Louisa Bufardeci: The Sea Between A and I

Louisa Bufardeci's exhibition The Sea Between A and I (as in Australia and Indonesia) opened on Saturday at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. The artworks – all needlepoint on a fibreglass screen – make reference to maritime disasters, sunken boats and the plight of desperate people risking their lives to make the perilous journey across the seas. Bufardeci has used Google Earth to pinpoint the precise coordinates of eight of these tragedies and crafted intense and abstract forms in gradations of blue. They invoke the swirl of meteorological matter, weather charts and thermal imaging, though in this instance in place of heat associated with living, breathing organisms  these works speak of the opposite – death itself.

The real events described in Bufardeci's artworks felt very far away on that sunny Saturday afternoon. I felt very graciously welcomed into the gallery where I was not only offered a Campari after climbing the stairs but the monkeys even had a room set aside for art making. I was surrounded by some pretty lovely people, some of whom I knew. The opening speaker, human rights lawyer David Manne gave a considered, moving address. It was long sure, though not overly, and given the subject matter it felt appropriate: my legs were bearing less stress than the asylum seekers. Manne drew on statistics on the number of displaced persons around the world, recounted the lack of detail in reporting of asylum seeker journeys and drew a line between that and the abstracted language of Bufardeci's needlepoints. For someone who admitted he hadn't written about art since year 11, to my eye some twenty five years earlier, it was a perceptive observation.

If you are wondering whether there is a market for these kind of works, the entire show sold to the NGV before the exhibition opened. Not only was the work well crafted, but topical. I felt very pleased for the artist with whom I share a personal connection (we both have girls in the same class at school). It was only afterwards, on the journey home that I felt growing ambivalence. The work and its backstory forces us to consider uncomfortable truths about the country we live in and the world at large. But in the space that opens up afterwards, what resides there other than Guilt and Shame, and possibly Anger. Is there anything wrong with turning tragedy into art and those art objects into dollars? Is it worse to not make that art? Does not making the art only mirror the silence that characterises the government and media on this 'issue'. I just don't know.

Louisa Bufardeci
The Sea Between A and I
17 October - 11 November 2015
Anna Schwartz Gallery
185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Brent Harris: Dreamer

There's no contemporary Australian artist I admire more than Brent Harris. Is there another artist as inventive, courageous, surprising and plain well skilled? Can't think of one. Sometimes when someone has had such a consistent, prolific practice – and Harris has exhibited prodigiously for 30 years – it's difficult to know where to begin? As an artist who has worked across printmaking and painting there's a lot to account for. I'm not going to attempt it here (though keep an eye out for a forthcoming article by M Zagala – she's putting some ideas together on Harris' printmaking in long form). If Harris' current exhibition is anything to go by he is in the rare situation of being both a critical and commercial success.

Dreamer is a beautiful exhibition. I liked the hang that positioned Harris' small canvases close to Tolarno's gallery entry. They have a vignette-like quality, a shifting plane of figurative and abstract elements that recall the figure groupings of religious Italian Renaissance paintings by way of Turner. Harris' brush work is a riveting combination of flat scrubbed back surfaces overlaid with buttery paint strokes. But Harris' real gift to the viewer is the way in which he brings the process to the fore. There is a sense of chance, discovery and serendipity articulated in the compositions that might appear tentative but actually reflect Harris' enormous experience.

In the larger canvases whimsical faces emerge, some tiny little proto-beings,  not more than graphic linear gestures animated by cartoon-like eyes. I was intrigued by the different propositions contained in single works – late 19th century landscape traditions, psychedelic colours, and the human form. In all the paintings it's the human figure – searching, fugitive – that lend these abstracted landscapes a slightly unsettling quality. In them the spectre of the unconscious hovers like an inky presence drawing together the complex spheres of the social, sexual and religious.

Brent Harris
Dreamer
12 February - 4 April 2015
www.tolarnogalleries.com

Images courtesy of Tolarno Galleries

Trente Parke - The Black Rose

Last week I flew to Adelaide for the opening of the Trent Parke exhibition, The Black Rose, at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The exhibition, co-curated by Maria Zagala and Julie Robinson had been a topic of daily conversation between my twin and I for months, if not years.  There was no way I was going to miss it. Sharing my life with two curators I’ve come to understand that every now and again – and it’s really not that often – curator and exhibition subject connect in a powerful way.  I had a feeling that this was that kind of show.

