Exhibition dates: 16th October – 28th February 2009 . “Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. I like the word however. To me it suggests something all together different: it evokes concern; it evokes the care one takes for what exists or could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening ...
Archives for “existence”
Exhibition dates: 17th December 2009 – 28th February 2010 . “I draw from everything – from the National Security Archives collection to old material from the FBI’s website to postings by the ACLU. I concentrate on the content. It tends to be very rough material about what’s happened to soldiers in the field, about the good and bad choices they’ve been forced to make, and what has happened to detainees and civilians. I also go to material that’s almost completely gone, either whited out or blacked out, because that represents the issue. You don’t have to spill words when the page is ...
Exhibition dates: 22nd January – 18th April 2010 . You saw it first on Art Blart! Many thankx to Sue, Erin, Alison and all the crew at the National Gallery of Victoria for inviting me to the media opening (and for doing such a splendid job!) and to David Hurlston, Curator of Australian Art at the NGV, for allowing me to interview him. The photographs of the exhibition proceed in chronological order. There are a couple of lovely photographs using long exposure (especially the very last photograph one of my favourites). Enjoy! Marcus . . . . . . Ron Mueck ‘Dead Dad’ 1996-97 . . Ron Mueck ‘A girl’ 2006 installation photograph . . . . . Ron Mueck ‘A girl’ (details) 2006 . . Ron Mueck ‘Wild Man’ 2005 installation photograph . . . Ron Mueck ‘Wild ...
. Here’s my pick of the twelve best exhibitions in Melbourne for 2009 that featured on the Art Blart blog (in no particular order) – and a few honorable mentions that very nearly made the list! . . 1/ ‘The Water Hole’ by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) . . Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger ‘The Water Hole’ 2009 . “The most effective bed has a small meteorite suspended in a net bag above it. The viewer slides underneath the ‘rock’ placing the meteorite about a foot or so above your face. The meteorite is brown, dark and heavy, swinging slightly above your ‘third ...
. One thing always struck me about Sue Ford’s work when I saw it. The work had integrity. Whatever she produced it was always interesting, valid and had integrity. She followed her own path as we all do – and her voice was clear, focused and eloquent. I loved her series ‘Shadow Portraits’ – an erudite investigation into the nature of Australian identity if ever there was one! Vale Sue Ford. . The Age obituary for Sue Ford . . . Sue Ford ‘Dissolution’ 2006 from the Last Light series . . Sue Ford ‘Silhouette’ 2006 from the Last Light series . . Sue Ford ‘Apparition’ 2007 from the Last Light series . . Sue Ford ‘Transparent’ 2007 from the Last Light series . . Sue Ford ‘Shadow Portrait II’ 1994 – 2002 . . Sue Ford ‘Shadow Portrait III’ 2003 . . Sue Ford ‘Shadow Portrait ...
Exhibition dates: 24th April – 9th August, 2009 . . John Brack ‘The chase’ 1959 . . John Brack ‘Two typists’ 1955 . . John Brack ‘Collins St, 5 p.m.’ 1955 . . John Brack ‘The bar’ 1954 . . John Brack ‘The conference’ 1956 . . John Brack ‘The block’ 1954 . . John Brack ‘The fish shop’ 1955 . . “One either has a subject, or one has not.” John Brack . This is a solid retrospective of the work of the Australian artist John Brack (1920 – 1999) presented by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. John Brack is, quintessentially, an Australian and more specifically a Melbourne artist. Melbournians have a love hate relationship with his work – loving the earlier paintings that view the working classes of 1950s Melbourne through a nostalgic, humorous, sardonic lens (when originally ...
Exhibition dates: 6th June – 2nd August, 2009 . Photographs from the exhibition are in the chronological order that they appear. . . Tacita Dean ‘Grobsteingrab (floating)’ 2009 . . Tacita Dean ‘T & I’ (Tristan & Isolde) 2006 . . Tacita Dean ‘Totality’ 16mm colour film 2000 . . “The subjects are connected to the medium I use. It’s all about light and time and phenomena to some extent, like a rainbow or a gust of wind or even an eclipse or a green ray, things like that. And this is the language of light. It’s not the language of binary pixels.” Tacita Dean1 . “The value of her [Dean's] work, writes Winterson, is one of the virtues of art itself: it is ...
