I did a test shoot a couple of nights ago to build upon my concept for the series In Absentia. 

This image represents the seed for the entire project.

Dissociation from the series In Absentia 2015.

I was playing hide and seek after dinner one night and as I waited to be discovered the sun gradually set to reveal the luminous iPad in the centre of our recently abandoned dinner table. Within this recreation the places remain set, the chairs positioned as though occupants are still seated around a family dinner. In place of this family gathering the iPad sits like a siren, spilling its light into the space and overwhelming the scene. 

It struck me as a perfect visual representation of the way devices and screens can disrupt our traditional moments of interaction.

I’ve been working with Vivien Anderson Gallery to develop a social media presence across Twitter and Instagram as well as maintaining an existing Facebook account. 

Preparing and scheduling posts and monitoring engagement is time consuming and by outsourcing these tasks the gallery staff can better focus on the day to day running of the gallery.  I enjoy spending my working hours with the fabulous imagery from their exhibitions.

Vivien Anderson Gallery is a specialist gallery with over 28 years experience in the field of Australian Indigenous art.  This year they are in the process of relocating the gallery and are operating as Gallery in Residence at Brightspace in St Kilda.  These images are from their most recent exhibition which closed last weekend. Their next exhibition opens in October, follow them on one of the social media accounts linked above to receive all the latest gallery news.

James Tylor - Aotearoa my Hawaiki

DUVAHE NIOGE – BARKCLOTHS BY THE CHIEF ÖMIE ARTISTS OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

I love how inspiration hits you from the strangest places. Earlier today my kids were attempting to bite the wall, a veritable impossibility as their teeth couldn’t get past their chin and nose.  They kept at it for a while with great enthusiasm and then happily moved on to other things.  

What struck me about the situation was how effortlessly they dealt with the adversity of the whole endeavour. They remained playful in their approach and free from repercussions from their failure to achieve the desired outcome.

While one part of my brain was busy processing this train of thought another part was giggling at the action as analogy for how parenting has felt to me just recently.  Hard, no, impossibly challenging, like trying to bite a flat wall.

Whereas this activity would have filled me with frustration my kids were still able to approach it in a playful spirit.  Despite all the mindfulness I try to bring to my parenting the fears associated with repercussions of doing a bad job tend to suck the playfulness out of me far too frequently these days. A perfect depiction of the dichotomy of childhood and adulthood just jumped up and slapped me in the face, and managed to make me giggle.

A third part of my brain was screaming ‘you have to photograph this!’ I intend to recreate this scene soon…

I found the perfect toddler friendly exhibition space on Friday in Julie Rrap’s Remaking the World, Artists Dreaming. Television screens suspended from the ceiling entirely out of reach meant my inner conservator could relax and enjoy the exhibition without fear my kids would *gasp* touch the artwork!

Above and beyond giving me the chance to exhale within a museum environment this is a really lovely space, the title operating in combination with the installation to produce an experience that is contemplative, peaceful and hopeful. 

The adjacent room, replete with low lighting, trip hazards, and things kids can but shouldn’t touch, is a polar experience full of motion, dynamism and fragmentation. Made somewhat sinister through the looped projection of eyes dilating to a point that can be described as demonic, the ever changing pupil replicates a lunar cycle, conjuring traditional associations of the feminine and witchcraft. 

Julie Rrap: Remaking the World is at The Ian Potter Museum of Art 23 July - 15 November 2015.  

Julie Rrap: Artists Dreaming, 2015

Julie Rrap: Artists Dreaming 2015

This is the beginning of a project I’ve been contemplating for a while now.  I took these couple of images over the weekend but want to work towards building out the series into a photobook.

Distraction, 2015

Slumbering, 2015

I’ve been reflecting on the role of screens in contemporary family life and relationships more broadly. Connection and disconnection, absence and presence, inhabited psychological spaces, illumination and things that lie hidden in the shadows, things that fall within and without the frame… 

In Debt: Saving Seeds (Dave Jones and Steven Rhall) is currently on display at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Fitzroy. The exhibition was commissioned by Horsham Regional Art Gallery (HRAG) and CCP as part of ART + CLIMATE = CHANGE2015.