A few things pointed in this direction: Trent Parke’s remarkable personal story, the project’s ambition (only seven years in the making) and the scale of the exhibition (carte blanche to the entire temporary exhibition space). In his early thirties, and newly a father, Parke’s thoughts turned to the traumatic memory of his mother’s sudden and unexpected death from an asthma attack when he was 13 years old. The exhibition charts Parke’s odyssey – an epic emotional, cosmic and vast geographical journey – undertaken with his own young family across the country and ending at his childhood home in Newcastle, NSW. Documenting birth, death, and the everyday banalities of suburban life, Parke and the exhibition curators have collated a selection of the thousands of mostly black and white photographs, in addition to multimedia and installation works, into a series of self-contained rooms that articulated the exhibitions themes.

Apart from the visual material, Parke wrote some 15,000 words to accompany the project: a diaristic collection of notes, recollections, dreams and observation, some of which appear on the walls and as part of the exhibition catalogue. These form an interesting adjunct to the visual works. The photographs, all formally exquisite and technically precise recall the documentary style of iconic mid 20^th century magazines like Life.  (Parke is Australia’s only Magnum photographer – a difficult feat and rare honour). Parke acknowledges that he is not a writer in the short film that introduces the exhibition, and reiterates the statement in the catalogue despite identifying as a storyteller. His prose –  unabashedly pulpy and overwrought – is everywhere.  Parke’s widely divergent skills as a artist and writer had an interesting effect. I literally flipped between Amazing! and Terrible! every second step. The juxtaposition of very different modes – professional and amateur – added a compelling dimension to the exhibition. For Parke, this project was a total excavation.  

Parke’s exhausting and exhaustive search for meaning by way of documentary, vernacular and theatrical form powerfully conveys the messy, dislocating experience of trauma. At the exhibitions end I was in awe of Parke’s capacity for risk – emotional, professional and financial. It seemed to me the definition of courage.

Trent Parke, Black Butterfly from The Black Rose, 2014 gelatin silver hand print 120 x 152cm

The Black Rose

Art Gallery of South Australia

14 March – 10 May 2015

Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City

                                                   

I designed this catalogue Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City to accompany the exhibition of the same name late last year. This was one of those charmed projects from the outset –  a creative joy from start (a coffee date with its writer and exhibition curator Melissa Miles in North Carlton during the last school holidays) to finish (the arrival of hand delivered freshly printed catalogues wrapped in paper and a bow courtesy of the always diligent team at Adams Print). When I break it down, what then constitutes 'creative joy' in a project such as this with several players: a gallery, an independent curator and a printer? It had a team of good listeners with expertise, a sense of confidence, and a healthy perfectionism. It had an adequate timeframe, not overly long, nor too tight. It had a great subject and visual material. And I had autonomy.

The exhibition – documenting modern photography in Australia – straddles the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Keeping this in mind Melissa and I wanted the design to reflect the time and to keep the emphasis squarely on the photographs. Given that the photographs are all gelatine silver prints we decided on a monochromatic palette with a single steely blue as an accent. That accent appears only in the image credits and on the inside cover, a late addition thanks to Shane from Adams Print who was not certain that the shade of the cover and inside paper stocks would marry well – a good call).

The font is Quadraat, a digital serif font created by Fred Smeijers in 1992. Although it is contemporary in feel it actually draws on pre modern typefaces Garamond (from the 1500s) and Times (late 1700s). I've always liked using Quadraat for body copy for its qualities, legibility and a touch of eccentricity. The headings, credits and footnotes are in Scala, another font designed in the early 1990s. Both Scala and Quadraat were conceived in the Netherlands, a hotbed of typographic innovation. As I'm thinking about it, it strikes me as slightly wondrous that two font families from the other side of the world designed in the same language and within a year of one another would be so right for a historical project from the Antipodes.

Naturally, I am tormented by two or three things I would have done differently (goddammit!) but overall I was happy with the result. Can I say I like it? In fact I am not the only one. A number of people have liked this catalogue. One enthusiast, blogger Peter Costigan, has even posted on it. How nice is that?

Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City 
Closes 1 March 2015
Catalogue costs $25 from the MGA shop.

