Currents II
Issue 26:3 | September 2006
Editor: Stephanie Britton
Currents II is the second in our biennial series of issues on mid-career artists: Robert Owen, Kevin Todd, Heather Ellyard, eX de Medici, Yvonne Boag, Bronia Iwanczac, Nicholas Folland, Sera Hughes, Renate Nisi.
In this issue
Currents II
People involved in the arts and education might have difficulty recognising the Australia that the Treasurer has been talking up recently: the one with the record 4% low unemployment. But the Treasurers spin fails to mention that to be counted as employed you only have to work one hour per week, which bears out the reality of a life in the arts.
ex de Medici: Symbols of Mortality
ex de Medicis self-named approach to her practice Dogs Breakfastism signals an idiosyncratic working method that has seen her embrace photocopy, sound, performance, photography and drawing across a three-decade career. Kelly Gellatly looks at the multifaceted creative occupations of de Medici as both a visual and tattoo artist and the inherent connection she makes in and between these two practices. This text looks at two of de Medicis most prominent series - Gals n Guns and Spectre - through which she explores pressing issues such as global capitalism, corporatisation, materialism and the ongoing war on nature.
Yvonne Boag: Mapping Place, Memory and Conversations
Yvonne Boag is a traveller, a wanderer and keen surveyor of her surroundings. Her concerns of language and place traverse a myriad of media such as paintings, prints and drawings in a career spanning three decades. As Boag commented in 1989 With every new work I start, it seems I am always at a beginning. Each work is an attempt to hold on to time. To make marks of that time, which will trace a pattern through my life& Through this text Donna Brett looks at Boags journeys to places such as Korea, Paris and the Lockhart River and her use of iconography and dense layering as a means of mapping her interaction with places, journeys and people. Some artistic influences here discussed include the works of Roger Hilton, William Scott, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Avis Newman. The Lockhart River, Urban Landscape and Conversations series are referred to in considerable detail.
Heather Ellyard: Inventories and Commentaries
Heather Ellyards valued objects are static, symbolic, juxtaposed rather than flowing. Ellyard asserts that she wants to speak the lyrics and sorrows of our time. As she has said, I am interested in the glimpses, held, remembered, aligned inclusively&I am interested in awareness and how to acknowledge it within a visual framework. It may be that Ellyards vision of the periodical table is a bridge: between life made up of many little things and the one big thing toward which we all yearn. She leans more to wisdom art than to the mimetic or the sublime. Ellyards art is incorrigibly plural, and sustainedly committed to the broadest kind of human vision. Textual references include the works of D.W. Winnicott, Jacob Rosenberg, Arthur Koestler, Basquiat, Brett Whiteley and Primo Levi amongst others.
Robert Owen: A Different Kind of Modern
Robert Owens longstanding interest in exploring dimensions of light and space beyond the merely visual reaches back into an important line of constructivist art of the early twentieth century. Experiments with form and material have characterised Owens practice throughout his career, as has his openness to heterogeneous influences. Some of the major influences on Owens practice include metaphysical philosophy, Buddhist spirituality, optics, geometry in physics, minimalist sculpture and the work of Marcel Duchamp. This article refers to the works of Naum Gabo, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, Lynden Dadswell, Walter Gropius, Chairman Clift, George Johnston, Leonard Cohen, Jack Hirshman, Jean-François Lyotard, Charles Biederman, David Bohm and Stephen Hyde.
Becalmed: The Art of Going Nowhere in the Work of Nicholas Folland
Becalmed: the art of going nowhere in the work of Nicholas Folland
Sara Hughes: The Big Stick Up
The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references. Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.
Renate Nisi: Sculpture of the Senses
Renate Nisi is obsessed by being packaged in a body, that condition common to humans, other animals, plants and even microbes. Growing up in Germany, where 'art had epic qualities', she flirted with the Sublime and the Romantic but converted to Expressionism 'with the figure as central motif.' A further shift has occurred since then, towards minimalism and three-dimensionality, 'away from the sovereignty of forms onto the relational qualities of environments.'
Indigenous Art of the Kimberley > Warmun Arts: The Unfolding Stories
This January, in the startlingly beautiful country of the Warmun Community, rained in by a particularly intense wet season, art matriarch and grandmother of eighteen, Mabel Juli, sat on the veranda of the Ngalangpum School looking through some of the old paintings which comprise the Warmun Community Collection.
Indigenous Art of the Kimberley > New Energy: Mananambarra
On the white walls of the gallery the large paintings of Wandjina by senior Kimberley artist Omborrin beam forth filling the room with the radiance of his beloved Kimberley homelands.
Biennale of Sydney 2006
Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Pier 2/3 and 14 other venues in and around Sydney 8 June 27 August 2006
Tracey Clement: Border Zones
Groundfloor Gallery, Balmain SafARI, Pelt, Chippendale Sculpture, installation, jewellery http://www.groundfloorgallery.com/ 14 June - 1 July 2006
Deluxe: decorous crossover between art and design
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania Hobart 6 - 26 May 2006
Reflections in a Golden Eye
James Lynch. Sean Meilak. Viv Miller. Jonathan Nichols. Lisa Radford. Michelle Ussher Curated by Jan Duffy and Kate Barber Linden - St Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts 8 July - 13 August 2006
et al: the second of the ordinary practices
The second of the ordinary practices et al Institute of Modern Art Brisbane 10 June - 22 July
Twenty: Sherman Galleries 1986-2006
Twenty: Sherman Galleries 1986-2006 Laura Murray Cree (ed) Craftsman House ISBN 0 9757684 1 7 RRP $95