Last week I visited In Debt: Saving Seeds, an exhibition featuring work by Dave Jones and Steven Rhall responding to the Horsham based Australian Grains Genebank.  Viewing this exhibition brought me sharply back to my own time living in the Wimmera and I found myself reflecting upon the impact the landscape and agricultural environment has on the artistic community of the region. Of course Australian Art History is redolent in imagery of the Wimmera but what is perhaps less well known is the vibrant community of contemporary artists of the region.

The exhibition presents two distinct approaches to the subject matter, displayed on opposing walls. The crops in Dave Jone’s project are luminous and alluring, some possessing an ethereal quality, achieved through a technique called light extrusion. Yet there is an underlying tension present in the recognition of the contrivance of these representations. Produced in collaboration with local school students, Jones’ photographs encapsulate a wondrous futuristic landscape illuminated by the magic and hopeful vision of childhood. Although even young children of farming communities are attuned to the threat of failed crops, poor weather and crisis, as a parent my misgivings around a future influenced by genetic modification, climate change and food security introduce increasing layers of tension into my reading of these works.

Viewing Jones’ light extrusions immediately brought to my mind Rainbow based artist Belinda Eckermann’s research driven exploration of genetic manipulation, science, agriculture and luminosity. There are multiple intersections between their respective projects. I was struck by further correlations when I recalled Eckermann’s recent thesis had responded to the project Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2006) by Newcastle born artist Lyndall Osborne which was itself a response to the Millennium Seed Bank. Eckermann’s work explores the fluctuation between hope and repulsion for the agricultural future science may create. In pondering these connections it occurred to me that this tension is present in the artwork of multiple artists working in relation to the Wimmera landscape.

Dave Jones, In Debt: Saving Seeds

Belinda Eckermann, Trial Sequence, 2012

It is interesting then to compare the experience of Melbourne based Steven Rhall, the other exhibitor in In Debt: Saving Seeds, an outsider to the agricultural community. Rhall’s documentary project was produced during a residency at the Australian Grains Genebank in Horsham. The project’s namesake Shindig Box reveals a humorous treatment and indeed among Rhall’s analysis of place is an ongoing sense of irony or playfulness. Playfulness and community engagement is a uniting thread between Jones’ and Rhall’s projects. 

Reading Rhall’s blog entries throughout his residency is illuminating, providing glimpses of his outside view into the community and place he is inhabiting. Consideration of his previous engagement with issues of identity and belonging opens further readings into his selected subject matter and treatment. A video loop featuring the relentless shuffling and removal of lentils kept drawing me back. Watching, I sensed certain lentils were being discarded due to failure to meet specified but unrevealed criteria. A bit of sniffing around online tells me that what is occurring is a process called roguing, which ‘is the act of identifying and removing plants with undesirable characteristics’.[1] The idea of roguing at play beyond the agricultural sector is an undertone in the video sequence which seems to point to a sense of acceptance and rejection based upon set characteristics. Ideas surrounding who is welcome and unwelcome resonate with the artist’s engagement with eugenics but also his own position as an outsider to the community he is documenting.

‘I’m really interested in the environment that we are in as we grow and how this impacts on how we experience life and the person we become over time. As part of this is the idea of traits and other characteristics we inherit from ‘where we came from’ or origin. This can be biological, cultural, societal, familial. To some degree this relates to the work of the Geenebank where they concentrate on species endemic to Australia – kind of looking historically at a ‘best practice’ that brought about their existence and what current (and future) conditions are best for them and therefore us all as food.’[2] 

A sense that some of us may be expendable byproducts of a future agricultural landscape is confronting but not unique, rather it is revealed as part of a burgeoning global zeitgeist in Eckermann’s thesis The Grain, The Artist and The Snail. The tension in Rhall’s work is between what is presented and what is represented. 

