Collage @ the Counihan

Collage art is popular, people generally like it. They are familiar with it and have often done some themselves. They also like the amusing juxtapositions and fantastic transformations that can be created with collage. After seeing many collages by many artists, including artists, like Max Ernst who are notable for their collage work; I think that the charm of collage is that the results are all pretty good but rare does anything rise above this standard.

In preparation for the exhibition of collages at the Counihan Gallery I found Cut & Paste – 21^st Century Collage by Richard Brereton with Caroline Roberts (Lawrence King Publishing, 2011, London) at the Coburg Library. But it wasn’t that helpful; the book has great design, lots of pictures, love the cover, but almost no content except for a very brief introduction and equally brief introduction to each of the artists. The artists weren’t exceptional; more good collages but that’s it.

The catalogue for “Cut With The Kitchen Knife” is a better read; in it the curator, Emily Jones explains the history of collage as art and introduces the exhibiting artists. The exhibition gets its title from a collage by Hannah Hoch. There are plenty of good collages in the exhibition but there are some artists in this exhibition who move beyond tradition of the Cubist collages and the Dada/Surrealist collage.

There is the optical intensity of Elizabeth Gower’s “Savings” series made with the repetition of printed discount promotions. Combining op-art with the optical features of advertising design transforming the everyday into art.

Christian Capurro also uses advertising material but he erases rather than combines images. Now this isn’t exactly collage, although sticky tape is used, but is certainly worth including in the exhibition because the work is almost anti-collage and the images he produces from meat advertisements have the fantastic qualities of combined realities found in collage.

Mandy Gunn’s work has a permanent presence in the lobby of the Counihan but it was good to see more of her work. Gunn takes collage and deconstructing books in a post-minimalist direction. Text, music scores or Braille are shredded into small sections and arranged in a grid with variations of wave formations.

The exhibition was light on collages that used objects rather than just paper. Heather Shimmen’s “Suspended Anima” were very surreal and one of the few collages to use three-dimensional elements. Suspended from the gallery ceiling their Rorschach test shapes throwing great patterns on the gallery wall.

Collage continues to use available printing and graphic technology, think of the Dadaist photomontages, and in the 21^st Century this extends to digital images. Joan Ross’s digital collage depicting a forged colonial Australian history, “BBQ this Sunday” is animated in a fun 5-minute video.

We live in a cut and paste world and if collage seems ubiquitous “Cut With The Kitchen Knife” demonstrates that there is a future for collage and moves beyond the techniques perceived limitations.

Containment Structure @ No No Gallery

The first exhibition opening that I’ve attended this year. I enter No No Gallery from a lane in North Melbourne, with the ubiquitous Drew Funk painting. There is a small banner above door and then down a short very pink corridor. It is like a small bar, with carpet and club chairs and low red lights. The bar was selling bottles of Dutch or German beer for a “$3 donation”. Up a short flight of polished wood stairs was the small wooden floor and white walls of the gallery space with exposed ceiling beams and brick wall.

On the mezzanine floor people were waiting there turn to listen to the headphones at two of the exhibits. Maybe I could get into Daniel Jenatsch’s “para- archaeology society”, it is amusing in a pataphysical way but it doesn’t really go anywhere.

At first everyone was drinking beer and reading the catalogue essay: “Containment Structure” by Robert Nelson. Then they were wearing pink moustaches, something to do with Clare McCracken’s “Megafaunna Mo”. More and more people arrive, there are about 40 people at the opening, and more pink moustaches are applied. Very amusing but you’d have to have been there.

Why am I concentrating on the scene of the exhibition opening rather than the art? There wasn’t that much to see really, there never is at No No Gallery. It is one of those contemporary galleries that believe in lots curatorial space between the art and it is not a large space. This time there were 5 artists and 11 pieces of art. Stephanie Hicks’s 5 woven collages of pages of rocks and minerals were possibly the best, beautiful in their rigid crystalline structures. Jessica Brent’s two photographs were competent but I didn’t see the point in the way they were hung.

