The GAS: Graduate Art Show and GARAGE Awards 2009

the

GAS

Graduate Art Show Espresso GARAGE Awards 2009 QCA Gallery 25 Nov 2009 – 14 Feb 2010 Queensland College of Art Gallery Griffith University, 226 Grey Street, South Bank.

the GAS

Graduate Art Show & Espresso GARAGE Awards QCA Gallery 25 November 2009 – 14 February 2010 Queensland College of Art Gallery Griffith University 226 Grey Street, South Bank Q 4101

Our thanks to:

Title: The GAS Graduate Art Show

Simon Livingstone (espresso GARAGE, Piaf, Sardine Tin)

Editor:

SP Wright

Josh Milani, Milani Gallery

Writers:

Abigail Fitzgibbons, Camille Serisier, Jo Duke, Deb

David Sargent and Jacqui Higgins, LIVEWORM Studio

Porch, Liz Shaw, Chris Handran, Simon Wright.

Mick Richards (photography)

Publisher: Griffith Artworks

Nat Koyama (photography)

ISBN:

9781921291869

Bruce Thomas, FINE PRINT

Contact:

Simon Wright, Sewell House

The graduating year of 2009

Nathan Campus, Griffith University Q 4111

ABN:

781 0609 4461

The QCAG installation crew: Eric Rossi, Brian Sanstrom,

Design by: LIVEWORM Studio

Christian Flynn, Trevor Moore, Andrew Forsyth, Jo Duke

Designer:

Ardian Nuka

INTRODUCTION SP Wright, Director Griffith Artworks + QCA Gallery

Welcome to The GAS 2009: Graduate Art Show and espresso GARAGE Awards, a showcase of fifteen graduating students across selected disciplines and degree programs at Queensland College of Art Gallery. We’d especially like to thank espresso GARAGE, and Simon Livingstone, for their generous sponsorship of two nonacquisitive $1500 cash prizes!

QCA Gallery has been transformed into something of a dark void — a totally blackened space — from which many of these new artists will ‘emerge’ for their first major public gallery show. Artists from all over South East Queensland, and South East Asia — Japan, China, Cambodia — make up the constellation of artists selected to take part in the project, and we wish them all a bright future.

Involvement from the local private gallery sector is a vital part of our community outreach and we work with some of the best to generate sponsorship, choose award recipients, and entrée new artists into ongoing relationships. This year we are grateful to Josh Milani, of Milani Gallery, for choosing two recipients of espresso GARAGE largesse.

Griffith University’s commitment to emerging Australian artists manifests in a range of initiatives, from local projects like GAS, to the pinnacles of world art. In 2009 we were Supporting Partner at the 53rd Venice Biennale of International Art, where Vernon Ah Kee, a QCA graduate, represented Australia.

In June 2010 a newly formed partnership will facilitate The CHURCHIE National Emerging Art Exhibition for the first time at Queensland College of Art.

Thanks for your support! Enjoy the show!

In previous years several professional development opportunities have arisen from QCA Gallery projects such as The GAS. The support of dedicated public gallery curatorial and installation professionals has afforded access for new artists to a range of exciting prospects, including museum standard readiness, media profiling, curator and collector interest, and dealer gallery representation.

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 03

Chris

BENNIE Chris Bennie’s video work, 1080 (2009), was completed as part of his Doctoral studies at QCA. It records in reverse the trajectory of an aeroplane that was spotted by the artist on a trip back to his birthplace in New Zealand. The scene is Arthur’s Pass National Park, a wilderness landscape region of the Alps on the South Island, renowned for its rugged snowcapped terrain, hiking and skiing. As in many of Bennie’s works, this ordinary, everyday and potentially banal occurrence is recorded and re-presented in a considered manner. In this way, Bennie’s works offer us new viewpoints on the commonplace; new perspectives that are illuminating and often unexpected. The simple gesture of rendering the footage backwards, like the jarring periodic repositioning of the camera to follow the flightpath, frames our experience of this ‘normal’ occurrence even as it draws attention to the constructed nature of this documentation. As Danni Zuvela has argued, Bennie’s project aims for an aesthetic of the banal: Bennie’s self-described point-and-shoot technique, choice of everyday subjects and use of long takes means that his work has a documentary feel. He explores the places where documentary urge and video art overlap, which in this case is the elevation of the ordinary as subject. In place of documentary’s earnest anthropological drive is video art’s ambiguous impulse, multivalent responses to ‘the real,’ and the representative practices deployed in search of it. All of Bennie’s works encourage a different perception of the ordinariness of their subject through both long-established film techniques such as montage, and reference to contemporary video art vocabularies. 1 Such subtleties of editing and filmic convention feature throughout Bennie’s practice, directing viewers’ attention towards such overlooked and seemingly unremarkable subjects as a sheet on a washing line (Our Communication Recorded 2006), an amusement park ride (Big Dipper 2005), a dagwood dog set adrift on a roadside puddle (Portal 2006), or the not-so-special effects produced by lens flare.

1080 (2009) digital video; 0:02:28 mins

Informed by the phenomenological fascination with the nature of being (in time, in space) as articulated by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and John Paul Sartre, Bennie’s work presents everyday moments that have been, in the words of writer Clare Murphy, “accidentally captured and carefully edited”. 2 This aura of the accidental permeates Bennie’s videos.

