1 CACHE Blackfriars off Broadway
Mar 30, 2016
1 CACH
EBlackfriars off Broadway
CACH
E 11 November - 22 December 2009
Brian Blanchflower
Robert Boynes
John Citizen
Domenico de Clario
Mikala Dwyer
Kim Yong Hun
Janet Laurence
Ruark Lewis
Anne MacDonald
Eva Marosy-Weide
Arone Meeks
Tracey Moffatt
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri
We would like to thank
Bronwyn Bancroft, Merilyn Fairskye and Gary Sangster
for curating the show
Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Co-operative
John Buckley Gallery Melbourne
Greenaway Gallery Adelaide
Leeuwin Estate
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney
Joyce Parszos
Anthony Wallis
and all the exhibiting artists who made Cache possible.
3
Viscopy is Australasia’s rights management organisation for the visual arts. Viscopy provides
copyright licensing services in Australia and New Zealand for a wide and varied customer base
on behalf of our members. We represent over 7,000 Australian and New Zealand artists and their
beneficiaries.
Our membership includes many famous names as well as up and coming artists. Indigenous artists
account for almost half of our membership. Viscopy represents approximately 43% of all artists in
Australia and New Zealand. We also represent some 40,000 international artists and beneficiaries
of artists’ estates in the Australasian territory through reciprocal agreements with 45 visual arts
rights management agencies around the world.
Blackfriars off Broadway is Viscopy’s new exhibition space for artists located at our premises in
Chippendale, Sydney. An annual exhibition program is planned which aims to showcase the quality,
beauty and diversity of the visual art created by our members, providing opportunities to stimulate
new licensing ideas amongst our customers. We are delighted to launch this new space with our
inaugural exhibition, Cache which features artists from every state and territory in Australia.
We should like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Gary Sangster who wrote the
essay for this catalogue and helped curate Cache. Currently a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts,
University of NSW, Gary Sangster has international experience as an art educator, curator, writer,
and museums director in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the USA. He has organised more than
100 museums exhibitions, including several groundbreaking, collaborative projects.
For more information about Blackfriars off Broadway, please telephone 02 9310 2018.
Blackfriars off Broadway
We would like to thank
Bronwyn Bancroft, Merilyn Fairskye and Gary Sangster
for curating the show
Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Co-operative
John Buckley Gallery Melbourne
Greenaway Gallery Adelaide
Leeuwin Estate
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney
Joyce Parszos
Anthony Wallis
and all the exhibiting artists who made Cache possible.
4
One question we could ask is what does a jet-black canvas painting tell us? What do we see?
How can we respond to it? What do we know by looking at it? Or what can we say of a circular
black and white photograph of a tightly arranged bouquet of artificial flowers? Or what do we
see in the ghosts and shadows of deep night paintings of French city architecture, or looking
through an image of a giant lens trained on an indeterminate landscape.
In a large painting, a figure turned away from us almost obliterated by intrusive, splotched
paint is one half of a diptych. In the other half of the picture, the representation is entirely
indistinguishable. Then there is a costumed child, posing, stock-still for the camera, situated
in a backyard with nondescript backdrop of a prosaic shed. Is it a snapshot of a child cast
member of Planet of the Apes, or a strange and sad party document, or a weird projection of
animistic substitution?
Combined in the ensemble exhibition Cache that launches Viscopy’s new gallery space,
Blackfriars off Broadway, we see a varied collation of different kinds of fictive, imaginative,
and discursive visual art. It is a group exhibition with diffident reservations about the status
of the group. There is, self-consciously, little alignment and indistinct correlations. But there
are particular statements, precise alternations, and there is a unified sense of dexterous
presence, delicate lines, seductive surfaces, visual constructions and inferences, and distinct
and indistinct material pleasures.
While there is no underlying premise or specific thematic embedded in Cache that does not
mean it is not a highly constructed and precise experience. The curatorial strategy behind
the exhibition provides an opportunity to animate the discussions surrounding the nature of
implied narrative and emergent meaning in any range of collocated visual art. The inherent
quality and success of this exhibition depends exactly on the logic and history of the artists on
display. The production of meaning and narrative intent is an emergent process in which form,
gesture, and material artifact operate semiotically to conjure memories, suggest associations,
or stimulate visual pleasure.
