CONTENTS Message from the Mayor of Joondalup
Page 3
Selection and Judging Panels
Page 4
Introduction by Robert Cook, Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Page 5
ARTISTS Amy Perejuan-Capone
Page 7
Ben Waters
Page 9
Christophe Canato
Page 11
Clare Peake
Page 13
David Attwood
Page 15
Denise Pepper
Page 17
Fiona Gavino
Page 19
Jacob Ogden-Smith
Page 21
Jacobus Capone
Page 23
Jurek Wybraniec
Page 25
Lee Harrop
Page 27
Mike Gray
Page 29
Nathan Beard
Page 31
Tim Burns
Page 33
Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty
Page 35
MESSAGE FROM THE MAYOR It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the City of Joondalup’s Community Invitation Art Award (CIAA) for 2015. This prestigious award presents an opportunity to celebrate the artistic, creative and innovative talents of professional West Australian artists. All exhibiting artists are either residents of the City or a member of the Joondalup Community Art Association (JCAA). This year’s CIAA showcases a series of three artworks from 14 solo artists and a collaboration between two artists. The exhibition provides a wonderful demonstration of the diversity of artistic talent in the Joondalup community, with the quality and scope of talent confirming the City’s reputation as being home to an active and vibrant local arts community. The CIAA also enhances the City’s status as a local government dedicated to encouraging and fostering culture and the arts for the betterment of its community. I hope you enjoy this exhibition of work from some of Western Australia’s most outstanding contemporary artists. His Worship the Mayor Troy Pickard City of Joondalup
SELECTION PANEL Renae Coles, Communications Manager, PICA (former Co-director, Paper Mountain) Shannon Lyons, Lecturer, Visual Arts, Curtin University Connie Petrillo, Curator, St John of God Hospital Art Collection
JUDGING PANEL Brandon BallengĂŠe, Artist, City of Joondalup 2015 Artist in Residence Gregory Pryor, Lecturer, Visual Arts, Edith Cowan University Robert Cook, Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia
INTRODUCTION Shop as world, world as shop By Robert Cook, Curator, Art Gallery of Western Australia As a kid and as a teen and as an early twenties person, the shops were a triple threat destination of wonder, aspiration and fear. When my family first moved into a sketch of a suburb, we had to drive up a limestone track into bushland to visit the Charlie Carters that was on stilts. To get to the butcher we’d drive down the super-suburb-connecting-road to a small cluster of shops made of white painted brick. The butcher was friendly because that’s how people in the past were (especially butchers) and would give us free frankfurters which we’d eat on the spot, dipping them into his tomato sauce. Then, when the Charlie Carters on stilts was demolished, a sizeable mall was built. Nobody mourned. Now there were proper sealed roads and a proper car park. Quite suitably, they named it a City! In my stranded deli-less suburb (the deli always promised, never delivered), the shops were more than just places to get stuff. In those days, when there were great slabs of day and night with nothing but the test pattern on the TV, and time was an actually horrific abyss of nothingness, the shops offered spaces for engagement and encounter with the world. A visit broke up our days, gave us things (including people) outside ourselves to look at. The shops gave us horizons. I didn’t know who Andy Warhol was at the time but without question and without anxiety shop-front and store shelf and showroom floor commodity culture was the whole of my visual culture, along with TV. Here, then, was a brilliantly generative combo of image and object, between which was sat, in the vinyl backseat of Mum and Dad’s car, my ever-expanding body, and always day-dreaming mind. Because of this, the shops were always places of aspiration and inspiration. It’s why I’ve mostly preferred,
say, bottle beer over tap. It’s in a pack, it’s sealed because it’s from the shops, and so it bears more of its connection to the non-home environment*. It is more in the world and the world had a freshness to it, an openness. Things might happen! Anything! When older, when more awfully self-conscious, this aspirational world became more scary. In my teens and early twenties I was desperately shy and found the wide spaces to be gruesome, the internal savannahs of critical and criticising surveillance. Only in the last ten years, more settled in my skin, has this let up. Only since that time have I been able to see again, the social and psychological role of the shops in the way I did when I was younger. It’s because I am always a bit awkward when artists and critics etc., start on about commodity culture, railing against it. I do understand it, but on a personal level, this arena has always been a space where I’ve (those awkward years aside) found myself and found a self to aspire to.
