FUTURE PROOF
Some time before Canberra 100 launched its year of hyperactivity, CCAS, in the spirit of community imagined how it might respond to the initial thematic structure of this significant anniversary for Australia’s capital. The artistic program for 2013 has thus been based on the interpretations of guest curators working with initial centenary themes such as women, heritage, politics, Aboriginal issues, science, youth and future. While these were only ever guidelines, from its early 1980s conformation as the Bitumen River Gallery, CCAS has exhibited artists whose work provides ongoing commentary in all of these areas and looking back, the results have been way more far-reaching than was first imagined.
As Canberra’s first 100 years draws to a close, several of the centenary curators, Alexander Boynes, David Broker, Anni Doyle Wawrzynczack, Janice Falsone and Annika Harding continue to live in Canberra where they are able to consider its future from within. Through organisations and activities all five are thoroughly immersed in Canberra’s visual arts community and equally reluctant to say what the future might hold. Through CCAS and the Studio Residency Program, Australian National Capital Artists Studios and Gallery, arts writing and criticism they contribute as artists, administrators, commentators, advocates and supporters. As a curatorium, they bring comprehensive firsthand knowledge to the final exhibition 2013 and each has selected two artists who delineate something of the future. Coincidentally, a number of the works selected for Future Proof have a futuristic feel, in the sense of being appropriately apocalyptic, but more importantly, they represent artists whose practices have become inextricably integrated with their daily lives. As with the curators, the boundaries between art and life appear to have dissolved and in this way the future is not only set, but also assured.
None of the artists involved in this exhibition have previously shown work in the CCAS Centenary Program and this is significant because it to some extent defines them as a distinctive group. Future Proof brings together quiet, but never silent, achievers whose steady work over an extended period of time may (or may not) have been noticed. It is an exhibition that focuses on resolute process as a means to an end and thus attempts to side-step any notion of success, especially that of the instant or fleeting kind. Future Proof effectively addresses the lengthy process of gaining ground as an artist and the idea that future will be to some extent based on a blend of flair, hard labour and resilience over a period of time. It envisions the future, not as a prophetic fiction but rather as a fact, an inevitable consequence of the present.
Daniel Vukovljak’s Hang Nine (2013) is a short history of painting. Presented in the salon style of a museum this absurdly ambitious installation, however, defies history by proffering no beginning or end. The earliest allusion is appropriately with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden where a severed cable has replaced the duplicitous serpent. Vukovljak’s earnest attempt to emulate the painting style of Lucas Cranach The Elder (1472-1553) is replicated throughout the series as he toys with Picasso, Doig, Botticelli, Jude Rae, Tuymans and Klimt. Although his faux copies are convincing, they also acknowledge the futility of a project in which the field of art history is ultimately Vukovljak’s playground. The flipping of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, for instance, has a levelling effect and in this new context it becomes simply a part of art’s game, changed with respect, to suit the artist’s and the audience’s contemporary sensibility. David Broker
For Nicci Haynes the contortions of mind and body are mixed metaphor, part symbol and part cold reality. Working with the inadequacies and flexibility of language, ideas such as this reverberate throughout her multimedia practice. Beginning in this series with gestural marks on an etching plate she also uses photography, performance and video to explore an inner world of communication through physical means, and thus the original marks are the basis for costumes in which ideas are imbued with corporeal form. The lines of communication seen in Body Language trace the complexities of expression through constantly
changing media. Haynes transforms gestural marks into physical gestures that in turn produce new abstract forms representing her ongoing struggle with linguistic systems that continue to challenge an articulate route from thought to practice. David Broker
In her work featured in Future Proof, Rosalind Lemoh pieces together materials found in urban wastelands; wood, metal, concrete, signage. Her wall based assemblages O’Connor Ridge and Voodoo Split (both 2013) reference Rosalie Gascoigne with their cut and pieced recycled wood and signs, but burnt or rusted found metal objects bloom and blister on the surface. These trashed, abandoned objects become relics of the recent past, but are also symptomatic of the cultures of both waste and recycling, which look set to continue warring well into the future. Lemoh’s other work, It’s Black on the Outside (2013), is provocatively political, linking black identity with the unknown, bleak, and even the apocalyptic, and posing simmering questions around voice and agency. Annika Harding
For Jonathan Webster, life informs art, and vice versa. His work in Future Proof explores a potential new Australiana, using imagery and objects collected in his travels around Canberra. Riffing on decorative art objects of the past, Webster’s Australiana collection is not functional and not entirely picturesque; he favours ordinary landscapes where introduced species of trees have sprung up of their own accord or been planted methodically. While decorative art objects are controlled in their style and texture, Webster overlays plate or found wood with his concise but flamboyant painting style, with attention to stripes of colours found in the landscape itself, asserting these objects as paintings, if unconventional ones.
