Stories from the city, stories from the sea, queer urban tales
14 January – 26 February 2012 Andrew Browne Lucas Grogan Kate Just Martha McDonald TV Moore Patrick Pound Heather B Swann
Stories from the city, stories from the sea, queer urban tales Curator Jessica Bridgfoot When researching for a ‘Queer exhibition’ it was Queer film that drew me to the idea of the flaneur – a term coined by French poet Charles Baudelaire meaning that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. Films such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), Urbania (2000) and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) explore the idea of the city as Queer playground. The Queer or (‘Bi-curious’) protagonist stumbles from one strange apparition to the next, much like Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole, each scenario seemingly darker and more absurd than the previous. In Urbania, the central character awakens after a nightmare and wanders the streets, the film quickly becomes a series of vignettes peppered with hallucinations, abstracted fragments of vision and dark symbolism. Like the narrative structure of film, the artists’ work in this exhibition present a series of curious tales fragmented through the physical gallery spaces, where one may encounter scenes of sex, death, fear and mourning. On first sight, Kate Just’s long table of resin sculptures titled Unearthed, presents as a series of otherwordly tools and weapons, laid out from their respective canvas pockets as if in situ in a Neolithic workshop. The objects lay un-sheathed as if ready to be selected for action, as one might lay out tools in a surgery, or, more sinister ‘lair’. On closer inspection, Just’s tools have a humanistic organlike quality. Some of the works are undeniably phallic, some feminine with an unsettling viscerality in their softness – like amorphic appendages solidified and perhaps preserved for a darker purpose to reflect, cut, prod and probe the figure. Much like Heather B Swann’s sculptural works Boys and Girls and Night’s Tongue the phallus and indeed the body becomes
an interchangeable site – it is not clear where cavities and orifices begin and end, where animal becomes human and male female. Night’s Tongue has the legs and lower torso of a feminine human however from the waist up the figure morphs into cluster of tongues, arcing in unison and resting delicately against the gallery wall. At first the figure seems harmless enough -almost shrewd, until closer inspection disarms with the revelation of a rather large unapologetically erect phallus previously (and perhaps bashfully?) hidden from view. With their shifting limbs and sensual curvature, Swann’s sculptures and drawings propose an anthropomorphic fluidity and a blackness which conjures up the dark, the subconscious, the netherworld. Her figures draw themselves away and huddle together, keeping their secrets close and waiting for the cover of darkness to scuttle away on their business. As in the cloak of darkness all does seem sinister – the real becomes unreal and seemingly innocent objects and shadows take on an air of menace. Andrew Browne’s work Sixteen Figments presents a series of nocturnal photographs shrouded in unsettling ambiguity and innuendo. Many of Browne’s images were shot in and around the urban fringes of Newport, where industry creeps in to residential areas and the remnants of the brutality of industrialisation mar the landscape. These are the void areas of our city, sites that have minimal aesthetic or domestic functionality. The sites of dereliction, waste product, one would not visit these areas without darker intentions and Browne’s still, shadowy, filmic images bears witness to sites and actions unseen. The images are seemingly random, however they are carefully composed fictions or figments. Browne plays on our willingness to seek out the fraught, the sinister, to construct
a narrative from seemingly inanimate objects. With an eerie film noir stillness, capturing evidence of odd, cryptic or nefarious actions or behaviours, Browne creates a series of uncanny fictions, where the everyday becomes the strange. Patrick Pound’s photographic installation operates similarly as images, recontextualised, take on a completely new narrative. Images of people who look like they’re dead but (probably) aren’t displays a collection of found photographs collected by the artist over many years. Some are quiet, personal moments, others surreal, and ludicrous in their subject matter. A woman on a tennis court, face down racquet in hand while her opponent watches on as if waiting for the next serve. Whether these people are really dead or sleeping, one can’t help but question the intentions of the original authors of the photographs. Further still are the ‘questionable’ motivations of the artist as archivist of stranger’s memorabilia. Presented like a wall of trophies housed with delicate paper photo corners, lovingly displayed as one would present in a family photo album. People who look like they’re dead but (probably) aren’t is one of many of Pound’s themed archives (others include photographers’ shadows, misfirings, double exposures, houses, people outside their houses and so on) and reveals something of the obsessive disposition of the artist as collector, on a nostalgic mission to collect, synthesise and understand the world. TV Moore’s projected video work Old Love in Song, in Death appears as a self portrait of the artist as he imagines facing his mortality. The film features Moore dressed in sailors garb, his face painted like a ghoul. As smoke appears into view his face recedes into the blackness and becomes skull-like – were it not for his
