'How Did I Get Here?' Catalogue

H OW DI D I GE T H E R E ?

ART ON THE MOVE and Art Gallery of WA would like to acknowledge that Australia’s First Peoples are the traditional custodians of this land and we pay our respects to the Elders both past, present and future for their unique contribution to the cultural life of communities across Australia.

FRONT COVER:

Anne Zahalka, The Bathers, 1989.

Courtesy the artist.

The Regional Exhibition Touring Boost (RETB) program is an $8 million McGowan Government election commitment that will share Western Australian culture more widely within the State. The RETB aims to increase the number of touring visual arts exhibitions, providing the regions with increased access to the State’s collections. We are also building the capacity of regional public galleries to receive and present touring visual art exhibitions by providing professional development for gallery staff and through a small capital upgrade fund.

This touring model values the development of genuine relationships, meaningful encounters, community connections and the contribution of many diverse voices. As such, the exhibition forms only part of the story. Local collections and local communities will be involved and engaged throughout the process.

A pilot program is underway with ART ON THE MOVE and the Art Gallery of WA to deliver a series of capsule exhibitions comprised of works from the State’s art collection to participating regional galleries: Bunbury Regional Art Galleries, Carnarvon Library and Art Gallery, Collie Art Gallery, Ningaloo Centre, Geraldton Regional Art Gallery, Katanning Art Gallery, and the East Pilbara Arts Centre.

Public Galleries play a vital role in regional communities by supporting their social, cultural and economic growth. The RETB will provide the building blocks for an improved arts and cultural experience for all Western Australians, so we are delighted to see this project is coming to fruition.

Hon Minister Templeman MLA Minister for Culture and the Arts Hon Alannah MacTiernan MLA Minister for Regional Development

FR E IG HT IN G I D E A S Freighting Ideas challenges traditional exhibition touring by making artists, audiences, questions and creativity central to engagement with galleries.

A key concept connected to the capsule exhibition from the AGWA collection travels into regional Western Australia, inspiring local artists and community members to explore, expand, dissect, respond and extend ideas through the creation of collaborative works.

Freighting Ideas invites audiences to become content creators playing a significant role in broader public conversations about creativity and the arts. It questions what art is, who makes it, and who it’s for?

FA M OU S SH A R R O N Famous Sharron is famous for nothing at all, celebrates the world around her and is only just discovering art and art galleries. As Audience Ambassador for Freighting Ideas, Famous Sharron connects audiences and the touring exhibitions.

She reaches out across platforms with her unique Shazzisms, through direct engagement, provocations, a book launch and site-specific activations.

Looking at looking at looking: behind the scene of Freighting Ideas, 2019 Photographer: Bo Wong | Art Direction: The Freighting Ideas team (AOTM/AGWA) Featuring left to right: Graham Miller, Fionn Mulholland, Famous Sharron, Toni Wilkinson.

“This year I became the Face of WA. Because no-one else wanted the job.

I love it, I’ve been going regional, to Bunbury, Geraldton, Karratha... all the Hollywood locations and now I’ve been given the inaugural honour of being Audience Ambassador for Freighting Ideas, a brand-new ART ON THE MOVE and Art Gallery of WA touring program.

Isn’t that fabulous, dolls?”

- Famous Sharron

HOW DI D I G E T H E R E ?

How Did I Get Here? features works by seven of the country’s most accomplished photographic and video artists: Tony Albert (QLD), Graham Miller (WA), Toni Wilkinson (WA), Michael Cook (WA), Anne Zahalka (NSW), Petrina Hicks (NSW) and David Rosetzky (VIC). Drawn from the 17,000-plus items in the State Art Collection, these still- and movingimages represent some of the highest points of the Gallery’s recent collecting in the arena of Australian photography and video.

