Simryn gill 'On the Shelf'

Simryn Gill On the Shelf

Cover and this page: detail, Half Moon Shine (miniature version), 2012

Simryn Gill On the Shelf

27 September - 18 October, 2014

Š Utopia Art Sydney

Utopia Art Sydney is delighted to stage Simryn Gill’s exhibition On the Shelf.

This will be Gill’s first solo exhibition with our gallery. Fittingly, it is also the first opportunity, for those who didn’t make it to the 2013 Venice Biennale, to appreciate the essence of Here art grows on trees, Gill’s exhibition for the Australian Pavillion.

On the Shelf includes the suite of 8 prints from the Eyes and Storms series that were in Venice, a series of works on paper that directly relate to the large scale piece Let Go, Let’s Go, which is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent (Belgium), along with the miniature version of Half Moon Shine, which was the basis for the large version shown in Venice and now at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria.

We thank Catherine de Zegher for her insightful essay. Her connection with the artist, as curator for the Australian Pavillion, gives her a unique perspective.

We also acknowledge and appreciate the contribution made by the Australia Council, and the many others who supported Gill’s exhibition in Venice.

CH

Eyes and Storms as a facet of Simryn Gill’s “curating rubbish” Catherine de Zegher

Since the early nineties, Simryn Gill has been what she calls “curating rubbish,” in the sense of conserving and classifying the many things picked up along the street and the beach in containers on shelves—all this, as a matter of fact, in a homely, idiosyncratic, and feminine fashion. Unexpectedly perhaps, the woman artist, shut out of “his” system’s space, appears to enact and ensure the system’s functioning, although she is shaking the old law, the existing order of things. But this act can also be interpreted as the caring gesture of the “housewife” in the kitchen and drawing room—a caring gesture in the domestic interior that extends outwards to Gill’s two home bases: her neighbourhood of Marrickville, Sydney in Australia and the beaches along Port Dickson in Malaysia.

Constantly moving between the two countries, between the near and the far, between the sight of a Burmese rice bowl on the dining room table at her family house and the prospect of an offshore platform on the horizon of the Malacca Strait—two viewpoints—between empty shell and fossil fuel, both remnants of the transient passage of a species, Gill zealously tries to recreate the links between micro- and macrocosmos that have been severed in the process of globalization. Though distances are said to be shrinking in a so-called “flat world,” alienation and desolation are growing as a consequence of movement and migration. With domesticity at the core of her practice, Gill utters the potential of the present, while describing the dismaying effects of the corporatization of a surrounding world, of what it means to be globalized, by portraying Port Dickson, her small native town, as the mirror of a future—a near future that seems out of control. This sort of coincidence is not an illusion; it is a warning, a signal. Today, the combination of deep understanding and powerlessness exemplify the current ironic condition of humankind. However, in between near and far also lies perspective. By indicating the small, the positive, and the generative in the everyday, in an attempt to rule out negative energy affecting a global world, the artist can bring about a slow sea change.

It is within this perspective that Gill’s recent series of pictures of pit mines, dams, and remote lakes and waterholes, Eyes and Storms (2012-2013), needs to be seen—fossilized and globalized. Photographed from the air, some of the round open pit mines appear to be orifices on the surface of mother earth, or as Gill suggests in the work’s title, all-eye, huge, gleaming and staring at “the perfect storm of ecological and social problems” the world faces today. Driven by overconsumption and environmentally malign technologies, the extraction of valuable fossils, gold minerals, and other geological materials from an orebody or vein in the earth has been practiced worldwide for some time. Surface mining in Australia, by stripping the surface vegetation, layers of bedrock, even by removing mountaintops in order to reach buried ore deposits at depth, has left immense scars in the landscape. These mining processes have a disastrous impact on the environment, both during the mining operations and for years after the mine is closed. Mining in a wider sense also comprises the extraction of any non-renewable resources, such as petroleum, natural gas, and, increasingly, water—non-renewable resources in a finite world, yet considered as infinite, due to a lack of human insight. While the earth gives more and more, until exhaustion, humankind respects it less and less. The results of this vast abuse of the earth’s gifts are catastrophic, whereas around the globe so much destruction continues to be allowed in the name of the perpetual economic growth myth.

