Graduate Art Show (GAS) and Espresso GARAGE Awards 2010

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S A G W O H S 2010 T R AWARDS N E T A RAGE A BITIO U D I A GRESPARESSO GER EXH & M SUM

W O H S 2010 T R AWARDS N E T A RAGE A BITIO U D I A GRESPARESSO GER EXH & M SUM

INTRODUCTION The GAS: Graduate Art Show and espresso GARAGE Awards is a Griffith University Art Galllery showcase for graduating students from the Queensland College of Art, South Bank. The project provides an excellent opportunity for many graduating artists from QCA to launch into the realm of a public gallery space for the first time. Invited artists are drawn from three graduating student populations at Queensland College of Art: (i) undergraduate, (ii) honours and masters (iii) postgraduates.

Our guest judge for 2010 is Mr Josh Milani, a highly respected private gallery owner and specialist in contemporary art based in Brisbane.

We see the GAS as an opportunity to build confidence in artists, along with enhanced profiles for them wherever possible, and seek to promote their work to peers and art industry professionals each step of the way.

Our specialist advice to exhibitors assists in the transition from student to independent professional, and we enjoy ongoing relationships with many of those who exhibit.

The GAS is a key emerging artist platform which often feeds a conversation with diverse audiences, and can result in further projects in private and public realms. By example, GAS artists have gone on to feature in some

of Australia’s highest profile emerging talent forums, such as Hatched (The National Graduate Survey) at PICA, Fresh Cut at IMA, and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize.

In 2010 I have selected 21 artists, with works ranging from a tiny, unassuming and eloquent stack of cut paper roundels by Sophie Bottomley (Fine Art Undergraduate), through to an 8.5 metre long painting by Maureen Kay Kane (Doctor of Visual Arts DVA), titled ‘The Restoration of Venus’. There is a spread of rich ideas among the works, and a number of platforms to support their development and realisation: dvd video, photography, installation, and painting. In 2010 the project features a non-acquisitive awards component generously sponsored by espresso GARAGE at South Bank, where two artists will receive $1000 cash. This would not be possible without the generous support of South Bank hospitality baron Simon Livingstone. We urge you to support espresso GARAGE, Piaf Bistro and The Sardine Tin at South Bank.

The show and awards encourage best-practice contemporary art methodologies among graduating QCA students, where there is no theme limiting potential entrants and no medium specificity in the award structure.

There are usually a few applicants and shortlisted artists who are ultimately unable to be

included in the project, owing to the nature of specific practices or individual works.

These are selection decisions that include practical consideration of requirements for specific darkness, potential sound and light bleeds, spatial demands for a single work, or the potential that an artwork’s fragility or technical components would be under pressure to withstand 11 weeks continual operation.

There are also, often, a number of students who elect to do ‘solo’ installation shows around campus at this time of the year, and these are often best left unfettered by GAS, as to take a key element from a work conceived for a particular site and isolate it in the GUAG would make both sites susceptible to weakening the artist’s vision and intent.

Each year a new sense of what’s happening ‘out there’ tends to poke out of the student body, and this year it’s been interesting to see the dominance of screen-based culture and how it is now an all-pervasive driving force behind image making. Many now play extensively within a ‘default field’ heavily influenced by rules (and attention spans) you’d find in the blogosphere, twitterdom and websites. In other words, images are being conceived, cropped and manipulated to look good on small screens or transmit easily, which breathes a new formalism into the vernacular - and arguably, perhaps less

of a sustained critical or conceptual edge.

The exact portability and legibility an image has across the different digital platforms, the more life potential it is assumed to have (however brief) — a weird reversal of Walter Benjamin where ‘aura’ is now thought of in terms of multiplicity and how many ‘hits’ or transmissions you can jag with an image that may actually never exist in hard copy.

One obvious source, but also a destination for these practices, is across guerrilla forms of advertising, info blitzing or ‘e-blasting’.

The technology available to young artists is exploding to the point where an iphone screen is now as much a tool as anything else, not just to view, but to make an animation or shoot imagery. The range of readymade options to use is going to keep opening out exponentially into the future, and it raises an interesting question for galleries. Here comes yet another potential item for the equipment rack necessary to screen works to wider audiences!

Exceptions to my hastily fashioned rule are equally interesting and provocative - and those able to bend the language back on itself tend to be making what might prove to be the most enduring work. Sean Barrett’s photograph, and the dvd piece of his own extended pashoff in a mirror is able to expand on the cliche of narcissism whilst retaining sexiness and

validity as a counter-contribution to how US theorist Camille Paglia recently characterised Barrett’s cohort: The Gaga Generation. For Paglia, the asexual, atrophied and attenuated voice of young people ‘these days’ has been destructively morphed via over-reliance on technology, and enhanced by a shameless ignorance and vanity amid the rhetoric of appropriated performances. Paglia’s pin-up girl for the argument was superstar artist Lady Gaga. A vein of works in GAS, including Blythe Smethurst, Leena Riethmuller and Jess Quinn, each has resonance with some of these ideas. Dominic Reidy’s modest dvd installation of ‘a man’ is also part of a group, including Barrett and Jared Worthington, who are clearly motivated by sensitive investigations into the conflicting expectations and stereotypes of masculinity.

There are also some very strong works based around identity politics this year.

Emerging Indigenous artists Ryan Presley and Shannon Brett, and Lujain Mirza (Saudi Arabia/Uzbekistan) are exemplary.

Presley’s commemorative banknotes are large watercolours of great execution and wit, celebrating ‘household names’ (in Aboriginal homes) of heroic figures ignored by mainstream Australia, where Brett has made a biting photographic series tackling the politics of intervention, Northern Territory style, via the

filter of a background in film and cinematic effect. Mirza’s perspective as a young Muslim woman has informed a series of portraits, unpacking some unfortunate ‘Australian’ attitudes toward women and their wearing of the burqa.

Works by Matt Dabrowski and Roderick Bunter, both stalwarts of the Brisbane contemporary scene are also in the mix. The GAS exhibitors list for 2010 is: Sean Barrett, Sophie Bottomley, Shannon Brett, Roderick Bunter, Amy Cochrane, Andi Crosser, Matt Dabrowski, Mitchell Donaldson, Nicole Gillard, Maureen Kay Kane, Hannah Kelly, Nat Koyama, Lujain Mirza, Kate Nash, Ryan Presley, Jessica Quinn, Dominic Reidy, Leena Riethmuller, Monica Rohan, Blythe Smethurst and Jared Worthington.

by SP Wright, Director GUAG

THE GAS 2010 LIST OF WORKS

Sean Barrett / Undergraduate [1] Man 2010 150 x 100 cm [2] Love You 2010 DVD 1:43 sec Sophie Bottomley / Undergraduate Untitled 2010 paper, stand

Nat Koyama/ Honours Fine Art Exchange DVD video 4:30 sec Lujain Mirza / Master of Visual Arts Series: Revealing the Unrevealed (Ayeesha, Muneerah, Alaa, Afnan with Burque) 2010 Four photographs, each 112 x 80 cm

Shannon Brett / Undergraduate [1a] Stabilise [1b] Normalise [1c] Exit [2a-b] Not Again photographs, various dimensions

Kate Nash / Undergraduate Self-portrait with pug 2010 oil on board, pencil, fake fur, fairy lights. 130 x 120 cm

