The Message at Yarra Sculpture Gallery

An exhibition of four installations that “transform language into visible and physical forms”, curated by Sarah Randal and the YSG. The curatorial conceit of transforming language into visible and physical forms is too easy, I’ve just done it myself with text. I doubt that half of the installations have anything to do with language.

There are other curatorial connections to be made in the exhibition; the four women artists have all transitioned between places with different dominate languages. And otherwise, the curators have made excellent use of the space.

Annette Chang, Shopping Net #3

 

In the largest of the YSG gallery spaces, Annette Chang, Shopping Net #3 hangs from the ceiling, flowing in and around itself, finally draping on the floor. Since 2012 Chang collects all her receipts folds them on to the net and taped closed. The paper flags recording her purchases as days go by.

In Senye Shen, Shifting Field #1 and #2, print installation of lino and relief prints, footprints and petals, cut from the prints, leads you through the space to the next space. Shen has been cutting many lines cut into lino to deploy the moiré effect; bubbling and rippling along her series of prints. (Sorry I forgot to photograph them.) Shen was gallery sitting on the day that I visited.

Anwar Anwar, Dancing Letters

Anwar Anwar invites the viewer to carefully navigate around, Dancing Letters, the long hanging Arabic letters cut out of paper that almost fill YSG’s projection room. It is a delicate journey around them. Avan Anwar is a Kurdish artist who is referencing the Nalî, a 19th Century Kurdish poet and fellow exile.

Pimpisa Tinpalit, Silence is like an illustration of an unknown, unspoken sutra. The ladder of linked arms reaches to the heavens or at least the ceiling. The gold leaf applied to the hands emphasising their importance to the lesson that we can only imagine. To indulge in language for a moment; the word ‘sutra’ comes from Sanskrit sūtra ‘thread, rule’, from siv ‘sew’, like the black rope that ties the arms together.

Pimpisa Tinpalit, Silence

 

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It’s Alive!

Candy Stevens Changing Landscapes at Yarra Sculpture Gallery is an exhibition of living and growing sculptures; rye grass is growing over everything. The sculptures are beautifully tactile, the growing grass creating a fuzzy distortion to their outlines. It is a fun exhibition with amusing ideas and punning titles.

Candy Stevens, “Please Keep Off”, 2011

Landscapes have long been the subject for paintings but until Earth Art in the 1970s it was not a subject for sculptures. In Stevens’s Lambscape the visitor has to navigate the space between 49 cut outs in the shape of sheep-sized hides in order to get to the darkness of her video installation space. In her wall work Ha Ha! there is a reference to ha ha fences, a cunning design that allowed the English upper class to have views of uninterrupted lawns without allowing the sheep and cattle to approach the house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-ha Crown Land, a great circular crown with a 4.3m diameter, refers both to a crown and to public land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land Outside the gallery on a tagged and stencilled wall, Stevens has added her own grass covered bomb, Jonx.

Candy Stevens, Jonx, 2013

It is not just growing grass that Stevens is commenting on but also the way that we consume it. In Mother’s Milk a calf, covered in grass, looks in a fridge, also covered in grass, for milk, while her grass covered mother-cow stands nearby. Milk being a type of processed grass.

Candy Stevens, The Conversation, 2014 (with Candy Stevens and Black Mark posing in front)

Candy Stevens told me at the opening of the exhibition that she had finished hanging ten minutes ago, started installing three days ago, started growing the sculptures three weeks ago and has been working on the forms for four years. However, she has been working with grass a medium for sculpture for longer than that. I first saw Stevens work Keep Off the Grass in the Moreland Sculpture Show 2008 and again in MoreArts 2010 where her Rocks of all Ages received a commendation, and again in MoreArts 2011 where her Landscape Gardeners, a grass covered ewe and lamb were stolen (someone so loved her art that they scaled a fence to steal them).

Candy Stevens, “Landscape Gardeners”, 2011

Melbourne Stencil Festival

Last night was the opening of the 5^th Melbourne Stencil Festival at Yarra Sculpture Gallery. The festival includes: tours of street art, live spraying collaborations, a film night, book launch, panel discussions, stencil workshops and master-classes. There are international artists from Iran, Scotland, South Africa, Brazil and the USA. It is a huge 9-day event.

Unlike the contemporary art scene the opening night of the Melbourne Stencil Festival was turned into an event with bar, entertainment and a $20 entry price, including a drink and raffle ticket. Hundreds of people came through the door, bought art, drinks and merchandise. The Melbourne Stencil Festival is a non-profit organization but the organizers know how to raise money and get good sponsorship for the festival.

At the opening street artists, goths and schoolboys mixed with collectors, gallery owners and city councilors. Part of the reason for opening events is to mix people together and the more diverse a mix the better; the other part is to sell art and there were lots of sales at the opening. I said hello to Satta Van Daal, who used to organize the stencil festival, amongst the crowd at the opening; I hadn’t seen him since Leeana Edward’s opening at 696. Satta is now working full time, which is why he is not part of the team organizing this year’s festival. Full time work makes a lot of cultural involvement difficult; it certainly makes it difficult to find volunteer gallery attendants for the middle of the week.

The Yarra Sculpture Gallery is a good venue for the festival. The large converted factory has all the facilities that the festival needs and it is rough enough for a street art exhibition. It is a relief from the designer look that many Melbourne galleries try to cultivate. I not going to review the exhibition because of a conflict of interests, as I am involved in organizing it and I will be part of the jury judging the emerging artist’s prize. It has certainly been very useful for my background research on street art, especially meeting some of the international artists, and I am trying to take notes for future blog entries.