BLAZE AT ANCA
CURATED BY DAVID BROKER & JANICE FALSONE
ANCA Gallery & Studios 1 Rosevear Place Dickson ACT Weds - Sun 12 - 5 | www.anca.net.au | www.ccas.com.au 6pm WEDNESDAY 20th FEBRUARY until SUNDAY 3rd MARCH 2013
JULIA BOYD / HANNAH BATH
ELLY FREER / HOLLY GRANVILLE-EDGE
RUBY GREEN / PATRICK LARMOUR
TRISH ROAN / ROMAN STACHURSKI
STEPH WILSON
Top: ROMAN STACHURSKI, Twins, 2012, wood, steel and glass, 110cm x 390cm x 30cm. Photo: Stella-Rae Zelnik
Middle: TRISH ROAN, Buck Lake, 2012, sieve and cotton thread, 7cm x 36cm x 16cm
Bottom Left: HOLLY GRANVILLE-EDGE, The way I sip my tea 2012, digital inkjet print, 84cm x 60cm
Bottom Right: ELLY FREER, I got drunk and ordered like 5Arnie posters
digital inkjet print, 22cm x 32cm
Front: PATRICK LARMOUR, Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 30cm x 25cm x 15cm
BLAZE AT ANCA
In the year of Canberra’s Centenary there will be two versions of Blaze. Initiated by Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) in 2006 as an annual exhibition to record the progress of emerging artists in the ACT, Blaze 7 sees CCAS join forces with Australian National Capital Artists (ANCA). Over the years both ANCA and CCAS have served the Canberra arts community in different ways and thus it seems fitting to collaborate at a point of historical significance. The curators of Blaze 7 at ANCA Janice Falsone and David Broker have selected work from emerging artists’ exhibitions throughout 2012 and the CCAS Studio Residency Program. Later in 2013 Annika Harding will look at all seven Blaze shows for an exhibition at CCAS Gorman House entitled Blaze: Back Burning. Through both exhibitions audiences will be able to gain a sense of the exciting new work being made by emerging practitioners in the ACT, work that continues to renew and revitalise Canberra’s cultural scene.
As “emerging” is the raison d’etre for Blaze it is impossible to begin with a predetermined curatorial rationale. Work is selected from solo and group exhibitions throughout the year and the hunting grounds include artist-run-initiatives and galleries that participate in the ANU School of Art’s Emerging Artists Support Scheme (EASS). There is no similar scheme anywhere in Australia and community support for new artists has become a distinctive feature on the ACT’s artistic landscape. Once the work is selected for exhibition ideas, themes and trends tend to materialise and these differ from year to year.
Following several years that seemed to be dominated by abstraction Blaze 7 atANCA brings together a group of artists whose highly refined experimental practices subvert familiar objects and materials in ways that are more often than not amusing. Thus we find found objects such as books, scenery snapshots, strainers and office furniture being transformed into artworks with astonishing wit and skill. Kitsch materials such as velvet and 50s kitchen furniture are ripe for subversion in an exhibition that seems bent on iconoclasm. Photographic portraits that neither lie nor tell the truth, paintings hanging precariously from their canvases or crumpled on the gallery floor and dangerously tense sculptures challenge the ways we think about the visual arts. There is nothing cynical about the works in this exhibition, each work is produced with great care and presented in ways that use humour to shift audience perceptions from customary understandings of the art object.
HANNAH BATH
Hannah Bath makes skillfully hyperrealist drawings from photographs as a way of refamiliarising herself with subjects from her childhood. In this case her subject is Mount St. Helens, an active volcano in southwestern Washington. Bath’s source material is a collection of photographs taken during a family holiday, which Bath was too young to remember. Curiosity and an unexplained nostalgia for this far-off scenic location compelled Bath to produce multiple studies of the site. Within the drawing plain information from the source material is subtly edited-out, altered or exaggerated, including the colour-bleed scarred edges mimicking the look of the aged film. The drawings are a personal tribute to places that memory forgets.