seemingly intact clothes one would believe he had been recently exhumed. Moore wails and croons in falsetto and abstracted ecclesiastic Pie Jesu from the Latin Mass punctuated with periods of unsettling silence and a somewhat aggressive, snarling rendition of an innocent Ameda Riddle children’s ballad about farmyard animals. The work is chillingly beautiful as a possible portrait of the artist mourning his own sorrowful death, both songs evoking a nostalgia for the artists own past – as a choirboy and a child. Martha McDonald’s performance and installation Deep Sea Chanties uses song to communicate rich historical and autobiographical allegories. Drawing on the history of maritime culture and life at sea, McDonald’s work references both the historic site of Newport and surrounds, and the artists own seafaring family history. Sea shanties, also known as ‘shanties’ originated as call and response working songs in the mid 19th Century and were later performed by sailors for entertainment and comfort during long voyages at sea. Having migrated from America and soon to embark on the journey back home, these songs and stories of longing and isolation resonated with McDonald. Developed as a site specific work aboard the heritage HMAS Blackbird, and accompanied by collaborator and musician Craig Woodward, McDonald performs songs from a catalogue of vintage chanties and tells tales of the high seas peppered with personal anecdotes, transporting small audiences both literally and metaphorically from the city through the industrial river passage to Newport. Rather than assume a fictional persona McDonald ‘plays’ herself, often addressing the audience and the surrounding landscape directly during
the performance, all at once she is host, performer and historian of the high seas. McDonald’s installation in the gallery distils remnants from the ‘world’ of the performance. With carefully laid mariner’s rope, sailor’s knots, and a vintage record player, the latter plays McDonalds soulful rendition of The Grey Funnel Line – a homage to her late father-in-law who served in the merchant marines during the 1940s and 1950s and taught himself opera by singing along to Enrico Caruso records on a wind-up Victrola aboard his ship. The stillness of the installation is a stark contrast to the energy of the performance, as if the objects within have settled after a long journey. McDonald’s vocals, beautiful and melancholic, drift through the room, the presence of her disconnected voice highlighting her absence and impermanence imbuing the surrounding space with a sense of nostalgia and loss. In a series of drawings and paintings, Lucas Grogan creates fictive and autobiographical narratives spliced with provocative one-liners gleaned from the vernacular of the everyday, high and low brow culture and Australian colloquialisms. Appropriating the aesthetic devices of Indigenous and Polynesian art and crafts Grogan’s work features obsessive patterning coupled with tribe-like figures and plant motifs. As Grogan himself is not indigenous, his use of these techniques challenges notions of ownership and authorship and what is deemed politically correct in the treatment of indigenous art. In an installation comprising of a large wall mural and collection of ‘shields’ and limited to a palette of predominately blue and white (traditional decorative colours of colonial imperialism), Grogan presents a series of witty and absurd allegorical vignettes. Contemporary characters are
depicted as neo tribal figures, mostly naked and posed in erotic stances reminiscent of classical Greco-Roman homo-erotic art. The wall mural cannily titled Recent Events imagines the artist riding what could be interpreted as a spirit guide, through a milieu of provocative ‘vox pops’ of social commentary and global events. As the first in an autobiographical trilogy, The Blue Bride, depicts the artist’s pregnant mother, resplendently decorated, the bride is central to a series of scenes and symbols depicting Grogan’s early life and relationship with his mother. Included is the text ‘we have two cemeteries and no hospital’ – an ironic quote form a sign which graced the entrance to Grogan’s home town. As we reach the end of our metaphorical journey through a strange city I take a moment to decamp to the beginning – to the ‘premise’. Some of the artists in this exhibition are Queer, some are not, however the commonality is that the works themselves are queer – in the more literal interpretation, in that they are curious narratives on sexuality, death, crime, ritual, and making the everyday the strange. Returning to Kubrick and our wandering protagonist, the city becomes a series of rooms each containing its own history or tales. One can only respond to the works in this exhibition as the flaneur – taken on face value – in a new city, everything is queer.
Many thanks to the artists, Andrew Browne, Lucas Grogan, Kate Just, TV Moore, Patrick Pound & Heather B Swann and a special thanks to Martha McDonald for creating the performance Deep Sea Chanties.
Andrew Browne, SIXTEEN FIGMENTS 2012, digital photograph on Canson Rag Photographique. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Installation image, Andrew Browne, SIXTEEN FIGMENTS 2012, sixteen digital photographs. Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
andrew browne Lives and works, Melbourne. Browne has held 26 solo exhibitions since 1981 at public and commercial galleries Australia wide, including ‘Painting Light’, at the Bendigo Art Gallery (1999), ‘From the Periphery’, commissioned by McLelland Gallery and Sculpture Park (2010) and a forthcoming exhibition at the Gippsland Art Gallery (2012). Browne’s work has been shown in public galleries, most recently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in ‘Wilderness – Balnaves Contemporary Painting’ 2010. His work is held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Bendigo Art Gallery, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Monash Gallery of Art, Gippsland Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the British Museum, London as well as corporate collections here and overseas.
Lucas Grogan, The Blue Bride, 2011, ink, watercolour and acrylic on matt board. Courtesy the artist.
