Exhibitions

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'The work in this exhibition was made in residence at Australia's Storrier Onslow Studio, at the Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris. This studio award, enable me to paint and live in Paris for three months.

The architectural surfaces of Paris are laden with centuries of graffiti, posters, filth and humanity. The works draw upon these references and the sense of transience, the passing of time, the organis and the antique'

Anthony White 2010

Anthony White comes from the gestural abstractionist school of painting that has emerged from the National Art School in the past decade. After spending time travelling on the Marten bequest and the Friends of the National Art School (FONAS) Paris studio award, White has brought together a body of work which has a strength of colour, form and movement rarely seen in a painter his age. White has been a finalist in many of Australia's most respected prizes and awards, including the Brett Whiteley travelling scholarship, The Churchie emerging artist award and Art on The Rocks. White has also been a recipient of international programs in both New York and Paris.

This is Anthony White's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

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In Hugh Ford's world, the backgrounds are blocks of abstract colour, the foregrounds are bold line work but, more than anything, the people are facelss, be they schoolgirls, businessmen or carnival workers. Maybe the odd beard here, pair of goggles there.

"At first it was because faces take a bit more time," says the Sydney based artist. "I deliberately omitted those parts, and thought I'd come back to them later." But he quickly discovered that the more he left out, the more viewers added their own stories to the comositions, "which was really unexpected, but made sense. You don't know whether people in the paintings are happy or sad, disgusted or excited."

Old circus posters, magazine ads, and comic books continue to influence Hugh Ford. "I look for things that appeal to my sense of humour." With a low boredom thresehold, Hugh likes diverse subjects. "I've thought about trying to focus on a particular theme for 10 paintings or so, but find my attention span wanders after a few."

 From an interview with Alex Warren, Inside Out January/February 2010

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Works from recent COFA graduate and master printer Ben Rak.

In affluent post-war America of the 1950s, a society of conformity developed. “Men in grey flannel suits” became the norm, and advertising agencies began mass marketing to the members of a society who wanted to be “one of the Joneses”.  When the counterculture (hippie) revolution of the 60s began, so did a shift in the thinking behind the advertising industry.  This shift has continued to affect the way brands are created to this day, because marketers began to sell youth culture, rebellion, and individualism.  The capitalist system co-opted emergent counterculture in order to sell the notion of youthfulness to everybody. 
My work explores the relationships that have evolved between clothing, brands, and identity since the co-option of subcultures began.  If clothing is understood as a form of identity in which styles and brands associate us with different groups, we must ask what effect the ability to change our identity by buying clothing off the rack has.
In 1987, Barbara Kruger created a photo print in which she stated “I shop therefore I am”, equating her entire existence with her consumer habits; her statement offers evidence that the idea of acquiring an identity through consumption has been around for decades. My works have been looking at this same issue of identity construction through acts of acquisition and have evolved to examine more specifically the effect of clothing and brand consumption on our idea of identity.  Nowhere is this purchasable identity more evident than in a shopping centre.  “In the shopping mall multiplex, the shopper-spectator tries on different identities in a space that defers external realities” (Grunenberg and Hollein 2002, 64).

 

The prints on paper in this exhibition are editioned. While some works may indicate SOLD, there are multiple copies of each work. Please contact the gallery to enquire as to a prints availability. 

 

 

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James Drinkwater is a 25 year old painter originally from Newcastle New South Wales, currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. 

Drinkwater's canvas' showcase his unique sense of colour and hint at numerous Australian influences. The colour palette of the 19th century Australian painter Roland Wakelin and the abstracted way of seeing, reminiscent of the iconic works of Grace Crowley, Kevin Connor and Frank Hodgkinson.

This is Drinkwater's first exhibition with the gallery. His future seems full of promise and potential, with his most recent Melbourne exhibition selling strongly.

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"You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you - the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of other roses, because it is she, that I have watered." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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The inaugural Head On Photo Festival will take place in Sydney from  April 29 to June 5.