Art and nothing but Art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life...
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Cache
5
The world of art and the world of images exist in a complex and fertile moment that is
held in tension by unprecedented changes in access to and exchange of knowledge. In
our technology-driven society which disputes empathy, values, and meaning in favor of
reductive systems, functionalism, and instrumentality, social exchange is surprisingly and
compulsively interpretative, reiterating forms of discussion and twisting words and meanings
to classify, codify, and quantify human spirit and emotive interactions.
Art, at least since the advent of Modernism, has been split along various axes that create
seemingly irreconcilable differences. At least three kinds of division can be identified, the
first being the division between the perceptual and the conceptual. A later, more subtle
variety, exemplified by the ground-breaking work of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, divides
along an axis of the spiritual and the material. A more recent bifurcation exists between
notions of the expressive or the gestural, and the artificial or the technologized. In this
context art is no longer just a representation or visualization of the world, it is a witness
and evidentiary-based statement of fact, connected causally to a maker, a creator, an artist.
The instrumental value of art is circuitously connected, through provenance of transitional
ownership, to the originating gesture of the hand, body, and neurology of the artist. This is
the palpable fact that makes art and the control and operation of images so significant.
Cache is an exhibition that presents a range of both emerging and established artists whose
work is characterized by a sophisticated and nuanced accomplishment in traditional and
new media. The exhibition is both a cache of form and style, and an evocative display of
the artists’ commitment to their professional role within the arts economy through their
membership of Viscopy, Australia’s not-for-profit rights management organisation committed
to preserving and guaranteeing their rights as creative practitioners and producers of
materially and economically significant objects, images, and artifacts.
6
John Citizen, Interior (Stacking Chairs) 2005, acrylic on linen, 101 x 101 cm.
Photography John O’Brien. Courtesy Greenaway Gallery Adelaide.
© John Citizen, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Gordon Bennett has been recognized as one of the foremost Australian artists of his
generation. He has constrained the force of identity politics and identity aesthetics in his
work. By deploying strategies of deflection, concealment, and containment in constructing
his images he has resisted the descriptor of Aboriginal artist, while never denying his
Indigenous identity. In a stylized and bland “IKEA” interior, Bennett has presented
the ordered inhabitable space of his assumed and precisely defined persona; the
unremarkable, undistinguished morality and socially repressed sensibility of John Citizen.
7
Robert Boynes, Next Exit, 2009, acrylic on canvas - diptych, 120 x 164 cm.
Courtesy Brenda May Gallery Sydney. Photography Robert Boynes.
© Robert Boynes, licensed by Viscopy 2009
John Citizen, Interior (Stacking Chairs) 2005, acrylic on linen, 101 x 101 cm.
Photography John O’Brien. Courtesy Greenaway Gallery Adelaide.
© John Citizen, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Robert Boynes is a painter and print-maker, whose work engages with the narrativity of
cinematic forms in a deliberate and precisely expressive manner. His work acknowledges
the inevitability of the narrative inherent in all painting, where a picture is a single
selection from an infinite range of possible configurations of elements in time and space.
But Boynes double-downs on the contemporary experience of media-driven perceptions
of time, space, and story-lines, allowing figures in motion to be arrested in a vibrant and
present urban landscape, and creating a taut, tense vision that invites reflection within the
cryptic, crowded physicality of contemporary life.
8
Brian Blanchflower, UNNAM(E)ABLE (black on red), July/August 2005, oils, acrylic, pumice powder, silica powder, on cotton/
linen canvas, 61.25 x 41 x 3.5 cm. Photography Brian Blanchflower.
© Brian Blanchflower, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Brian Blanchflower is a painter who explores color and form in a reductive system of
painting that creates meaning by implication and visual effect. A black painting is never
entirely black, can never be entirely dark, as no defined quality of blackness can ever be
achieved. And what can be said through a black painting as hardly constrained; the notion
of darkness, death, nocturne, heaviness, depth, density, invisibility, danger, morbidity
can all retain efficacy in front of an abstract black canvas painting. In conversation,
Blanchflower has suggested “that black is the most substantial colour, yet it is the colour
of space itself.”
