SALLY ANDERSON BESIDE THE POINT, BESIDE MYSELF, BESIDE YOU
Cover: Sally Anderson Have Both (Up There, Down Here) acrylic on board 160 x 240 cm
SALLY ANDERSON BESIDE THE POINT, BESIDE MYSELF, BESIDE YOU 11 October – 29 October 2017 Exhibition Opening Wednesday 11 October 2017, 6 – 8 pm
Likeness I notice that when I want to define today, I reach for history. When I want to define why I write, I reach for someone else’s words. When I want to define labour, I use time. When I want to define art, I use the world. This sort of gentle and deliberate counterpoint proves the subject, without improving it. The point of these exchanges between things, is that what is lost is as vital as what remains. By doubling [and even dodging] the subject, the subject is raised in relief. For Sally Anderson, the subject is the self and when she wants to define it, she uses landscape as an alternate. Her paintings often cite places that could be found on a map; places that Sally spent time as a child, as a girlfriend, or as part of a family. But to focus for too long on the familiar topographies of the map would be misdirection, because although they allude to the terrestrial, the territories these paintings chart are emotional. Anderson works in parallel with her environment and, accordingly, her paintings continue to arrive in pairs. Together like this, yet apart, they remind me of messmates, hands, wolves, water, glass and other signs with echoes like clapping, walking, nodding or the simple repetition of a single word. The subject is most accurately rendered by comparison. In Unfolded Bedroom, Dancing Rooms, Rooms Holding Hands [all works 2017], the body is hinted at through the architecture and iteration of intimate domestic space. The work suggests, through the proximity of flesh and linen, bedframe and limbs, that the body finds its logic when it meets its double. Anderson’s paintings define the blindness associated with looking back and returning to ourselves in time. Via a type of exquisite erasure, she layers painted landscape upon painted landscape until sedimentary layers form. [If she were a writer, she would hand in the final draft and insist it be published with all its corrections and original errors in tact.] Her paintings are born from indecision, arousal, recollection and delay. They account for the type of double vision with which we view our fractured selves. They are provisional even as they are absolute. In linguistics, the process of elision refers to the times when certain sounds are omitted to make words easier to pronounce. Anderson undertakes this sort of necessary elision in her own work, dodging the subject so that it might become visible.
Over time, Sally’s paintings have begun to subtly repeat and address themselves; time demands this sort of revision. Her paintings contain nascent works that may take root elsewhere as new paintings, or remain wholly invisible. Sally describes these subterranean scenes as “possible paintings” and in this way, alludes to her treatment of painting as an indexical form. Indeed, several of Anderson’s recent paintings quote—in her own hand—the works of her partner, the painter Guy Maestri. [Guido's Landscape of Tweed Valley on Blue with a View Between The Pandanus and Your Landscape of Govetts Leap on My Landscape of You or You Guy's Tweed Valley with Mirra's Yellow Lilies on Nanna's Walls.] These visual amalgams play with the history of the readymade and indicate a sort of emotional and intellectual honesty wherein Anderson [as the subject] finds it essential to call her context into account. In the same way, her slow and lingering titles recall the painting’s origins as feeling and correspondence. In the spirit of return and revision, I rewrite (and therefore rethink) an account of Sally’s paintings that I gave earlier in the year. These paintings are made intaglio, with histories and figures sunk below their surface. They are like wombs or libraries—where gestation and absorption are tacitly implied. They are evocative of our desire to be invisible and yet still be wholly known. Likeness might be a form of substitution—but it is never without regard.