And it’s because of this that I fully appreciate the spirit of the City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award. I love that a batch of the state’s best artists are parking in the car park, grabbing a trolley and bringing their work into the very heart of the shops. I see it is as a generous homage to what the shops meant to my generation, to bring culture to speak within it, to lodge thinking and articulating and making from bodies in that space of resonant image and intractable object. It is not a Duchampian manuevure of the expansion of art to anywherenessand-anyplaceness, but a distillation of desire into the heart of a space that is always about just that. This is, the art brings the shops back to themselves, opens them up to be what they truly are. It’s my hunch that, even though they’re from a younger generation than me, something of this is at play in all the artists minds as they make artworks for this show, as they set up and as they consider it afterwards. I’m confident of this because today’s artists are at least three generations away from being dour white cubists and thereby understand that their work should and needs to resonate outside the confines of the gallery. Indeed, I think that there is a truly egalitarian spirit that inflects all artists now and that this is why these Awards are embraced. Sure, it is no doubt embraced as an opportunity to win, to be part of an increasingly significant public collection, but I think it’s also embraced as an avenue to speak openly (via the self-composed gestures of their craft) to those who are not just artists or art punters and to those, like me when I was younger, who might be hanging around hoping for a new take on the world, or hoping some of the world would enter me. The shift from then to now, of course, is that time is not as open as it used to be, and packaging is everywhere (even if in the form of logo-ised downloaded software). In light of this though we can argue that this “art with no packet” and no wrapping functions as the point of difference that says that other worlds might be out there. It’s a reversal that pivots on the same logic.
So, yes, all these very wonderful artists have every right to proudly say to folks: “Hey, my work is at the shops”. It is a genuinely meaningful statement and I congratulate all the artists and the organisers of the exhibition and awards for letting it be so, for being part of a real scene of desire and potential desire. *Not that we had tap beer at home, but there was a great joy in taking wrapping off, maybe it was also about selfishly owning something… Robert Cook Curator of Contemporary International Art Art Gallery of Western Australia
AMY PEREJUAN-CAPONE Amy Perejuan-Capone was born in 1987 to parents who are both collectors and makers. She lives and works between Perth, Western Australia and Reykjavik, Iceland. She graduated from Curtin University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art and later completed an Advanced Diploma of Industrial Design. She has exhibited in various group shows in Perth, Helsinki and New York and regularly travels internationally for artist residencies. In 2015 she launched the label ‘Horse On Toast’ at her first solo exhibition for Paper Mountain Gallery in Perth. Her practice engages with both the contemporary art and design discourse, with a focus on using methodologies more aligned with art-making to bridge the two disciplines. She has spent many years investigating various topics including art, ecology, trains, mental health, aeroplanes, public transport systems around the globe in addition to cabinet making and has applied this diverse array of knowledge to the creation of her pieces.
Her one-off furniture pieces, ceramics and drawings exist on a spectrum that spans ideas made manifest as sculpture and traditional object representation. She makes sculptural furniture as a means to explore the agency of objects, from their genesis as an idea to their practical use as an item in the home. This expresses both the intent of the maker and the user and sometimes even its own subjectivity. Perejuan-Capone’s work has a gleeful absurdity and serves as a conceptual guide for creative investigations. It looks at the world sideways and tries to hijack traditional systems of object meaning.
Amy Perejuan-Capone - Field Notes (Machine Embroider Machine), 2015.
BEN WATERS Ben Waters, born in Western Australia in 1977, currently works from a shared studio space in Bayswater and for larger scale works, from a studio space at Edith Cowan University where he works as a painting technician and sessional lecturer. He completed his Bachelor of Arts with Honours from ECU in 2002 and is “somewhere between nowhere” in completing a Masters by research. Ben Waters has an interest in painting technologies and has a diverse practice, working with a range of painting media. He enjoys experimenting with both traditional and contemporary painting practices, and exploring painting technologies and materials with an underlying interest in painting processes and materiality. Most often his ideas are made manifest through the medium of painting but he has also used installation-based and interventional methodologies that are almost sceneographic in nature, and in some ways similar to set-design, by setting up tableaux that reference museological aesthetics. He is interested in the act of curating, presenting artefacts in galleries and museums, and he critiques this via his artworks, often in a cheeky or humorous way. Water’s explorations of meta-narratives and universal truths often poke fun at, and reveal, some of the underlying political substrates that feed into everyday lives. He also critiques the authority of academics, curators, taste-makers and place-makers whose reflections on today’s culture may affect the way future generations understand contemporary art and culture in the early 21st Century.