Though coming from different places, generations and backgrounds, the artists included in How Did I Get Here? are united by their commitment to create instantly accessible and appealing works that pull us into a prolonged engagement with their subjects/“characters”. Visual short stories compact, potent, powerful - is one way of seeing them. Considered this way, we can catch how each artist’s work flickers between reportage and the realm of fiction, drawing from real life to carefully craft new visions that speak about the challenges of coming of age, cultural continuity, maintaining a sense of self around others, changing social conditions, and much more. So, while their visual language has been fed by many sources (Queensland Indigenous culture for Tony Albert, magazine and pop culture for David Rosetzky, American cinema for Graham Miller, French feminist

psychoanalytic theory, in part, for Toni Wilkinson), it is the commitment to openended narrative that dominates.

The Thrust comes from a deep understanding of several more general key threads in the medium. First, we see the influence of the development of American and European photography from the 1930s on that saw an increased awareness of the way that supposedly off-the-cuff shots were in fact highly choreographed statements about life as much as reflections of it passing by. Then there’s a debt to the ways conceptual artists created purposefully undramatic and prosaic “flat” images and videos that documented the expansion of art into everyday life (in performance or strategic gestures). Finally, there’s the influence of the 1970s and 1980s post-modernists who saw all imagery as carrying messages about the power and politics that structure the world. And so, being made at the end of the 20th and start of the 21st centuries, the works in How Did I Get Here? smartly embody a lot of history.

These works are more about questions than answers and their concerns come together under a much bigger question, one that gives us permission to delve even deeper into the mysteries of the art works in this show. How Did I Get Here? therefore, is a question that we can ask about each and every person in these works: what forces have landed them in this moment, simultaneously as themselves and as actors in a photographer’s drama?; what’s their next step in life? The question “how did I get here?” is also one that speaks to the practicalities of how a photo, a video piece, was set up, how the encounter came into being in the first place. Clues are given, but such is

the nature of this art work that while roadmaps are offered they are never perfectly visible. We see each image and video as a moment of tension, of drama, that speaks resonantly but always ambiguously. And as these works do this, we’re reminded of why we come to art in the first place: to be taken within by being taken outside of ourselves; to spend time thinking from, imaginatively inhabiting, another’s place… in order to rethink our own.

Such avenues into art are ever more relevant given the increasing command the social media image-machine has on our collective and individual senses of ourselves. The works in How Did I Get Here? not only demonstrate just how much deeply informed and artistically experienced image-makers can tell us about how we too shape ourselves for the perception of others in our own photographic and online activities, but they encourage us to come to them with our own experience of image and self-making. Given that we are all stateless citizens of the global-image-dreaming that is the world wide web (that in many ways is the culmination of photography’s early promise to be a truly popular art form of, and for, the people) we are more “image-aware” than ever before. Even if we don’t have the language for it, we know intuitively how images are composed, what stories they are trying to tell and, sometimes, what they are trying to hide. So we should come at these works ready to engage as equals, to enter into a real conversation, and to hopefully, therefore, feel relaxed enough to follow one’s own pathways into the realms the artists have made. But also, from this place of quiet, cultural confidence, we ask you to consider how the artists have created these layered works as objects whose scale, surfaces and colour balances were

shaped, just so, to reflect light, hold a specific amount of space, to address the body as much as the eyes. They are also in fact “sculptural objects” that ask something from you, that insist on a certain kind of embodied noticing.

This flipping between the audience’s thinking and experiences, and the artists’ works, is absolutely crucial to this exhibition and the larger Freighting Ideas project it sits within.

Such a focus takes us away from an exhibition model that privileges factual knowledge embedded in an art work, or the relaying of artistic histories and intentions as being the single “key” to understanding works of art, towards the exhibition being a framework that encourages the audience to honour their ability to engage, question, expand, and project out from the many layers of information. And, in some senses to remake the works in their minds…and to create their own stories within these stories…

How Did I Get Here? is a question that is, we hope, the start of something…and, in this spirit, as the show rolls around the regions, it will spark engagement with local collections and artists by featuring their works in displays to further create a dynamic set of encounters about our places and roles in the world…wherever we may be…

Robert Cook, Curator of 20th Century Arts, AGWA

D A V I D

R O S E T Z K Y

Contemporary artist working across photography, video and installation.

