Jan Manton
... out of time | Carl Warner
... out of time | Carl Warner
Jan Manton
Desire Path | Karla Marchesi
Desire Path | Karla Marchesi
Jan Manton
False Continuity | Jacinta Giles
False Continuity | Jacinta Giles
Jan Manton
Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright
Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright

2019

Marking Memory | Denise Green

 

Marking Memory | Denise Green

3 - 24 August, 2019

Since 2013 I have incorporated photography in my decades’ long art practice. Initially attracted to the medium for its memorial capacity, I combined photography with abstract drawings.

This work took an important turn when I discovered an album of my father’s Second World War service. Organized with a curatorial eye and indexed, this album documented his experience as a medical corps driver in the North African campaign, experiences he never disclosed. When he returned to Australia after the war he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, coloring the atmosphere of our family life and my childhood.

Discovering these photos explained my father to me. In creating photo collages from these images, I processed some of the experiences that he never did. Subsequently combining photography and painting, where the photographic image is silkscreened and abstracted, my work continues to deal with war, memory and trauma.

— Denise Green.

 

Various Objects | Aaron Butt

 

Various Objects | Aaron Butt

3 - 27 July, 2019

Various Objects presents three loose strands of my studio practice; figurative paintings made in response to my research trip to Amsterdam in January this year; works made immediately prior to this trip and to as far as 2014 and non-objective objects from both before and after the trip. While differing greatly in appearance, many of the works engage with notions of transit, and present travel as a methodology in and of itself. The figurative works navigate images that I encountered in books or took or while in Amsterdam, increasingly drawn to the verticality of historic buildings and places of worship.

Works from before the trip proceed these interests in verticality and transit, with subjects such as walking, bungee jumping, high wire and distant memorials. Many of the abstract paintings attempt to embody the idea of transportation through scale, or appropriate the aesthetics of freight, such as cardboard and tape. Bridging all strands is an ongoing interest in and investigation of photography as an ideal bridge between distance places and times.

Presenting these disparate objects together in the gallery without differentiation is an attempt to invite subtle connections and new understandings, while presenting my practice highly consciously as an ongoing cycle of investigation and revisitation.

— Aaron Butt, 2019.

 

Altered | Jacinta Giles

Altered | Jacinta Giles

3 - 27 July 2019

Altered explores the idea that moments of recognition do not entail a direct correspondence between a subject and an object, but can occur aesthetically in moments of strange familiarity; in which neither consciousness nor the object discovers its place. These strange murmurings are an uncanny, origin-less memory that appears displaced, fragmented and incomplete. Reveries able to trigger the effect of melancholy and nostalgia.

By using photography - a medium traditionally used to fix events in time - as well as photomontage in unconventional ways, the viewer becomes witness to the disorientating fragility of remembrances and the slippery shift that exists between fiction and reality.

 

Capture, Torture, Kill, Throw | Dadang Christanto

 

Capture, Torture, Kill, Throw | Dadang Christanto

6 - 27 April 2019

This series Ciduk, Siska, Bunuh, Buang, translated into English as “capture, torture, kill, throw”, honours the countless victims of political violence and crimes against humanity. This sincerity and rawness of emotion portrayed in his works stem from his personal narrative, which he has subtly woven into every aspect of his art. References to the year 1965 appear again and again. Christanto’s own father was dragged from their home by soldiers, never to be seen or heard from again.

Throughout his search to discover the truth of what happened to his father, Christanto heard of a news photographer who had been able to access photographs of those tortured between 1965-66 in Tegel.

Chronicle | Aaron Perkins

 

Chronicle | Aaron Perkins

6 - 27 April, 2019

For emerging artist, Aaron Perkins, the genre of history painting is of profound interest to the contemporary era. While prestigious institutions throughout the world hold grand paintings historicising Renaissance battles, Revolutionary wars and Imperial metaphors, Perkins’ is driven to understand a way in which one can capture the historical present. With an omnipresent awareness of our global connectedness, the present moment can feel as endlessly fragmented as it does hopelessly fast. No longer is there any illusion of a grand historical narrative, and as such, Perkins’ work aims to consider the way history painting can capture a multitude of voices.

To develop contemporary history painting beyond the traditional framework, Perkins references the literary genre of ‘autofiction,’ in which the author uses a protagonist, who is written in the first person and in some way, represents the character of the author themselves. Comprised of both autobiographical and fictitious narratives woven together, autofiction seeks to critique the inability of singular accounts to constitute a true historical narrative. Through these inconsistent autofictitous narratives, there is often a sense of plotlessness– an idea which Perkins explores in these works.

The works in Chronicle combines two distinct elements– online news articles containing photojournalistic images, and cryptic crosswords. Both of these forms published in either print or online news sites daily, work as reportage of contemporary events and culture. By loosely drawing photojournalistic images, Perkins simplification of line removes any ability to robustly gauge the image depicted, without knowledge of the original image. Thus, the viewer must engage their own subjective consciousness to consider the narrative at play. Overlaid with these images are the solutions to cryptic crosswords Perkins solves directly on the canvas, taken from the same day as the images. As the words are scrawled hastily and often crossed out, the viewer is drawn between reading and viewing the artwork. The use of the cryptic crossword serves as a somewhat distilled form of contemporary news and culture, which Perkins considers as an abstraction of broader editorial statements.

By combining these two elements, Perkins work conveys the incompleteness of any historical narrative that the artist attempts to set or the viewer attempts to reconstruct. However, despite these limitations, the work paradoxically becomes part of the historical record of a given day, capturing the fragmented and incompleteness in the 21st Century.