This interest in museums, history, politics and painting media is combined in a recent body of work where the artist is layering many different types of black pigment. He has collected 24 black pigments from across the world, from places such as France, Lebanon, America, the UK, Africa and Montreal, sourced through travel, through friends, and through purchases made online. These pigments also come from different eras in history; some are natural and some are synthetically produced. He grinds and mixes the black pigment to make his own oil paint and applies it using traditional and non-traditional tools such as brushes and refillable graffiti markers. These black paintings are created via a controlled and laborious process of collecting and layering.
Ben Waters - Recycling a pedagogy of undetermined doing (after Fludd, Reinhardt and all of those Russians), 2015.
CHRISTOPHE CANATO Born in France in 1966, Canato grew up in an artist family environment where his father was a painter. As an early drawer and painter, he successfully entered the Beaux-Arts school at 17 years of age. In 1989 he received the equivalent of a Masters of Visual Arts and in 1993 he completed a Diploma in Fashion from the prestigious Institut Français de la Mode. Photography became an important tool to express himself as an artist and also provided him with opportunities as a freelance photographer. In 1997 Canato was awarded the Paris Salon de la Jeune Création prize and has since exhibited widely in France and Australia. With a diverse approach to the photographic medium, Canato works in both film and digital from his Perth studio. Some of his images are candid, while others are composed using both natural and studio lighting. His recent work direction consists of a search for identity and a desire to articulate the ideas of perception and interpretation of social, cultural and material affiliation. In De l’Image Aux Sens (From Image To Senses), No Man’s Land, Crie! and more recently Hunting Trophies Vol.1, Women of Jerusalem, Canato invites viewers to contemplate everyday life through the phenomena of synaesthesia. He writes: ‘I photographed this character in a moment of intimacy. In the development, the result was so close to my physical desire of other, that it stimulated taste and salivation. This sensory reaction recalled strongly buried childhood memories with visual and fragrant flashes.’
In other works, Canato works with personal objects that hold an important place in his life as witnesses of human presence, and is interested in the way that they transcribe a private, inner life of individuals. In the work Pièces à Conviction (Evidence), a large inventory of the artist’s personal objects are presented like a police investigation and allow the viewer an intimate glimpse into an inner world. In his work Ragamuffins, abandoned sofas and armchairs are imbued with a human presence. The underlying concern in these works is that they serve as an illustration of the habits and behaviours of a contemporary consumerist society.
Christophe Canato - Untitled (work in progress), 2015.
CLARE PEAKE Clare Peake was born in Geraldton in 1984 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Art) from Curtin University in 2006 and completed postgraduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia in 2010. She has contributed to a number of significant shows, notably: A Comprehension of the Farthest Points at Venn Gallery, 2013; remix at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2011 and Here&Now12 at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2012; with her work most recently exhibited at 55 Sydenham Rd, Sydney, 2015; and WIN/WIN at Hugo Michelle Gallery in Adelaide, 2014. Informing Peake’s practice is a philosophical enquiry into knowledge production and invention and an interest in the materiality of thought how to generate ideas and navigate through what viewers already know to arrive at what they do not, and how to conjure up something that they haven’t yet thought about are overarching questions central to her practice. For the City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award, Clare has produced three new works collectively titled In the shu that take a new approach to investigate this problem of generating ideas. Shifting away from using the allegory of traversing and navigating the natural landscape, Peake instead shifts focus to attempt to navigate this same problem through the mind, looking internally and looking at the artist’s own studio space.
The first video in the series Assisted Sculptures – The 12 Labours of Hercules sees the artist and her studio assistant perform a pas de deux re-enacting the 12 struggles of Hercules. The second video Tap Code – SOSOSOS uses a prisoner invented communication system to rhythmically tap out the code for SOS. The introduction of Tap Code to Peake’s practice has been motivated by the desire to learn a new skill and fill in wasted time spent in the studio. Putting this new skill to use, Peake sends an endless open callout in the hope for a response. The third and final video in the series Studio 36, maps the artist’s studio and showcases things that sit abandoned, awaiting activation.
Clare Peak - Tap Code - SOSOSOS, 2015.