BORN:

1970 Melbourne, Victoria

Previous exhibitions include; 2014: Gaps, Australian Centre of the Moving Image, Melbourne 2013: True Self: David Rosetzky: Selected Works, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (Touring nationally 2013-15)

WORKS: Melbourne,

2011: How to Feel, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

www.davidrosetzky.com

2009: The third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Centre for Photography, New York

Victoria

2009: Viewpoints & Viewing Points: Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan

Justine, 2000

digital video, 5.25 minutes

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased 2003 2003/0158 [ID 18019] Justine was the first of Rosetzky’s major video projects. Shot in inner city Melbourne, it’s a moving image portrait of the title character (who was a friend of the artist). The dreamy visuals show her living a young, city dweller’s dream: all her needs (social, romantic, material) are catered for. Nonetheless, her voiceover reveals that she is disconnected from her life and the people in it. She also reveals an inability to define herself on her own terms. While totally embedded in her world, therefore, she is questioning whether it is the right place for her, and whether, maybe, she is the right person for that place.

P E T R I N A

H I C K S

Photographer and video artist.

BORN:

WORKS:

1972 Sydney, New South Wales Sydney, New South Wales

www.petrinahicks.com

Previous exhibitions include: 2018: Wall Power: Contemporary Australian Photography, Embassy of Australia, Paris 2015: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Michael Reid Gallery, Berlin 2014: In the Flesh, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 2013: Internationell Konst Film Utställning, Jönköping Läns Museum, Sweden 2011: What’s in a Face, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Jackson and Tiger, 2005

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2014 2014/0050 [ID 24521]

Before becoming an artist, Hicks originally worked as a product photographer for advertising. The clean look this work required is evident in all of her subsequent artistic output. In each of her photographs, though, there is an unsettling edge that shows the ways our visceral nature pokes through the civilised facade. This image was taken in her Sydney studio with a blank background. The boy holds the dog, revealing the teeth almost as a weapon against the photographer and the viewer. Making it more complex, however is the sense that such a gesture between boy and dog could only happen with a large element of intimacy and trust between them.

G R A H A M

M I L L E R

Photographer

Previous exhibitions include: 2017: Instincts, Mt Rokko International Photo Festival, Japan

BORN:

1966 Hong Kong, Peoples’ Republic of China

WORKS: Perth,

Western Australia

www.grahammiller.com.au

2015: WA Focus: Graham Miller, Art Gallery of Western Australia 2012: Anthology: A Biennial of Contemporary Photography, Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida 2010: Waiting for the Miracle, Turner Galleries, Perth 2008: Pingyao International Festival of Photography, China

Rhonda + Chantelle, 2007

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2009 2009/0094 [ID 24513]

Miller’s works are inspired by a range of sources. One of the most important of these are the short stories of American writer Raymond Carver (1930-80) whose works opened up the emotional lives of his subjects, often at points of crisis. Playing the two characters in this image are the celebrity chef Anna Gare (who was also in the Perth band The Jam Tarts) and her daughter. They’re in the backseat of one of Miller’s friend’s cars, a Holden Belmont station wagon he was interested in for its lush red vinyl interior. Taking the photo from the front seat of the car, with hints of the car park (of the Leopold Hotel in Bicton) behind them, his characters make us wonder about who they are waiting for and what kind of journey are they on. Are their lives about to unfold in triumph or unravel in disaster?

Kaleigh #1, 2015

Cowboys, 2009

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2016 2016/0007 [ID 24514]

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2016 2016/0002 [ID 24517]

digital photographic print

digital photographic print

Kayleigh #1 shows its subject as being like a character in a movie. Miller had been planning this work for some time in his mind. Kayleigh was a photography student of his and he was always impressed by her meticulous outfits; the other element of importance for him was the clouds. In his own words he was after “Simpsons clouds”, like those in the opening sequence of the television show. The image came together when Miller finally saw the right cloud formations, called up Kayleigh who was perfectly made up and ready to be photographed in fifteen minutes. It was a perfectly planned accident!