Perhaps less accidental is the link back to the real event Bennie filmed, hinted at by his title for the work.

Ten-Eighty (1080) is in fact a compound poison (sodium monofluoroacetate), used as an aerial pesticide by the Department of Conservation in NZ to kill introduced mammal pests such as possums, rodents and other browsing animals. While toxic to livestock and domesticated pets, 1080 is favoured because it is argued to be biodegradable, of no harm to birds, and targeted specifically at animals who threaten native species. 1080 as an artwork, and as an event, could be construed as far from random, produced in adherence to a set of strict standard operating procedures, one from the Ministry from Health, the other from the artist as observer.

Chris Handran and Simon Wright

04 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

1 - Danni Zuvela, When there’s video, there’s Love, Machine Volume One Issue 1, 2005 pp11-13 2 - Clare Murphy, Daring to disturb the universe (2007) MSSR, unpaginated

Alex

CUFFE Alex Cuffe’s conceptual practice merges sculpture, installation, sound-art, music and performance. For a recent solo show at Metro Arts ‘Natural is the Static’, he exhibited a series of hybrid projects incorporating recycled, found materials and low-fi ‘technology’, materials sourced from “discarded and forgotten spaces across the city”. 1 A self-confessed “urban gleaner”, Cuffe’s work uses a homogenous mish-mash of commonplace materials to create new objects, from homemade solar-powered electric guitars and amplifiers, to a sound installation of beer brewing, and (exhibited in GAS), his ‘Biosphere’, a hydroponic sound sculpture rooted in the principles of permaculture and conceptual art. Emitting the esoteric sound of plants growing (created by the gentle gurgling of water), the work derives from Cuffe’s interest in “science, ecology, physics and kinetics”. In a self-generating system, it incorporates “materials with potential to be activated

and renewed” - both abandoned technology (a sound amplifier, mics and various electonics); unused detritus such as hosing, a plastic trumpet, a milk crate and glass jars; and natural elements — the plants themselves. If the installation is intentionally ephemeral in nature, it has an ongoing life of feeding into Cuffe’s general practice, with the sound having been used outside the gallery space in the performative side of his practice.

His artworks resist simple categorization, amalgamating several art forms. Sources would perhaps include Hans Haacke’s early environmental sculptures informed by system esthetics, or Nam June Paik’s performances utilizing found materials. Like Paik, Cuffe sometimes crosses into performance in a more traditional context; he has performed at venues such as the State Library of Queensland and West End’s The Forest with his created instruments. He is also part of Sky Needle, a collaborative “conceptual music ensemble” with Joel Stern and other artists in which “all the instruments are experimental sculptural objects conceived and constructed by hand, by the artists”.2 The kinetic sculptures of Jean Tinguely, with their eclectic process of construction and destruction, or Japanese artist Ujino Muneteru’s rotating sound sculptures and performances which reference discarded technology are also relevant comparisons. Cuffe’s installations also share the laid back attitude of a 1960s countercultural heritage, with “its slightly nomadic quality, as well as its general air of resistance to gloss and consumption”. 3 Implicit in his work is a critique of consumption and the mindless production and disposal of material goods. For this reason, permaculture has become a strong interest. Cuffe views it as “an alternative ‘low-tech’ gardening philosophy which provides a medium to communicate cycles of biodogradablity and sustainability”. He considers this practice to be an environmentally conscientious and appropriate response to contemporary debates in the context of environmental crises.

With works such as this, he both challenges and extends the history of sculpture. At once dynamic and static, authored and self-generated, the work is both ephemeral in nature yet capable of continual regeneration, both inside and outside the space of the gallery.

Biosphere: A Sum of Parts (2009) mixed media installation

1 - All quotes unless otherwise indicated are from a statement provided by the artist.

2 - See <http://skyneedle.wordpress.com/> 3 - Paul Wood, Conceptual Art, London: Tate Publications, 2002, p.2

Abigail Fitzgibbons

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 05

Kevin

FOO In A collection of personalized objects, Kevin Foo presents an intimate selection of painted ephemera. This work links with a strong history of interdisciplinary artistic practice in Australia, particularly through the work of sculptors Robert Klippel and Rosemary Madigan. At the same time, it explores contemporary issues concerning the relationship between individuals and their material environment.

By using paint and assemblage to resurrect abandoned objects, Kevin Foo orients his work firmly in the tradition of ‘Junk’ assemblage. Pioneered by one of Australia’s most important sculptors, Robert Klippel, it is an interdisciplinary art form that blurs the line between painting and sculpture. Using industrial cast-offs and paint, works infer an intriguing story both about their composite parts and the vision that gave these objects new life. In A collection of personalised objects, Foo presents a range of contemporary ephemera, including empty bottles, wood off-cuts and pieces of paper bin rubbish. Each object is intricately painted by the artist using a variety of colours and shapes.

Presented on a flat horizontal surface the work appears similar to a teenager’s bedroom shelf of treasures, or perhaps a small shrine. Each item’s position within the whole seems meticulously considered. Objects are layered over other objects and forms are matched or contrasted with what could be interpreted as a Morandi-like compositional awareness. Some objects also seem to have been painted in-situ with drips meandering across horizontal surfaces and dropping to objects below.