Annika Harding
Introduction is a series of collaborative works by Clare Thackway and Gregory Hodge. Although both primarily painters, they approach the collaboration from very different perspectives, each bringing disparate yet complementary qualities to the work. Thackway uses painterly figurative representation to suggest narrative, with a nod to the romantic sublime, while Hodge’s psychedelic abstraction may have evolved from post-modernism, yet the neon clashes of churning colour seem to owe more to a box of exploding origami. The duo makes small collages from newspaper, magazine clippings, staged photographs, and paintings on paper, which inform the final works. Often the subtleties of the collage are faithfully recreated in paint, with masking tape and torn edges as important as a face – it is this truth and honesty to the making process that ultimately helps to bind the surface together. Hidden within each work is a multitude of ideas, thoughts and concerns, where an intricate moment is built, frozen in time. These moments feel as though they are on the edge of an unknown importance, galaxies implode, children are born and we gaze in awe and uncertainty at the strange new world ahead.
Alexander Boynes
is born of apart ,
Timothy Dwyer is a video maker, musician and digital diehard. His work Primitive Derivative is an ode to the digital future, using the sales pitch of the present to sell the lifestyle of the past, where caveman apes salesman. With origins in Musique concrète and experimental filmmaking, digital collages are built from sections of vintage VHS, made and found CGI, Google imagery, home video, and accompanied by sound produced using digital and analogue techniques. This extreme mash-up and manipulation aesthetic renders the context of all his information unclear, but that’s exactly the point. Are we being sold something? Can I ‘like’ it? Am I trapped in that-weird-part-of-the-internet? Dwyer’s work uses the language of the twenty-first century to parody itself, one’s digital presence simultaneously the maker, the meme and the malefactor; its Internet psychosis and sensory overload comes racing at us with altered perception, confusion, danger, anonymity and ever-presence. This complex excess of man-made information has both the potential to warp and corrupt, and spread like a virus. Alexander Boynes
The body: irresistible, inexhaustible muse; contemporary wonderland of interventionist possibility. Patsy Payne and Jo Wu interrogate this miracle, the human race’s Future Proof container, flirting with the gauzy veil of shared curiosity that links art with science.
The human body - Miracle re-imagined: Patsy Payne’s enduring interest is the physical body. In 1998, (Soma, CCAS), she initiated a body of work whose iterations continue. Precipitating Soma, hours of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning yielded 506 imaged slices of her own body; Hypochondria, three works from Soma, reimagines that process as shimmering, oneiric prints, from handmade dotted screens, on Chinese skin paper. From early 2013, (Beyond, Helen Maxwell), small scale, airy, perspex bodies seem paradoxically static yet imbued with movement. Stand, (Future Proof, CCAS), reimages these perspex forms as print, referencing Hypochondria; over-printed 45 times, the body appears to stream outwards from the exquisite Ribes paper. Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak
The human body - Signifier celebrated: Glass artist and social activist Jo Wu conceives and executes neon artworks that beautify those living and working at the margins of society. Madam Fyshwick references the sex industry; revisioning sexual objectification as a celebration of the women working within this universal trade. Untitled provides a rare opportunity to watch our own reactions to depictions of the overtly performative elements of transgender identity. Lady Hedwig (after Hedwig and the Angry Inch) illuminates the signifiers of gender and sexual performance, stimulating dialogue by aggressively directing the viewer’s attention to performative aspects while subtly underlining the everyday body. Anni Doyle Wawrzynczak
In Togetherisbornofapart(2013) Brendan Murphy presents an array of scavenged brick fragments, which have been laboriously sorted and patiently reassembled. Murphy’s work conveys a sophisticated minimalist aesthetic, and could be read as an act of homage to Carl Andre’s brick sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966). Unlike Andre, however, Murphy’s bricks aren’t intended to defy meaning. They are intended as a reminder that human effort has the capacity to create and to destroy. The work challenges us to reflect on individual and collective responsibility. Janice Falsone
Frank Thirion fondly recalls being told as a child by his father that “the future arrives tomorrow”. He remembers being filled with wonder at the marvels of technology and sci-fi possibility: the first moonwalk, and stories of bold starships exploring the universe on his black-and-white TV set. He imagined a future where palm-sized communication devices and talking super computers would allow humanity to navigate the cosmos. Forty years on, while humans have yet to master interstellar travel, technological advancements in our everyday world have in many ways surpassed the bold and playful sci-fi imaginings of Thirion’s early childhood. To echo the artist’s father, the future should be arriving any moment now. Thirion’s hyper-realist self-portrait Personal Space (2013) is a poignant reminder of our rapidly changing world, and is simultaneously a tribute to past idols and future promise. Janice Falsone