As a child growing up in Hong Kong and then living in a boarding school in Perth, Miller’s cultural references, through film and photography, were largely American in origin. This is one reason why his photographs appear so cinematic, so “movie-styled”. When he was on a road trip across America in 2009 with his wife and son he felt like he was finally inside an American movie. As he says, “the landscape felt incredibly familiar despite having never been there before. I saw photographs everywhere I looked”. As if proof of this fact, he came across this cinematic grouping of (tour guide) cowboys while visiting the Grand Canyon. Instead of asking verbally for permission (as he would normally do) he simply gestured silently and two of them nodded back.

T O N Y

A L B E R T

Contemporary artist working with text, video, photography drawing, painting and threedimensional objects.

BORN: 1981 Townsville, Queensland WORKS: Sydney,

New South Wales

www.tonyalbert.com.au

Previous exhibitions include: 2018: Visible, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2017: Unalienable, Tandaya (National Aboriginal Cultural Institute), Adelaide 2013: Vivid Memories: An Aboriginal Art History, Musee d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France 2013: Making Change, National Museum of China, Beijing, China (touring internationally 2012-13) 2011: Roundabout, Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel

Optimism 3, 2008

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Gift of the Artist, 2009 2009/0127 [24515]

These photographs feature Tony Albert’s cousin Ethan Rist wearing a jawun on his back. In Indigenous Australian culture these hand-woven objects have both practical uses, like carrying objects as seen here, and ceremonial uses. In these images, Rist is pictured in different scenes from contemporary life in order to express the continuity of traditional Indigenous life within the urban world. As the title suggests, it expresses optimism that Indigenous culture will be retained and flourish in the future.

Optimism 2, 2008

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Gift of the Artist, 2009 2009/0128 [ID 24518]

The works in the Optimism series were taken within a one-kilometre radius of where Albert lives in Brisbane, and staged to appear natural and relaxed.

The contents in the jawun in each image were chosen by him and his cousin, making this in part a collaborative work.

T O N I

W I L K I N S O N

Photographer

Previous exhibitions include: 2017: The Park, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth

BORN:

1966 London, England

WORKS:

Perth, Western Australia

www.toniwilkinson.com

2014: Bali: Return Economy, Perth International Arts Festival, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle 2013: Photoquai Biennale, Musee Du Quai Branly, Paris 2011: The Beautiful South Claska, The 8th Gallery, Tokyo 2009: Pingyao Photography Festival, China

Uncertain surrenders #17, 2009

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2010 2010/0016 [ID 24519]

These two images by Toni Wilkinson are of her daughter (Georgie Wilkinson-Derums who is now bass player in the all-female Australian rock band Body Type) at the age of fifteen. While of the same subject, they reveal almost totally different personalities. One seems reserved and shy, apparently locked in her own imaginary world. The other is more womanly, facing the camera with grace and confidence, but also somehow slipping away from her mother. Combined, they reveal a mother’s non-judgemental warmth and her ability to understand and depict adolescence as a time of change from one state of being to another.

For Wilkinson, they are also self-portraits; not only does she see herself in her daughter, but she is using her to represent the different aspects of herself at the age of fifteen.

Uncertain surrenders #9, 2009

digital photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2010 2010/0017 [ID 24520]

The title of these works, Uncertain surrenders, makes us aware of the dynamics between subject and photographer. Who is surrendering to whom? Is it the child to the mother’s photographic gaze or is the mother surrendering herself to take care of her daughter at all costs? Is it the love we have for others without knowing if it will be returned? The number after the title also resonates with an unexpected poetry. It suggests that life is made of any number of uncertain surrenders, of varying types and varying intensities, the consequences of which we may only know in time.