JULIA BOYD
Julia Boyd’s work can be seen in terms of a process of defamiliarisation. Books and magazines, for example, are the most familiar of objects: we grow up with them, collect them, borrow them and read them in the secure environments of familiar surrounds. For Boyd almost any object is a suitable vehicle for a photographic print and books are ideal. Their covers are ripe with graphic imagery and text designed to provide an elusive something that the potential consumer desires. At this juncture Boyd intervenes, changing covers through the overlaying of disparate images that bring about an imperceptible shift in the way audiences experience or perceive the graphic intention of the cover and ultimately the object itself. While her books are related to culture jamming, the disruption or subversion of messages in mainstream media, her larger pieces are more related to the practice of ostranenie, which compels audiences to see common objects in strange unexpected ways. Boyd also has a history of printing photographic images onto large objects, a practice that converts the customary twodimensional photomedia interface into a sculptural object. A natural extension to the books is Boyd’s 1950s table, which is stripped of its original function, serves as the canvas and frame for an architectural image that represents the structural skeleton of a generic modern building that focuses the audience’s attention on things most common.
ELLY FREER
Elly Freer reconstructs 17th century Dutch still life compositions, using objects from her own lounge room, to an amusing effect. Freer skillfully photographs these arrangements to create an arresting series of self-portraits and a satirical reflection of contemporary society. A loaf of bread is substituted with a Dr Pepper can, an oyster with a packet of Tally-Ho tobacco papers, a pitcher with a smoldering bong. A cheap vase decorated with naively drawn skull silhouettes becomes a present-day memento mori. Using familiar symbolic codes, like a half peeled orange or cut flowers, Freer successfully reminds us of the temporary nature of sensory pleasures while also adopting an irreverent standpoint in relation to high art and consumer culture. These works successfully appropriate traditional vanitas artworks as a form of social commentary.
HOLLY GRANVILLE-EDGE
Holly Granville-Edge’s Chimera (2012) series depicts the artist as a hybridised being in disconcerting photographic portraits. Pieced together from Granville-Edge’s own features and
those of others, the images portray the self as composed of multiple facets. Each photo appears at first glance to be a faithful, through slightly uncanny, portrait of the “real” Granville-Edge. Only by viewing numerous works in the series do we discover that they cannot all possibly be images of the same person – details in each reveal impossible physical inconsistencies, thus giving away the composite or chimerical nature of these “portraits” constructed from multiple bodies. In aggregate, however, the images are still recognisable as Granville-Edge. The artist is both familiar and alien, blurring the boundary between self-portraiture and the depiction of others. Granville-Edge’s images hint at the possibility of genetic modification, image manipulation and the creation of a virtual self, with subdued humour. Exposing the “authenticity” of photography as a myth, these images have been cleverly manipulated to produce convincing yet disquieting individual portraits.
RUBY GREEN
Ruby Green approaches the Australian bush from a feminist and eco-conscious perspective, at once erotic, mystical and political. Her works are populated by wandering silhouettes, transient human presences in the landscape. Green paints on a stretched velvet support. Although the technique can be traced back to the 14th century, contemporary painting on velvet cannot avoid an association with kitsch. The seductive tactile material parallels the artist’s physical engagement with the landscape, at the same time affording aesthetic possibilities that heighten the mystery of her dark brooding images.
PATRICK LARMOUR
The first impression of Patrick Larmour’s paintings is likely to be perplexing as they lie crumpled in corners or hanging from gallery walls, as if torn violently from their frames. Viewers with knowledge of art history will wonder if these works question the definition of painting or traverse media to exist in a zone between painting and sculpture. Indeed they appear to do both. Others might consider the works in a context where the art object is stripped of its preciousness, to be levelled like other neglected or undervalued objects of the consumer society that gather dust in their state of disrepair.