Roderick Bunter / MAVA Blind Spot (it’s a beautiful world we live in, a sweet romantic place) 2010 oil on canvas 180 x 170cm

Ryan Presley / Honours Fine Art [1-4] Series: ‘Blood Money’ (Bembulwoyan, Dundalli, Oodgeroo, Waloa) 2010 watercolour on arches paper, 75 x 100 cm

Amy Cochrane / Undergraduate Six Axes 2010 sterling silver, carved timber various sizes up to 13 x 3 x 0.5 cm

Jessica Quinn / Undergraduate Dialogue between two individuals Pt II two channel DVD, silent, 2:24 sec

Andi Crosser / Undergraduate For Jimmy 2010 DVD 4:00 sec

Dominic Reidy / Undergraduate A Man 2010 DVD floor installation/video TV, crate, fluro, magazines

Matt Dabrowski / MAVA Lake Lycanthropy and Your Albedo Ratio 2010 DVD installation with concrete, water, gels Mitchell Donaldson / Undergraduate Proactive Interference 2010 oil on canvas 70 x 110 cm + 20 x 25 cm Nicole Gillard / Honours Fine Art The Eternal sunshine of Fred and Anne 2009–2010 photographic residue on glass, shelving 28 x 180 cm Kay Kane / DVA The Restoration of Venus oil on linen, five panels, 160 x 850cm Hannah Kelly / Honours Fine Art All for One... 2010 [Display Case] bronze and sterling silver rings, 30-40mm D overall dimensions 90 x 90 x 40 mm

Leena Riethmuller / Undergraduate Saliva (Self Grooming) 2010 two channel DVD 6:00 sec Monica Rohan / Undergraduate Consumed 2010 oil on board 90 x 120 cm Blythe Smethurst / Undergraduate From the series: Divine (Angel, Heart, Rhiahn) 2010 Suite of three photographs Jared Worthington / Undergraduate [1]Self Portrait 2010 photograph 150x105cm [2–4] Series: ‘Prep Prop’ (Polo Mallet, Polo Shirt, Trophy) 2010 photographs 52 x 42 cm

Sean Barrett Undergraduate

[1]

Man

2010 [Foyer Gallery] photograph 150 x 100 cm

[2] Love You [Main Gallery] DVD 1:43 sec

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Have you ever pashed yourself? Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and let it rip — seductively engaging with your own image and exploring your potential for sexual selfgratification? Have you ever filmed yourself doing it?

Watching Sean Barrett’s ‘Love You’ film, questions like these floated through my mind.

My next reaction was strangely conflicted. As a voyeur I was surprised to find something extremely banal about the work’s eroticism.

It was like watching someone perform any bodily movement. Gilbert and George’s pieces about the unappreciated beauty of ‘shit’ also came to mind1. Yet, there is something off-putting about the experience. These are normally intensely private moments, and Barrett addresses this tension directly in his introduction to the work: While narcissistic by nature, the seductive and confronting action of loving oneself in the view of others suggests a sacrificing of the egotistical preoccupations reinforced by the gaze of contemporary culture. 2

Unlike the work of Anastasia Klose3 , who offers herself up for public embarrassment and humiliation, Barrett’s work is more flamboyantly narcissistic. However, this isn’t something I would automatically associate with ego sacrifice. Barrett presents himself on a stark white background. The only other thing visible is a mirror which he holds in his hands.

All emphasis is placed on him; even the mirror reflects his visage. The background is completely wiped clean, offering no distraction from the artist who occupies centre stage.

The entire set-up seems controlled and tested.

The work was evidently struck in a studio environment and could have been re-shot until the image was to the artist’s liking.

This piece presents a world pared back to just Sean Barrett. By making himself the sole subject, Barrett becomes performer(s), recorder, and viewer. This closed circuit gives the camera a mirror-like quality4. To engage with this circuit, the viewer, the voyeur, must at some point step in for the artist and become part of the loop. Suddenly the work is not just something to watch, but something to consider in a self-interested way that echoes the artist’s own narcissism.

Watching the artist seduce himself becomes more akin to watching anyone be seduced, or indeed the experience of seducing someone else directly. This sense of a generic human experience subverts the more obvious selfobsessive tendencies of the work. It negates any embarrassment the artist might have felt for displaying his most personal activities.

These actions are common and in this sense public.

Eternally raising his finger and pointing down the camera, or shamelessly holding his penis, I wonder if Vito Acconci5 would be happy knowing that we are still checking other people out in the mirror and realizing they are not that different from us.

Camille Serisier 1 Gilbert and George, (NAKED from) SHITTY NAKED HUMAN WORLD, 1994 2 Artists statement, November 2010.

3 Anastasia Klose is an Australian visual artist based in Melbourne.

Her work deals with issues surrounding self-deprecation, humiliation and embarrassment.

4 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”, October Vol.1 (Spring 1976): 50-64.

5 Vito Acconci is a well-known pioneering American conceptual and performance artist whose works often used the body engaged in sexual activities to confront the viewer. See his Center 1971 and Seedbed, January 15-29, 1971.

Sophie Bottomley Undergraduate

White 2010 paper, stand

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Spaces of refuge do not have to be large enough to physically inhabit. Even a small object can provide a place to retire from the world if it gives you somewhere to hide, and somewhere to think. The meticulous works of Sophie Bottomley present immediate opportunities for the viewer to retreat. They exhibit a definite sense of interior, exterior and their co-mingling, offering us a few moments of quietude to consider the distinction.

The works themselves are subtly seductive. At first glance they seem raw and uncomplicated, made of basic materials. Moments later they appear a sophisticated frontier for exploration.

Meticulous addition after meticulous addition reveals intriguing internal structures, which bring into focus a creeping realisation that this apparently simple object is the product of many careful hours. Just as a pencil sculpture

by Lionel Bawden dares you to damn its humble beginnings, these works lend the fantastic to the ordinary. Careful consideration inhabits each component, drawing the eye and the mind in piece by piece.

In White, Bottomley presents an intriguing object. A cylindrical form sits on a basic wooden table. The elongated legs of the table and small horizontal platform exaggerate the vertical extension of the cylinder. The sharp angles in the table also draw out the softer variations in the object. It is not a perfectly symmetrical piece, rather a subtle variation that smoothly gestures from side to side as it meanders its way to the top. The construction is simple, easy to comprehend and familiar enough to offer a gentle type of tactile empathy. The structure is composed of flat pieces of paper, layered one on top of the other so that they wind their way up the object slowly and gently. This seductive journey upwards draws the viewer closer and begs a peek into the internal structure of the vessel. A sensuous organic series of curves surrounding a central void pull you within the work. The resulting landscape is cave like. A private place, contained and self sustaining, more similar to a dreamscape than anything seen in waking reality. It is also quiet.

Bottomley speaks about the importance of pleasure in a world ‘where we are bombarded by images of war and tragedy daily’. She goes on to describe the way:

‘A miniature space engages our sense of depth perception and with it a bodily awareness of space, which encourages us to make the imaginative leap into its constructs. Each object challenges conventional notions of materiality and interior space, immersing the viewer in mini-worlds that investigate emotion and imagination’.

As a graduate of a Bachelor of Built Environment and Design, Bottomley has mastered an understanding of space and purpose that lends itself to her conceptual intent. The fine arts have honed her interest in the visual exploration of emotionally evocative terrain. These works are humble, like a Nicholas Jones book sculpture, but also mammoth like an Anish Kapoor installation.