The items collected by Foo and the actions performed upon them map aspects of their owner’s trajectory through urban space and commercial geography. Objects collected from public areas such as seed pods from a reserve or park are placed alongside disposable drinking cups. Empty medicine jars and old pens indicate potential domestic activities.

06 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

In this way the work forms a type of visual anthology about the artist and his relationship with the material world surrounding him. Foo’s painterly manipulations are highly personalized actions. Each layer of paint connects these items directly with the artist via his emotional palette. As a result each piece of previously discarded or apparently insignificant refuse is turned into a valuable item of personal significance worthy of our consideration.

Although this work implies much about the artist who created it, it also reveals a considerable amount about the cultural context in which it appears. At a time when many of us are reconsidering the environmental cost of a culture characterised by abundant waste, pieces of ‘junk’ are ripe for reconsideration. Foo’s celebration of refuse invites the viewer to reconsider the value of objects they may have otherwise passed without consideration and, in turn, think about their relationship with the material world in a slightly different way.

Camille Serisier

A collection of personalised objects (2009) various found objects, acrylic, oil, wax, and shelves

Kristina

HALL Fecundity in an infertile world by Kristina Hall brings together the refuse of consumerist culture to create sculptures in the form of fake flowers and plants. Using brightly coloured synthetic off-cuts and suggestively shaped pieces of plastic, Hall presents the viewer with works that embody the conflict between the natural and human made world. Not only does this work attempt to outline the physical distance that exists between nature and the synthetic, it also indicates a conceptual distinction that has been embedded in human approaches to the environment.

reference to native plants link with the argument that globalised commercial horticultural techniques are potentially insensitive to local ecosystems, and are thus inefficient, not to say damaging.

Hall’s kitsch aesthetic also relates the works directly with consumerist industrial design practices. By introducing the idea of nature as commodity, Hall is able to step closer to contemporary versions of Futurist principles – consumerism as the vehicle for technology as salvation. However, by orienting these ideas in such infertile territory, Hall provides a very blunt argument against the idea that we might be able to simply purchase a solution for our environmental problems.

Camille Serisier

In 1909 when F.T Marinetti outlined the Futurist Manifesto, he articulated a now popular link between technology and Utopia on Earth. Drunk on the intoxicating speed and super-abundance of the industrial revolution, Marinetti and his colleagues were keen to leave the tiresome ways of the past behind. In an age less bound by religious piety, they positioned man as ‘standing alone’ with no dependence on the natural world. 1 Man was viewed as a God of technology if not creation. Today there are burgeoning online communities dedicated to exploring the frontiers of higher intelligence and the social implications of accelerating technology. 2 Far from supporting any ideas about the Futurist Utopia, this series of work by Hall undermines the tradition of Futurist principles and ideals. Not only does Hall link her work with traditional symbols of the feminine and nature, which were regarded with disgust by the Futurists, she also critiques their basic belief that humans can operate independently from the natural world with technology as their ally. As the title of this body of work suggests, the flowers Hall creates are essentially infertile contributions to a world increasingly overwhelmed by infertile content.

By directly identifying these carefully constructed fake plants with the scientific names of Australian natural flora, Hall also takes issue with industrial globalisation’s colonial roots. The emphasis on the infertility of her creations indicates a link with debates about reduced farming productivity, and concerns about denied biodiversity and food availability in the future. Along with this, the

1 - The Futurist Manifesto, F.T Marinetti, 1909 2 - Future Hi, http://www.futurehi.net/

Dinbutyl Telopea Speciosissima (Butyl Waratah) (2009) from the series ‘Fecundity in an infertile world’ mixed media, plastic materials

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 07

Caitlin

HALSALL Caitlin Halsall’s undergraduate (Honours) studio concerns have sought to traverse physical and conceptual conventions of ‘painterly process’, in order (or is that chaos?) to facilitate hybridised sculptural-installation-paintings. To a medium often thought of as on the brink of endgame, she combines an optimism founded on principles of play, inconsistency, dysfunction and eccentricity, with wide-ranging experimentation with few obvious boundaries. It’s a project about the representation of painting and the possibility that a collapse of several aesthetic, process-based and formal outcomes might be affected in a ‘single image experience’.

A sense of limitlessness prevails, from an extension beyond the rectangular plane as a vessel for the containment of twodimensional illusory space on canvas (a traditional painting format), to painting becoming an open space literally ‘out’ from the wall, inclusive of verso areas and hanging devices. This random scatter approach extends further to incorporate all over field painting, abstraction, accumulation and assemblage. She references practices from as far afield as African fetish objects, outsider art (most notably the influence of The Philadelphia Wireman), Julian Schnabel, Yayoi Kusama, and Brisbane artists like Sandra Selig and Giles Ryder. Theoretical principles from writers and artists such as Clement Greenberg, Dan Cameron, John Cage and Rosalind Krauss are also triggers. And there is the artist herself, as epicentre, where what we get to experience is actually a documentary avowal, or residue, of her performative outpourings. Frenetic energy, impact and, most importantly, momentum ‘make’ the work out of all this information about painting. These are not immersive environments in the classic sense, in so far as we cannot really breach their perimeters ourselves, but rather the re-staged spaces in which the artist has immersed herself in order to perform immersion. What we experience is its peculiar aftermath by her hand.