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
Telephone +61 3 8544 0500
T–F 10am–5pm S&S 12–5pm
www.mga.org.au

Whisper in my mask

Whisper in my mask

TarraWarra Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art

16 August – 16 November 2014

TarraWarra Museum of Art has been mounting biennial’s for eight years. The exhibitions are designed to chart new developments in contemporary art. From the outset the museum has engaged external curators to conceive exhibitions that explore an idea, theme or tendency in contemporary art practice. Whisper in My Mask, the fifth in this line is a collaboration between curators Natalie King and Djon Mundine. King, who amongst other shows, curated Up Close: Carol Jerems with Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and William Yang at Heide in 2010 is interested in edgy subcultures and relationships - between artists, milieus, individuals; Mundine’s writing and curatorial practice has focused on Aboriginal art, including the remarkable Aboriginal Memorial (1987-1988), 200 hollow log coffin poles from Ramingining, a project similarly geared towards the collective. 

While King and Mundine have gravitated towards different curatorial subjects, in their joint catalogue essay King and Mundine offer an insight into their shared methodology: “ The relationality  of curating individual artists, community, society, inside and outside the gallery, and creating a conversation between objects and community through a number of devices and on a number of levels, is something we unconsciously just thought was our normal practice.” King and Mundine’s practice foregrounds relationships, collaboration and conversation and this is evident in the assembled artists and works. This methodology underpins the biennial in a myriad of ways, and, in fact, forms the most cogent framework for thinking about the exhibition itself.

The exhibition features 16 individuals and groups, including a number of collectives; boat people, a Sydney based collective of 10 who contributed a video-based work, The Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a dynamic social enterprise that were commissioned by the biennial to make sculptures, as well as artistic collaborations: Destiny Deakin and Virginia Fraser, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, and Karla Dikens’ who took photographs in partnership with Lismore Soup Kitchen and Southern Cross University, and sisters Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano. 

Whisper in My Mask explicitly draws on the trope of the mask. The accompanying exhibition catalogue essays elaborate an understanding of the origins, meaning, symbolism and use of masks in Western and indigenous cultures. Masks allude, we know, to human disguise, to camoflage, to erasure, secrets and hidden meanings. How then is this theme articulated across the exhibition? The curators have taken a broad perspective selecting artworks that either formally or by way of subject probe this idea. Walking through the gallery space there was a palpable sense of intensity. Between Polinexi Papepetrou’s photographs of clowns, some wearing costumes made of the Union Jack, boat-people’s video instillation Muffled Protest depicting the collective artists sitting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House with their faces covered by the Australian flag, Tony Garifalakis’ photographic camouflage portraits, and Nasim Nasr’s video installation of a weeping woman wearing a chandor,  I felt the full impact of so many potent symbols in close proximity. Fiona Foley’s sculptural installation of towering serif letters spelling out Black Velvet rendered in wood and metal (referring to the racial slur and not simply fabric) ratcheted it up a notch. Foley’s words loomed like a provocative headline in an exhibition that read like a newspaper; a cacophony of people, stories, recent events demanding action.

An edited version of this review appears in the forthcoming issue of Artlink 34 #4 Sustainable? out in December.

image: Tony Garifilakis, The Hills Have Eyes, 2012

Street Strollers of New York

You know in the couple of years I've been writing this blog, I don't think I have ever featured the writing of Mr Stephen Zagala. The essay below accompanies the current exhibition, New Photography From the Footpath, which opened at Monash Gallery of Art over the weekend. It's a great show and excellent essay. Along with reproductions of Catherine Bell's photographs it's been pulled together into a super cute booklet. You can pick it up for 10 bucks in the MGA shop. 

Images (top-bottom) Catherine Bell, from the series Street Strollers of New York (series no. 48) 2010, courtesty of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne), Catherine Bell, from the series Street Strollers of New York 2010, courtesty of the artist and Sutton Gallery (Melbourne).

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Street strollers of New York is a sequence of photographs that document African-American nannies shuttling white children through the affluent mid-town streets of Manhattan. Catherine Bell’s interest in this subject grew out of her own experience working as a nanny in London; she embarked on this project with the notion to pay tribute to an under-acknowledged workforce. While there is a significant tradition in documentary photography of images of heroic workers, Bell’s images of African-American nannies belong to another tradition altogether – that of the clandestine street photograph. In these pictures, taken with a hidden camera and for the most part without the subject’s knowledge, Bell has cast each nanny in the role of a fugitive.