I think I’ll have another beer. The exhibition was too insular, it was like the self-recording of Heidi Holmes that edits out everything but the “I”. It wasn’t a containment structure; it was just another excuse for a group exhibition.

November 2010 Exhibitions

Tim Sterling’s solo exhibition, “Metamaterials” at Michael Koro Galleries is a post-minimalist exercise in sculpture and drawing. Post-minimalism is like minimalism but with a lot more. Sterling’s sculptures use a lot and lots of paper clips held together with cable ties most impressively a small I-beam (17x73x80cm) supported between two perspex pillars. His drawings are made up of a many, many small marks with a pen, his drawing “Wall” is made up of repeated marker pen marks that form bricks in a wall.

At Mailbox 141 Tasmanian sculptor Ange Leech has a small solo exhibiting “Hand of the Composure”. Leech has carved small wooden puppets and masks along with collages that are pinned together. These collages are subject to alteration like the articulate joints of the puppets.

This time of year there are many exhibitions by graduates of art, design, photography and jewellery courses.

RMIT Diploma of Photoimaging Graduates are exhibiting at First Site (“photoimaging” is a portmanteau word includes both photography and digital imaging technology). The reality that photography once implied has been replaced with fantasy and glamour. There is a lot of fantasy in this exhibition to the extent of visionary art, fashion and glamour model photography.

Box Hill Institute jewellery graduates their work at Guildford Lane Gallery. It is not just rings and necklaces there are wall pieces, cups, spoons, an hourglass of luminous sand and a wizard’s staff with a crystal ball. Some of the jewellery is inspired by Alice in Wonderland themes from a course assignment.

Guildford Lane Gallery is strange place to visit during on a weekday; they obviously don’t get a lot of visitors. It is an old factory/warehouse with a music space/bar on the ground floor. Whenever I go in someone asks if I’m here for some exhibition, I say yes and they tell me that it on the 2^nd floor. They then follow me up the stairs to turn on the lights.

 

Bus Projects – January

There is a lot to see at Bus Projects in January with five artists exhibiting in five different spaces. It is a good first start for the new year; I didn’t dislike any it but I enjoyed some more.

In the main space is “For Illusion Isn’t The Opposite Of Reality” by Dida Sundet, an RMIT fine arts student. It is a fun exhibition with lots to look at and look at again. Her surreal photography is excellent, carefully staged with beautiful chiaroscuro lighting. It is like the Mad Hatter meets Hannibal Lector. The series of photographs was awarded two honorable mentions in the 2009 International Photography Awards. Along with the photographs there are elements that have been used in the photographs: painted animal masks are held out by plaster hands and in the center of the gallery there is an installation of a bloody dinning room.

Leo Greenfield’s “The Coverings Project” is installed in the “Sound Space” although not a sound installation. Greenfield is exhibiting a deceptively simple installation; a circle made of recycled t-shirts, titled “My teenage life”, on the floor and a series of six collaged photographs, “Garments in Motion” on the walls. It is almost an anti-fashion exhibition if his photographs weren’t so stylish – complete with Doc Martens boots. They continue the late-modern tradition of documenting body art through photographs but they have been altered with subtle and stylish collage. For more about Leo Greenfield’s art visit Fashion Hayley’s blog entry about him – The Bride Stripped Bare.

Jodi Cleaver’s video, “Little Machine” in the “Window Seat” space in the stairwell, is basically a good music video (without the industry standard images of the band playing) with music by the Ice Cream Creatures. And, why not? Music videos have done some of the most interesting film making for years. It didn’t have much of a narrative; Cleaver describes it as: “A little girl tries to fly her kite while being tempted and pursued by both a machine and a magician.” The video uses stop motion animation like those of Jan Svankmajer where ordinary objects that become magically animated.

In the “Skinny Space”, Brooke Wolsley’s “Feast” is a series of now rather traditional, that is Dada and Pop influenced, mixed media collages. The wall painting by Jessica Wong, “Parallel Universe”, in the Foyer reminded me of Tom Civil’s use of stick figures to draw worlds of people, but I didn’t take a close look at it as all the other exhibitions had distracted me.

