Looking for an exhibition

First Site Gallery at RMIT “I Feel Like I Know You” by Chris Bowes, not the musician but the little known Brisbane-based artist. Except I think that the image is a portrait of Chris Bowes, the heavy-metal musician. Each of the subjects of the portraits was a ‘Chris Bowes.’ Bowes has added something more to the usual mosaic of tiles creating an image as each of the tiles is the logo of a page that the subject liked on Facebook to create a portrait of them. It was a visually and intellectually pleasing exhibition.

Another exhibitions at First Site was also looking at our digital image but unlike Bowes, Stephanie Milsom “All of It” was visually boring and focused entirely on herself. It is always more interesting to focus on other people rather than yourself.

I have a physiological reaction to bad art; it feels sickening (in the past bad poetry has caused me to actually vomit), oppressive and there is something like mental claustrophobia. Then there is the dull boredom of another average exhibition. I try to pay attention; maybe I haven’t paid enough attention, maybe the artist will improve in time, maybe it’s just my taste or even my current mood. It is always a risk, especially with the small galleries, the rental and artist run spaces.

I wanted to get back to my routine of visiting a couple of small galleries and writing a review of some or all of the exhibitions; regular readers will be aware of a gap of several months this winter without any reviews. Yesterday this became a desperate search for some art worth writing about.

Sometimes I am looking for a gallery that I haven’t visited before but recently I have been missing all of the galleries that have closed or moved to new locations. There are only two galleries left on Gertrude Street: Seventh and This Is No Fantasy. A decade ago there were seven, which is why there is Seventh Gallery.

Jen Mathews, A self-tormenting grinder that is no doubt enjoyable, 2017

Joe Gentry, Warehouse 2, 2017

At Seventh in Gallery Two, Joe Gentry and Jen Mathews exhibition; “skyscraper, school, shrine, slaughterhouse” looks at the power and inherent violence in architecture. It is a good idea and it can almost be seen in Jen Mathews’s substantial mixed media assemblages and Joe Gentry’s paper warehouses and houses with graffiti on their walls.

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Exhibitions @ Blindside & First Site

Blindside

Jacqui Gordon, Re-building Our Flat-pack Aspirations, 2015

Quarter Acre is a group exhibition of six artists about suburbia but in the end the two rooms at Blindside was not simply not big enough. Even Jessie Scott’s four and a half minute video of brick houses and shops, The Coburg Plan, made from original 35mm slides of with faded colours, wasn’t enough. It is hard to comprehend or to depict the vast suburban spread without resorting to cliches.

The curators of Quarter Acre, Adriane and Verity Hayward did well with what they had with the space and art. Videos by Penelope Hunt, sculptures by Adrian Doyle, paintings by Eugenia Raftopoloulos, installation by Jacqui Gordon, and the photographs of Eva Heiky Olga Ebbinga. Earlier this year I wrote about the suburbs and Adrian Doyle’s art.

First Site

detail of Oliver Hutchison, Reflex, 2015

Prue Stevenson’s Neuroambiguous exhibition is not as it appears. Something is vibrating and moving under a homemade knitted woollen blanket. Using her foot and black paint Stevenson has systematically painted eight metres of the gallery wall. Over a metre up the wall the marks of her toes and the ball her foot are clearly visible.

Frances Cannon’s Paper Queens was eighty drawings of naked women. Some of the drawings are erotic, some humorous and all attempt a different style of drawing.

Melbourne based artist, Oliver Hutchison’s exhibition is great slacker art. So slack that he has a robot to do a large doodle on the wall, a hole in a portrait is filled in with a mirror and now it is a portrait of everyone. Hutchison has a background in jewellery, print making and carpentry, so he knows finishing but in this exhibition, Reflex he is channelling his slacker instincts in his art.

What do I mean by ‘slacker art’? I mean art that acknowledges the slack, un-rigorous, half-joking, un-finished, couldn’t be bothered nature in art. It is not the most glorious aspect of humanity but it is there and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it. (Isn’t all glory dishonest?)

Dark & Light

Two current exhibitions one dark and the other light.

RMIT First Site Gallery describes this exhibition as “probably the darkest show we have ever had…” on their Facebook page.  The trio of exhibitions at First Site are dark as in obscured rather than dark subject matter; obscured by lacunas, palimpsests and dark spaces. Lacunas and palimpsests were popular subjects at the height of post-modern in nineties because they referred to areas of uncertain and indeterminate meaning.

Eugenia Raftopoulos, Some things last a long time is a series of uncanny and subdued oil paintings that often featuring lacuna, a missing section, a hole in the illusion of the painting. Nicholas McGintity, Parallel, a 47 sec video loop features palimpsests, crossed out black and white pornographic images, shown sideways, out of focus and otherwise obscured as they rapidly click through the loop like a demented slide show.

Wilson Yeung, Trace, features 31 boxes with pinhole photographs using a monotype transfer process. In the darkness of the gallery, the blurry images of the faces are almost unrecognisable as the images in the back lit boxes pulse from light to dark.