DAVID ATTWOOD David Attwood is an emerging artist living in Perth. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree from Curtin University in 2011 where he is currently a sessional academic and PhD candidate. His recent solo and two persons exhibitions include: Endless Autumn (with Oliver Hull), Bunbury Regional Art Galleries, 2015; Suburban Similes, Firstdraft, 2015; and Green and Gold (with Jurek Wybraniec), Fremantle Arts Centre, 2014. Selected group exhibitions include Ken Urban, Contemporary Art Tasmania, 2015; Mate, Paper Mountain, 2015; and Home and Away, TWENTY THIRTY SEVEN, 2015. His work is primarily concerned with contemporary Australian folklore. Inspired by driving an old car, daytime television, budget clothing stores and grocery store bargain bins, Attwood draws on his own suburban existence as a means to address a contemporary Australian culture, senses of place and identity. Attwood’s recent work has involved the appropriation of contemporary Australian iconography, using consumer products, federal politics and sporting celebrities. He takes an iconoclastic approach to these materials, and his work invites new ways of experiencing and critiquing the common and the familiar. The viewer is invited to re-imagine the ways that these ‘icons’ may or may not relate to broader cultural discussions. Urban mythology, the tall tale and the urban legend are other areas of inquiry within his artistic practice and the means by which new suburban myths might be transmitted and absorbed by a community provides a point of departure for his most recent work.
‘We live in a young society still making its myths. The emergence of myth is a continuous social activity. In the growth and transformation of its myths a society achieves its sense of identity. In this role the artist may play a creative and liberating role. The ways in which a society images its own feelings and attitudes in myth provides him with one of the deepest sources of art,’ Bernard Smith, 1959. Inspired by the abovementioned quote, Attwood’s work looks at the intersection of iconography and national identity. He has used sport as a means to address this intersection. Icons such as the Australia II, Phar Lap and Shane Warne all feature as materials to interrogate the notion of a contemporary Australian mythology. His works intend to ask questions about the politics of how myth is transmitted and absorbed by a community. Who is remembered, what events are held aloft and what details fade from memory.
David Attwood, Phar Lap aboard the Australia II, 2015.
DENISE PEPPER Denise Pepper has been a professional artist for ten years and has completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) and was granted the ECU Head of School and Sculpture Award for Excellence, Edith Cowan WA in 2006. In 2012 Pepper won the prestigious Australian and New Zealand Ranamok Art Glass prize and successfully exhibits her glass art in galleries around Australia and internationally. She has held three solo art exhibitions in Western Australia since 2008 and has participated in the Cottesloe Sculpture by the Sea exhibitions on three occasions. She also undertakes Public Art commissions with recent contributions to the Ronald McDonald House in Nedlands and the Oxford Foyer Supportive Housing project in Leederville. Denise Pepper has developed a unique and highly crafted set of skills to contrive an imaginative fusion of ideas and materials in her work, which considers the craftsmanship in the fabrication of lace and embroidery, by translating textiles-based research into a unique art that is both delicate and complex and unapologetically decorative. She has recently been researching pioneering women within her family in colonial Australia. These women arrived as free settlers migrating from Ireland, and spent much of their lives working in regional Australia. In this work she reflects on early women settlers and integrates this with lace-making and embroidery, translating them into complex, handcrafted artworks. Lace was once a prized commodity in colonial life, a contradiction to the daily hardships and an emblem of wealth and success.
A fragile lace collar worn for Sunday best showed a willingness to invest an extra effort keeping it clean and in good order, in what would have been difficult circumstances. It may not have necessarily been a choice for women to retain this show of respectability, as washing and care in housework would have always been considered a women’s role, and the wearing of a luxury lace collar rigidly and visibly forces a woman into the idea of what a respectable women should look like in a harsh colonial life; quite literally, she would have had to appear as ‘straight-laced’. Copper is used deliberately in these artworks. Both copper and women were commodities brought here by ships. Women were transported as convicts, but also free women looking for a new future to ensure that their colony was normalised, providing wives for settlers. Copper is also slang for police which the new colony had plenty of - the enforcement of authority and law, in addition to control in the harsh environment of those times, is a part of the Australian identity. In addition to this, copper was also a slang term for money as in ‘copper pennies’, and for these, the artist has provided a drawstring bag in which to hold them.
Denise Pepper, Straight Lace Collar #2 (detail), 2015.