Not vulgarised by the Rag Trade (2009) painting installation

Halsall is something of a bower bird, amassing various historical and contemporary understandings of her chosen medium, processes hinged on chance and improvisation to help realise them, and heaps of found, recycled or personal objects and patterns to meld these elements in binding relations. These objects are at once red herrings, with faux connotations of a particularity to ‘self’, and simply formal or compositional devices, designed to resolve various tensions amid the work. There is something refreshing in the way her drive to make these works eschews concerns to make something approximating ‘beautiful’, or a commercially relevant ‘product’ type of painting, just to focus on her core research concerns as a student of art, on the cusp of graduation. The ‘object’ of her painting is ultimately difficult to capture, being a cacophony of aesthetics which combine to cluster in space, an eccentricity, an atmosphere of painting, or painterly obsession. Even though we see the benday screen source of her dots and its link to the language of Pop, or the intensity of surrealism in auto-painting, or the links to abstract expressionism and conceptual art, it’s an elusive project… if I had three words I’d opt for maximalism, writ large.

SP Wright

08 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

Qian

JIANG Qian (Jane) Jiang’s experiences in Australia have challenged her ways of viewing China’s place within the world, and have allowed her a new perspective and appreciation of her culture and identity.

In her Masters dissertation Jane articulates the effect this has had ‘ … as a young Chinese woman who cannot escape her culture or heritage (and nor would I wish to).... Living and studying in Australia for the past two years has ‘Westernised’ me to where I now have a new pool of influences from which to draw. But far from being just an alternate frame of reference, something to consult when at a loose end, it has instead permeated into my consciousness and joined with my identity.’

Jane graduated from Shan Dong Normal University China with a Bachelor of Fine Art, majoring in Oil Painting. Her move to Australia to undertake postgraduate study has been a transformative and empowering experience which has included embracing a new studio major in Jewellery and Small Objects, an area in which she had no preexisting experience. In just one and half years she has progressed from novice to being a competent and articulate practitioner. She has not shied away from the many challenges, linguistic, cultural, technical, and intellectual that this has entailed. This is testimony to her determined focus.

Inspired by the artists Ah Xian and Ai Weiwei, whose works combine ‘influences from both East and West to produce work of global significance’, Jane has investigated how she can create artworks that acknowledge her culture and heritage while offering a voice amid international contemporary jewellery dialogue. Her dissertation explores the The Effects of Globalisation on Chinese Identity in Contemporary Art and her works seek to articulate her Chinese identity to a global audience. Jane’s jewellery includes reference to natural springs and the lotus, proud features of her hometown of Jinan. Each piece features Chinese Jade, the semi precious stone for which China is famous. The subject matter and materials could well be expected to feature in traditional Chinese jewellery, but the startling size and aesthetic aligns the work with international contemporary practice.

Liz Shaw

Lotus and Spring Water (2009) silver and Chinese jade

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 09

Margaret

KILI N When first viewed, Margaret Kilin’s delicate marks flow and dance across the surface, gradually forming an echo of the landscape they reflect, but there is an activist lurking just out of frame…. the artist herself. Kilin’s subject is the humble mangrove, sourced from Queensland’s swampy wetland coastal regions. Like many contemporary artists, these works express her ongoing concern with changes occurring in environments and ecosystems, within littoral zones that make up most of the Eastern seaboard. Her strategy equates roughly to a form of landscape history painting, as it references the current national environmental debate surrounding endangered species and important ecosystems, particularly within Brisbane’s river systems.

Although these two paintings are of the same image, Kilin has created two totally different scenes. She notes the “dredging of Brisbane river systems has transformed the ecology of the river from fresh water to salt, changing also the life forms dependent on the waterways. While mangroves now grow in salt water along Brisbane’s river systems, they have adapted to improve water quality by filtering pollutants such as heavy metals.

They stabilise and improve soil, and protect river shores and coastland from erosion. Unfortunately climate change, pollution and global warming is killing the mangroves, which in turn will cause loss of ecosystems which had thrived in and around these areas, as well as endanger migration routes for birds, destroying habitats and environments.” 1 Kilin uses photographs of landscapes which she then ‘overprocesses’ and manipulates, causing pixilation of the source image. She then crops her focal point, using components of the photographs to restructure and juxtapose elements for her final imagery, then interpreted in paint. This mixing of mediums, traditions and genres is understood by the artist to connect with global artistic currents, espoused by art theorists such as Nicolas Bourriaud. His recent lecture at Tate Modern argued the present is a place where different cultural elements, visual and conceptual, are combined with a mixing of mediums and artistic traditions to become a ‘shared’ space or visual domain. At the

10 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

heart of this contentious proposition is the claim that there is no longer a purely Western/Eurocentric aesthetic, but a hybrid mix where everything and anything can be combined to produce an artistic vision. This allows Kilin to play with, and push, the mediums of photography and painting as well as the stretching of landscape tradition, such as the use of multiple horizon lines and changing directorial visuals within one picture frame, something many of us recognise as a technique of leading indigenous artists.

Kilin’s method arose out of experimentation with different mark making techniques, and is derived from a previous career in the animation industry where she worked with translucent surfaces.