Bell is an artist who has worked in various media, including drawing, painting, video and performance. For this project she chose to work with black-and-white photographs, because of their association with the gritty realism of street photography. In keeping with the candid strains of this tradition, she has used a small, easily concealed camera to capture her subjects while they are on the move. As a result of this, her images pick up some of the formal qualities that characterise the genre, such and motion blur and coincidental composition.

However, Bell’s investment in street photography has less to do with stylistic traits than with the conceptual ambitions of the genre. For many street photographers, public space can be a theatre for tracking the aberrant complexities of human life as it is actually lived. For Bell, the nannies of New York bring to light the messy actuality of motherhood. In contradistinction to press photographs depicting Park Avenue and Hollywood celebrity-super-mums (who infamously adopt children from third-world countries), Bells’ pictures suggest that the maternal duties of Manhattan’s elites being outsourced to the African-American working class.

Street strollers of New York elaborates on Bell’s long-standing interest in the way that, in popular culture and literature, motherhood is often idealised in ways that deny its physical and psychological challenges. In order to maintain this idealised depiction of motherhood, its realities – its loneliness, its emotional vagaries, its messiness – are disavowed as ‘abject monstrosities’. Bell is interested in the ways that these myths permeate actuality.

The African-American nannies shown in Bell’s photographs can play a role in manufacturing this mythology. That is, the nannies help to distance mothers from the everyday messiness of family life, and give them time to uphold the super-mum ideal. But Bell makes the nannies the stars of her paparazzi-style project, celebrating the errant complexities of the street over the static ideal of motherhood.

- Stephen Zagala

New photography from the footpath
Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett, Ian Tippett
3 April 2014 to 8 June 2014

Alongside The Rennie Ellis Show, which celebrates the work of one of Australia’s most prolific street photographers, New photography from the footpath points to the ongoing relevance of candid photography in public space. Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett and Ian Tippett are all Melbourne-based artists who embrace street photography as a means of capturing the vitality of contemporary life.

Monash Gallery of Art

860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150
Telephone +61 3 8544 0500
T–F 10am–5pm S&S 12–5pm

Fabrizio Biviano

Fabrizio Biviano
Summer Stack (postcards)

Oil on linen

I find myself in the swamplands of Collingwood a few times a week but its not often that I visit the galleries unless its a friend's show. When I'm not at work, I'm with the kids. They beg for the park not contemporary art. But I might make an exception for this one. I have had it up to pussies bow measuring out my time like a Queen Street lawyer. I want to cut loose. Which is maybe why these works by Biviano speak to me. Books and music: they have a whiff of leisure, selection and taxonomy that remind me that summer and lazy days are on their way.

Fabrizio Biviano 
10 September – 5 October 2013

James Makin Gallery
67 Cambridge Street, Collingwood,
Victoria, 3066, Australia

Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday: 11am - 5pm

Michael Callaghan tribute

Tribute reproduced courtesy of Art & Australia, Summer 2012, volume 50, number 2.

Michael Callaghan: Merchants of War, 13 November – 1 December 2012 at Damien Minton Gallery
61-63 Great Buckingham Street, Redfern New South Wales, 2016

Get. There. Pronto.

Anastasia Close: I can't stop living

When I pulled the invite to Anastasia Klose's new exhibition from its envelope I couldn't help but giggle. A pencil drawing of a spooked ginger cat and the words, Dear God No. Hilarious. I often have this response to her work. Fuck it's funny. Her preoccupations (singledom, boredom, existential questions about life) always strike the right note. Is it because the work is never overly serious? That has something to do with it. While the ritual humiliations Klose puts herself through in the name of art can make for excruciating viewing, I've always warmed to her honesty. Somehow I always feel like Klose is okay with herself. Which is why the drawings in this exhibition intrigue me. Working with the Cunningham Dax Collection, a collection of over 15,000 artworks made by people with an experience of mental illness or trauma, I can vouch for the fact that this body of work would not look out of place in the storeroom on Royal Parade. Where am I going with this? Nowhere really.

This one is for the cat lovers. I know you are out there in the gazillions.



Anastasia Close
7 July – 12 August 2012
Tolarno Galleries

Level Four

104 Exhibition Street

Melbourne, VIC 3000

www.tolarnogalleries.com
Tel: +61 3 9654 6000
Fax: +61 3 9654 7000

Tuesday - Friday 10am - 5pm

Saturday 1pm - 5pm