Everything’s broken | Michael Riddle
Everything’s Broken | Michael Riddle
15 October - 16 November, 2014
“Seems like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground…
Broken bodies broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath feel like you’re chokin’
Everything is broken.”
Like this lamentation by Bob Dylan, everything in the work of Michael Riddle is broken. Black panels bear deep cracks in their surface. Lattice forms that we imagine once stood proud and strong, are crumpled, some under the weight of rocks, others by circumstances unknown. The titles of the works carry suggestive words such as catastrophic, collapse, control, and failure. The materials the artist uses are pulled from the industrial world, among them pewter, steel, acrylic resin, fiberglass, and concrete. Commonplace things, yet here alchemised to create bitumen-like surfaces and stoic metal structures. These materials are made to stand the test of time—they speak of willful permanence—yet each artwork is frozen in some state of undoing. - Meagan Williams – Acting Senior Curator/Curator (Public Programs) QUT Art Museum.
Grandiflora II | Daniel Mafe
Grandiflora II | Judith Wright
3 September - 4 October, 2014
“I work with and against a broad range of cultural references such as contemporary abstract painting, gestural and colour field, Chinese ink painting, and the decorative excesses of the rococo, oriental carpets and chintz. My paintings are cyphers to this inclusivity where a gestural exploration of the surface and paint is combined with an understanding of the painterly ‘field’ as a field sensitive to the allusive, that is the poetic, and the discursive, the conceptual. I work this dynamic conception of the field with figurative and abstract elements that shape and twist themselves into expressions of lyrical promise. This “lyric” grows out of a marriage between the materiality of paint and pre-existing floral images, where they together coalesce within of the very activity of painting itself.” - Daniel Mafe
Platform 2014 at Metro Arts 14 – 30 August
Miles Hall : Détrempe et Tourage 6 – 30 August
Détrempe et Tourage
Used in patisserie to describe the process of layering and the building up of surfaces, ‘Détrempe et Tourage’ is a technical term I have borrowed to highlight the physical processes involved in the act of painting.
The painter and the patissier share a common pursuit – both are concerned in some way or another with the amalgamation of independent stratums that combine to generate an overall experience for our senses. For the painter, oil, medium and pigment are blended to the required chromatic and material consistency and then applied to a support with a spatula, brush or tool. Layers are developed and combine in often surprising, mysterious ways.
I find this process of layering to be most compelling – these works are testaments to my desire to render the act of looking into a visually sensual, tactile experience.
Miles Hall
Robyn Stacey – Guest Relations Brisbane
Through Robyn Stacey’s photography we imagine other people’s private worlds. Stacey brings our gaze to contemporary life and the transitory meetings of private and public worlds within the modern hotel room. By turning the hotel room into a camera obscura, the interiors of Brisbane high-rise city hotel chains and Sunshine Coast holiday apartments are transformed into darkrooms for dramatically projected landscape vistas which literally wallpaper the room.
Camera obscura is a term from the Latin for “dark room,” the name given to the phenomenon whereby an image of the surrounding world is projected onto a screen or wall in a darkened room. Cited in the writings of Aristotle, and Da Vinci, used by Vermeer and Caravaggio to create their paintings, the camera obscura is in many ways the technological prototype for the modern camera.
Because light travels in a straight line, the camera obscura projects an upside down reversed image of the external world onto the walls and roof of the hotel room creating a surreal or hyper real space within a fairly prosaic and generic hotel room. Colonnades of buildings, cityscapes of roads and parks, well known landmarks such as Anzac Square, the Albert Street Methodist church and Customs House as well as everyday life are visually inserted into the closed and autonomous insularity of the room.
Underlying the hermetic nature of the hotel room is an awareness of its transient quality, whether it is experienced as a mode of transit between source and destination, or as the constructed world of inward-directed experience it is a world with a time limit, surrendered to the temporary and ephemeral.
The fleeting nature of the camera obscura corresponds to the brief tenure of the guest experience. Businessmen, young couples, and solo travelers are actors in these dreamlike scenarios; the upside-down, reversed and distorted visual effects of the camera obscura, produce surreal and psychological spaces which seem to materialize their inhabitants’ distant thoughts. Like stills from the sets of movies, the images offer us fragments of untold narratives. Intimate and enigmatic moments glimpse the plethora of stories we can only imagine might play out within a hotel rooms’ four walls. Through the theatrical and distorted view of the camera obscura is revealed a roving, fragmented and homogenised portrait of contemporary life. But by imbuing the transitory with the timeless, Stacey suggests that behind these closed, generic doors, we may all be looking outwards, seeking moments of beauty, clarity and meaningful connection.
The Brisbane hotels that generously participated in Guest Relations were the Sofitel Brisbane Central, Brisbane Marriott, Pullman King George Square, and the Mercure Brisbane.
Carl Warner: I will support you for ever and ever
I will support you for ever and ever by Carl Warner continues his ongoing engagement with the visual resonance of 20th Century Modernism into the 21st Century. This exhibition is offered as an online exhibition. Works can be viewed online and purchase enquires made via info@janamntonart.com or phone +61 7 3831 3060. Prints are also available to view at the gallery.