They possess a respect for materiality that is intoxicating and an interest in detail that is deeply enjoyable. In a bustling world full of challenge and unease, a few moments of quiet reflection in a hidden landscape is a welcome surprise.

Camille Serisier

Shannon Brett Undergraduate

[1a] Stabilise [1b] Normalise [1c] Exit [2a-b] Not Again photographs

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Shannon Brett is a descendant of the Wakka Wakka, Budjula and Gurang Gurang clans which surround the vast coastal outskirts of Brisbane. Brett is a multi-disciplinary artist, who is technically trained in fashion design, graphic and web design, music production, animation, theatre and film. Her has encompassed film, photography, painting, drawing and sculpture.

The photographs exhibited in GAS are from her series ‘Not again’ 2010, and use a filmic, quasi-narrative format to directly address the issue of a ‘second stolen generation’ occurring in present day Australia. Brett acknowledges the pain and suffering experienced by members of the Stolen Generation who were removed from their families and communities, and is passionate that such injustices must not occur again. She is particularly concerned with the recurrence of this issue in the Northern Territory, where she has been researching its effects, in the wake of the Howard government’s controversial ‘national emergency response’ of June 2007.

This policy followed the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry’s Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, known in the media as the ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report.

Each of the photographs creates a deliberately staged, cinematic scenario (the protagonists are friends of the artist and professional actors) to illustrate these concerns and to explore interracial tension and social injustice.

Three photographs are titled with combinations of the words ‘stabilize’, ‘normalise’, ‘exit’, which derive from a statement in the ‘national emergency response’. Brett comments: Aboriginal people in 73 communities in the Northern Territory since 2007 were forced to surrender their basic liberties and allow officials to fulfil their duties; to “stabilise, normalise and then exit”. . . . . This body of work aims to explore these constantly recurring atrocities . . . It is an inexcusable act for the Australian government to have created, yet again, another stolen generation of Aboriginal children. This can simply not happen­— not again.1 The works contain a powerful emotional punch, highlighting the social problems created by such a strategy of intervention, as well as the grief and powerlessness experienced by its victims. Stabilise, Normalise and Exit and Stabilize show the heart-wrenching image of a young girl being removed from her mother by a man wearing a military uniform. Normalise shows a woman working as a prostitute. In the two

photographs entitled Not again a young girl confronts a partially viewed soldier, with a determined stance and slogan t-shirt, while her anxious mother clasps her arm.

Photography and portraiture by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists has emerged over the past two decades as an important expression of contemporary Indigenous life in Australia. Artists such as Fiona Foley, Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon and Brook Andrew are a few of the artists who have worked within this medium, and Brett clearly inserts herself within this current. To this mix, Brett brings a strong sense of activism and serious intent. While clearly exploring past and present events that have affected Indigenous people and culture, Brett’s work engages with the universal issues of identity, power and history, transcending cultural and temporal boundaries.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

1 Artist statement, November 2010

Roderick Bunter MAVA

Blind Spot (it’s a beautiful world we live in, a sweet romantic place) 2010 oil on canvas 180 x 170cm

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Rod Bunter’s work lifts and recontextualises visual passages as a writer quotes or musician samples rifts, but the ‘new whole’ he conjures relates more to himself than any of his disparate sources. It’s a type of autobiographical painting where, over time, he has built an idiosyncratic system, and process, that allows close followers of his work to decipher veins of information to mine. More a series of pointers than actual confessions, the signs he uses also have some currency in broader contexts, so it’s possible also to weave your own narrative out of the jigsaw pieces.

The first component of Bunter’s process, collection, ‘is a daily ritual and consists of taking photos and copies as well as collecting images from a diverse range of sources including newspapers, magazines, comics, advertising, packaging and promotional material.’

The material collected for my studio work, is mostly related to substance abuse, alcohol advertising, artwork about substance abuse or artists with addiction issues, medical pamphlets and texts. I collect this material as I pass through my immediate environment, this focus on the localised and immediate, helps to imbue the finished works with a sense of time and place. The various elements that give the work their voice however are not just culled and collected at random from the flotsam and jetsam; they are shards of personal experience.

There are other balancing acts performed along the way, and one irony that emerges is the way by which the artist deliberately avoids any kind of gestural ‘signature’ style or painterly approach. These are flat, almost deadpan lift and drags, detached and emptied, clinically rendered so as to maintain a distance between disclosure and emotion.

We sense the artist’s ambivalence toward the apparent ‘truths’ embedded in ‘expressionism’ or an approach that would give the game up too readily. We read them as a kind of mask, somehow indicative, yet still poker-faced.

Blindspot... is a ‘cover version’ of the artist’s 1997 painting Never screw with Lassie’s Close-up, a notorious work in Bunter’s career that became the centre of a media sensation after it was shown at the IMA and was slashed by a vandal who implied the artwork ‘promoted paedophilia’. Reflecting on the work and its reception (perhaps the major ‘issue’ of contemporary art since Koons), Bunter has drawn on the figuration of Peter Tyndall, and the agency of nonobjective portraiture via another artist, John Nixon, to speak of a nameless, faceless target, in proximity to a place of learning, or governance. Rendered in a mute palette we might date to a time and place — Australia in the 1950’s, we might see it as a corollary to the apparently good old days of personal security, domestic bliss and emotional suppression, except, in the ‘now’.

SP Wright

Amy Cochrane Undergraduate

Six Axes 2010 sterling silver, carved timber various sizes up to 13 x 3 x 0.5 cm

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Amy Cochrane’s group of works Six Axes explores the relationship between people and inanimate objects. As the title suggests, each object in this group comprises a small silver axe with a carved native-timber handle, resting on a miniature tree-stump. The axes have a delicate, fairy tale quality, enhanced by their diminutive size, yet their origin is very practical in nature. Cochrane comes from a rural, farming family, and the axes are exact replicas of an axe originally owned by the artist’s family. Cochrane comments: Objects of utility and particularly hand tools are rarely of great personal or monetary worth, their value lying in their ability to ‘get the job done’. . . .

However when I consider their practical applications, and the essential role these tools have played in the day to day life of my family, I understand them to be more precious than other objects more traditionally accepted as family treasures.

For me these axes are laden with memory, and are representative of Australian rural life and its practical attitude.

Axes are hand-tools, and like an artist’s brush or pen, they take on some of the form of the person using them, imprinting themselves with the body of the person wielding them.

Cochrane’s axes thus become commemorative vessels of family memory and personal history.

As archaeological remains testify, axes are also one of the oldest forms crafted by a human hand. In prehistoric societies they were valuable and symbolically charged objects, yet today members of the urban-based population would rarely own one.

Cochrane’s treatment of these very functional objects transforms a prosaic, everyday item into a fetishised, ornamental and beautifully displayed object. As she remarks: By replicating these axes in miniature using precious metals and native woods, I translate these objects of utility into an object to be treasured. Hand carved, they juxtapose the nature of axes as functional tools against the careful treatment jewellery receives, which is also a functional object.1

She thus raises questions of value and worth, and asks us to examine the way we invest objects with a significance that transforms them into extensions of our personality and values. It is also difficult not to see in these works a comment on deforestation, particularly as Cochrane has taken care to use recycled and native timbers in their creation. Each object speaks of an affection and respect for family, heritage, the inanimate and for the Australian landscape. Through its thoughtful examination of this symbol, Cochrane’s work rejects the ideals and standards of the world of commercial jewellery, with its emphasis on prestige and monetary value. Instead, her work participates in a larger dialogue on experimental form, personal adornment and expression.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

1 Artist statement, November 2010. Subsequent quotations by the artist are from this source.

Andi Crosser Undergraduate

For Jimmy 2010 DVD 4:00 sec

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From a non-indigenous perspective Andi Crosser’s short video speaks intimately of her role as a friend and intermediary to two inspirational influences in her life, Debbie and Jimmy Aitkin, a brother and sister of Pitjantjatjara descent who never met, but with whom Andi had become close.

