Group exhibition / RESIDUAL HISTORIES
Opening night, 6 – 8 pm Thursday 14 August
Open until 5 pm Sunday 7 September
Curated by Annelies Jahn
Never Seen
Essay by Lisa
Pang
There’s a feeling that washes over (you may know it) on returning to a once familiar place after having been away for some time. The place may feel smaller, less imposing, more rounded, less crisp than your memory would have you believe Expected details are aberrant, glitched, unexpected. It is an unsettling feeling, even alienating, for a homecoming, a sensation that has been described as jamais vu As if during your absence, your familiar place accumulated agency. Your memory-asresidue settled like dust in the corners, among other unknown possibilities. For visual artists, the familiar place might be a set of routines by which they go about their work - favoured materials, known processes, a hummed melody. These familiarities set up a continuum of making, so the thing that is made – the artwork – once seen, is recognised as unfamiliar to its maker Arriving at something once known but anew, and askew, is to be open to the unfamiliar and in a way, to look for the never seen.
In this way, Residual Histories is an exhibition defined less by exactness of intention and more by the vagaries of unintention; where marks and forms arise out of the fog of what-if, doubt, play, and experimentation. The works are drawn in a way that is somewhat tremulous, often playful, impetuous, with the precarity of mark-making hovering between design and accident There is a provisional quality to them, as if they are suspended in a moment, and they may be, or may not be, finished works. This might be unsettling, but in a good way, sitting in that expansive gap between the sensory and the intellectual. Working with a sort of knowing unknowing is a way of uncovering the residual, visual, stories that move us.
Annelies Jahn, the curator of Residual Histories speaks of this exhibition holding aside a compelling space for those things that happen ‘to the side of what we think is the work’ She has assembled six artists, herself included, around the question, ‘how does placing the self into process deliver us into artmaking?’ There is a point at which process transforms materials into art, but for Jahn the far more interesting (and ambiguous) moment, as well as answering her question, is the one where process and materials reveal things that could easily have remained hidden, and the artist chooses to stop there In terms of drawing, this is a moment of observation rather than of purpose, requiring a state of openness, and the
designation of work as provisional The materials, though known, are much more inconsequential to the process, as it is a disposition of curiosity in which the artist, almost as an estranged onlooker looks onto their own practice and work Jamais vu may then best describe that sensation, as it goes beyond the optical, conceptual, planned, or known
Picture Izabella Pluta, working away in her colour darkroom. It is a known setting, a confined space where she deliberately sets out to breach ‘safelight’ rules, even turning it into a performative chamber as she engages bodily in what sounds like a symbiotic dance between herself and her hand-held laser-level, while her breath and hand movements sweep rhythmically - and injuriously – over the exposed papers. Pluta describes these almost-accidental moments in the dark as an inversion of process and the resultant errors productive; ‘because the damage is produced by the very light meant to protect the print, the work turns a precautionary device into a generative one. This inversion echoes my broader interest in ‘productive errors’: or moments when the apparatus reveals its own limitations and, in doing so, opens new perceptual space.’
The artworks by Aude Parichot are the re-assembled contents of a package sent to the curator, wrapped in tenderness of intention The contents spill, a selection of material residues, fragments and drawings from the places Parichot has worked, an object catalogue of a series of drifting residencies over the past 2 years; places in Portugal, France, Australia She describes how she works - in ‘process whispers’ – a phrasing evocative of the lightness and ephemerality of her practice. ‘Making is a way of connecting with the places I inhabit through physical presence and creative attention ’ Her ‘process is body-led, between consolidation of methods and improvisation, rooted in attention and presence. Drawing holds a central role not only as medium but as attitude anchored in immediacy, awareness, and a durational unfolding ’
This might be the moment to consider how artists draw as an immediate and intuitive action made with residue, within and alongside other actions. Perhaps no other discipline, process, or medium (and drawing is all these things), is at such ease with speculative actions, ongoing doubt, even the possibility of failure. While painters have an abundant art historical tradition, including its own language, forms of critique and materiality to draw upon in contextualising their practices, here are some painters drawing with paint Oliver Wagner describes his work as ‘experiments with labour, speculation and volatility to examine notions of skill, care and chance.’ Through an exacting process of application and removal of paint, brushing on and off, Wagner sublimates the body of paint into mere dust, creating marks and works that appear fleeting and formless, more characteristic of shifting vapours, gases, clouds. His response to these unexpected outcomes, contrary to imagination? He has ‘no choice but to accept them ’
And so, as one painter in the exhibition reduces paint to dust, another draws with residue. This then is painting slipping over to drawing, as the primacy of mark – or in this case, the absent touch of it, so suggestive of the slippage of memory. There, inserted between the formal vocabulary of plane, support and surface is drawing Among the soft mantra of materials listed by Tara McIntosh is the enigmatic ‘studio debris’ as ‘the works play with the threshold between human gesture and the studio environment.’ The quiet expanses in McIntosh’s work to take us to the edge of what is visual and remembered, often involving the use of unconventional tools (angle grinder) to rend marks as scars, the drawn remains of removing superfluous matter.
Residue as a disarming memento of the unintended culminate in the palimpsest patternation of Lisa Stack’s work As told, ‘part of (the) process in the making of each printed garment is a cleaning and secondary process that creates large print-layered fabrics completed over many years – a residue of process, labour and time. The work shown bears witness to 30 years of work.’ Like an ocean bed, Stack’s silkscreened cotton piece is a fecund celebration - spiralling dots, fern-like tendrils, feathery corals washed in waves of gentle colouration, blending, mixing and continuously changing.
Annelies Jahn’s practice of making site-determined interventions has a productive side-effect. As these interventions are begun, even as they end, Jahn prolongs the moment of making so that it remains a continuous process. De-installation for her is as methodical a process as installation as she removes and collects, often re-assembling removed materials into new forms. Her terminology, ‘spatial artifacts’ captures how objects and residual materials can hold the memory of what was. A line once spread with angularity across a wall, mapping, measuring, now held in a curled form. Overspray captured as shadow marks. Marks that were once loud and prominent now held as fragments, quietly, votive tokens of their past.
It is the acceptance of a certain precarity of mark, inherent fallibility of process, and insertion of self into the work of artmaking that unite these artists, even as they hail from varied practices – painting, installation, multi-media, printmaking, photography. Curatorially, Jahn describes the group, rather poetically (and pictorially) as a selection of those leaning into vulnerability, drawn to the provisional nature of making And so, they go on, not straight ahead, but leaning - into error, temporality, even absence. They return to the things, places, materials they know in order to do their work, but at a remove, seeking out alternate ways to chance upon and then to recognise, things as never seen.
Note: Italicised texts are extracts from ar2st statements and notes provided by the curator.