A N N E

Z A H A L K A

Photographer BORN:

1957 Sydney, New South Wales

Previous exhibitions include: 2018: Civilization: The way we live now, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul 2017: Threshol, Jarvis Dooney Gallery, Berlin

Sydney, New South Wales

2015: The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

www.zahalkaworld.com.au

2013: Mix Tape 1980?s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

WORKS:

2008: Hall of Mirrors: Anne Zahalka Portraits 1987 – 2007, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (Toured Nationally)

The Bathers, 1989

c-type photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 2013.

2013/0050 [ID 24523] Anne Zahalka’s photograph The Bathers is based on Charles Meere’s painting Australian Beach Pattern 1938-40, housed in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Featuring an all Anglo-Saxon cast, Meere’s original work was a highly idealised take on the “Australian type”. Planned for and created in the wake of Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations of 1988, Zahalka’s works of this period critique the myths of what Australia is, and who Australians are. The Bathers, therefore, takes one of the most iconic (and politically loaded) works in the country’s history and reshapes it to include a range of children of immigrants. Her points were to demonstrate that Australia is, in fact, composed of people from many backgrounds and that our ideas about who an Australian is, are often highly selective.

The Women, 1989

c-type photographic print

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Gift of the Artist under the Commonwealth Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2013 2013/0104 [ID 24522] Like The Bathers, this photograph was made after a six-month residency at Bondi Beach. For it, she recreated the beach scene in her studio. The crudely painted nature of this backdrop highlights the artificial nature of constructions of national identity. More particularly, The Women is a calm and considered celebration of recent and past migrant women to the country, the intimacies between people, and the layers of Australian society rarely seen in official accounts and representations.

M I C H A E L

Photographer BORN: 1968 Brisbane, Queensland WORKS: Sunshine Coast, Queensland

www.michaelcook.net.au

C O O K

Previous Exhibitions: 2018: Colony Frontier Wars, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2017: Undiscovered, Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, Darwin 2016: Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacy, National Gallery of Singapore, Singapore 2015: Personal Structures: Crossing Borders, Palazzo Mora, Venice 2012: Broken Dreams, October Gallery, London

Mother (TV), 2016

single-channel digital video, 1.47 minutes

The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2017 2017/0010 [ID 24527] In 2010, Michael Cook moved away from his twenty year-long career as a fashion photographer to become a full-time photo media artist. Using constructed scenes, like sets in a movie, Cook creates portraits of Aboriginal men and women that investigate the Colonial past and present, and conditions of disadvantage and exclusion.

This video depicts an Aboriginal woman – a mother – dressed in 1960s garb, in a seemingly isolated town.

With the empty pram in the foreground, Cook’s work encourages us to think and feel about the rupture in the mother-child relationship with the image harking back to the experience of the Stolen Generations, as well as legal and immoral adoption in Australia. The series was inspired by Cook’s life story, as he was adopted at birth, though the series is not literal because Cook’s birthmother is a non-Aboriginal Australian.

Design: Studio Papa ISBN: 978-0-6485263-0-8 This is an Art Gallery of WA and ART ON THE MOVE touring program developed as part of Freighting Ideas project.

This project has been made possible through the Regional Exhibition Touring Boost managed by the Department of Local Government Sport and Cultural Industries, supported by Royalties for Regions and delivered in partnership by ART ON THE MOVE and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

The Act-Belong-Commit Engagement Program is sponsored by Healthway promoting the Act-Belong-Commit message. ge. www.freightingideas.com.au

ART ON THE MOVE

Website: www.artonthemove.art Facebook: /artonthemove.art Instagram: @artonthe_move AGWA

Website: www.artgallery.wa.gov.au Facebook: /ArtGalleryWA Instagram: @artgallerywa DEPARTMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT, SPORT AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

Website: https://www.dlgsc.wa.gov.au Facebook: /DeptLGSC /cultureandtheartswa Instagram: @deptlgsc