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

The Right To Know

This week I sat in front of 20 Preps studying Journeys and told them the story of our family's migration to Australia from Poland when I was precisely their age. I had their rapt attention. It's that kind of story, which includes our family separated across continents, my father's trip by boat to Africa, my mother's escape from Poland with four small children over the mountains in an unreliable car and our eventual reunion in Vienna before the long journey by plane to Australia. 

My own background as a refugee was one of the reasons I was so glad to participate in Red Cross' exhibition, The Right To Know, which tells eight stories of family separation and reunion thanks to the efforts of the Red Cross Tracing Service. It's difficult not to be moved by the stories of sadness, longing and loss told so achingly concisely. 

Designer Cate Hall and I worked on the project out of her backyard studio calling out measurements to each other against a background of children's voices, and Cate's large, doleful black rabbit hopping silently around the yard.

It was the beginning of winter. There was a birth – beautiful Nina in Adelaide – and the shock of Otto's diagnosis of diabetes to contend with the week the artwork was due at the printers. To be honest I was grateful for the chance to lose myself in meaningful work. I laid out photographs of Emmanuel – his warm, positive and dignified face – alongside quotes that were horrifying in their meaning. His story begins: "I was only 14 years old when my family members were killed, when I witnessed that mass killing." 

Moving graphic elements around millimetre by millimetre in Illustrator and changing pixels sizes in Photoshop, I felt fate's cruel hand: good and bad fortune, historical and geographical forces. What choice do we have but to keep moving forward one foot in front of the other? 

The Right To Know

Immigration Museum

400 Flinders Street, Melbourne

Until 25 October 2015

www.sweetpolka.com

www.catehall.com.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

Defaced

At Monash Gallery of Art on the weekend for the opening of the Photography Meets Feminism: Australian Women Photographers 1970s–80s exhibition I found myself on the floor where pencils and paper had been provided for the kids. I doodled with the monkeys who were enjoying the materials and space. Otto found loose sheets of photocopies, reproductions of early photographs and got busy defacing them. Shortly afterwards assembled in the large hall for comedian and art history graduate Hannah Gadsby's opening address things got a bit raucous. Speaking without notes, Gadsby dropped a few expletives. Nothing too outrageous but someone left the room in protest. Gadsby enjoying the unfolding scene called out to Otto "What is the rudest word you know?". Was there something in the cheese? The air? I can't say for certain but it was kinda funny.

Angelica Mesiti's The Calling

Before visiting ACMI last weekend I would have said that DreamWorks Animation: The Exhibition would be hands-down more entertaining than Angelica Mesiti's The Calling. I am pretty sure I don't have to explain the DreamWorks studio (creators of feel-good animations including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung-Fu Panda etc). The Calling is a half hour non-narrative multi screen artwork about whistling. And yet despite DreamWorks' pleasures – and there were many including several  interactive opportunities, delightful dioramas, masterful illustrations and informative documentary shorts that outlined the creative process – Mesiti's beguiling artwork won out.

Me and the monkeys sat glued to our bench seat captivated by the action as it unfolded across three screens. We saw goats on a hill side, old ladies picking tea leaves, a tourist bus stopping at a restaurant, children in a classroom. The settings shifted between Turkey, France and the Canary Islands. Each sequence showed, at some point, whistling conversations between people separated by distances. We were intrigued by so many different things: the ambiguous relationship between footage that created a strong sense of suspense; the different whistling techniques; the rituals and routines of rural life in different parts of world.

I appreciated the calming sense of space that it opened up internally. I only ever feel like that after practicing yoga, a trip to the country or an hour with the psychotherapist.

The Calling
Angeica Mesiti
ACMI
4 February – 13 July 2014
Entry free

Still from Angelica Mesiti: The Calling 2013-14.

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

Flags for Friday

 

I was visiting sweet polka Marion last week and noticed an embroidery (Don't Stop Cheering) on her wall. It was that good, I felt like cheering.

Then, mooching around in the digital world, I found these lovely textile hangings, recently displayed in Sydney as part of an exhibition titled Maps. Seems they are by the same talented hand, or hands, of Marico and Maricar Manalo.

I like the flag-like nature of these hangings, the eighties vibe, that's a little bit nautical and a little bit vertigo. If I didn't know how to sew I would be tempted to drop five hunjies on one of these. And even though I rarely sew (sewing machine chord, where are you?) that rarely used skill makes me cautious.

I can't make cosmetics as yet, which is why was not cautious when I visited Mecca this week. But that's another story...

Mariocr/Maricar

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

Community and Context

 

Franck Gohier, Big Boss, 2012, 4-colour screenprint, hand-printed on acid-free, carbon-neutral 290gsm ivory board. Courtesy artist and Red Hand Prints, Darwin:www.redhandprints.com

We're All in this Together

In the course of my work I often ask artists why they make art. Some shrug, others try and put it into words. Listening to artists respond to the question is like watching someone trying to catch a cloud. When it comes down to it there is rarely one simple reason. Like most things in life it’s complicated.