Exhibitions – September & October

I have managed to see a few exhibitions on Flinders Lane (Arc One and forty-five downstairs) in the city and Albert St. in East Richmond (Karen Woodbury Gallery, John Buckley Gallery and Shifted) in between the many meetings, emails, phone calls and wrangling with the Melbourne Stencil Festival website.

David Ralph exhibition ‘Extension’ at Arc One’s small “and” gallery space is just a couple of small paintings but Ralph’s paintings are always worth seeing. David Ralph’s painting is a marvel of contemporary techniques, drips and scraps and squeegeed of paint scatter the canvas. The images appear to be cut into the surface of the paint. The eccentric temporary imaginary architecture, tree houses with a space shuttle built on the back, the caravan for which Ralph is becoming known. The scenes are like something from Wm Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. “…houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred foot long sheltering entire tribes, house of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet into the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.” (p.90) Ralph could have found his palette of iridescent and nitrous colours on the pages of the Naked Lunch too.

“Tiny Tunes for Wee Australians” is an exhibition of small works on paper by Mexican artist Roberto Márquez at forty-five downstairs in Flinders Lane. Roberto Márquez has created an exhibition of Mexican surreal comments on Australia in mixed media collages with added illustrations. His tiny paintings of skeletons on pressed tree leaves are very Mexican.

Megan Evans “The Fall” in the side gallery at forty-five downstairs was using more dried leaves arranging them in post-minimalist ways in wall pieces, a framed arrangement and in a DVD.

The AK44, the Blackwater AR15, the Saber Defense Elite 5.56 and the Patriot P414 (US$1,125 RRP) sounds like the catalogue of a gun show rather than a description of an art exhibition. eX de Medici exhibition, “sweet complicity” at Karen Woodbury Gallery features delicately drawn images of all of these weapons. The pictures are drawn in a mixture of ink and mica that creates a thick and glittery line. The machineguns are set amidst neo-Rocco tattoo influenced background and wrapped in garlands. The background luxuriates in an excess of detail, dragons and waves or swallows and stars, completely fill the large sheets of paper. eX de Medici is a tattoo and fine artist which explains the tattoo motifs and the ironic machismo of titles, including “American Sex/Funky Beat Machine”.

Janenne Eaton’s “Bella Vista” is a fun exhibition at John Buckley Gallery. Janenne Eaton is Head of Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts. I thought that I was going to get away from the Melbourne Stencil Festival but there was more stencil and enamel aerosol paint in this exhibition. In “Only sleep cures fatigue” (2009) Easton uses a real bamboo blind as a stencil for the image of a window blind. Eaton also uses vinyl and decal bullet hole decals, LED lights and even rhinestones in her paintings contributing to their fun.

Shifted had two exhibitions Paul Batt’s “Mountain Portrait Series” and Andrew Gutteridge’s “A Linear Collection”. Batt’s “Mountain Portrait Series” is a series of photographs of the back of different peoples heads as they looked out over a view. It is a study in looking at someone looking at a landscape. Andrew Gutteridge’s “A Linear Collection” is a scatter of minimalist sculptures and or paintings. And it was hard to tell the Gutteridge’s sculptures from his paintings, a canvas with a twisted corner or another with diagonal cut into the surface. Lots of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines that Gutteridge has collected together and played with. Much of this play is about perspective and the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional plane.

My Own Private Idealogue

Whose got the funk? Joanna Langford, Peter Madden, Rohan Wealleans, curated by Emily Cormack, have the funk. And they are not afraid to show it off in public. I mean, we all got that funky mish-mash of stuff. We’ve put it together, collected it and carefully arranged it. And we croon over its beauty; it is too precious to throw out, like a foil chocolate wrapper. Emily Cormack describes the exhibition as “a highly subjective language to describe personal mythologies.” But most of us don’t show off this funky stuff in public. A few boho-artist types do but mostly it looks like crazy junk.