Installation image, Lucas Grogan, Recent Events 2012, wall mural. Courtesy the artist.
lucas grogan Lives and works, Melbourne. Since graduating with a BFA from the University of Newcastle, Grogan has held solo exhibitions at Watt Space, Newcastle (2008), Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2010) Iain Dawson Gallery, Sydney (2011) and Until Never, Melbourne (2011) and in Brisbane and Hong Kong. Public commissions include the recent MoVida mural, Hosier Lane (2011). His work is represented in a number of public and private collections including, Deutsche Bank, Artbank and Newcastle Region Art Gallery.
Kate Just, Unearthed 2011, modelling clay, wire, tape, cardboard, cotton, MDF, pine rope, Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne
Installation image, Kate Just, Unearthed 2011, Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne
kate just Lives and works, Melbourne. Just is an American-born Australian artist. She holds qualifications from Boston University, Victorian College of the Arts, RMIT University and is currently a PhD (Fine Arts) candidate at Monash University. She has exhibited her work across Australia at a range of public and commercial galleries including Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, and Daine Singer. In 2006 Just was the winner of the Siemens Fine Art Prize. She was an artist in residence at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2007, and at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces from 2008–2009. In 2011 she undertook a residency at Krems AIR, in Krems Austria and from January – March 2012 will be undertaking an Australia Council studio residency in Barcelona.
martha mcdonald Currently lives and works, Melbourne. McDonald’s work has been shown in Berlin at Brotfabrik; in Melbourne at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Craft Victoria, Death Be Kind and Monash University; in Sydney at Elizabeth Bay House; in Tamworth at the Tamworth Regional Gallery and touring Australia in the Tamworth Textile Triennial; in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. She has been selected for residencies at Monash University, The MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH), Evergreen Museum and Library (Baltimore, MD), Ursinus College (Collegeville, PA) and The Rosenbach Museum & Library (Philadelphia, PA). She has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Independence Foundation. She recently completed a Masters of Fine Art by Research at Monash University.
Performance image: Martha McDonald & Craig Woodward (concertina), Deep Sea Chanties 2012. A performance work on board the HMAS Blackbird, Melbourne. Installation image: Martha McDonald, Deep Sea Chanties 2012, Mariners rope, sail twine, cork board, mixed media, record player, 7-inch vinyl record. Courtesy, the artist.
tv moore Lives and works, Sydney. TV Moore holds a Master of Fine Arts from Calarts, Los Angeles and has been exhibiting internationally since 2003. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Tell Me Tell Me’ Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2011), ‘New Psychedelia’, University of Queensland Art Museum (2011). He has also exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2010), the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), The Busan Biennale, Korea (2008), and the Turin Triennal (2005). Moore received the 2009 Anne Landa Award at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was the recipient of the prestigious Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship as well as the Don Lucas Art Fellowship USA.
TV Moore, Old Love in Song, in Death 2004, DV/DVD duration 8:30 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Installation image, TV Moore, Old Love in Song: in Death 2004. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
patrick pound Pound has held over 60 solo exhibitions and been in curated shows in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Italy and Malaysia. Pound has held three major photographic installations; the inaugural Auckland triennial, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Other notable exhibitions include ‘Present Tense, An Imagined Grammar of Portraiture in the Digital Age’, National Portrait Gallery of Australia (2010), ‘Photographer Unknown’, MUMA (2009), and ‘Order and Disorder: Archives and Photography’, National Gallery of Victoria (2008). Pound’s work is held in the collections of the NGV, the National Gallery of Australia, Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa, the Christchurch City Art Gallery, the Dunedin Art Gallery and corporate and private collections. Patrick Pound, from People who look dead but (probably) aren’t 2009 – ongoing, found photographs. Courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Installation image, Patrick Pound, People who look dead but (probably) aren’t 2009 – ongoing, found photographs. Courtesy the artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne
heather b. swann Lives and works, Melbourne. Swann has held several solo exhibitions in Australia since 1993. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Accademia Brittannica, Rome (2011), Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart (2009), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2007), as well as Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Woollahra, Sydney (2007 & 2006), and the National Works on Paper prize, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (2004). Swann’s awards include the Goddard Sapin-Jaloustre Scholarship, France (2005) and the Rosamund McCulloch Scholarship, University of Tasmania, to Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris (1998). Swann’s work is held in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Artbank, Dubbo Regional Gallery, La Trobe University, and the RACV. In 2003 Swann completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania.
Heather B Swann, Night’s Tongue, 2010, metal, plaster, resin, ink, boot polish. Courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne. Installation image, Heather B Swann, wall left to right, Bone Dance 2011, Tosser, Drawing, Drawing all 2010, floor left to right, Boy and Girls, Night’s Tongue, both 2010. Courtesy the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne.
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Project supported by
Commissioning sponsor
Martha McDonald, Deep Sea Chanties, 7inch limited edition vinyl and sound recording.
Event partners
Organisation sponsors