- Stella Rosa McDonald
Washdown, Brainwash and John Smith’s Brainstorm 2017 acrylic on board 122 x 160 cm
Unfolded Bedroom, Dancing Rooms, Rooms Holdings Hands 2017 acrylic on board 122 x 160 cm
City Blues, City Longing 2017 acrylic on board 122 x 160 cm
The Falling out beside the SelfWatering Room 2 2017 acrylic on board 120 x 160 cm
Lulls and Lullabies 2017 acrylic on board 80 x 122 cm
Indoor Weather Conditions, Outdoor Weather Conditions 2017 acrylic and oil on board 122 x 160 cm
The Waterfall on a Library of Landscapes 2017 acrylic on board 122 x 164 cm
A Copy of Your Landscape of Govett’s Leap on My Landscape of You 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
Guy’s Landscape of Tweed Valley on Blue with a View between the Pandanus 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
The Point Lookout, Coogee Bay, Swimming in the Same Sea 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
Guido’s Burrawang on Two Bodies of Water 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
Tweed Valley, The Point, Guy’s Landscape of Robertson 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
The Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow Between Our House and Their’s 2017 acrylic on board 122 x 164 cm
Two Versions of That Morning in May (Yours and Mine) 2017 acrylic on board 160 x 122 cm
The View North 2017 acrylic on linen 35 x 35 cm
That Little Still Life From Their Place on a Landscape of Near There (Round and Round) 2017 acrylic on board 80 x 90 cm
The Last Wave 2017 acrylic on board 50 x 45 cm
A Window of the View North 2017 acrylic on board 36 x 36 cm
Opposite: Guy’s Tweed Walley with Mirra’s Yellow Lilies on Nanna’s Walls 2017 acrylic on board 80 x 90 cm
Landscape and Self (Coogee) 2017 archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle photo rag 101 x 72 cm
Landscape and Self (Lennox Head) 2017 archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle photo rag 101 x 72 cm
SALLY ANDERSON Born 1990, Lismore, New South Wales Lives and works in Sydney, Australia EDUCATION 2014 2011
Bachelor of Fine Art, College of Fine Arts, Sydney Bachelor of Visual Art, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS: 2017 2015 2014
Beside the Point, Beside Myself, Beside You, Olsen Gallery, Sydney (Forthcoming) The Washdown and Salvation Jane, Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane HOUSE HOLD ME, Wellington St Projects, Sydney Iceworld, Small Spaces, Sydney
GROUP EXHIBITIONS: 2017
Colour and Form (Olsen Gallery), Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Carriageworks, Sydney NSW (Forthcoming) Group Show (Edwina Corlette Gallery), Sydney Contemporary Art Fair Carriageworks, Sydney NSW (Forthcoming) Dirty Filthy Painting BSA Projects Space, Mullumbimby NSW Kilgour Art Prize Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle NSW
2016
2015 2014
2013 2012 2011
Paddington Art Prize, Woollahra, New South Wales Portia Geach Memorial Award, National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Present Tense, Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane So Fresh, Wellington St Projects, Sydney Studio Wars, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane Be Quiet, Blend In, Art Month Sydney, Small Spaces, Sydney New Works, Small Spaces, Sydney You Are Invited, Watters Gallery, Sydney Intersecting Archives, SCU Library Exhibition Space, Lismore, New South Wales 11.11.15, Home@375 Gallery, Sydney Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney Bridges of Expansion, SGC International Print Conference, San Francisco, USA Surface Tension, Galleryeight, Sydney 11.01.14, Home@735 Gallery, Sydney COFA Annual, College of Fine Arts, Sydney CPM National Print Award, Tweed River Gallery, Murwillumbah, NSW STOP PRESS, Beowulf Galleries, Sydney NSW SCU Acquisitive Artists’ Book Award, Next Galley, Lismore, New South Wales
AWARDS:
2017 2016 2015
Finalist, Kilgour Prize, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle NSW Nancy Fairfax Artist in Residence, Tweed Regional Gallery NSW Finalist, Portia Geach Memorial Award, National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney Finalist, Paddington Art Prize, Woollahra, New South Wales Runner up, Belle Artstart Award, Sydney Finalist, Brett Whitely Travelling Arts Scholarship, Sydney
2014 2013
SIM Artist Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland Winner, Earle Backen Award, UNSW Art and Design, Sydney
2012
Winner, Nortec Young Artist Award, Tweed Regional Gallery, New South Wales Finalist, Kudos Award, Sydney
COLLECTIONS:
SCU University Artist Book Archive, Lismore, New South Wales SCU University Print Archives, Lismore, New South Wales Private collections in Australia, England, Canada and USA
SALLY ANDERSON BESIDE THE POINT, BESIDE MYSELF, BESIDE YOU 11 October – 29 October 2017 Exhibition Opening Wednesday 11 October 2017, 6 – 8 pm