The meta-narrative at play is how the story of these three people affects harsh realities about The Stolen Generation. This is not only with regard to forced removals or generational familial disintegration, but of how the story of contemporary Australia is inextricably about how previous public policies actively bind nonindigenous people to the lived reality, in real time, of indigenous people.

It is testimony of the currency and relevance of how lives are lived today, directly as a result of ‘historical’ events, very often a euphemism used to allow for myopia and amnesia. For Crosser, the personal is political, just as it is for indigenous peoples, and her opinions regarding these issues are part of the video’s ‘confessional’ appeal, where the main protagonists (Debbie and Jimmy) ironically remain either silent or invisible.

These cinematic devices might at first open the work to criticism regarding Crosser’s overwriting of indigenous experience, but what becomes clear during the unfolding narrative is that the artist is also both a subject and object of the conceptual premise.

It emerges that there is a certain obligation on the artist, dictated from both Debbie and Jimmy, to become an intermediary and ‘get the story straight’ so a sister can learn about her kin from a mutual friend.

A small non-professional digital camera, hand held, takes us on a journey, literally and metaphorically, as a car bounces about a long stretch of highway, and a voiceover steadily reveals the plight of the narrator’s friend Jimmy, and about the driver, his sister Debbie…and the relationship they all share.

In 2009 Crosser was a finalist in The Churchie National Emerging Art Award and exhibited as a finalist in a NAVA initiated portrait commission. She has travelled widely, within Australia and abroad, working as a volunteer in a Women’s Shelter, a Life Model, and as a deckhand on board long range yachts. She has previously studied a Teaching Degree, Environmental Science, Creative Writing and Editing, and now Fine Art at QCA. SP Wright

This is not only with regard to forced removals or generational familial disintegration, but how the story of contemporary Australia is inextricably linked to previous public policies that actively bind non-indigenous people to the lived reality, in real time, of indigenous people.

Matt Dabrowski MAVA

Lake Lycanthropy and Your Albedo Ratio 2010 DVD installation with concrete, water, gels

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Matt Dabrowski and his entourage of alter-egos, the Many Hands of Glamour meld science, astrology, mythology and popular culture in a body of work that spans performance, video, photography, sculpture and installation. His works prise open our beliefs and assumptions about the realities that we choose to believe, opening up sites for controlled explosions of the fantastic and the absurd.

In Lake Lycanthropy and Your Albedo Ratio, Dabrowski brings the moon down to earth with a reflective shimmer. Out of the edge of a faintly lit red cusp, a lunar crater rises up from the gallery floor, like a cross between a Hollywood stage set and an oversized ashtray from a children’s pottery class. This apocalyptic prop is filled with water, across the surface of which floats a reflection of the fullest moon traversing a night sky. It is a mesmerising spectacle, a sublime screensaver that may cause the viewer to pause and consider their own place in the cosmos.

The title of the work refers to two seemingly contradictory, yet inter-related, concepts.

Lycanthropy is a term for the mythological ability for humans to transform into wolves. Within this mythology, the cycle of transformation is intimately linked to the lunar cycle. Ironically, a patient who has delusions that they can or have transformed into an animal is also said to be suffering from lycanthropy – a case of the delusion and diagnosis being one and the same. In Dabrowski’s work, lycanthropy is landscaped, settling amongst other lunar landmarks such as the Seas of Tranquility and of Fecundity, and Lakes of Forgetfulness, of Sorrow and of Excellence.

Related to the fullness of the moon, the Albedo Ratio is the scientific measure of light reflected by a surface. Therefore, when the moon appears ‘full’, it is because the albedo ratio of the moon is equally distributed across its face and therefore evenly reflected. When the earth partially blocks the light from the sun, only part of the moon’s surface reflects the light, giving it a crescent shape. These lunar cycles also play an important role in Astrology, a practice that holds great significance for Dabrowski.

In particular, the traditions of Medieval Astrology, which have their own symbology for and understanding of the world around us.

These in turn point to an underlying system, beyond our perception but deeply entwined with all aspects of our experience.

Dabrowski’s work thus forms a conceptual loop, drawing together aspects of the social, the sublime, the intuitive and the fantastic. He invites his audience to delight in an experience of unadulterated wonder, and to let their thoughts roam into the beyond.

Chris Handran

Mitchell Donaldson Undergraduate

Proactive Interference 2010 oil on two canvas panels 70 x 110 cm + 20 x 25 cm

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Time and lived experience have an ambiguous relationship. The reproduction of a photographic moment in paint obscures our perception of time. Defined by its engagement with the past, Mitchell Donaldson’s painting Proactive Interference (2010) is sourced from two photographs. The work juxtaposes an ambiguous image of an old rowboat scene, with an image of a child’s face.

The artist sources images from his family photo archive. His work explores a relationship between memory and photography, death and genealogy. Donaldson explains: My paintings describe a relationship with time that is defined by resistance and fear. This is not resistance or fear of something unknown but of nothing; of the disappearance of everything… the disappearance of me.1

A photograph punctuates the time between the present and the moment of the photograph.

According to Roland Barthes, presence and absence are bound together in the photographic image.2 Paradoxically, a photograph marks the absence of subjects once present.

In Donaldson’s painting, the photograph also functions as a ‘transformational object’. According to Christopher Bollas a transformational object prompts the subject to recall an earlier experience. In Donaldson’s painting, family members are the objects of experience and their image prompts the artist to recall their relationship. As a result, Donaldson’s painting becomes the afterlife of photos and memories, triggering a recall of specific memories and experiences.

The gestural style of Donaldson’s painting resonates with Julie Fragar’s interpretations of photographic sources. Like Fragar, Donaldson is reinventing a photographic representation of the subject, not reproducing it. Although Donaldson’s images are personal; the identity of the subjects and the artist’s relationship with them are unclear. The artist is vested in the images through memory. The uncanny ability of a photograph to foreground the absence of its subjects is transferred through the paint.

It marks not only a disappearance of those depicted, but the eventual disappearance of the artist him/herself.

Kat Sawyer

1 Artist Statement November 2010. All subsequent quotations from this source.

2 Sarah Kember, The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York; Routledge 2003) p. 213.

Nicole Gillard Honours Fine Art

The Eternal sunshine of Fred and Anne 2009-2010 photographic residue on glass, shelving 28 x 180 cm

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Photographs are part of our everyday lives – we use them to record our most important moments, and to commemorate the events, both big and small, that seem to represent happiness in our lives. Yet in preserving these experiences, photographs also show us what we have lost.