This photo festival is an exciting initiative involving galleries, restaurantsDean Golja and cafes around Sydney exhibiting local and international photography. Public galleries, including the Museum of Sydney and the Manly Art Gallery will be taking part, as well as a large number of commercial galleries.

Keeping the same philosophy as Head On Portrait Prize, the festival aims to attract a wide range of excellent photography from Australia and overseas that speaks for itself, regardless of whether the photographer is well known or not.

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“Do You Dream?”

This is a personal question.


Sleep and dreaming remain a mystery to science, a mystery in which we all engage each night. It is known that everyone dreams: does one of your dreams come to mind? Or perhaps, as you wake, you have a lingering sensation that a dream was there a moment ago?

Our power of memory for dreams varies greatly and it’s usually difficult to remember dreams. I know this because I’ve been practicing writing down my dreams. I kick started this by having a pen and paper by my bed. Then I had to will myself awake if I had dreamed. It meant I woke up several times each night and scrawled, with my eyes still closed, what I could remember. Then I drifted back to sleep.

The effort allowed me to examine the effects on memory of the waking state, as I had a raw record of the dream to use in contrast.

On waking we all experience a host of impressions that flood our minds and obscure the subtle dream experience we just had.  It’s as if we live in a Morse code of awake-asleep-awake-asleep, light, dark, light, dark. It is memory that is the binding agent of our lives, for it alone can cross over the blackouts of our sleeping state.

The memory of a dream has a strange quality because what occurs in the dream is so alien to normal everyday events, and so at odds with the logic of our waking life.

I began examining my dream life during two semesters spent at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, where I studied the development of human consciousness and philosophy. An underlying theme of these painting comes from the concept of a continuum of consciousness: that is, maintaining consciousness by using memory as the bridge that leads us back, awake, into the midnight of sleep.

You can approach these works as my search for and discovery of a way to resolve images that hold a potent attraction for my subconscious. The images transfix me.

While painting them I realized I wanted to hide part of the painting. I found myself painting important motifs just so I could remove them later. I engaged in a process of revealing something to myself, only to hide it again.

This is like a dream memory: an image full of meaning revealed itself---but then faded, leaving only its implication.

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Naming her 2010 exhibition 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' after a 1920's bluegrass song by Harry McClintock, Karlee Rawkin's has always been drawn to the fantastic, the utopian and the legendary. The McClintock song is "about a fantasy place with trees full of birds, streams of alcohol and chickens that lay soft boiled eggs, I have always had an interest in invented places and concepts like Arcadia and Eden, and I often refer to them in my work".
Since her previous sell out exhibition with Iain Dawson Gallery, Rawkins has developed an interest in traditional native American art and spiritual totems "creating a series of animal characters that are metaphors for emotions and experiences". The title of the exhibition is a pun and post modern nod to Rawkins own life, where she exists completely off the grid, on top of a mountain in northern NSW, surrounded by lush forests and abundant native fauna.
"I wanted this show to be a bit 'growly' with some of the more nasty or scary animals, the wolves and coyotes!"
 
From correspondence between the artist and the gallery director, June 2010 

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Against Nature: Craig Johnson on the animal works of Troy Emery

There is a tradition that comes out of Pop Art where the work of art does not present us with a problem or difficulty that wants to be solved. The work is satisfied in remaining on the surface; what you see, is what you get. Oldenberg and Koons are known for works, texts and objects that were conceived in such a way that anybody could do them, and this is to some extent the legend within which Troy Emery’s new animal works fit: they do not require incredible, unreachable abilities to make. When painters go to the shop and buy up on canvases, Emery does something different. He dials up the taxidermist and orders high-density foam moulds. Emery’s works do not presuppose an art audience, but are open to be freely experienced at the level of the natural history museum, the jeweller shop window, or even the zoo.