FIONA GAVINO Fiona Gavino graduated from Charles Darwin University with a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) in 2006 and was selected to exhibit in Hatched (PICA, 2007). She has Filipino, Maori and Australian heritage and has been described as an intercultural artist working from the traditional to the contemporary, who ventures to investigate those undefinable places that exist in the visual language of space, place, architecture and identity. Gavino has been involved professionally with Indigenous and non-Indigenous arts practices for many years and spent twelve years in the Northern Territory as a practicing artist, resulting in her work being featured in Hot Springs; the Northern Territory and Contemporary Australian Artists (Macmillan Art Publishing). Gavino relocated to Western Australia seven years ago and currently lives and works in Fremantle. Her work has toured nationally in Momentum, 2008-10; and ReCoil, 2007-10 and internationally in A Prefix:Re, Japan, 2011; and Fibreface Indonesia, 2011. In 2014 she was the recipient of an Asialink Residency where she spent three months in the Philippines studying rattan furniture making techniques to apply to her sculpture practice and post-colonial Filipino discourse in contemporary art. In August this year she exhibited at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with a solo show, In-between-spaces. ‘Reflecting on my life it seems I have always existed on the boundaries. I have never made a conscious choice to step outside of the borderlines its just that I am more comfortable there. Growing up I was a painfully shy child, as an adolescent a misfit and as an adult it took many years to have confidence in being who I am.’
Cultural and architectural space intersects with material cultural traditions of basket weaving framed with contemporary visual dialogues. Space is a three-dimensional realm in which objects and circumstances become part of the unavoidable framework by which to organise and reference personal experiences. However, space is only created by boundaries, lines or structures, this allows the eye to define space to make sense of it and to engage with it. Cultural space is more ambiguous and cannot as easily be defined by the drawing of lines and the pigeon-holing of identities. Gavino’s recent work exudes a unique ethnicity, underpinned by her scrutiny of self, and of the notion of being ‘exotic’ and/or ‘authentic’ and by her own unique lived experiences and family heritage.
Fiona Gavino, Authentic not Exotic (detail), 2015.
JACOB OGDEN-SMITH Born in Fremantle in 1985. Jacob completed an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art at Central TAFE in 2005 and a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in Visual Art at Curtin University in 2010. He was selected for Hatched at Perth Institute for Contemporary Art in 2005 and 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include: Pottery Three Ways at the Fremantle Arts Centre, 2013; Hovea Pottery Ale at OK Gallery, 2012; and Pottery Practice Project at CraftVictoria, 2012. Selected group exhibitions include Getting Things Done, Fontanelle in Adelaide, 2015; Here and Now at Laurence Wilson Art Gallery, 2014 and Totally Looks Like at Stills Gallery, Paddington, 2014 and Occasional Miracles at The Shepparton Art Museum, 2013. His work is held in many private and institutional collections including, The Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Shepparton Art Museum in Victoria. Jacob currently lives and works in the Perth Hills. Jacob Ogden-Smith works across multiple disciplines and media, but most consistently uses photography and video, and has in recent years incorporated ceramics into his work. He was initially interested in the innate utility of clay and ceramics, and this has developed over time into a deeper appreciation of the historical, symbolic and mythological importance of clay as a material and ceramics as an artfrom. He has also discovered a connection between video, photography and ceramics, in their shared ability to record an action or event; this ties back to his interest in the historical and archaeological meaning of ceramics. In recent investigations, Ogden-Smith has looked at the appearance of pottery in film and in computer games. There are tensions when a ceramic object is rendered across multiple dimensions and materials. This has also brought up the question of what constitutes pottery - is it an object or a practice?
Can it still be called pottery if it is not clay? Is it still pottery if it is virtual? These questions are of growing importance as they can be applied to all artistic disciplines and even to everyday life people are increasingly living their lives in both virtual and real environments. In a recent group exhibition, Getting Things Done, at Fontanelle Gallery, Adelaide 2015, Ogden-Smith dealt with ideas about labour and productivity, and a pragmatic approach to life, artistic production and areas where they intersect. The artworks exhibited in Adelaide were a personal investigation into managing time, creativity and labour. In newer works created since then, he presents the viewer with a collection of photographs, found objects, ceramics and artefacts from various construction and art projects at his home in the Perth hills. Each piece in the collection is in a state of flux of materiality - such as from clay to ceramic, photograph to sculpture, documentation to object. Each object offers a clue to the understanding of the whole, and are also connected by material and formal similarities.
Jacob Ogden-Smith, House and land Package (detail), 2015.