Rhall refers to the straight works in his project as a response to the elements necessary to plant life but also implicated in climate change ‘Sun, heat, wind, earth, moisture, gas (as in O2 and CO2)’. His documentary engagement with the physical landscape called to mind Natimuk based photographer Melissa Powell. Her commercial work documenting agricultural land has bled into an artistic expression of the landscape via aerial photography. Her exhibition at Anita Traverso Gallery (2013) combines many of the geometric forms from her preceding exhibition of agricultural markings in fields of abundance with fractals found in nature and increasingly tenuous representations of life. Powell’s work presents a romantic engagement with her natural environment. It exudes a raw power present in the vastness of the landscape and more recently a sense of the tenuousness of our existence here. Images of barren trees and scorched and baked earth sit in opposition to lush verdant fields, hinting at grim possibilities should this earth fail to sustain us. The aerial perspective provides both the distance and vantage to romanticise and meditate upon the patterns of the landscape rather than fretting over scars and other telltale signs of stress evident upon the land, although if your attention lingers long enough the signs are certainly present.

Meditating upon sustenance and survival in the context of the Wimmera landscape my thoughts carried to the video work Stay or Go (2010) by Qantong based artist Anthony Pelchen. Dr Sheridan Palmer has highlighted the idea of sustained struggle for survival in Pelchen’s work. In Stay or Go the stillness of the Lake Hindmarsh landscape is repeatedly ruptured by the sound of gunshots, almost marking time with the motorcycle as it passes to and fro across the landscape and our field of vision, yet somewhat and increasingly out of sync, stirring a sense of discord and uncertainty. In what would otherwise be a meditative experience the gunshots introduce a growing sense of disruption. The spent shotgun shell is a recurring motif in Pelchen’s work, replete with personal symbolism and also the larger stage of death and survival ever present in an agricultural setting. Recent responses to environmental crisis generated under the moniker Code Maroon during the 2014 heatwave and fires are situated within the artist’s Qantong landscape, alternating between drama, relief, forbearance and foreboding. The ongoing psychological territory of Pelchen’s personal reflection and the experience of living somewhat tenuously in the Wimmera environment find strong resonance in this series revealed in real time to followers via his Facebook feed. 

In one of those random instances of synchronicity that sometimes occur, at the same time as I find myself contemplating these contemporary instances of tension in relation to the Wimmera landscape, Suzette Wearne, curator of the exhibition Weird melancholy: The Australian Gothic (currently on display at the Ian Potter Art Museum), has recently spoken of the prevalence of fear in settler and modernist representations of the Australian landscape. In contrast to traditional readings wherein the landscape is romanticised she perceives fear in response to a foreign landscape that can be both fierce and unforgiving. 

The landscape is such a dominant part of the experience of inhabiting the Wimmera region that it is intrinsically bound in the psyche of the local population. It is however interesting to contemplate a select body of work by artists of the region directly engaging with the land and how the environment continues to inspire their creativity as well as imbuing a sense of tension. Although the tensions are somehow specific to their unique rural setting they are universal in that agricultural issues inevitably bleed into urban communities and in that sense their contemporary issues can be felt as harbingers of our imminent concern.

Over the last few months I have been working with artist Angela Viora to redevelop her website. Today it seems we might have completed the task.

Angela has recently relocated from Italy to live in Australia so ensuring the English version of her website becomes the main platform for her work has been the major focus of this task, as well as a complete overhaul of the layout and content.