Here she has settled on a way of laying paint down onto the substrate of perspex by using a ‘tomato sauce’ type bottle, a device which simultaneously evokes flow and shimmer, and a completely different aesthetic to the visual drag of a brush through pigment.

Jo Duke

Deconstruction / Reconstruction 1 & 2 (2009) acrylic on perspex; each 60 x 160cm

1 - Information supplied by artist, 2009

Nat

KOYAMA Nat Koyama’s Screen/Play uses the video screen as a permeable surface on which to reflect on issues of transience and permanence, self and non-self, illusion and depth. Although video is his chosen medium, he draws attention to its status as one means of self-investigation, allowing the screen to operate as a painted, calligraphic or photographic surface of many layers.

The artist is interested in identity and the self, and the livefeedback style of video (used to great phenomenological effect by artists such as Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci) enables him to merge his investigations with allusions to Buddhist and Taoist philosophies of change and transformation. While there are many branches and subtle nuances within these teachings, broadly they suggest the ideal of the inner self’s liberation from the wheel of rebirth and the world of time and change; as well as from the illusion of individuality and ego-consciousness. Koyama’s Screen/Play uses a circular construction to hint at these complex interactions, tracing a process of self-portrayal and self-erasure framed by the clicking shutter of a camera.

The first section of the video begins with a blank TV placed in a room. Within its reflective surface, the artist stands before a camera and photographs himself with a click of the shutter.

He turns on the screen showing the blue static of ‘white noise’.

In the next scene, the focus is on the screen of the television.

A hand takes a brush and paints over this surface to gradually reveal the artist’s still, unblinking face, against the background of a flowing river. In this section, which comprises the bulk of Screen/Play, Koyama has used the television production technique of ‘chromakey’, 1 whereby a colour (usually blue or green) is used as a tabula rasa on which an image from another source can be projected. When the artist’s face is completely visible, he reverses the procedure, beginning to paint himself from within the screen, directed by a female voice off-screen. Gradually the river obscures his features, as he merges into its depths. The occasional awkwardness of this procedure perhaps reflects the difficulties of self-obliteration or the persistence of the ego. In the final events of

1 - Chromakey mixes two image or frames together, making one transparent and revealing another behind it.

Screen/Play (2009) digital video; 0:09:42mins

this section, a hand external to the screen begins to wipe the paint from its surface, revealing the blank static of the original image.

The third section of the video focuses on the static in close-up detail, as a pair of hands cutting with scissors begins to disrupt its illusory surface. It is revealed as a piece of paper, which is cut into smaller and smaller fragments. Behind, a landscape appears showing a river, a road, buildings and human beings.

The artist walks in front of the camera once again holding a camera; he snaps a picture and the screen fades out as the video has come full-circle.

By drawing attention to his medium and combining its essential properties with metaphors of transience and change, Koyama reveals the cycle of existence and the process of self-liberation as an endless real-time loop of reality and reflection, erasure and reversal.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 11

Emma

LINDSAY In these works Emma Lindsay presents the viewer with a series of intimate bird portraits. Each small painting adduces a different species of bird, though for the most part, only a detail is visible. Each piece is accomplished, but on closer inspection something about these representations is disconcerting. Their forms are stiff. Some birds have curious paper tags attached to their legs. In actual fact, the birds are dead: each one forms part of the Taxidermy Bird Specimen Collection, which is held at the Queensland Museum.

As the title of her series suggests, Simulacra deals with simulations or representations. The term has been in use since antiquity and refers to a representation of an original thing, which in most cases is considered a lesser copy of the original. However, Jean Baudrillard gave the term renewed contemporary significance by defining simulacra not as a copy, but as a comprehensive representation that becomes a truth in its own right. 1 When considered in this context, Emma Lindsay’s work deals with simulacra in a number of interesting ways. She gives us the opportunity to view painted studies of birds which may exist in original living form in the wild. But, in doing this she takes the circuitous route of painting animals that have been detached from their original environment, gutted of life and natural movement, to

present a potentially misleading version of the original. Moreover, if these images were painted from photographs, taken in the museum itself, extra levels of representation would be layered on the process by the specifics of the camera, lighting and print quality, together with taxonomic systems designed to frame their existence in the archive.

In this sense, the subject of this work may not just be the birds, which might seem an all too obvious focus. Rather, these beautiful little images can be taken as a potent comment about our contemporary experience of the natural world. Although Lindsay refers to various levels of simulation of a natural subject, at no point within the work does a pure experience of living nature exist. The work is a study of a simulated original, lacking life and sensory dimensions. Indeed, it is a study of the simulated experiences of nature that we often experience as realities in their own right, and perhaps a comment on the contemporary tendency to disregard the value of the true original.

Camille Serisier

Simulacra (series) 2009 oil on canvas paper

12 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

1 - Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988) pp. 166-184.

Ryan

PRESLEY

particular works is informed by reversing such logic, to herald an ‘other side’ to the story of mapping. Whether employed for tall ship navigation, early pastoral selection, controlling the natives and their land, or gridding it up to service the Great Australian Dream, one fully fenced ¼ acre block at a time, his counter narrative for mapping is carved out here in print.