Patrick Larmour is a versatile and skilled painter who is not shy when it comes to experimentation. A close study of his screwed up paintings will reveal that these were competent completed works that appear to have been destroyed before exhibition. A little more research will also reveal that the patterns so beautifully rendered on the canvas are those of his distinguishing shirts (or sometimes those of his friends). Thus they convey aspects of self reflection and a mood of sadness. Larmour’s work is often characterised by a sharp melancholy that in these works has been further sharpened by his attentiveness to what has apparently been discarded. Although he does not consider the work to be sculptural the process of destruction is actually a method of creation. As the paintings become three-dimensional each fold and twist is that of the artist’s hand, or more precisely, a problematic collaboration between mind and body. At this point the “experimental” gives way to the metaphorical, whereby the frame rejects its role as a support and stands for the artist’s body – flawed, fragile, unreliable and unpredictable.
TRISH ROAN
Trish Roan creates situations that invite us to reflect on a continually shifting world. Roan exploits the potential of the handcrafted and the found object using simple materials to express a profound sense of wonder and delight. In BuckLake(2012) Roan has meticulously embroidered the reflected image of a Canadian lakeside panorama onto a second-hand kitchen strainer. By entwining a Romantic landscape image with a household utensil Roan recontextualises the everyday object while also creating a work that questions our experience of, and relation to, the natural world. Buck Lake is exhibited alongside three peculiar groupings of found objects.
A Collection (ongoing) is the result of Roan’s meticulous gathering of weathered items – soap shards from the shower floor, eraser stubs from the bottom of a pencil case, garden pebbles. In a public gesture of intimacy, Roan invited strangers to contribute their own detritus to the collection – an invitation that remains open (hence the completion date is ‘ongoing’). Roan transforms her sense of wonder at the beauty of the everyday into whimsical, captivating and often amusing artworks. Each work is an unpretentious contemplation of everyday phenomena.
ROMAN STACHURSKI
Roman Stachurski’s elegant sculptural works investigate the physics and metaphysics of tension. Like the scales of justice his works are ostensibly possessed of symmetry and balance while simultaneously acknowledging the fragility of such ideas. In Twins; at the ends of two interlocking pieces of New Guinea rosewood on a metal plate Stachurski “balances” bottles whose weight create strain at the join. At this central point the internal oppositional forces of stress occur as both physical and metaphorical phenomena. Similar structural stresses are apparent in Untitled where a length of fraying sisal rope joins the ends of a spring steel crescent. For Stachurski pressure points, strain, tension and stress are not simply matters of physics. Within the precarious relations that exist among materials in each work there is an underlying current of symbolism that addresses the state of the planet. Natural materials such as wood and fibre attempt to hold together industrial materials, steel and glass, in a way that evokes a sense of the breaking point. Through fraying rope and bending wood audience is confronted with a disconcerting environmental vision of the present and future, which Stachurski suggests in the language of natural materials has come to the end of its tether. Thus these two works speak to the limitations of continued economic growth on a planet that is hell bent on industrial expansion and may have already reached the point of no return.
STEPH WILSON
Fascinated by the way in which architecture choreographs social dynamics and modes of encounter, Steph Wilson uses painting to illustrate the aloof atmosphere of modern corporate interiors. Wilson’s waiting rooms, office cubicles and public foyer spaces exaggerate the banality and artifice of these environments through peculiar colour combinations, awkward compositions, deliberate inconsistencies of detail and inaccurate perspective. A generic human presence is alluded to through furniture and décor without the need to include a figure. This presence by association actually heightens the impersonal nature of the spaces. In The Hyperdome (2012-2013), Wilson creates an installation based on her own painting of the same title. Elements of the painting, an indoor pot plant and black lines on the wall, are reconstructed in 3D space, never quite in the same arrangement as on the canvas, which is itself included in the display. The Hyperdome reveals the absurdity of the typical office and highlights the arbitrary nature of built (and painted) space. Wilson’s work reveals the tension between individuality (in this case, the artist’s whim) and conformist corporate identity, a fundamental contrast of contemporary life.
David Broker and Janice Falsone, February 2013
Top: HANNAH BATH An other landscape (2) 2012, watercolour and colour pencil on paper, 57cm x 76cm.
Bottom: RUBY GREEN Gondwana seeded 2012, oil on stretched cotton velvet, 146cm x 181 cm. Photo: Stuart Hay