I’m excited to be able to share the website with you so you can explore Angela’s past work. She has just commenced her PhD studies in Performing Arts at Monash University so stay tuned for new projects.

http://www.angelaviora.com

Angela Viora, Precious No Precious, Site Specific Project, 2011

A.Viora, Post Scriptum, Ars Captiva (prison), Turin (IT), 2011

Angela Viora, Alla fine vide il mare, black pencil and pen on printed paper, 2013

Exhibition Review - Domestic Bliss, Deakin University Gallery, Burwood 5 June to 19 July 2014

I’m here to tell you that I braved the great outdoors to drive to Burwood last week in what can only be described as violent, umbrella thwarting winds. The purpose of this mad capped journey was to visit the exhibition Domestic Bliss which inhabits the space at Deakin University Art Gallery in a drawing together of institution and personal.

Despite its high ceilings and modern facade, the gallery space invites intimacy by virtue of its modest size and single open room. While there are none of the nooks or crannies of a domestic space to allow for private contemplation, the open plan propensity for a sense of surveillance has been muted by the artful use of a large table to create something of a meeting point within the exhibition.

The table is the first thing visitors encounter, providing a point of welcome and congregation akin to the experience of entering someone’s home. Its presence also imbues a sense of compartmentalisation, a key feature in the exhibition’s demarcation of various domestic spheres. The grouping of objects atop the table form interpersonal relationships, carrying on multiple conversations around the table, much as would a gathering of their makers.

The pure organic forms of Gwynn Hanson Pigott’s vessels sit beside the creative potential of Prue Venables’ bowl, bottle, scoop and spoon. The first possess individual identities that might deign to offer themselves up as vessels for nourishment, the second exhibit a mechanical perfection yet are formed for processes of production and nurture. Katherine Hattam’s Specific Object – White is heavy with family history and a sense of belonging, although its current closed form acts as a potential barrier to outsiders, holding its secrets close. Honour Freeman’s Days Measured reveals traces of lives lived in spite of the ritual cleaning that regularly threatens to erase them.

At the top of the exhibition Michael Doolan and Darren McGinn interrogate our relationship to the house and home. Beyond the table Hannah Bertram’s stenciled ornamental rug constructed via repurposing the detritus of domestic life connotes the lounge. The dust for this in situ work was contributed by Deakin staff. Lucas Grogan’s The Wedding Quilt draws on strong traditions of the domestic arts and politics of the personal, its pointed message made inviting by the welcoming, restful presence of the bed.

Lionel Bawden, Julia Deville and David Ray’s works sit somewhere between ornamental objects and narrative about the underside of domestic spaces, in what Emma Cox (curator) and Georgia Downey’s catalogue essays both highlight as a doubled physical and psychical space. Nadine Christensen’s acrylic doorway is positioned by the exit, so that even as you prepare to leave you find yourself wondering about concealed interior spaces.

The exhibition includes a strong selection of contemporary artists, built around key works from Deakin’s own collection. Domestic Bliss is showing at Deakin University Art Gallery until 12 July 2014 (now extended until 19 July). You can read Emma Cox’s catalogue essay here

Domestic Bliss catalogue cover (detail), featuring Katherine Hattam’s Specific Object – White.

Exhibition review - The Rennie Ellis Show and New Photography from the Footpath (Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett, Ian Tippett)

I ventured out to Wheelers Hill today to visit the Monash Gallery of Art. The trip in and of itself was a decadence for a stay at home mother to a 3 year old and an 18 month old. An hour drive across town, a gallery visit, plus the return trip was asking a lot of restraint from my young ones.

To placate them, upon arrival I dosed them up on treats from the MGA cafe. Coconut water is a favourite for my youngest and a hot chocolate for miss 3, accompanied by smiley face cookies and gingerbread men. The cafe is not overtly child friendly but it wasn’t hostile. So far so good.

The current exhibitions are The Rennie Ellis Show and New Photography from the Footpath (Catherine Bell, Glenn Sloggett, Ian Tippett) both showing until 8 June. New Photography from the Footpath is billed as a contemporary adjunct to the Rennie Ellis retrospective, highlighting the ongoing relevance of the genre through the work of 3 Melbourne-based artists.