In these works Presley argues this crux of the colonialist novel to be indicative of ‘a society of exclusion’, one that persists in the present courtesy of a ‘confusing, devaluing and offensive’ amnesia which knows no bounds. It spreads like rabbits, propagated by unbalanced mainstream ignorance, populist politics, and generational racism. The point is that whenever supposedly ideal constructs such as ‘mainstream Australia’ are given credence by officialdom – government, education systems, media – it cuts both ways to expose immediately those who are excluded from the very system it conjures. These are the people, related to the first Australians, who are often situated by such constructs to be outside common attitudes employed to shape ‘national identity’.

Whilst some of Presley’s work invokes the power of mapping over physical terrains of land and sea, it is its impact on people, and their psyche, he explores to greatest effect.

from The Cruxes series (2009) linocut print on Magnani paper

The cutting precision of this graphic suite exposes a jingoistic crux of colonial rhetoric, found by the artist to be ever-present in ‘postcolonial’ Australia. He targets foundational narratives which are celebrated annually and with which most of us are familiar. These relate to epic tales of a glorious discovery and the ‘birth of our nation’, or as with Queensland, separation from New South Wales in 1859. These works were conceived as a personal response to Q150 celebrations, presently in full swing around the state.

Presley suggests many institutionalised narratives are underpinned by the logic of mapping, a version of Cartesian rationality where it was believed everything (land and people) could be understood (quantified, measured) and then co-ordinated (controlled). It was the colonialist ‘system’ par excellence, exported by civilised society to bring order, value and progress to lesser societies on the fringe of the known world. The thread which relates these

The Crux: Don’t Aggravate Because they don’t Tolerate, takes up the concept of ‘flag’ as a well known signifier of place and belonging.

Rather than the Union Jack or Australia’s national flag, Presley is focussed on a brand of ultra-nationalism promulgated by the appropriation of the Southern Cross by card-carrying patriots.

Typically White Australians, they speak at once in favour of ‘one nation’ whilst adopting the charged language of xenophobia.

Harbouring racist viewpoints under the guise of creating a better Australia can be mapped on a historical trajectory. There are claims in this regard for ‘The Intervention’ and ‘The Asylum Seeker’ debate, and steadily back through time… Hansonism, the annexation of indigenous people (such as Torres Strait Islanders, or Stolen Generations), The White Australia Policy, and various governmental structures such as the Department of Native Affairs and Protectorate of Aboriginals. Perhaps the greatest foundational myth framed by the logic Presley strips bare was the concept of Terra Nullius.

SP Wright

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 13

Yuki

SAKAMOTO the viewer in an environment or experience that she describes as ‘mischievous’. The word captures her intention to upset assumptions and expectations, but also to close the distance between viewer and artwork, reviving an intimate relationship between art and life: Doors are generally mundane and functional pieces of furniture, used to link or separate one space from another, to create an entrance or exit. However, doors also suggest a narrative or poetic dimension utilized in storybooks and fairy tales, acting as mysterious invitations or portals to an unknown space. With Pink Door artist Yuki Sakamoto plays on both of these implied meanings. Her Pink Door is both a video and an installation, and a key component of her proposed site-specific work for GAS, Mischievous Room 2009. As an installation, Pink Door consists of a portable door and frame on wheels, painted a bright, childlike pink. For her video work, Yuki used the door as a performance prop, taking it to a variety of public spaces and recording reactions to its presence in unexpected situations. Describing the work, the artist comments: Attaching wheels to an old toilet door, I created an autonomous doorway, which can go wherever I wish to cause mischief. It has been put in many places, such as the Queen Street Mall, in front of elevators and stairs, ATMs, and the Gallery of Modern Art. There are a lot of different reactions. Some people compliantly open the door and step through, and others indignantly push the door out of the way, creating an alternative exit. When people encounter the door, they have an opportunity to stop and interrogate their everyday activities. 1

While there are a lot of artworks related to the everyday in contemporary art, the particularity of my work is making it mischievous. My works are not serious and mysterious but funny and naughty. I don’t want to separate people from my art, so I try to make them informal, by using everyday objects.

Her installation for GAS, Mischievous Room 2009, will be a sitespecific work with the artist creating an environment comparable to her own studio; she will paint directly onto the gallery wall and incorporate previous works created throughout her graduating year. These include her portable pink door; a bed of grass which is also a bed for sleeping; a hybrid toilet-seat chair, and a pair of overly long socks. In each case, the essential function of the item is subverted, causing the viewer to pause and reflect on conventions and assumptions, those things we take for granted and the cultural rituals they involve. In each case, Sakamoto’s special talent is to create a space for curiosity, surprise and discovery.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

Recorded as a series of random and humorous encounters, Pink Door uses social mobility as its medium and subject, exploring the relationship between the individual, the spaces they inhabit and the objects within their surroundings. It invites our reflection on social and cultural conventions which we would otherwise rarely contemplate, and how these shape our behaviour on a daily basis.

Sakamoto’s practice spans sculpture, video, performance and installation and often utilizes quotidian objects which are made strange through removal from their usual context and placement in a non-functional situation. In her own words: “My works consist of everyday objects, which have something wrong”. Humorous, absurd and playful, she frequently creates works which immerse

14 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

Mischievous Room (2009) mixed media installation

1 - Artist statement November 2009. All subsequent quotations are from this source.

