives us a very refined vision - something from the past to enjoy into the future.