Continents of Curiosity is Emery’s first solo exhibition in Sydney.1 The artist has long held an obsession with animals that continues unabated. In the past, his animal objects have occasionally been sewn or stitched from scratch.2 Continents, however, exhibits works exclusively assembled, almost like hobby kit projects, from disparate, readymade parts. The works can be enjoyed simply for their sensationalism, yet they contain other contexts that hint at opening up a critical-historical reflection on art-object-animal complexes within culture. For centuries, animals have been stuck in a language of taxidermy and a discourse of realism, even while the other arts were being radically transformed by modernists. Continents presents taxidermy animals with ‘wronged’ surfaces, designed to reanimate animals within the realm of visual pleasure, wonder and surprise.3

Most of Emery’s works contain real animal components, which the artist buys online from North American and Tasmanian commercial taxidermists. In an Emery sculpture, the agenda is not in the service of representational science. Instead, the works might be usefully grasped within Steve Baker’s concept of ‘botched taxidermy,’ where ‘improvised knowledges, inexpert knowledges’4 of the animal are deployed, as opposed to strictly zoological or historical knowledges. Botching is not a necessarily negative technique, rather it is a creative procedure that is experimental and playful. The surfaces of animals are irreversibly altered, and become sites of potential infinite resignification, or screens for projecting colour, texture, pattern, idea and emotion onto animal foams that retain their integrity as whole objects.

In Continents, the forms of familiar creatures – a rosella, wallabies, foxes, a rat – are not radically modified into new and different shapes, but their surfaces are tangibly altered, or repurposed, using combinations of felt, crystals, glitter, flocking, fur, glass, and dislocated parts, such as foxtails. The works are about surfaces understood as theatres of mediation, association and adornment: surface is abstract, sometimes contradictory, and always free to explore untried territories. The innovation introduced in You Must Not Ask Too Much (a black glitter fox) and Hey, Why Not Ask For More (a green diamonte fox) lies in the idea of stretching surfaces over animal forms other than skin or fur. By contrast, in We Can Be Better Friends and Bird on a Wire, decoration is the order of the day wherein an unreconstructed rat is encrusted in Swarovski crystal beads and a rosella has been, as the artist quite enigmatically states, ‘dressed for dinner.’

Emery’s objects point towards the existence of an undoable condition, a right to error: the taxidermist’s animals have crossed over into the discourse of art and there is no return. Unlike Damien Hirst’s use of animals preserved in formaldehyde in vitrines – such as the canonised shark corpse in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) – Emery’s animals really cannot be folded back into the natural history museum. Emery’s fox wallaby head hybrid in bright green glitter would seem to be symptomatic of the path crossed, having become altogether camp, like a mean showground prize.

For Emery, the natural history museum, that great European centre of science and enlightenment, is an influence and a departure. A representational apparatus, the museum is a site of accident, humour, and surprise, as well as a place of impossible juxtaposition. Nowhere outside of its walls (and those of many zoos) does one find animals that are usually separated by continents posed together, such as polar bears and grisly bears, or animals separated by evolution, such as megafauna and contemporary kangaroos, all occupying the same museum environment – which is imaginative.

The natural history museum emerged in its current form in the nineteenth century as an apparatus of display and effect for communicating the natural order of things, which might be linked to the imperialist determination to classify and possess as a means to power. Emery can be said to undo two bans: the ban on stretching other surfaces in taxidermy and the ban on decoration in modern art itself. Emery’s combination of taxidermy and art brings us to a big, theoretical picture: the works begin to revise how we conceive of the relationship between the representational spaces of natural history and the modern fine art museum.

Sydney, September 2008

Craig Johnson holds a PhD in critical and cultural studies from Macquarie University. He has taught literary and cultural theory at undergraduate and masters levels and published in Architectural Theory Review, Colloquy, and Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts (Gent 2009).

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In recent times I have become interested in observing the people and things around me. I study people and the way events unfold. I sketch intently and unthinkingly – almost unconsciously. I am an avid spectator to my surrounds and that offers up an infinite degree of wonderment.