No Vacancy’s exhibition Look Mum! couldn’t be more different, it is light like a child’s drawings on the fridge. Look Mum! is a group show featuring eight Melbourne-based illustrators: Eveline Tarunadjaja, Sean Morris, Fiona Lee, Gnashing Teeth, Stevie D, Sass Cocker, Jeremy Ley and Jospeh Keena. Each of the illustrators are showing their mature work next to drawings and toys from their childhood displayed on fridges, just as they were in childhood. Each of the fridges has the artist’s name displayed on it in magnetic letters. Beside each fridge there is a shelf of toys and other memorabilia from the artist’s childhood. The gallery has a domestic feel with a lounge area and a table with paper and crayons for doing your own drawings. It is a great look for an exhibition about illustration and I don’t know why I haven’t seen it before.

Refashioned: Sustainable Design Survey showcases the talent and skills of graduate RMIT students exploring sustainability.

Where: First Site Gallery 344 Swanston Street

There were no deadly poisoned tunics ready to melt the skin from your very bones in this years showcase of graduate RMIT students which speaks well of the selection committee involved in choosing design students. They must have a ‘’No Medeas’’ policy. Though it would be interesting to figure out how exactly they could ascertain whether or not a student had a vengeful nature.

They hung from the ceiling like apparitions moving infinite nano inches from the breeze made from the air conditioning. This added to the allure of what was a very enjoyable and eye opening ode to sustainable forms of fashion. A waist coat made of growing grass hung on a limbless mannequin. It brought to mind a more army styled outfit that the first man, Adam himself would have worn had he been more creative and had more time in the garden of Eden before being distracted by illicit fruit. As I wandered the gallery quite spell bound, a gallery attendant sprayed water from a small spray bottle all over the green grass waistcoat in order to keep it lush. A cropped knitted jumper hung from a coat hanger with sleeves resembling wings and complete with plumage each tiny plume a different bright colour. I would have worn that quite happily. It would go so well with black leggings and ….

But I digress.

It is this kind of digression that made the whole exhibition so enjoyable. A blue dress made from garbage bags and a tutu skirt that included six strips of malleable metal curving around the flare of the skirt, adding a sense of resilience to another otherwise feathered friend inspired item. It is a dress for the environmentally conscious girl with a steely determination to succeed. How often do you by items of clothing because they are cheap and wear them once only to throw away soon after because they fall apart?

This exhibition is not just a flimsy excuse to look at pretty items of original clothing. It is an excuse to raise questions about consumption and excess in our day to day. Clothes become ladfill just as easily as take away coffee recepticles and plastic plates. We need to redefine how we think about clothes and fashion. This is not to say we must not enjoy it and take pleasure in a well fitted and flattering item but to simply be more mindful of how much we buy and dispose off over time. The talented students of RMIT should be proud of their accomplishment as its breadth is far wider than the confines of the gallery it inhabits.

By Jessica Knight

Turning Ceramics Spiritual

“If you are coming to see me, I’m stuck in a land of nothingness (Never land)”

–       a translation of one piece of Persian calligraphy, from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri

Well, Melbourne is close to the Never Never.

I went to First Site Gallery to hear the artist talks and meet Mojgan Habibi, one of the artists. Mojgan Habibi is an Iranian-born, Melbourne-based artist working in ceramics and calligraphy doing her Masters in art at RMIT. The artist’s talk by Mojgan was more a conversation as there weren’t that many people; there was just myself, an Iranian calligraphy teacher, Amir-Navid Molaverdkhani and his two girls.

Mojgan Habibi, Spiritual Transformation, 2012, photo courtesy of the artist

I had seen Mojgan Habibi’s exhibition “Spiritual Transformation” at First Site Gallery last Saturday. It had made me smile, the many white ceramic spirals looked impossible to construct. They looked so fragile but also like spinning tops balanced or spiral galaxies in the middle of the gallery floor. I enjoyed the frozen movement and meditating on the spiritual message of the spiral, in a spiral of thought about the whirlwinds that took the Prophet Elijah to heaven, whirling dervishes and the universe. The spiral is a universal spiritual theme and a symbol of the universe.

For Mojgan the spiral also represents hope and change, hence the title of the exhibition – “Spiritual Transformation” and she sees a poetic alchemy and mysticism in their creation. “I think pottery making can be Karma Yoga or centeredness through action. The turning wheel, the rhythms of throwing with its steady flow of energy from hand to clay, the gestures of wedging, glazing and the transmutations of the fire, all of these involve selfless concentration, the letting go of everything except the work at hand.”

We talked about the spiral form in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and cosmology; one of the girls thought that they looked like whirling dervishes too and also like, ice cream.

Mojgan Habibi, Persian Calligraphy, 2012, photo courtesy of the artist.

“Spiritual Transformation” included a selection of calligraphy on ceramic tablets (the quote at the start is a translation of one of them) and so the conversation turned to calligraphy. We talked about the exhibition of Persian manuscripts, “Love and Devotion” at the State Library earlier this year. Mojgan showed off her calligraphy printed on her red t-shirt, in translation: “What passion, what passion, we are burning like the sun”. I like calligraphy I write about wildstyle graffiti even though often that I can’t read it any more than I can read Persian calligraphy; there is always the flow and placement of the letters. Later that day, while taking some photos in Hosier Lane for another blog post, I saw some tags with beautiful calligraphic qualities and felt it all come spiralling back.