Every so often, huge holes in the orebody have been identified with the orifices of the female body. Dirt and rubbish too, as the filthy reality of everyday life, have long been associated with women. Yet, the domestic can challenge and counter corporate hegemony, as was recently the case in Wandoan (Australia), when the inhabitants of this Queensland hamlet asked Xstrata to pay it at least $100 million, if the global mining giant decided to proceed with a multibillion-dollar coal mine in the area. On August 10, 2012, The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: “Wandoan, home to just 380 people, is one of a growing number

of small towns that risk being overwhelmed by Australia’s fast-paced mining boom. The hamlet is a five-hour drive from Brisbane and in the middle of farming and cattle-grazing country. Mining firms often pay communities a token amount before commencing on projects, but industry experts said the amount Wandoan was requesting was unusual. Ray Brown, the mayor of the Western Downs Regional Council, said the $100 million would go towards paying for some of the infrastructure needed to host a mine, including an airport, roads and water and sewerage networks. ‘I know it does happen on a much smaller scale…what seems to be possibly unique about this is the size of the funding,” Gavin Wendt, an analyst with MineLife in Sydney, said of the amount the Wandoan was asking for. ‘It does make a lot of sense from their perspective.’”

Indeed, survival in such environment means the pollution, leftovers and rubbish need to be handled and ultimately curated, the land and its people needing “cura” or care.

Here, seen as shelved, the photographic series of Eyes and Storms was first presented in Here art grows on trees at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) in the Australian Pavilion—a temporary building from 1988, designed by architect Philip Cox and built by Transfield—a few months before the structure was dismantled and discarded for a new pavilion. As always, Gill’s proposals bridge past and future in the present, far and near in a new perspective. Hers is the tidal zone, the insecure in-between zone. Like the mangrove tree, Gill thrives in the space between the sea and the land, between nature and industry—a space of negotiation too. As always, her work is grandiose in its ephemerality and precise in its poignancy. It considered the building’s steel structure, which was composed of two rectangular volumes alongside each other, each having a different height and floor level inside. On the outside, the roof unifying both spaces was wavy as it followed the level difference. While the upper section housed the large screen, consisting of twelve panels of collaged drawings, Let Go, Lets Go

(2012-2013), and the lower section the series of photographs, Eyes and Storms, the roof was taken off, leaving the building open to the elements—as if “the work was made for the Gods!” Gill stated.

During the roughly six months between June and November 2013, what visitors saw was the process of disintegration, the transformation of Gill’s artwork by sunlight, rain, and wind, by the birds and insects feeding on the paper featuring insects—effectively, the passing of time, the cycle of life. In the upper room, comfortable seats in a style of tropical modernism were placed for visitors to pause and look at the collection of books from which Gill had drawn her paperwork. On the lower level, a big bowl with nippled basin collected the rain. As well, Eyes and Storms were given back to nature, while the necklaces of nowadays Naught, made both of organic and synthetic materials, of plastic derived from petrochemicals and of metal from iron ore, closed the circle—around and around, thus exposing the cyclicity and complexity of the world we live in.

There, amidst the Giardini della Biennale, as in Gill’s Forest (1996-1998), the books entered the cycle of nature, becoming leaves, trees, and roots, apparently nourished by the soil that they in turn fertilize when they rot. The exhibition project, Here art grows on trees (2013), presented Gill’s works as being of vegetation and ore from the earth’s crust, as a cog in the whole system of turning wheels, as just a link in the chain, in the string of gems that the world is offering— a cyclic instead of linear worldview. Originating from pulp made of decayed plants, the works on paper slowly return to the vegetal, in an organic cycle from foliage to folio to foliage. Ultimately, Gill’s project is about entropy, the passage through time: paper’s passage, the work’s passage, the pavilion’s passage, the artist’s passage.

Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2013. Photograph: Jenni Carter.

Eyes and Storms 1, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 2, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 3, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 4, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 5, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 6, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 7, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 8, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 11, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 17, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 20, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Eyes and Storms 22, 2012/13, ilfochrome print, 125 x 125cm

Half Moon Shine (miniature version), 2012, mild steel, 30.5 x 37cm (diameter)

Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2013. Photograph: Jenni Carter.

Detail of ‘Let Go, Let’s Go’, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2013. Photograph: Jenni Carter.

Untitled 16, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 33 x 85.5cm

Untitled 17, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 33 x 85.5cm

Untitled 19, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 33 x 85.5cm

Untitled 20, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 33 x 85.5cm

Untitled 39, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 31.5 x 85.5cm

Untitled 40, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 31.5 x 85.5cm

Untitled 47, 2013, collage and ink on paper, 31.5 x 85.5cm

Simryn Gill On the Shelf

27 September - 18 October, 2014

Utopia Art Sydney 2 Danks Street Waterloo NSW 2017 Telephone: + 61 2 9699 2900 email: utopiaartsydney@ozemail.com.au www.utopiaartsydney.com.au Š Utopia Art Sydney

Utopia Art Sydney 2 Danks Street Waterloo NSW 2017 Telephone: + 61 2 9699 2900 email: utopiaartsydney@ozemail.com.au www.utopiaartsydney.com.au