Haruka

SAWA Arranged on a laminated flooring surface, Haruka Sawa’s installation Conduit links together a disparate collection of objects through the means of plastic tubing from garden hoses, medical tubing and electric cables. Joined together in a continuous cycle with no clear beginning or end are items such as books, shoes, a dilapidated chair, an alarm clock, a tennis ball, a human doll, a telephone and a model house. These items are the detritus or evidence of contemporary life (at work or leisure) and are routine items with a universal code, immediately recognizable and mundane.

Sawa’s practice encompasses photography and sculptural installation. Like Conduit, her group of serial photographs Books, Sponges, Tobacco and Pegs (the titles itemize their constituent components) evoke a sense of movement and dynamism through the assemblage of domestic items. The photographs suggest a minimalist vocabulary of serial, pared down style and systematic working procedures, balanced with a commitment to the quotidian and whimsical. In Sponge, for example, a tiled bathroom wall provides a tongue-in-cheek minimalist gridded background, against which a rhythmic arrangement of green and yellow sponges

suggests a drawing by Mel Bochner or Sol LeWitt. Capturing these ‘sculptural events’ in two dimensional form, photography for Sawa becomes a tool to analyze the inherent seriality and repetitiveness of everyday life; as well as a record of the artist’s performative gesture.

Hovering between photography and sculpture, these works recall Swiss artist Roman Signer’s ‘action sculptures’ which involve setting up, carrying out and recording ‘experiments’ that bear aesthetic results, creating new forms from unconventional materials such as barrels, boots, bicycles and balloons. The title of Conduit provides a key to Sawa’s practice. Inspired by Fluxus theories of ‘action experience’ (in which experimentation and action are documented as art), she explores the notion that the familiar can be represented by an accumulation of repetitive actions. Everyday objects are thus, in Sawa’s words, symbols of “the continuous actions that make up our lives”. 1 She continues: “The focus on habitual repetitive use of these objects is to look at life and death as the consequence of control, chance and synchronicity in action”. She is aware that issues of time, transformation and change are often experienced through such objects, which also act as triggers of “memory”, of “action and . . . shared experience”. Thus in Conduit the tubing acts as a metaphor for the way inanimate objects unite and represent human experience.

Sawa’s photographs, in their recording her sculptural actions, also act as conduits, between viewers, between the artist and the viewer, and the viewer and objects. As the artist concludes: “These objects have no inherent value or meaning unless they are related to the consciousness of individual human being. Every action and object becomes a conduit to form our life”.

Abigail Fitzgibbons

Conduit (2009) mixed media installation

1 - Artist statement, November 2009. All subsequent quotations are from this source.

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 15

Kat Danger

SAWYER In Untitled 2009, Kat Danger Sawyer presents the viewer with a series of short films in which people interact with constructed sculptural forms made out of rubber tyre inner tubes. These interactions, though pointless and absurd, are also loaded with intent and focus.

Although each work is made unique by its particular use of materials and specific series of absurd actions, the formulaic nature of the component parts imply very particular parameters of exploration. Each performer appears to carry out prior instructions and at times engage with someone off-screen. In one piece performers attempt to climb a dubiously constructed inner-tube ladder. In another, a young man determinedly plays with an inner-tube as if it were a hoola hoop. The next shows a young woman painfully attempting to squeeze her body into the negative space of an inner-tube that has been partially attached to the base of a wall.

The implication is that the artist could have created this work using any number of performers, or any series of illogical instructions, as long as a sufficient number of inner tube tyres were available. This points to the deeper significance of Sawyer’s project. It is the absurdity of it all that stands out. In all elements of the work a tension is established that creates a strangely incongruous whole.

Initially, the nonsensical is embraced through the materiality of the rubber inner tubes, which are counter-intuitively stretched and pushed to the point of snapping. Similarly, various minimalist virtues, such as the white cube, industrial materials, and sculptural reduction to the ‘irreducible minimum’ are set in tension with other fundamental minimalist practices, such as the de-emphasis of personal involvement and expressive content. In addition, the aimless actions of the performers and less than crisp rubber forms suggest Dadaist or Fluxus influences that directly contrast with the broader minimalist aesthetic.

However, it is the determination of the performers to carry out their nonsensical actions that is most indicative. As different figures strive to climb an un-climbable ladder, a parallel emerges between this circumstance and those famous individuals who spent all that time ‘Waiting for Godot’ in Samuel Beckett’s play of the same title. Although in some cases the performers seem to successfully reach their goals, the cyclical nature of the films seem to refute their achievements. The absurd exercises act metaphorically and cement a paradox within the work.

By leaving the resolution and execution of the instructions up to the individual performer, the individual is granted power. But by making the actions so absurd, the artist undermines this power by dubbing it pointless.

Camille Serisier

Untitled 2009 digital video

16 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

Bindii

THOROGOOD

Using a single shot and close focus, the series records her oral or tactile encounters with a variety of substances and food-stuffs, from hair and plastic beads, to mung beans, sweets, red string and sticky tape. Shown in close detail and rendered grotesque through the actions performed, the body becomes a site of both discovery and confrontation — at times difficult or unpleasant to watch. As Thorogood explains: “I aim to explore abjection, repressed and regurgitated emotions; pushing the boundaries of what it means to be ‘socially acceptable’”.