Exhibition dates: 19th June – 25th July, 2009 . . Emma Davies ‘Sekai’ (meaning ‘be humorous’) 2009 . . Emma Davies ‘Tariro’ (means ‘hope’) 2009 . . Emma Davies ‘Rutendo’ (detail – means ‘faith’) 2009 . . A stimulating exhibition by Emma Davies at Craft Victoria of polypropylene industrial netting and packaging that has been heated, moulded, sculpted and literally morphed into these fantastical sculptures, inspired by the artist’s experiences when visiting Johannesburg in South Africa as part of the South Project. Davies evokes the mysterious and the bizarre in her figures, making the commonplace into something uncommon, taking her themes from the relics of bush medicine present in the street markets: the medicine market of Johannesburg full ...
Exhibition dates: 5th June – 18th July, 2009 . Photographs of the exhibition and interesting observations by Karen Thompson on the Johannes Kuknen talk can be found on the Melbourne Jeweller website. . . Johannes Kuhnen Rings 1971 . . Johannes Kuhnen Ring 1973 . . This is a superlative exhibition, one of the highlights of the year so far in Melbourne. The exhibition presents work from the early 1970s to contemporary work and evidences the breadth of vision of this master craftsman and artist, the arc of his investigation showing a consistency of feeling for the energy and form of his materials over many decades. Technically the work is superb; conceptually the work ...
Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 27th June, 2009 . . Josephine Kuperholz ‘Themognatha pascoci’ Woven hand coloured silver gelatin photographic image 2008 . . Josephine Kuperholz presents a beautifully engineered set of photographs in her exhibition ‘Blight’ at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Featuring hand coloured silver gelatin photographs of endangered Australian insects sourced from the Entomology collection of the Victoria Museum Kuperholz literally weaves multiple narratives into the photographs. The execution (an apt word for the circumstances of extinction facing these insects) of these images is fastidious, the weaving superlative, almost clinical. The layering of the photographs disrupts their surface tension. There is a disjunction between the dead specimen and the ...
Exhibition dates: 13th June – 4th October 2009 . You saw it first on Art Blart! Installation photographs from the latest Winter Masterpieces blockbuster from the media preview on the day the exhibition opened at NGV International, Melbourne. Thank you to Jemma Altmeier, Media and Public Affairs Administrator at the NGV for the invitation. Photographs were taken using a digital camera, tripod and available light. There is a posting on the Melbourne Jeweller blog about this exhibition, complete with interesting drawings of the jewellery – well worth a look. Fantastic to see my friend and curator of the exhibition, Dr Ted Gott, at ...
Exhibition dates: 1st May – 13th June, 2009 . Three very interesting exhibitions at Craft Victoria at the moment: ‘Babel’ by Natasha Dusenjko, ‘Gleaning Potential’ by Simon Lloyd and ‘Cycle’ by Liz Low. I particularly liked the delicacy and textuality of Natasha Dusenjko’s sci-fi towers and bone fragments and the wonderful box of 6 red bricks (small and large) that you can buy from the Simon Lloyd show, like blocks for a child builder. There is an excellent and erudite review of the exhibitions at Daniel Neville’s ‘The Theory of Nevolution‘ blog, a site that I have also added to my Blogroll. Marcus Bunyan ...
Exhibition dates: 18th March – 4th April 2009 Peter James Smith links the culture of science and of human experience, bringing together mathematics and the power of nature in realist imagery that is balanced by strong mark making and text. Redolent still life and landscape images juxtapose with astronomical, poetic and historical observations in the painted images. Handwritten citations, notes, jottings, diagrams and erasures float on the loosely painted surfaces of stretched linen, paper collage and found pieces which bring a Beuysian sense of the charismatic object. A sunset, a violin, a book of verse, an installation of old bells or ...
Exhibition dates: 25th February – 14th March 2009 “We live in a world where high achievers are congratulated, yet true achievements are not related to what we can get done, but to how deeply we aware of how wonderful it is to be alive. In this exhibition, flowers are not only a predominant source of visual inspiration, looking at them also engenders a kind of appreciation and wonder. The fragile and ephemeral flower provokes in me an awareness of the human condition that reveals the true nature of our existence. My goal is to create images which are strong and soft, bold and ...