Humans, for me, make for irresistible subjects – as they appear in my work. They're mystifying and amusing. They are self-contradictory and xenophobic oddities. They embody a multitude of mysteries that inspire an incredible array of possibilities for my art making.
In 2009, I was awarded the Storrier Onslow Paris Studio Residency. This was to have a profound impact on my practice, technically & conceptually. I arrived in Paris and hit the streets, finding myself in the neighbourhood of Pigalle – the infamous red light district. Montmartre, the centre of the Pigalle area, has always known as a place of follies, fun and diversions. The name Pigalle was coined after the slang term for this area that arose during WWII, "Pig Alley". Soldiers frequented this area for R&R and amusement of an alternative kind...
Place de Clichy is where I met and befriended Madalina, her portrait forming part of an forthcoming exhibition with Iain Dawson Gallery, Sydney, in October this year. Madalina was a Romanian immigrant who had been working as a prostitute for five years – ever since the violent murder of her drug dealing husband. Raising three children and battling a drug and alcohol addiction, she turned to prostitution to provide for her children. As we chatted, she told me she had been raped twice and fears the prospect of being murdered like some of her fellow street workers. We I spent weeks on end sketching Madalina. Some days she would sing to me, offering me a morning Croissant and telling me stories of her childhood. Within the prostitute I found a sensitive and caring mother simply wanting to provide for her family in the most unfortunate way. The last time I saw Madalina she told me “God has given me this opportunity to provide and I thank him everyday”.
Two hours after leaving Madalina I was mugged at knife point. Pigalle is not the safest place at 1 o’clock in the morning. It does have some of the most interesting characters though. Oddly, too, the neighbourhood made me feel at home and comfortable within chaos - it brought out in me a strange mix of compassion & hate.
These experiences gave me new insights, from which I’ve developed new techniques that allow my drawn characters to burst from their skin. By using watercolour, gouache & ink pen on paper, my works combine the form of a comic book’s expression with the influences of stained glass windows; the way in which they fill a room with light to mesmerize the viewer. This current exploration of technique, style and influences led me to recent portrait of my mother, which was selected & received the highly commended award at this year’s Doug Moran Portrait Prize.
Within my current body of work, I have found the most unforgiving, strange and quirky aspects of the human soul. I have looked at and represented the small minority of our communities that breathe life into the lungs of a diverse global culture. I have embraced some lonely tortured souls and found more than any institution could ever offer me.

 

Justin Cooper

From Artist Profile feature 2010

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Nick Morris graduated from Monash University (Caulfield Australia) in 1986 with a Diploma in Graphic Design.
 
He has worked in the Street / Surf / Art subculture since creating clothing label “UMGAWA” in 1990. Morris then worked as art director for Quiksilver before launching his “Anyhow” design company in Torquay. He went on to produce art for Paul Frank, Stussy, Mambo, Mossimo, etc, and was a guest speaker at both the Semi Permanent and AGideas Art and Design conferences.
 
In 2007, Morris turned his back on commercial work to embrace a career as a full time artist. He has been prolific and devoted ever since. He works with acrylics, collage and screenprints, using images from post-war popular culture, Australiana and his own photographs.
 
He also collaborates with fellow artist Dave Bowers, under the name Doug Bartlett.
Morris has sold out shows around the globe with his solo and collaborative works.

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New gallery artist, Aaron Kinnane, presents an exclusive pop up photographic exhibition for one week only. "In The Night Garden" is Kinnane's visual reaction to the birth of his first child, a continued exploration of his equine painting series, and a bold, fresh, mysterious exhibition perfect for hot summer nights.......

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Hope Chest explores the intimate nature of our relationship with objects. Throughout our lives we surround ourselves with objects of both utility and beauty, with some starting as one and becoming the other. These objects are the ones under scrutiny in Hope Chest, the everyday items transcended to prized possessions. Due to events in our lives and association to those close to us, simple items around the house can become precious. It is this change in status that is the source of Hope Chest, the moment when an object transforms from disposable to irreplaceable.  The objects are wrapped in cloth to protect and keep them from harm; kept separate from the hardships of daily life within the home.