In delving into the excesses and limits of the body, Thorogood draws on both the history of feminist art practices and on the theorisation of the abject, as articulated by theorist Julia Kristeva.

These influences tie her work to ‘abject art’, a term used to signify the body and identity art informed by sexual politics and postcolonial concerns which emerged in the 1980s and 90s in the work of artists such as Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, the Chapman Brothers, or Paul McCarthy.

Mouth Cropped (2009) single screen dvd series

Mouth Cropped presents Bindii Thorogood’s extended exploration of her own body as material. The artist’s mouth and face are bound, taped, fed, filled and spilled on. Within the narrow constraints of a predetermined format, the ordinariness of flesh is made strange. The act of cropping, referenced in the work’s title, fragments the body and disembodies the mouth, rendering it anonymous and abstract. As Thorogood puts it, “the gaze has been removed so the viewer is no longer looking at a face but at an object”. 1 She explains her exclusive focus on this part of the human body: I play with the mouth, as the most prominent orifice of the body, the most recognisable signifier of communication and identity. It is through the mouth we speak and express ourselves and receive nourishment to live. It is loaded with sexual meaning and cultural significance.

According to Kristeva and other theorists who followed her, such as Judith Butler, loathing or repugnance of food is one of the most elemental forms of abjection and is linked to a child’s distancing from its mother’s body, hence the formation of subjectivity. Food, drink and bodily excretions signify the natural entering the cultural body and are thus a potential threat to the identification and the defined boundaries of the subject. Food and its inevitable byproducts transgress the line between self and non-self, challenging the desire to be self-contained. Thus abjection and food sustain and perpetuate the social or cultural body, yet also represent a strong threat to it. Thorogood’s work plays on these associations.

While the everyday and familiar is made strange through Thorogood’s explorations, it is also important to remember that the mouth portrayed is a feminine mouth; it is a feminine body that is distorted or defaced with red string or tape, made to consume strange non-food like substances, or to masticate food until it becomes invasive and disgusting. Thorogood’s work highlights the exclusion of abjectness and otherness from the social order. Disregarding notions of attractiveness and appropriateness (hair and beads are not generally inserted into the mouth), Mouth Cropped suggests the arbitrariness of social regulation. If her work participates in portraying the feminine body as a site of pollution and threat (a criticism sometimes leveled at Kristeva), it also calls attention to the fragile state of feminine subjectivity in the dominant symbolic order. By resisting a process of aesthetic sublimation to which female subjects are often relegated in film and video, Mouth Cropped disrupts the voyeuristic gaze, showing the other side of an ideal femininity.

Abigail Fitzgibbons and Chris Handran

1 - Artist statement November 2009. All subsequent quotations are from this source.

THE GRADUATE ART SHOW | 17

James

WATTS Curb-side Magician Driving through Brisbane’s suburbs one unconsciously passes the discarded refuse waiting for curb-side collection, furniture, building materials and general debris, the worthless trash waiting to function as landfill. Yet, very consciously, James Watts is scrutinising and collecting this debris as a pirate might search for and collect treasure. For Watts there is no eBay searching, only driving and looking through Brisbane and beyond, keen to discover a nuance of worn paint on a weathered skirting-board or Aunt Minnie’s well-used wardrobe.

The searching for and collecting of outcast rubbish has been the source of imagination and invention, and forms the core of James Watt’s sculptural constructions. The creation of new structures evolves from objects with past histories through imagination, sensitivity and skill. This is where the Watts magic takes over — a considered saw-blade used here and an array of bolts used there and, a bit like the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man, something is created and revealed that has not previously existed.

texture, colour, and spatial scale and proportion. As in Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’, Watts’ works are a balance between the elegant and the everyday, the social and the environmental.

While the phenomenon of chance operates in the discovery and collection of material, it is the elements of skill, calculation and ability that collide with imagination to produce new structures, quietly stoic, yet evoking secret stories of Brisbane’s past.

One can almost hear the invisible histories vibrating in these works — murmurs of past turmoil and hope. Jean-François Lyotard said that “Art is the flash that rises from the embers of the everyday”, and the work of James Watts is just that, but it is also the treasure created by a magician’s hand and mind. So next time, when driving past another Brisbane curb-side collection, look out for James the magician, he’s the one examining and collecting the discarded treasure.

Debra Porch

In asking other artists what they think of Watts’s work, immediate responses were ‘chance’, ‘beauty’, ‘honesty’, and ‘the symmetry between sculpture and painting’.

The beauty of humble street-side refuse has been developed into monumental works that evoke the whispering of past joys, loves and other histories. His works have brought the everyday into the extraordinary.

The formal qualities of both sculpture and painting are revealed through the use of recycled timber, wallpaper and sheet metal—these become the foundation for works that transcend the meaning of the quotidian into immediate associations of memory, fragility and rejuvenation. The works, which can be experienced by sight and body proximity, blur what is trash and what is treasure.

References to sculpture and painting are evident in the fabrication and formal qualities of the structures that examine composition,

18 | THE GRADUATE ART SHOW

Untitled (2009) wood, plastic, metal