Nicole Gillard’s The Eternal Sunshine of Fred and Anne presents fragments of photographs fused over time to glass. Some of these were found attached to photo frames bought from an op shop, others come from the artist’s own family photographs. The title of Gillard’s work recalls the 2004 Film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, whose protagonists seek a wilful state of amnesia, in which to take refuge from memories that are too painful to hold on to. Memories fade, sometimes not as quickly as we would like, sometimes all too fast.

Photographs offer us the comforting promise of permanence, but of course, they too fade, and with them those memories that we sought to hold onto are doubly lost. This is one reason that, for many people, when confronted with natural disasters or evacuation, the first priority amongst their possessions is a photograph album. When we lose something we love, we hold onto our photographs. But when our photographs are lost, that which we loved is lost forever.

Gillard states: “I see the photograph’s fragility and materiality as symbolic of the human body and memory, which are fragile and doomed to perish.” In this, Gillard mirrors Roland Barthes’ description of his own relationship to photography. In addition to his semiotic analysis of photography in terms of index and referent, Barthes employs a range of poetic metaphors. For example, in describing the relationship between someone viewing a photograph and the thing depicted in the photograph, he states: “the photograph of the missing being touches me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed”1 .

The fragmentary bodies and partial panoramas that float on Gillard’s glass surfaces were once cared for and put into frames, placed on display, perhaps with fondness, or with pride. And it was this attempt at preservation that caused the damage. Disconnected from their source, the indexical chain that binds the photograph and the photographed is broken. The poetics of this relationship however remain, and are in a sense amplified. No longer linked to a specific subject, what remains is that skin,

shared amongst all of us who have been photographed.

The linguistic root of this connection, between photography and skin, is pointed out by Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortes-Rocca: “This play between light and skin, between the photograph and emanations can be registered in the French word for “film”: pellicule. From pellis, the skin, pellicule and “film” originally have the same meaning: a small or thin skin, a kind of membrane.”2 In Gillard’s work these fragile membranes of memory are all that remain, preserved under glass and presented as mementoes of memories lost.

Chris Handran

1 Barthes Camera Lucida pp 80-81 2 Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortes-Rocca, Notes on Love and Photography pp 3-34 in October 116, MIT Press p 26

Maureen Kay Kane Doctor of Visual Art

The Restoration of Venus oil on linen five panels: overall 160 x 850 cm

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These paintings honour and deploy traditions of close observation and careful rendering in order to retrieve an idea of beauty argued by the artist as being often neglected in much contemporary art. Her practice is steeped in the history of classic European atelier-based practices of representational and figurative painting.

Principally motivated by a balanced appreciation of formal skills and art historical knowledge, her technical skills in drawing underpin a painterly approach exemplary of a highly disciplined approach to form, tone and colour. In her major painting, The Restoration of Venus, the four cornerstones of figuration, landscape, still life and portraiture are played out in a Cezannesque scene redolent of bathing bush idylls, preoccupied with purity and cleansing.

Kane’s priority has been to express the: “perennial, irresistible power of the beautiful through the erotic force of the female nude, a traditional symbol of beauty under the aspect of Venus.

I have sought to amplify the effect by imaginatively deploying multiple female nudes in the Queensland landscape (specifically, a site at Springbrook). The combination of nudes and landscape has allowed me to explore deep visual resonances between human and environmental forms, thus to reveal some of the complex harmonies and entanglements at the root of ‘beauty’. I have found that such a disciplined endeavour frees the imagination to find meaning within the very process of working, as opposed to imposing some external pre-given meaning on the materials.”1

Kane first studied art at London Central School of Art (Central College of Art & Design), an institution established in 1896 and now internationally recognised as a leading studiobased teaching and learning facility, and graduated with a B.A (Honours) in 1981. She was twice a finalist in the John Player Portrait award, (National Gallery) London, and was accepted for the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Show, London. She moved to Australia and began exhibiting in 1990, and has recently established ‘Salisbury Studios’, a Brisbane-based centre dedicated to the promotion of core skills.

SP Wright 1 Artist statement November 2010

Hannah Kelly Honours Fine Art

All for One... 2010

[Display Case]

bronze and sterling silver rings, 30-40mm D overall dimensions 90 x 90 x 40 mm

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Featuring a colony of miniature human beings cast in silver, Hannah Kelly’s All For One… manipulates scale. Doubling as a diorama and a set of wearable objects, the work has a social impetus as well as a relationship with the body. Engaging with notions of resource consumption, the distribution of the figures over all 9 rings separates them into units but unites them as a group.

All for One… is the central component of Kelly’s MicroMegas (2010) series. The series title references Voltaire’s 1752 science fiction story about a 120,000ft tall alien displaced on the Earth.

Exaggerating scale, the work is like a microcosm; a small world in which human beings exist on a small landmass. Kelly notes that the work ‘seeks to challenge the viewer to reflect on their consumption...’1 Through miniaturisation she is exploring the distribution of environmental and economic resources ‘and the resultant elitism that this exclusivity can create.’ The truncated phrase referenced in the work’s title - ‘All for one and one for all’ - suggests a negation of community values at the onset of a resource crisis.

Initially stemming from a Time Magazine article on the ‘doomsday’ Svalbard Crop Seed Bank in Norway (2009) All for One… began as a meditation on control of the world’s agricultural resources in the wake of planetary catastrophe. The work raises the notion of ecological footprints – the individual and collective impact of humanity on finite resources. It is particularly relevant in Australia with ongoing debates on management of natural resources and mining practices. The distribution of the figures over 9 rings, with some rings containing two or more figures, suggests that some subjects have a greater environmental impact than others.

In the past Kelly has investigated narratives of intergalactic colonisation. Today’s futurology proffers images of disaster and dystopia triggered by environmental and ecological mismanagement. This suggests a direct connection between the social impetus of All for One… and Kelly’s earlier work on the adaptation of human communities to space exploration. Referencing other artists, Kelly sites the small worlds of Thomas Doyle and Alistair Macintyre and emphasis on human collectiveness in Do Ho Suh’s work.

She borrows from Patricia Lemaire’s strange organic forms and manipulation of scale.

Ultimately, our sense of size and proportion is related to the human body; all things measured against our own form. The miniature itself has a long history; Kelly uses it to encourage others to contemplate the issues at hand.

Kat Sawyer

1 Artist statement, November 2010. All subsequent quotations are from this source.

Nat Koyama Honours Fine Art

Exchange

2010

DVD video 4:30 sec

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Nat Koyama’s drawing and video-based practice uses unlikely means to enact a consideration of concepts drawn from philosophy, both ‘eastern’ and ‘western’.

Through his works, Koyama meditates on the nature of transience and mortality, life and decay, identity and otherness.

In Exchange, the same special effect that once enabled Superman to fly here causes the features of two individuals to merge, each one gradually erasing the features of the other through what at first appears to be the application of makeup. The faces merge and morph, at times seamlessly, at times uncomfortably, at times taking on the appearance of a drawing.

The effect used is known as chromakey and involves the processing out of a particular colour (usually blue or green) from an image, rendering it as negative space, into which other footage is then layered. Each of Koyama’s videos therefore presents a layering of screens, visible and invisible. This layering is amplified by the two screens’ complimentary reflection of one another – when viewing one screen directly the other all but fades to white.