JACOBUS CAPONE Born in Perth, Western Australia, Jacobus Capone received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Edith Cowan University in 2007 graduating with a work that saw him cross Australia by foot, to pour water from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific (which he carried each day on the 147 day journey). Working in an interdisciplinary way, often utilising durational performance and video installation, there is a holistic nature and futility embedded in Jacobus’ practice which increasingly attempts to integrate all action, however perceived by others, into the wholeness of one lived experience. Consequently his work is enshrined with a sense of dark optimism as most projects take the form of uncertain pilgrimages, unfolding as a search for “something else”, acknowledging that this “something else” may not exist. Dedication to certain lived situations and/or experiences takes precedence, facilitated by a genuine honesty and sincerity. As such the underpinnings of most work emerges from an intuitive process. Even if strong concepts are developed in the studio their material manifestation remains open to influence from the specific space in which the work unfolds. Because of this nature, fragile and fragmented gestures (that constitute most works) are increasingly held together through delicate junctions both physically and metaphorically and thus seek out a poetic harmonisation.
Since 2009 he has been actively exhibiting nationally and internationally in such places as Momentum, Berlin; HEREart, New York; Australian Experimental Arts Foundation, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne; Linden Centre of Contemporary Art, Soapbox Gallery, New York; The Cable Factory, Helsinki; Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin; as well as participating in such festivals as the 2014 Rapid Pulse international performance festival, Chicago; 2013 Brer Art Week Milan; Aurora, Dallas 2013; and the 2011 European Performance Art Festival, Poland. In 2011 he held the Australia Arts Council Residency in Helsinki, and from 2012 to the present has received numerous national and state grants and residencies.
Jacobus Capone, First Forgive the Silence (detail from series), 2015.
JUREK WYBRANIEC Perth-born Jurek Wybraniec lives and works in Fremantle, Western Australia, having completed a Diploma in Fine Art in 1986 and a Bachelor of Arts (Art) from Curtin University in 1993. He has exhibited nationally and internationally over a period of 28 years in numerous solo shows, group exhibitions, and national survey shows. Wybraniec also has established a collaborative practice, SURF, with architect Stephen Neille, focusing on public art projects. He has received a number of grants and awards, and his work is represented in collections in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Daimler Chrysler Collection in Berlin. Jurek is a highly collected artist with a successful career history attracting both commercial and critical interest in his work. Some career highlights include exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the National Gallery of Australia. He has been involved in many exhibitions locally as well; at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Mine Own Executioner at the Mundaring Arts Centre in 2014 and Salon Vernissage at PICA in 2012. In 2015, as well as being selected for the Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award, Jurek was also selected for the prestigious Bankwest Contemporary Art Prize and the Albany Art Prize.
Wybraniec’s work has developed through a process of bringing things together, experimenting and exploring; allowing for contradictions and complexity. He examines how the aesthetics of popular culture and the everyday may be reinterpreted through a reductive formal approach; inviting viewers to reassess their engagement with objects, materials, use of language and place; celebrating the poetic experiences in daily encounters within built and social environments. Wybraniec’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation and photography and makes use of industrial colours, aesthetics and materials, particularly eye-popping combinations such as yellow and pink enamels.
Jurek Wybraniec, Disappear 2 (detail), 2015.
LEE HARROP Lee Harrop is a visual artist who lives in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. She received a Masters of Fine Arts (first class honours) in New Zealand, 2009 and emigrated to Australia in 2010. Harrop’s artwork is predominantly text-based and non-medium specific. It is mostly site or context specific. Her research focuses on how violence is communicated through language, in particular, from a local perspective. She is interested in demonstrating the ability of the arts to offer an experience that also becomes a form of criticism. More specifically by using language as the artwork in ways that disrupt or cause a disjunction of language. Most recently Harrop was a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards, New Zealand, 2011; Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, Melbourne, 2012; Mid West Art Prize, Geraldton WA, 2013; and Fremantle Print Award, WA, 2014. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as The Wellington Collaboratorium with Gregory Sholette, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, New Zealand 2010; The Imaginary Archive, TULCA Galway, Ireland, 2011; Drawn from Sound, Spectrum Project Space, Perth, 2012; The imaginary Archive, The Kurbas Center, Kiev, Ukraine, 2014; Mine Own Executioner, Mundaring Arts Centre, 2014; PCWK6, Nyisztor Studio, Perth, 2014; Drawn from Sound, Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney, 2014; The Imaginary Archive, as part of ‘Traces in the Dark, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2014; City of Perth’s TRANSART 2015: RED temporary public art commission.
