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 ...
Archives for “installation art”
. 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 ...
The major exhibition at Platform is a group exhibition, The Interventionist Guide to Melbourne curated by Lynda Roberts, with a good overall design with maps of the city on the cabinet windows but I couldn’t really get into it. It was like the city, lots of signs and people were going in many different directions. I tried to get into Maddie Sharrock’s installation Look’ (sic) but there was very little besides the two distorted mirrors with holes in their middle. This reductionist approach to art quickly gets dull. Aly Aitken - Vitrine Aly Aitken has created an installation featuring altered furniture and more ...
Exhibition dates: 15th August – 27th September 2009 . . Installation view of ‘Scenes’ by David Noonan at ACCA . . Thoughts Limited colour palette of ochres, whites, browns and blacks. Rough texture of floor covered in Jute under the feet. Layered, collaged print media figures roughly printed on canvas – elements of abstraction, elements of figuration. The ‘paintings’ are magnificent; stripped and striped collages. Faces missing, dark eyes. There is something almost Rembrandt-esque about the constructed images, their layering, like Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ (1642) – but then the performance element kicks in - the makeup, the lipstick, the tragic/comedic faces. Mannequin, doll-like cut-out figures, flat but with some volume inhabiting the ...
In the underground vitrines along Campbell’s Arcade, under Degraves Street, the train commuters exiting Flinders St. Station are exposed to contemporary art. The August series of exhibitors were typical of the exhibitions at Platform. Claire Gallagher’s Absence of the Inner is a glass tank, an empty vitrine lit by a single fluorescent tube inside a vitrine. Nature, in the form of potted plants, taxidermy birds, taxidermy fox, animal bones, wire, string and dirt, has been pushed to the side and what remains in the centre is a void. Gallagher’s Absence of the Inner is a comment and a critique of the ...
I wasn’t excited by “Liu Xiao Xian: From East to West” at RMIT Gallery. Fun though it is, I have seen a lot of neo-Dada, neo-Pop art before. And there didn’t seem to be much more than a continuous Chinese-Australian or Chinese-Western references. Liu Xiao Xian putting his own face in western images has limited amusement; it is yet more re-branding of familiar images. The superficial of content is masked by an over production the creation of larger and more spectacular images. I did enjoy his various glazed porcelain game boards, as an avid game player they generated imaginary sculptural ...
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: 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 ...
“Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite ...
9 December 2008 – 15 March 2009 “Rosalie Gascoigne’s art comes from, is inspired by, and in turn reflects the spare countryside of the southern tablelands and the Monaro district, a unique natural environment that lies relatively close to Canberra, the artist’s home of more than fifty years. Gascoigne’s transformation and re-investment in her work of battered and weathered materials sourced in the landscape surrounding Canberra also highlights the importance of collecting to her oeuvre, as different materials appear in works from across the decades … Gascoigne’s knowledge and love of language and of Romantic poetry is evident in many of her ...
“Warning. Watch your step while gazing at distant view.” Sign at entrance to the exhibition. Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger Entrance to ‘The Water Hole’ exhibition at ACCA, Melbourne 2009 A cave like entrance presents itself to the visitor as they enter the exhibition leading to a long winding tunnel that is lined with silver insulation foil and tree branches, lit by floor mounted electric light bulbs. The foil moves with the natural movement of air causing not a rustling of leaves but of artificial surfaces. At the end of the tunnel the viewer enters a large installation space, confronted with a effusive pop art Garden ...