Viewing any exhibition with very young children forces you to distill the experience down to it’s essence in record time. Our first encounter was with New Photography from the Footpath, where each artist’s imagery is presented projected onto the wall in a looped sequence. My daughter was captured most immediately by Glenn Sloggett’s work which had the necessary mix of tangible reality and the absurd to capture the imagination of a 3 year old. As with all of Sloggett’s work the decadence was to be found in the decay of contemporary life.

Bell’s images capture African-American nannies pushing strollers inhabited by white children around the ‘affluent mid-town streets of Manhattan’. To someone attempting a gallery visit with her own children in tow the decadence represented in Street Strollers of New York is only too obvious.

The faceless selfies of Tippet’s series I want you back are a reflection upon the culture of decadence embodying the online era. Self-absorbtion, self-adulation, self-promotion and the individualisation of public space. ‘Nuff said really.

The Rennie Ellis Show reveals a different era of decadence in Australia. In complete contrast to the age of the selfie, Ellis operated in an era where social interaction is strongly embedded in experience and belonging. The images on display capture families, party goers and subcultures, but the human interaction is very real. Ellis’ talent for capturing the human element is writ large in this exhibition, its expression perhaps most obvious in Girl’s Night Out, Prahran (1980) or At the Pub, Brisbane (1982). As for the decadence, well the word first entered my consciousness in this exhibition, about the time I was viewing Fully Equipped, Albert Park Beach (c. 1981) but certainly not before viewing numerous other instances, not least significant of which was Berlin Party, Inflation, Melbourne (c.1981). Upon reentering New Photography from the Footpath the decadence of these contemporary scenes became apparent when viewed through the lens of Ellis.

Hustling my children out of the exhibition space I hoped to linger in the bookshop, a hope that my youngest’s decadent manner of displaying his objection quickly put to rest. Had I lingered even a moment I may have noticed the title of the book on display was in fact ‘Decadent 1980-2000′, as it was, my own current decadence, an overwhelming focus on my young family obscured this fact, which was only discovered when I began searching online for images to accompany this write up. So here I am, left with an exceptionally unoriginal yet surprisingly fitting blog title as proof that even under pressure from my overwrought children I can distill an exhibition (or two) down to it’s core in under 10 minutes actual viewing time, not counting child wrangling…

The performance opens with a ritual cleansing. Simic, poised and preened, moves purposely through the space ringing a feng shui bell. Enter the melody from Strawberry Fields Forever, combined with overwhelmingly buttermilk frocks and hairspray as accent to the almost clinical space, providing a Stepford Wives undertone. The discord in authenticity is immediate but the audience must travel with the duo through physical, psychological and emotional realms to arrive at a true appreciation of the contrivance.

Performing duties listed on a scroll, Gilbert and Simic enact a ritualistic series of tasks that increasingly rupture the pristine domestic space they inhabit. Between the periodic insistent ringing produced by ‘baby’ egg timers marking the passing of time in an otherwise circuitous environment, the pair remove flecks of dust, fold, crack eggs, produce baking ingredients and scrub floors. Initially these tasks appear to possess narrative intent, but as the sequence progresses it gradually reveals an unraveling of the clinical image of domesticity the pair have created.

Gilbert cracks an egg, and then abandons it to search for another. Suddenly Simic ruptures this familiar sphere of female endeavor, searching under her skirts to release a hidden bag of sugar. She walks through the space leaving traces of her passing as sugar leaks from between her legs, conjuring thoughts of amniotic fluid or urine. Gilbert jumps in with purposeful scrubbing, perhaps to remove traces of the other woman’s saccharine sweetness. As Gilbert succeeds in partially controlling and reshaping the trace of the other woman’s presence she stands up purposeful once more only to have Simic enter the space and violently throw down a slab of butter upon the floor in defiant ownership of her own unfettered traces, her action screams ‘I got this’.