Her current body of work is informed by her recent relocation to the Goldfields region of Western Australia. Living in Kalgoorlie is an immersion in an entanglement of history, myth and legend. The resulting gold mining culture and language is a reflection of this environment. Her research is concerned with this local language specifically as it pertains to gold. She is creating visual and verbal hybrids that present this language as text through art, in a manner that may encourage new interpretation and reconsideration of meaning. Ultimately her aim is to present each work as a kind of visual leading question regarding the desire for gold and its correlating value.
Lee Harrop, The Lucky Country (detail from series), 2015.
MIKE GRAY Mike Gray has worked for the past twelve years as a practicing artist with his preferred medium being photography. During that time he has applied several unique experimental photographic techniques to produce distinct bodies of work, where the technique compliments the concept. Some previous themes explored include concepts of machismo, uncanny suburbia and the continuing invention of Australian identity. With his latest series, New Australian Plants and Animals, Gray’s work has moved beyond photography. This is a multi-disciplinary body of work based on single-element lenses that produce an aesthetic similar to what is (hypothetically) experienced inside the human eye. The work comprises photographic, sculptural, video and installation pieces that re-introduce the viewer to a preconscious ocular phenomenon. By isolating the ocular part of vision from the mind’s role in perception, a fundamental yet unknown phenomenon is revealed. Gray finds that this is in some ways sympathetic to the immeasurable relationship between continental Australia and the introduced colonial psyche. He draws parallels between certain introduced plants in Australia that have inexplicably gone beyond adaptation to rapidly evolve into new species as a metaphor for the colonial experience.
An important artistic development within this series is the translucent spheres that the viewer interacts with. Looking much like a camera obscura, the outside world is projected into the spheres housed inside via a single element lens. When seen from behind, the viewer is looking at the world from the equivalent of the back of their eye. They are looking at the world and the back of their eye simultaneously, outwards and inwards. The work that has been created for the 2015 City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award is a continuation of that series with the context of the award’s exhibition space, Lakeside Joondalup Shopping City, providing the inspiration for thematic changes in both the materials used and subject matter.
Mike Gray, Backyard bag study 01, 2015.
NATHAN BEARD Nathan Beard, born in 1987, is a Perth-based interdisciplinary artist who works across media including photography, video and sculpture. His practice is primarily concerned with the influences of culture, memory and biography, in particular through the prism of his Thai-Australian heritage. Beard’s work often includes intimate and sincere engagements with family, embracing nostalgia as a tool to poignantly explore the complex ways a sense of heritage and identity is negotiated. Beard holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art) with First Class Honours from Curtin University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the National Graduate exhibition Hatched, 2008; and Memento Mori at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, 2014. His collaboration with artists Abdul Abdullah and Casey Ayres, The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was presented at the NGV Studio for the 2012 Next Wave Festival the space between us wants to sing. Beard has participated in solo residencies at Speedy Grandma Gallery, Bangkok; Soy Sauce Factory, Bangkok; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA); and Hong HUB, Bangkok. He was a recipient of the Australia Council’s Art Start Grant in 2013 and also undertook a JUMP mentorship with Thai artist Michael Shaowanasai in 2014. In 2014 he also received a Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts grant to pursue a mentorship with renowned Thai artist Arin Rungjang, to develop and present a solo exhibition, Obitus, at Moana Project Space, Perth. Beard’s recent work has seen him included as a finalist in the Victoria Park Art Awards, 2014; IRIS Award, Perth Centre of Photography, 2015 and Fremantle Art Centre Print Award, 2015. In 2015 his solo exhibition Ad Matres was shown at Artereal Gallery in Sydney, and he will undertake a residency at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, in the United Kingdom.
The research for the City of Joondalup Community Invitation Art Award has been focused around albums of found family photographs from Nakhon Nayok, a province in Thailand and the place that Nathan Beard’s mother is originally from. Exploring these albums condenses years, even decades, and a sense of melancholy pervades his process of looking. These images were held in storage in an abandoned house for decades without an audience, and are devoid of a context which renders them as alien depictions of immediate family. The otherness of the past, and the environment depicted, is compounded by the archaic photographic techniques preserving them. Beard is interested in unpacking these collections of anachronistic photos as intimate archives, in particular using the potential of contemporary printing and recording technologies to highlight the profound emotional qualities of these images.