Art making is not a way of life that makes much sense within the parameters of late capitalism. In dollar terms a cost benefit analysis weighs in at cost over benefit nine times out of ten. I don’t think I am speaking out of line when I say that artists’ often have a fragile sense of their economic self worth. For those without the cushioning effects of inherited wealth it’s a painful internal odyssey. Few worker bees think about value – the value of their work, how they are valued, what they value, where they belong – as much as artists. In some way it makes them particularly sensitive to the question of community.

Community and Context draws together artists working in the ‘expanded field’ of printmaking and the assembled objects in the gallery include sculpture, artist’s books, typography, poster art, etchings, wall drawing, and screen-based work. The exhibition attests to the broad boundaries of printmaking. Moving between the works feels like working a puzzle – there’s a strong sense of interconnectedness between artworks. Many of the works display an interest in history, from early printmaking traditions referenced by Ruth Johnstone in her wood engraving, photocopy and kinetic sculpture and eX de Medici and Rosalind Atkins Our Corporate Who Art in Heaven, an etching and engraving that combines botanical illustration and gas masks to subversive effect.

Echoes of war and the tensions of nationhood appear in other works. Study the digital prints of Neil Emmerson and the comical Abu Grahib-like figures lolling on the ground. Or Ruby Pilven’s installation Micro-boundaries that uses stamps to mimic the alienating procedures of institutional bureaucracies as they relate to asylum seekers. Or Stewart Russell’s silky national flags draped over a stand, like some kind of forlorn and forgotten relic from a United Nations meeting.

Failed colonial endevours pop up elsewhere. Check out Franck Gohier’s humorous screenprinted poster Big Boss, in which the Phantom, a popular comic book figure in indigenous and pacific communities finds himself knocked out by a boomerang. Gohier’s poster can be situated in a longstanding tradition of politically engaged posters from Australian poster workshops stretching from Earthworks Poster Collective to Redback Graphix and beyond that drew on the vernacular to draw attention to various social issues and causes from the 1970s through to the mid 1990s.

Caren Florence/Ampersand Duck’s Book of Michael Pageplay: WAR/RAW 1 & 2 pays tribute to Michael Callaghan (1952-2012), the founder of Redback Graphix. Callaghan’s work at the time of his death focussed on the Iraq war. It brought together a deep sense of compassion for the victims of war and violence and contempt for the doublespeak of its perpetrators. Caren Florence/Ampersand Duck and Callaghan had been in discussion about a collaborative project at the time of his death. War and history.

Australian political printmaking informs Emily Floyd’s series of prints, made as part of the Australian Print Workshop Collie Print Trust Printmaking Scholarship. Floyd devised the work after hearing a radio program about the Sydney-based collective Earthworks (1972–1979). Utilizing aquatint, an intaglio printmaking technique where texture is applied onto a plate (in this instance both copper and aluminium) Floyd's predominantly small works make bold proclamations such as 'It's Time' and 'The Problem Is the Solution' in display typefaces that recall William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Arranging the type into simple shapes, particularly circles, squares and diamonds, the prints bring to mind the principles behind alternative education philosophies. Floyd is clearly fascinated by the subject, she has exhibited an oversized Steiner rainbow in the past. Staring at Floyd's prints you feel poised on the cusp of a mystical revelation.

Trent Walter’s deadpan work, Cover Version #1 (Island) and Cover Version #2 (Expose), similarly appropriate graphic traditions from yesteryear. Walter draws on an existing archive of text and images to re-imagine historical magazines that fall somewhere between academic journal and National Geographic. His works display a strong awareness of the history of production processes. In this respect they are pitch perfect. There’s no doubt that Walter is making some kind of statement about imperialism but its difficult not to feel seduced by their seriousness and nostalgic optimism. Are they critique or celebration? A bit of both?

The history of printmaking is the history of the book and unsurprisingly books, and the associated field of typography, loom large in this show. Gene Bawden’s investigation into the “turnabouts” pattern devised by early Australian designer Florence Broadhurst pushes letterform from the legible to the decorative and abstract. Nicci Haynes, Thomas Coish and Jonas Ropponen take books as a point of departure but arrive at vastly different destinations. Haynes’ obsessional re-working of the Irish classic Finnegan’s Wake into an installation of shredded pages has a touch of the crazies. It’s a place that Jonas Ropponen and his paper mache bust also ventures. In each of these artworks paper has been shredded and pulped, folded over and overprinted.

To counter the drama, there are scenes of repose. Raymond Arnold’s lush and detailed representations of local landscapes, Bridget Hillebrand's monochromatic mountain climbing maps, John Loane’s abstract etchings and Marion Crawford’s sparkling, delicate disks that twirl and in space. They gesture towards a state of grace, remind us of our connectedness to the world around us, one another.

Catalogue essay for Community and Context.

6 February – 12 March 2013 

MADA Gallery
Monash University Caulfield, Building G
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East Victoria 3145

t +61 3 9903 2882
e MADA.Gallery@monash.edu

Monday-Friday: 10am-5pm
Saturday: 12-5pm
Sunday and Public Holidays: Closed