The erasure of self in the work echoes Koyama’s past interest in Buddhist thought on transience and impermanence, self and non-self, illusion and reality. At the same time, the fleshy formlessness of the melded faces also resonates with the writing of Georges Bataille: “human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds … they only communicate when losing a part of themselves. Communication ties them together with wounds, where their unity and integrity dissipates in fever.”1

In Koyama’s video, it is the communication of touch that both binds and obliterates the two individual performers. The touch of each figure erases the identity of the other, replacing it with their own. The process continues back and forth, an eternally returning interpenetration of opposites, an exchange that ends in mutual disappearance.

Chris Handran

1 Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 1985 Manchester University Press, Manchester pp 250-251

Lujain Mirza Master of Visual Arts

[L-R] Series: Revealing the Unrevealed 2010 Ayeesha, Muneerah, Alaa, Afnan with Burqa four photographs, each 112 X 80 cm

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The four portraits from Revealing the Unrevealed 2010 are part of a larger project by the artist, a group of 12 portraits of women wearing the hijab or burqa accompanied by personal texts, and a book showing the subjects unveiled (to be viewed only by women). The artist’s aim is to investigate the various reasons why women would wear the hijab – and she lists religion, culture, social pressure, force, or choice. She also aims to “break down barriers” between “Muslim women and their Western counterparts” by “sharing the stories” of her subjects.1 Through her practice the artist raises questions regarding self-representation and identity, as well as reflecting on the continuities and discontinuities between old and new ways of life.

Ayeesha, Muneerah, Alaa and Afnan are four portraits from the series, united by the fact that each of the women has freely chosen to wear the hijab or burqa. The accompanying texts explain their reasons and diverse backgrounds (Morroco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hadramaut). With the exception of Ayeesha who came as a tourist, each of them now resides in Australia and many are part of the artist’s extended social circle. Mirza

is Muslim herself, and describes herself as Saudi-Arabian, although she originally came from Uzbekistan. Perhaps this solidarity has given her an understanding and empathy that comes through in these portraits.

The image of a woman veiled or concealed in the burqa is a powerful symbol of contemporary Islam. It has become an increasingly common motif in contemporary art, particularly for artists from the Middle East and those of Muslim heritage, allowing artists to address themes of the seen and unseen, public and private, agency and submission. With the radicalization of Islam, artists like Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, and Lida Abdul have drawn on the ambiguous symbolism of the hijab to address issues of feminism and personal identity. While the influence of these artists is apparent in Mirza’s work, she brings a new perspective to an old debate.

If the image of a veiled woman is a loaded one for art history, it has also become an increasingly topical and controversial subject for Western media. Recent reports highlight the ban on young Muslim women wearing headscarfs in public schools in France, and increasing moves to forbid the hijab, burqa and other forms of Muslim

clothing in many other European countries.

A similar ban is already in operation in Turkey, and Belgium and the Netherlands are also considering one. So far Australia has proved resistant to this.

Perhaps dating from Western orientalism in painting, the hijab is often mistakenly viewed as evidence of women’s oppression and lack of agency. Mirza’s portraits rehumanize her subjects, challenging simplistic and homogenizing assumptions, and combining image and text to show different lived experiences. Ayeesha, Muneerah, Alaa and Afnan are strong women who choose their own identity and do not have it thrust upon them, despite troubles facing female immigrants and issues of integration and understanding.

For these women, the hijab represents an important cultural tradition and a very personal practice. Mirza’s attention to colour, surface and detail revels in the directness and individuality of her subjects.

She offers a poignant reminder that humanity lies beneath political turmoil and misunderstanding.

Abigail Fitzgibbons 1 Artist statement, November 2010.

Kate Nash Undergraduate

Self-portrait with pug 2010 oil on board, pencil, fake fur, fairy lights 130 x 120 cm

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Using a cocktail of materials, including oil paint, fairy lights, and synthetic fur, Kate Nash’s Self-Portrait with Pug creates an acidic, dream-like scenario populated by the anxious figure of a girl, a small monstrous child, and a kitsch pug-dog. The landscape bleeds with washes of pink paint, is embellished by fake-fur grass and clouds, and punctuated with electrically lit ‘stars’, in this deliberately humorous work.

Nash is interested in issues of masquerade and identity, truth and representation, and chooses the medium of the self-portrait to examine these concepts. Portraiture is traditionally a format for the examination of individual identity, with classical painting often affirming the sitter’s high position in society, their beauty, wealth, status, taste, learning or other qualities. Contemporary portraiture probes below the surface, looking for nuances of human character. In the self-portrait, artists turn the microscope on to themselves.

Nash deliberately confounds these aspects of self-portraiture by gleaning images from other sources, rather than portraying herself.

Both human figures in the painting are composites of figures from great portraitist and photographer August Sander, whose masterwork People of the Twentieth Century, aimed to portray types across German society with the greatest amount of objectivity possible. In contrast to Sander, Nash’s figures slip away from us, creating a disarming world of fabrication and surface subterfuge that arouses hidden anxieties. Nash is particularly interested in this effect, commenting on her practice: When one subscribes to the act of painting something inexcusable is confronted: paint is only a representation of an imagining, a trickery of the hand to the eye. Through this reasoning it seems a painting, in essence, is a representation of truth not truth itself.

I wish to exploit this quality of paint to investigate classical themes of masquerade and identity. I believe we create masks in order to deal with anxieties that are forged by society’s expectations. My work is at essence a questioning of this.1

The pug dog, which to a reader of trashy pulp magazines might irresistibly recall Paris Hilton amid the glittering and superficial world of the empty socialite, is intended by the artist as a kind of spiritual guide (‘dog’ is ‘god’ reversed), satirically representing honesty and direct communication.

Nash mentions as an influence French photographers Pierre et Gilles, whose stylized and deliberately flawless portraits play with notions of idolatry and representation. Like the artificially staged sets of this contemporary duo, glamour, humour and imagination take equal place in Nash’s disarming, inorganic and imaginary world.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

1 Artist statement, November 2010

Ryan Presley Honours Fine Art

[1-4] Series: ‘Blood Money’ 2010 Bembulwoyan, Dundalli, Oodgeroo, Waloa Commemorative Notes watercolour on arches paper, each 75 x 100 cm

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In his series of four watercolour paintings Blood Money, Ryan Presley reproduces with exquisite detail the banknotes of Australian currency, albeit with a new cast of characters and events. Presley targets colonial rhetoric in his work, particularly foundational narratives, and he often works with systems that symbolize this narrative — such as maps in his previous series The Crux (2009), and here, money — to produce subversive counternarratives.

Money is the capitalist system par excellence, an item used by people in their everyday lives which nevertheless occupies a nebulous state between symbol and matter. Presley comments: Given that money plays such a crucial role in every facet of day-to-day life, it holds an assumed intrinsic value that is deeply integrated with wealth and ownership.

This value stands as a visible symbol of sovereignty that often goes unquestioned.1 Presley is also concerned to present “an analysis of the link between the economies of Australia versus the non-monetary economies of Aboriginal Australia”, and he sees money as part of a “post-colonial milieu” in which concepts of “ownership, wealth and status” are formative of Western perception.