Nathan Beard, Aphasia (detail from diptych), 2015.
TIM BURNS ‘Tim Burns is a legendary figure in the history of Australian underground art. He rose to notoriety in the early 1970s with a series of (literally) explosive art actions, before decamping to New York, where he remained, on and off until the mid-1990s. He now resides on a large property near the town of York in Western Australia. Rather than identifying as a painter, filmmaker, karaoke videographer, installation artist, theatre director or performer (although he has done all these things and more), Burns calls himself “a context artist”. What unites the hugely varied set of projects Burns has worked on over the last forty years is a constant desire to set up situations that critically reflect on our hypermediated, industrialised western society. His interventions are usually created live, in the public sphere, rather than being quietly crafted in the privacy of a studio setting. More often than not, they result in some sort of dramatic surprise or shift in the participants’ attention.’ – Lucas Ihlein, Artists Profile, April 2011. He was awarded an ArtsWA Fellowship in 1999 and an Australia Council Artists Fellowship in 1996. He has also been awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts Book Award, 1977; The New York State Creative Arts Award 1978 for CARnage! and the National Endowment for the Arts (US) for performance in 1984. His work has been exhibited in numerous major shows and art institutions, worldwide, including The Beaubourg, Paris; ICA, London; ICA, Boston; MOMA, New York; The Hirschorn Museum, Washington; the Baltimore Museum; The National Gallery of Victoria; Art Gallery of NSW and South Australia, The National Gallery of Australia, the Sydney Biennale and numerous regional galleries in Australia. A conceptual survey of his work, Against the Grain is currently touring Australian cities and regional areas through Art on the Move. His work is archived in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Australia Screen and Sound, Canberra and Franklin Furnace, New York.
These paintings are part of a series entitled Property is Theft, which is an attempt to come to terms with the buying of iconic pre-colonial land in a post-industrial minesite that represents, to the artist, the metaphor of European and Aboriginal relations. This site is one where land was quarried in a significant initiation site, without regard to the cultural significance of the site. The artist’s frustration is borne via the medium of paint. It is frustration at aggressive and short term economic decisions, and of the overriding of Indigenous culture, and the corrosion of the long term welfare of the country. His frustration is also partly derived from being a self-proclaimed member of that “ignorant elite”. He writes, ‘I can only represent visually that ignorance through paint.’
Tim Burns, untitled (work in progress), 2015.
TREVOR BLY AND PATRICK DOHERTY Trevor Bly’s practice explores the idea of suburbia and how locale defines relationships, aesthetics and formed identity through a connection to a site. Influenced strongly by suburban rituals, traditions and icons, Bly’s constant reinterpretation of his home postcode (6025) creates a trust in the signifier, allowing the numbers and text to transform beyond a boundary location. Neighbourhood integrity, suburban narrative and urban folklore are explored through appropriated techniques common in propaganda prints and urban streetscape murals (graffiti art), while his aesthetic and practice has developed and refined through constant and unique collaborative processes. Collaboration is an important aspect of Bly’s practice, having created working opportunities with a number of various artists and long time collaborator Patrick Doherty. Doherty works strongly with narratives and myths enabling his artwork to reference specific and universal truths. His expressive styles are reminiscent of past historical deeds that echo spiritual and religious themes to captivate viewers. His drawn figurative characters wield fantasy powers to explore the human condition and psyche. Both artists’ practices unite creating artistic possibilities that would customarily not exist. The two artists explore these joint possibilities while Bly anchors the investigation creating common threads through his signifier of Craigie’s postcode.
Bly continues to examine the importance of defining acts through locale and refers to other artists (Francis Alys, Ian Strange, Howard Arkley) and critical theorists (Walter Benjamin and Sherman Young) who have directed their practice by achieving a greater understanding of their place in a specific context. His practice considers the act of the flaneur and the evolution and relationship of this individual from the loafing dandy of 19th century Paris to a modern pro-active individual who utilses the urban landscape through interventionist tactics. These tactics and actions are referenced and documented to act as both historical record and artwork. Trevor Bly’s practice is the telling of grand narratives through localised symbol and suburban folklore. It exposes the underlying traditions that are formed through individuals connecting to a site and further builds the case of locale and the importance of its role in modern identity.
Trevor Bly and Patrick Doherty, untitled (detail, work in progress), 2015.
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