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

La Java Bleue | Dadang Christanto

La Java Bleue | Dadang Christanto

18 November - 19 December, 2015

In this new series of paintings Dadang Christanto continues his collaboration with the master craftsman of East Java using the traditional paintings of the Wuku, or Javanese zodiac.

The Wuku can be mapped using a complex table of references where animals and elements from nature combine for each day of the year. With the intrusion of Western culture on traditional life, Christanto is concerned that the application of skills to the zodiac tradition are being lost. It is his hope, that through exhibiting to a wider audience, a greater understanding and appreciation of this ancient tradition will be recognized and its importance upheld for future generations.

 

Numismatics | Joachim Froese

 

Numismatics | Joachim Froese

15 April - 16 May 2015

It was Alexander of Macedon, whose portrait was the first in history to grace a coin around 300 BC and it manifested his claim to be the ruler of the known world. Money was the visible mirror of Alexander’s power and his image, stamped on a coin, also stamped his rule on the territory in which it circulated. But circulation of money not only affirms a delimitated space. In a globalised world the distribution of currencies reflects power beyond the national borders in which they are legal tender and stakes out visible claims of colonial and hegemonial influence.

But one decade into the 21st Century, money is becoming an increasingly invisible – faceless – force that seems to spiral out of control. With the world tumbling from one financial crisis into the next, the same national governments, that once emphasized their power on the currencies they released, seem to loose the ability to control the unfettered force of a globalized financial market. Financial trading is increasingly becoming a virtual realm, beyond a corporeal terrain, in which computer programs trade unimaginable amounts of assets at unimaginable speed. Simultaneously a cashless society is emerging. We pay with our credit or debit cards, our wages are electronically transferred into our bank accounts and we pay most of our bills online. Cash, and coins in particular, is left as small change.

My images refocus on this small change by taking portraits found on coins from different eras and nationalities out of their numismatic context. Lifted to a larger scale and with all references to their monetary value digitally removed, the portraits in my images now look like ancient sculptural reliefs. Now isolated, they first and foremost focus on the individuals whose busts were used as statements, which were meant to passed on by countless hands to proclaim different national identities. In a broader sense however they also reflect back on the base they were taken from: money and with it the visible, and invisible process of exchange that it facilitates and which continues to shape the fate of human society.

Joachim Froese, January 2015

 

Elsewhere | Kate McKay

 

Elsewhere | Kate McKay

25 February - 21 March, 2015

Elsewhere carries on from Kate’s most recent exhibition at The Hold Artspace. In an accompany essay Eileen Abood notes, ‘McKay’s compositions are spiritual and surreal inner worlds where we can escape civilisation via the myth of an untouched and vast wilderness. These are spaces of fluid emotional and psychological connections that invite the viewer to imagine themselves as the sole figure sometimes featured amid a wide and desolate landscape. In this region the viewer is free of their surroundings and in an immense space of possibility.’  (The View from Here, Eileen Abood, 2014).

 

Darkness Visible | Carl Warner

 

Darkness Visible | Carl Warner

25 February - 21 March, 2015

There is an apocryphal story of the painter J.M.W. Turner having himself lashed to a mast during a storm and deciding that if he survived the experience he was bound to record it.  I say apocryphal for it appears that Turner was as good a showman as he was a painter.  It is a story that sticks, an unctuous and oily legacy despite Turner’s light hand with paint, to any attempting to work with landscape, even photographers.  There is a demand that nature must be experienced so that it can be translated, it must be seen as wild, irrepressible and above all sublime.

 

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

 

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