Avant-garde artists have often chosen to work with money to undermine the established order. Important precedents include works by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol which compared the value assigned to the ‘hand of the artist’ and monetary value. Warhol’s painting 200 One Dollar Bills 1962 sold for vastly more than their denominational value, while Duchamp’s drawing of a cheque for $115 (Tzanck Check 1919) was accepted as payment by his dentist. Also important to Presley’s re-presenting of the Australian banknotes is Brazilian artist Cildo Mereiles’s group of actions collectively entitled Insertions into Ideological Circuits (commenced in 1970). In order to present a challenge to a repressive regime, Mereiles rubber-stamped bank notes with politically charged messages, then put the money back into circulation. In subsequent works he produced counterfeit ‘zero’ notes, replacing the noteworthy figures illustrated with “two people who existed on the margins of society with few legal rights: an inmate from an asylum he had visited in Trinidad and a Krao Indian”.2 In contrast to Mereiles’ purpose, Presley’s banknotes are large-scale, aesthetically seductive objects, an appearance that contributes to their meaning. Presley’s notes are not counterfeit, but like the Insertions

into Ideological Systems, they propose an alternative system of value not based on monetary wealth. Presely has chosen to illustrate figures from an alternative colonial history, Indigenous figures who were activists or resistant to colonial authority, yet were often misunderstood of vilified by colonial society.3 For Presley, they “embody struggle, pride and strength”. The new banknotes commemorate and celebrate these diverse and courageous figures. In addition, by replacing the original figures with these indigenous heroes – many of whom are unknown to white Australia — on the Australian banknotes, Presley highlights the lack of knowledge and misunderstandings about Aboriginal culture prevalent in current accounts and representations of Australian history.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

1 Artist statement, November 2010. Subsequent statements by the artist are also from this source.

2 <http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/cildomeireles/ rooms/room1.shtm> 3 The exception is Oodgeroo, whose poetry was widely admired and is well-known to a white Australian audience.

Jessica Quinn Undergraduate

Dialogue between two individuals Pt II two channel DVD, silent, 2:24 sec

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Over the last two years of her study at Queensland College of Art, Jess Quinn has embarked on a project obsessively recording the world around her, starting close to home with her family. As Quinn states, “My video camera has become an extension of myself, allowing me to constantly observe… The viewer is invited into an environment that may be familiar or foreign to them”. In dialogue between two individuals Part II, the viewer is invited into a conversation between Quinn and her sister, and a spontaneous moment that grows out of listening to music together.

This project has echoes throughout the history of the moving image; from the quotidian diversions documented in the Lumiere Brothers’ Actualities through home Super 8 and video, to the banal confessionals of contemporary web culture. In particular, Quinn’s consideration of her relationship to her video camera calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s characterisation of the Camera as a “Mechanical Eye”. But while Vertov’s mechanical eye presented a world the likes of which only it could see, for Quinn “the aim is to create works that represent a moment that can be accessible to anyone and everyone.

There are no boundaries in the work”.

Vertov’s quest for Kino-Pravda (film truth), to record “life as it is” later inspired the Cinema Verite movement, which was in turn parodied in the 1967 film David Holzman’s Diary.

For the protagonist of this film, his obsession with recording his every waking moment ultimately came to ruin his relationships, disconnecting him from the world around him. It is perhaps a sign of the ubiquity of the camera today, and their fusion with devices such as mobile phones and computers, that for Quinn’s protagonists the camera fades into the background. Rather than an intrusion, it becomes a silent witness to their “every move, dinner, dancing or late night conversations”.

Whether mounted on a tripod, held in the hand or left on a bench, it has become a constant and familiar presence, on constant surveillance mode.

Quinn’s project began with videotapes before moving on to digital video. All of the tapes and memory cards produced so far have been kept and filed, forming an ever growing archive of this young artist’s life, to be returned to and reviewed alongside fresh footage, re-edited into new works. Within this process there is something of push-pull effect at work.

On the one hand, Quinn strives to preserve the simplicity of the moments recorded; keeping them as a single shot or employing minimal

editing, perhaps only removing the sound to simplify down to the action or interaction recorded. At the same time, there is a desire to play with the formal elements of the medium, such as the relationship between sound and vision, a desire to let people in but also to keep her distance.

Dialogue between two individuals Part II presents an example of this formal play at its most active, echoing the spontaneous play that forms the subject of the video. This recorded moment jitters and shakes across multiple screens, the sound comes and goes, in and out of alignment with the vision. The viewer is invited to observe as the conversation continues.

Chris Handran

Dominic Reidy Undergraduate

A Man 2010 DVD floor sculpture TV, crate, fluro, magazines, soundtrack

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Dominic Reidy’s modest sculpture pulls together elements from a number of sources to construct a morphing image of masculinity.

Each originally had some agency in the formulation and projection of an ‘ideal’ male form, drawing on such things as body image, sex appeal, strength and power, amid the influential arenas of religious, popular culture/ media and peer socialisation processes.

At the base of the sculpture are various ‘men’s magazines’, with titles like IronMan and Muscle & Fitness. One uses for its front cover the Charles Atlas cliché of the muscle bound hero strutting on a beach, literally draped by (at least) three equally tough and toned babes.

Without irony, our hairless, bottle- blonded beefcake poses so as to ripple and flex all the appropriate anatomical delights.

While these magazines also include a range of advertisements and articles from ‘beating cancer’, to ‘power packed abs’, and tips for ‘sexual fatigue’ or ‘How to get better’, it is the process of gender representation they embody — of aestheticisation and objectification the artist wishes to research.He’s scanned and re-photographed images from within these publications to produce a looped dvd, screened by a bit of old school televisual technology (the ‘box’), and framed the entire equation within the confines of a milk crate, a readymade plinth.

Its DIY handyman look and feel belies a sophisticated and sensitive rendering of emotive and psychological states, where the frenetic wavering outlines of the prone figure, almost given repose as a corpse in a screenformat coffin, shimmers and pulses, linked to the heavens by a power umbilical cord and the dulcet tones of Psalm 23 (The Lord is My Shepherd).

Inner, corporeal terrains suggestive of anxiety and mood shifts are also given life, whilst the bodily form he conjures resembles the twitching flesh and gristle of electrified meat.

It’s hardly a physique that fits the stereotype offered by mainstream media, and yet it catches beautifully a sense of vulnerability and isolation largely ignored by more widely promulgated ideals of manhood.

Dominic Reidy graduates with a Bachelor of Fine Art with Majors in Sculpture, Art Theory and Drawing, and has exhibited regularly in QCA projects.

SP Wright

Leena Riethmuller Undergraduate

Saliva (Self Grooming) 2010 two channel DVD, 6:00 sec

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“I leaned over the railing on the back veranda into the dark and tried to see the ground far below. I opened my mouth a little to let myself drool into the unseen depths beneath me.”1 Over the last 18 months, Leena Reithmuller has created a body of work in which the private, momentary action described above is obsessively repeated in a variety of settings, both public and private.

These performances are sometimes witnessed by a live audience, either a dedicated audiences or one consisting of passersby.

At other times, as is the case in Saliva (Self Grooming), they are performed alone and documented via video.

While potentially confronting, Riethmuller’s performances are not anti-social actions designed to shock. They result from a repetitive and sustained releasing of the body’s instinctive control. In allowing the body to do what it does naturally, the bonds of decorum and social propriety are broken.

As Julia Kristeva has written: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.

What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”2 Riethmuller’s aberrant behaviour is an encounter with otherness - like a social trauma, to be sublimated or shut out, whether by crossing the street to avoid the drooling stranger or averting one’s eyes from the video.

The self grooming undertaken in Saliva (Self Grooming) adds an animalistic tone to this performative oeuvre. Like a cat grooming itself, the artist drools into her hand and then runs the saliva through her hair. The hair becomes slick and wet but she continues, the fluid dripping down her face and neck, and onto her clothes.