(For more Mojgan Habibi’s ceramics see Art Thread Blog)

True Beauty @ First Site

Last Friday night at a party the printmaker Joel Gailer was stamping “THE TRUTH IS A COPY” on people – I got one stamped on my arm. I love the anti-Socratic statement as Socrates held that reality was but a copy of the true form. However, if the truth is not a good copy of reality than it not true.

The three current exhibitions at 1^st Site Gallery at RMIT combine to further complicate any ideas you might have about truth, beauty, copies and reality.

“Render Complete” by Spencer Lai, Matthew Berka and Hamish Storrie, reflects on ideal beauty in “a society that is obsessed with the act of imaging itself and the spaces in which we inhabit.” It is like a digital Han Belmar doll with an Ikea catalogue. The digital simulacra are an ideal dream as the computerized narrator keeps on confessing in the video.

“Trashland” by Lucie McIntosh is about an enhanced reality, a better than real party. Naked Barbie dolls in glitter gimp masks, the repeated photographs of a head with all the details sprayed over except for the glitter lips, real glitter lips stuck on to the photographs. At one end of the space three television sets form “a shrine to instants passed by, trash punk, wasters and party people”. The only problem with “Trashland” is that there is not enough of it – the space is too empty to convince me that the exhibition really is over the top.

“Cardboard Cabin” by Harry Hay is an installation with a few paintings leading up to it. The installation is like a physical version of Hay’s paintings, with the same run-down Australian shed aesthetics. The installation of a cabin with furniture, tools and walls all made of painted corrugated cardboard. The photographs hanging on the wall of the shed in cardboard frames are photographs of a cardboard world contributing another level of simulacra. Creating a caricature copy of part of the world out of a different material has a special kind of appeal. (I was just watching the episode of James May’s Toy Story with the plasticine garden last night.)

Getting back to the old philosophical stamping grounds truth, beauty, copies and reality. “Render Complete” proposes that true beauty is an ideal dream that cannot be copied. Whereas, “Trashland” argues that reality can be beautiful but trashy. And “Cardboard Cabin” is an enjoyable copy of an ugly truth. I love the way these exhibitions confute (confutation, to confuse an argument, is less strong than a refutation but tactically can be just as successful as it is less aggressive) ideas of truth and beauty. I think this is one of the reasons that I love art because there is confutation in way that artists explore ideas.

“And let us not forget those auditory hallucinations which, as ‘Socrates’ demon’ have been interpreted in a religious sense.” – Nietzsche

RMIT Variety

I saw exhibitions in the various galleries at RMIT in May.

Sharon West, who also has work in the exhibition, curates “Girt by Sea” at RMIT School of Art Gallery. (See my reviews of Sharon West’s earlier exhibitions – just enter her name in the search box on the top of the right column). “Girt by Sea” is in observation of Reconciliation Week 2011 and combines the art of indigenous and non-indigenous artists. Maritime themes are not usual for Australian contemporary or indigenous art even though Australia is surrounded by oceans. The most popular work of the exhibition is Kirsten Lyttle’s “Kuki”, the three Hawaiian shirts with images of a dead Captain Cook. They are cool, self-referential (as Captain Cook was killed in Hawaii) and graphically appealing. The variety of art, from Simon Rose’s video work to the folk art paintings of Aunty Gewen Garoni and Aunty Frances Gallagher, in the exhibition is fun and engaging.

First Site had 3 photography-based exhibitions looking at the human subject: subjectively, objectively and “transpersonally”. The 3 photographers were working in different directions looking at the body or thinking about the self as a subject with memories as in Stephanie Peters “I Know You’re Stalking Me”. This installation using video, photographs and online interactions deals with idea of identity, truth is distorted and rearranged, who are you dealing with – I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Kawita Vatanajyankur takes an external view of bodies as beautiful objects, combining still and video photography, water or sand and the body. In Luciana Vasques “Transpersonal Photography” personal exploration finds new meaning in the interaction between people, objects and photography. Vasques makes excellent use of the space in First Site, a cluster of peep viewers attached to ribbons flutter in front of the air vent and a convex mirror. None of these photography exhibitions are great but they are not bad, there are some good parts and there is nothing wrong with the directions that these photographers are exploring.

Things were not working for me at RMIT Gallery. In Chelle Macnaughtan “Spatial Listening” I tried to listening to “Listening through Stillness” 2011 but my black Dunlop Volleys made no sound on the etched aluminum plates – there was some irritating electric whine going on somewhere in the gallery. I twice became trapped in dead end parts of Ainslie Murray’s “Intangible Architecture”. I didn’t have any problems with Malte Wagenfeld’s “Aesthetics of Air” even though there were warning signs about the lazars. Aside from the warning signs the “Aesthetics of Air” was like a disco without the music or the mirror ball but with the smoke machines and lazars. The aesthetics of air is lightweight.