9
Domenico de Clario, Left: o (le sacre coeur and rue saint rustique), Right: i (place du tertre), 2008/09, oil and acrylic
on primed linen, 50 x 30 cm. Photography Daniel Dorall. Courtesy John Buckley Gallery Melbourne
© Domenico de Clario, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Domenico de Clario’s work is an inviting meditation on memory and evocation of
melancholy through paintings of place. Beginning with the intimate architectural and
cityscape paintings of Montmartre by Maurice Utrillo, and connecting those conceptually
to his own birthplace of Trieste, de Clario arrives at system of producing a “shadow-trace”
which is a negative imprint of a positive image. It is an attempt to turn down the light of
a visible painterly representation of space, to discard readily available information, and
to create, through deep, dark shadows, a world of more tangible substance, an ethereal
world of structural essence permeated with psychological and visceral longing.
10
Mikala Dwyer, 31, 2009, couch, wood, wine, books, paint 260 × 170 × 70cm.
Photography: Ivan Buljan. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
© Mikala Dwyer, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Mikala Dwyer is a conceptual sculptor and installation artist. In her recent works she
has adopted an approach of eclectic compilation, in which forms, objects, and symbols
are collated and arranged, rearranged and reconfigured. Her work presents a lexicon
of articles and references that compose the rituals and habits of daily experience. As
much as the grammar of these systems can be opaque, yet at the same time playfully
or meditatively sensuous, she creates variable kinds of mystical, cosmological survival
guides.
11
Kim Yong Hun, Tiburonia granrojo (Still), 2009, GIF animation (continuous loop).
Photography Kim Yong Hun.
© Kim Yong Hun, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Kim Yong Hun is a younger artist whose work engages with new modes of communication
and altered forms of expression available through accessing and manipulating distributive
possibilities in developing technology. In his work Mobius, a series of infinitely repeated
loops of animated GIF’s, the artist selects one apple from three to eat, ad infinitum. It is
simplistic gesture, only enhanced by the looping repetition; performed for the camera to
erase any sense of boundary between beginning and end, start to finish, of a gesture or
experience. In this way he suggests links between binary opposites of such states as order
and disorder, beauty and ugliness, or good and evil, which make the flow between, and
transformation of, rigid states of being a potentially more fluid and productive encounter.
12
Janet Laurence, THE LIE IN THE LENS ed 1 of 3, duraclear acrylic dibond mirror, 700 x 1000mm
Photography Janet Laurence.
© Janet Laurence, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Janet Laurence has developed work around imagery of the landscape that both suggests
and frames notions of the fragility of the environment. In this work, she has used
laboratory glass vessels to blur and smudge our vision of the Styx Forest in Tasmania. The
subject matter, materials, and the technique combine to raise the questions of visibility,
legibility and accountability. Laurence views the glass as a kind of scientific forensic lens,
producing evidence and clarifying visual data. But in this case the effect is reversed, and
the science, while accurate, is deeply flawed, producing an indistinct, inarticulate view of
nature.
13
Ruark Lewis, AN INDEX OF KINDNESS, 2009, from AN INDEX FOR THE HOMELESS, aerosol on canvas / stencil,
100 x 200 cm. Photography Ruark Lewis.
© Ruark Lewis licensed by Viscopy 2009
Ruark Lewis has entered an arena of socially conscious, linguistically constructed work
that compresses several different ideas and reference points into single system, and
in so doing triggers a wide variety of systematic inferences and visual possibilities and
projects. So is an excerpt from a series of explorations in painting and graphics that
expose all the possible words embedded in the letters for the term Homelessness. The
letters, the words, the fragmented defining term, become modular and transportable, as
the artist explores a system for redefining and reanimating attitudes and descriptions of
homelessness. Lewis’ work operates at the edge of paradox in pursuing non-didactic
poetic forms without effacing the painful realties of lived experience and contemporary
dislocation.
14
Anne MacDonald, Ornament 8.2, 2008, Fine art ink-jet print , Image 83cm, framed 93cm diameter.
Photography Anne MacDonald.
© Anne MacDonald, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Anne MacDonald frequently uses deep, rich colors and imagery of folded, draped fabrics,
or delicate fragments of lace or fragile flower petals to evoke darker thoughts of desire,
gentle memories of compassion, and most certainly the imaginary stories of lost love
and elusive passion. MacDonald’s work has the capacity to both arrest the viewer,
slowing them to a standstill, as well as being able to excite the deeper recesses of their
imagination. Her work inevitably speaks to questions of identity, about who we are and
what triggers and constitutes our compelling relationships to others.