This may seem like an abject endeavour, but grooming rituals often are. For centuries, ambergris (an intestinal secretion produced by whales) was a base ingredient in perfume; fat and blubber were similarly used in soap and cosmetics. If we are mindful of the fact that botox is a neurotoxin related to botulism, it may not seem so appealing.

From mud baths to chemical peels, rituals of beautification can have an ugly side. In comparison, Leena Riethmuller’s all-natural spit and polish may not seem quite so objectionable.

Chris Handran

1 Leena Riethmuller, artist statement 2010 2 Julia Kristeva Powers of Horros: An Essay on Abjection 19 p 4

Monica Rohan Undergraduate

Consumed 2010 oil on board 90 x 120 cm

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Monica Rohan’s painting Consumed subverts normalcy with a confusing image of the quotidian. The person depicted in the painting seems to be seeping into the furniture, becoming part body, part object.

With links to how human psychology colours everyday experience, the artist aims to ‘present a visual manifestation of inner confusion.’ She explains: ‘The meaning is not explicit.’ 1 Rohan subverts codes and conventions: the body no longer sits on top of the chair, but is absorbed by the furniture. The artist leaves the image open to the viewer’s misconstrual of conventional coding. Consequently, the work is irrational and unsettling; the legs of the young woman appear to have vanished below the knee and her mouth is being swallowed by the sofa.

Rohan’s work recalls Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures (1999 - ongoing) a series of works where audience members, use everyday objects to pose as sculptures for one minute.

Frequently viewers are instructed by drawings to meld their bodies with furniture. Chairs feature in number throughout the series.

The melding of the human body with everyday objects evokes an extension of body image.

According to psychoanalyst Paul Schilder, clothing, chairs, walking sticks and couches connect with the body and can reinvent body image. In Schilder’s words: “Body image is capable both of taking objects into itself and of spreading into space” 2. Like the One Minute Sculptures, Rohan’s work demonstrates this skewed psychology, whereby a loss of self-definition provides a physical and psychological merging between the body and object.

The body of the young woman in Rohan’s image becomes a projection of the body of the viewer. As the title implies, Consumed destabilises normalcy and twists rational assumptions inward toward the psyche. The body of the young woman is consumed, along with our sense of psychological stability and our perception of our own body image. We too are dragged in, and able to relate closely to the artist’s ambiguous visual treatise, one we sense that may also speak eloquently and succinctly of ennui and creative stasis.

Kat Sawyer 1 Artists Statement, November 2010.

2. Christine Marcel, Erwin Wurm Fat Survival, ed. Peter Weibel (Ostfilden-Ruit; Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002) pp. 250-265.

Blythe Smethurst Undergraduate

[1-3] From the series: Divine 2010 Angel, Heart, Rhiahn. Suite of three photographs

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Attractive men bearing fluffy white wings and tattoos are more often associated with Mardi Gras than religious iconography. Well coiffed hair and a built physique are more familiar in consumer culture than the sanctuary of Sunday Mass. However, Catholic imagery and the seductive techniques of mass marketing are more closely linked than it might seem.

For decades the Catholic Church has, for a small fee, circulated images of saints and other religious stars. The visual techniques used in these depictions include unearthly backgrounds a CGI artist would be proud of and pristine bodies more air brushed than a bikini model.

These are the issues brought to our attention

by Blythe Smethurst in ‘Divine’, a series of three works inspired by religious iconographic imagery. The first depicts an attractive twenty-something angel, complete with halo and rock star confidence. The second shows a heart, real but clean, floating on a purple background with yellow beams radiating from its centre. The third depicts a figure dressed in the apparel of the Virgin Mary, holding a classical upward gazing pose and surrounded by puffy clouds suspended from string.

In writing about the work, Smethurst explains; ‘The brightly saturated, commercial aesthetic of the work highlights the fact that Catholic propaganda has absorbed the visual language of marketing. This complicity with advertising addresses the deeply ingrained commercial nature of Catholic practices. Religious commerce at Catholic pilgrimage sites is well documented in history. The church hypocritically comingles the spiritual and the material, despite the anti-materialist message preached by the religion.’

The artist suggests that the Church has, in one aspect of its activities, moved with the times and adopted contemporary promotional practices to preach to the people. This approach seems to have largely replaced the pre-Enlightenment strategy, which involved acquiring religious allegiance by threatening an individual’s immortal soul with hellfire and the gnashing of teeth.

But Smethurst questions the visual practices of Catholicism to highlight its conflicting priorities. Within an institution as massive and complex as the Catholic Church, how do the Marketing and Ideas departments engage with each other and balance their competing interests? Or perhaps, closer to the point, how does the marketing team promote religious salvation without advertising eternal damnation. For example, are those who control marketing at the Vatican aware of the ‘Catholic and Gay’ float at the annual Sydney Mardi Gras, and how good an advertisement for Catholicism that might appear to a number of people.

Camille Serisier

Jared Worthington Undergraduate

[1] Self Portrait 2010 photograph 150x105cm [Foyer Gallery] [2-4] Series: ‘Prep Prop’ 2010. Polo Shirt, Trophy, Polo Mallet.

All photographs 52.5 x 42.5 cm

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The polo mallet, polo shirt and trophy featured in Jared Worthington’s Prep Prop (2010) are inventively fashioned out of found objects and duck tape. The wooden surfaces, bright colours and hand-made logos, which epitomise the series, are representations of luxury lifestyle recorded by the camera.

Worthington’s practice is largely photographic and incorporates staged constructions. He also produces digitally created images of commodity objects and luxury lifestyles bearing some semblance to British painter David Hockney’s 1980s depictions of luxury homes and pools.

Like Prep Prop, Worthington’s Self Portrait (2010) demonstrates his interest in undermining the codes of commodity fetishism.

The subject of the portrait is obscured by a bright blue and red polo player silhouette.

Like screenprinted portraits by American Pop artists, Worthington’s work contains a similar stylistic overlay of brightly coloured segments, and engages with the diametric opposition of high value commodity and cheapening through mass production.

Describing his work, the artist notes that: “the systems of advertising are translated into hollow yet seductive visual constructions”1.

Investigating the sign value of commodities, Worthington mixes codes associated with bourgeois leisure activities, fashion brands and advertising. In the case of Prep Prop and Self Portrait the artist appropriates conventions from the sport of Polo.

Worthington’s Polo props are modest, low brow and hand made versions parodying high-cost, high-class sporting equipment. The images satirise the widening financial gap between Australia’s middle to wealthiest social strata. The wealthy can afford to play Polo and the rest can afford to play traded-down versions of the sport, or at least wear fake versions of the brands associated with luxury pursuits.

The appeal of Worthington’s images undermines the idea that an aspirational society should seek pleasure in the acquisition of luxury. The satisfaction of owning expensive items and the added psychological benefits of self esteem and prestige are questioned. Worthington’s works refers to the practice of emulating expensive brands and disseminating copies at fractions of the original cost; a ‘democratisation of luxury’. Also known as down-trading, luxury brands are now challenged by lesser fashion brands. Worthington parodies this practice by producing and disseminating photographs of his own brand of ‘down traded’ polo equipment. Further they act as a decoy, distracting from the acquisition, or impossibility of a luxury lifestyle.

Kat Sawyer

1 Artist’s Statement, November 2010