Peter Madden and Rohan Wealleans are some of the exceptions along with and Bruce Conner and Bootsy Colins. It took me a few days to distillate my experience of the exhibition, My Own Private Idealogue at Gertrude Contemporary Art Space. In many ways it was similar to so many exhibitions that I’ve seen recently, artists creating their own miniature worlds full of tiny details. Scatter style with collages made found materials. But this had something more, more personal, more obsessive, more funk. Funk was first used to describe art in the 1960s in San Francisco (Peter Selz, Funk, University Art Museum, University of Calif., Berkeley, 1967).

Joanna Langford has The Before Lands (2009) in the front room. A huge tower supplied with power cables from small adjacent towers. There are lots of tiny stairways and ladders leading up the different levels of the tower. The whole thing is delicately constructed with recycled shopping bags, bamboo skewers and cardboard. The whole construction is lit with tiny 12-volt lights.

Peter Madden and Rohan Wealleans are in the main gallery. To enter the main gallery you pass through Rohan Wealleans’s Bead Curtain (2008) made from bits of dried acrylic paint with layers of different colours. And then things really got funky.

Peter Madden’s Sleep with Moths (2008) is a black skeleton with black twigs growing out of its bones turns into a bush covered in paper butterflies. Peter Madden also makes beautiful delicate collages that float on layers of perspex.

New Zealand artist Rohan Wealleans was the funkiest of the lot of them. Wealleans creates personal totems, ugly but arresting images. His Orange Shark Jaw Sculpture (2008) creates a round, orange-painted, fibreglass body for a shark jaw. It is like the funky animal creations of American funk ceramicist David Gilhooly. Others like the hieratic postured of Maid (2004) suggest so many stories and explanations.

There was so much of it, the mess, the excess, coming from all directions and I knew that it was good.

More Street Artists on Exhibition

“The Clan MacLeod” sounds unified – a ‘clan’. It is a group exhibition with some notable names from Melbourne’s street art scene like HaHa and Happy, but the reality is disconnected art on walls joined together into a room above a pub on Highlander Lane. I don’t know if this strange disconnected group exhibition is due to uncritical mateship, commercial desperation or a deliberate agenda of extreme artistic diversity but the whole exhibition suffered from it.

Rus Kitchin’s “The Un-Familiar Series” was the small star of the small show; these digital C-prints are like Berlin Dadaist collages, their silvery blue colours making them appear like strange silver nitrate photographs. The series is the story of a European family’s photographs that include the un-familiar, African masked child of modernism. The European family’s identical faces are overlayed with occult patterns like the ritual scarification on the carved African mask, making the familiar un-familiar again.

Andy Murphy plays with patterns from tartans to zebra stripes but including the JEAN Symmonds (in punning denim) distracted from the quality of the rest of his work.

Matlok’s naïve painting style is as ugly, crude, colourful and brutal as the Melbourne streets that he depicts. His paintings are full of little details, word play and shops. He has a consistent artistic vision (that doesn’t appeal to me but that’s not a reason why someone else wouldn’t like it).

Happy is burning his bridges behind him before leaving the country. Happy was exhibiting photographs of burning one of his “Fame” paste-ups (along with the ashes in a jar) and the spray-can vandalism of his framed drawings (along with the results). This is a potlatch, the ceremonial destruction of value in an economy of excess. “We’ve come to wreck everything and ruin your life” is the title of a zine compilation of Happy’s part of the exhibition. It asks the question, in the ephemeral world of street art, are you happy with the creation and the destruction?

The worst was seeing RDKL shoot himself in the foot exhibiting a toilet seat figure, a demonstration of Arnold Rimmer level of taste of the most mundane and repetitive. The rest of his work is a rough and inarticulate psylocibin insipid drawings and computer graphics.

And there was only one HaHa, a black on white stencil “Ned Kelly”.

Cue the bagpipes and march to the exit.