15
Eva Marosy-Weide, Still from SETS OF CIRCUMSTANCE-FERRYMAN © 2008, single channel video, stereo
sound; 3 mins 10 secs, looped. Photography Eva Marosy-Weide.
© Eva Marosy-Weide, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Eva Marosy-Weide is a photographer and video artist, with training in psychology and art.
A poetic narrative that reveals the undertow in our connection to place, identity and space
underpins her visual work. Her video Sets Of Circumstance-Ferryman explores the act
of beginning a journey. In slow-to-stalled motion, an unseen internal rhythm enacted by
the water dragging backward and forward hinders visible progress, holding the audience
in a kind of mesmerizing stasis. The oar pushes into the current and there is a sense
of urgency, but the ferryman maintains a gentle pace. The result of the process is not
entirely clarified and there is a hint of danger in this entropic enterprise.
16
Arone Meeks, This Healing Place, Screenprint (4 plate), Edition 45, 57 x 76 cm.
Photography Kerry Colrain.
© Arone Meeks, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Arone Meeks’ work in the exhibition, The Healing Place, combines Aboriginal motifs and
narrative forms with echoes of modernist form, especially post-war surrealism. The logic
of connecting Indigenous interpretations of spirituality with modernist notions of physic
interpretations of dream-space provides an evocative channel to connect traditional
imagery with contemporary experience.
17
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Bushfire Dreaming, 1986, Tapestry, Atelier Pinton Aubusson France 2007,
Private Collection, 170 x 253 cm © Clifford Possum Estate. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency & Viscopy
2009, Photography by Richard Glover.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is one of Australia’s most acclaimed Indigenous artists.
His graphic style exemplifies the Papunya Tula dot painting that has gained remarkable
credibility for its capacity to negotiate a position within western aesthetic while maintaining
a compelling representation of Indigenous identity. Tjapaltjarri’s work is grounded in the
spiritual and cultural systems of belief that revolve around the notions of The Dreaming
which constitutes Aboriginal law, history, and lore (dreaming stories.) The large tapestry
work included in the exhibition, Bushfire Dreaming, narrates a natural, recurring, and
regenerative environmental event in Australian and Aboriginal history, and as an artifact,
is an interesting example of extending his imagery into an exquisite aesthetic/functional
product.
18
Tracey Moffatt, Planet of the Apes, 1973, Backyard Series, Off set print on Natural Snow Gum paper using light fast ink 44
× 35.5cm, Edition of 60. From the Boomalli Collection. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney, Photography Richard Glover
© Tracey Moffatt, licensed by Viscopy 2009
Tracey Moffatt is an internationally recognized artist working with video and photography,
whose work has proved adept at negotiating the politics of race and class in subtle and
evocative ways. Her work is emotional without being emotive, and she has imbued much
of her best work with poignancy and sadness, without conflating the underlying savagery of
social and cultural dislocation. This lifeless snapshot image of a child in a creepy Planet
of the Apes costume, taken from her painfully wistful Backyard series of down market
images, contains a redolent sense of sadness; of the inevitability of succumbing to the
fictions of Hollywood-dreaming in an improbable, inhospitable environment.
19
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, New Country, 2002, acrylic on canvas 121 x 151cm.
Courtesy Boomalli Collection. Photography Richard Glover.
© Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, licensed by AAA and Viscopy 2009
Michael Nelson Tjakamarra’s astonishing visual skills and sense of form and color in
constructing traditional Aboriginal narrative forms have ensured he is viewed as one of
the finest traditional Indigenous artists. His work consistently explored visual fields and
color planes that have readily extended and transcended the structured formal elements
of traditional Aboriginal motifs and strategies. In this way he has opened up the language
of Aboriginal painting for a far broader range of expert and casual audiences, curious to
discover the elaborate spiritual and tribal messages embedded in the prosaic beauty of
Aboriginal cultural forms.
© Gary Sangster 2009
CACHEViscopy
1 Blackfriars Street, Chippendale NSW 2008
ABN 98 069 759 922
Phone : 02 9310 2018
Fax 02 9310 3864
Email: [email protected]