A bag of flour is released from beneath Gilbert’s skirts. The comic delivery of the flour happily punctuates the serious overtones often ascribed to motherhood and domestic duties, although the nervous audience twittering accompanying its delivery reveals the cultural taboo still associated with what lies beneath women’s skirts and female sexuality. Linked to the advent of agriculture and the cradle of civilization flour is an ancient symbol of human nourishment, its appearance here perhaps signifying the birth of nurturing woman as Mother only further adds to the unraveling of the mythological domestic goddess as it creates mess and discord within the space. Indeed, for each new element ‘birthed’ into the space the control and chaos are exponentially inverse.

Simic moves in rapidly to take control of Gilbert’s delivery, gently shaping and molding the flour into a form she is happy with, before proceeding to mix it with the eggs Gilbert has been preparing, altering it’s very essence. A game of power relations has begun to appear between the two women who we initially identified as equals. Gilbert progressively rails at the tasks and the futility while Simic ‘leans in’ [1]and gets tough, seemingly supportive of Gilbert in their joint endeavours but only so long as Gilbert’s efforts serve her own objectives. Meanwhile, a bell chimes. Another task. Another bell, the picture further unravels. The list is checked another task and another bell.

Gilbert’s heavily expectant state influences the performance, imbuing her actions with authenticity – fatigue, irritation, surrender and detachment. Her physical experience of the event embodies the common conflicts of motherhood. Simic’s presence as performance of the feminine and domesticity contrast with Gilbert’s authentic emotive and physical presence as Mother. Gilbert is publicly undergoing the very transformation she is exploring.

As fatigue, both physical and emotional, begin to press heavily upon the scene Gilbert turns toward a bed of plastic containers covered with cling wrap sheets. She attempts to rest. Tossing, turning, attempting to find a comfortable posture, Gilbert’s disturbed attempts at sleep further disrupt the domestic space. This tension hints at the conflict enveloping all new mothers, to sleep or attempt some semblance of domestic maintenance, a state in which sleep becomes contested ground, necessity become guilty pleasure. The phrase ‘you’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ springs to mind.

Gilbert and Simic’s construction and deconstruction of domesticity and motherhood along with the incumbent societal and personal expectations captures the many tensions contemporary mothers encounter. Pressure to embody a fantastical construction of the feminine ideal when faced with an overwhelmingly corporeal reality imbued with repetition and the mundane presents as a maelstrom of emotional conflict. At the same time the two women often seem to be working at counter purposes.

This tension may be a commentary upon schooled competitiveness between women and girls that can undermine support and cooperation. In the final scenes a string of bags is being hung up like laundry and I wonder if I spy a noose at the end of the string. Gilbert begins screeching in frustration, Simic throwing her a line until Gilbert exits. The exit reads as a defeat but as Simic is left to manage the chaos of the reality they have created I cannot help but wonder if victory is Gilbert’s as she rejects the constructs of femininity. Whilst Simic maintains her control throughout the performance the impersonal mask of perfection she dons in the closing minutes reveals a shell maintained to her detriment as internal dysfunction surfaces.

Gilbert and Simic’s journey into the maelstrom reveals the depth of Mother as psychologically contested space. Here we can mock the overtly sanitized feminine shell and laugh with the deeply disturbed inner turmoil that is Mother.

[1]Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO), Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will To Lead, Alfred A Knopf, 2013

*Addendum* Cristy Gilbert and Anna Simic have been producing performance as installation artworks together since the late 1990s. The duo, originally hailing from Canberra, have more recently been based in Melbourne.Historically their work has focused on competition between women, however according to Gilbert Sunny Side Up differs in its conceptual origin. The two women in Sunny Side Up were envisaged as a single woman inhabiting different phases of the mothering journey, or alternatively at least as two women with a shared and supportive experience rather than the competitive one they have traditionally explored. Interestingly, I managed a competitive reading of the performance. Whether this reflects an internalized competitive state in the female psyche or a ghosting of Gilbert and Simic’s former interactions it was interesting to learn that this was overtly not the intent of this piece.Image courtesy of the artists.