FOCUS ::: Interact @ Sydney Contemporary (beam contemporary)

Clare Rae, Untitled #2, 2013, archival inkjet print, 50 x 60 cm, Editions 5 + 2 AP (image courtesy the artist)

The aesthetic value prescribed to the body in movement and how we make meaning through movement are investigated in Clare Rae’s works. Clare’s series Interact (on show as part of Sydney Contemporary), incite a contemplative look into the ways we utilise space in terms of our own physicality. Her photographs particularly deal with modes of human movement that are indicative to what can be classified as dance. This subtle suggestion is what brings the viewer to thinking about how we engage with our capacity for movement, and how environment plays a role.

Caught in mid-motion, the figures in Clare’s photographs take on unconventional forms, but this sense only comes across in relation to environment. The figures digress from movements commonly associated with the environment in Clare’s photographs, and although there is an ambiguity, the space in Clare’s series is recognised most strikingly as not a stage or any other obvious site for performance. This distinguishes an intimate look at our relationship with the environment; ourselves meeting the external, and how we make meaning of space via modes of movement.

Clare’s photographs communicate a melodic or rhythmic sensitivity, absent in the literal but which assists in understanding these works as performance. The figures transcend from regular, prescribed functioning of the body to a state of performance.  It’s slight how this occurs in Clare’s photographs, and this might be in part due to the nature of photography. These works show the beauty of working within a restricted colour palate and offer an inquisitive look at how we categorise and organise ourselves through particular modes of movement.

Clare’s series slides into the realm of performance and this process of organising movement allows for an intriguing look at the constructed meanings we place on how we use our body.

Clare Rae
Interact, 2013
Archival pigment prints on Ilford Gold Fibre Silk
50 x 60 cm approx. Edition of 5
(Exhibited at Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, 19-22 September 2013)

FOCUS ::: Last Song in Silence @ Darren Knight Gallery


Last Song in Silence, 2013, Gouache and pencil on paper, (image courtesy the artist)

The title of Kushana Bush's exhibition showing at Darren Knight Gallery, Last Song in Silence, reflects the ways that physical space emanates a form of silence within her series of motifs. Her gouache and pencil works have a touching quality where blank space encircles and surrounds the routine, familiar detail of our interactions with other people and objects. The absence of structure (removing walls, floors, roofs) frees the detail of the everyday and renders it singular, unhinged and poetic. The space in the works surely functions to eliminate any 'noisy' context relating to place.

One work that strays from this rule, is Handsome Paddlers, 2013 where water replaces still air, and figures (and fish) are submerged in a swirling blue. Considering the relationship between blank space in a visual world, and silence within musical composition, Handsome Paddlers in interesting in how it introduces new texture, and new sound. By contrast to Kushana's other motif's in this exhibition, the work is able to express something about the sensory interaction between ourselves and water. This is further explored in Murmuring, 2013 where water is contained and controlled in a wooden bath-like structure. Women bathe in an almost Ancient Grecian setting. Ceramic vessels and a watering-can assist the notion of containing water. Returning to the interchangeable qualities of visual art and music,  Murmuring conjures the sounds of voices underwater, and aligns this with the contained expressions of communication between people. The women in the motif appear as one unit but within are contained whispers and murmurs.

Each of Kushana's compositions appear like floating islands, where people and things are captured in moments of action or exchange. This idea is used beyond art history as a way of thinking about romantic relationships as a removed, private entity. Last Song in Silence, 2013 shares the title of the exhibition. It further pursues the 'motif' in Kushana's breadth of work, placing two figures at its centre. Silence surrounds the literal motif, which surrounds the motif of human intimacy. This work reaches a kind of pinnacle where music and visual representation are aligned and focused to express an unabashed yearning for sustained, private love.

Last Song in Silence
Kushana Bush
Darren Knight Gallery
20 July - 17 August 2013
http://www.darrenknightgallery.com/
http://kushanabush.com/

PROFILE ::: Alex Falkiner

Creatures, 2012, rope, threads, beads, wire, fabric scraps, ribbon, silk, confetti, sequins, polyfil stuffing, (image courtesy Alex Falkiner)

Alex Falkiner (aka Alfalky) has created a true bubble of visual delight and is someone who really blends the fields of art, craft, design and publishing. Alex predominantly works with textiles, also exploring with found materials, paper and text. She makes baskets, jewellery, sculpture, tea towels and zines!

Her colour palate is particularly exciting; many of her small sculptural works play with primary colours that appear childlike and playful yet they present in unusual forms and incorporate various found materials like thread, rope, sequins and domestic linen. The contrast of scattered and sporadic construction with more stylised stitch-work functions to further enhance the energy in Alex's work.

2013 marks a series of exhibitions for Alex, with a feature in Gaffa's Curio Collectors Cabinet earlier this year, Knit, Knot, Weave at Gallery Lane Cove, and later this month in Sydney is Half Way at COFA Space & Kudos Gallery and Stitch: The art of Craft at Viewpoint Gallery in Bendigo (VIC). 

See more here: 
http://www.alexfalkiner.com/

INTERNATIONAL ::: Smash Palace @ White Rabbit Gallery



‘I would rather be crying in the back of a limousine than laughing on the back of a bicycle’

Bai Yilou, Recycling, 2008, mixed media


An attendant at the White Rabbit Gallery gave this analogy when introducing a work by the artist Bai Yilou. Recycling, 2008, is essentially an old bicycle carrying an oversized heart (not the pretty-pink emoticon kind). Scraps of recyclable everyday objects like used water bottles, magazines and newspaper, litter the bicycle trailer and surrounds. The limousine/bicycle analogy provides a kind of foundation or framework for approaching both Bai Yilou’s piece, and other works in the exhibition Smash Palace; ‘an artists’-eye view of a fracturing China’. 

What becomes most apparent in Smash Palace is the tension between mechanics or technology and human or animal matter (flesh, organs and blood). These two components figure as a repeated motif throughout the exhibition where in some cases they are pushed to an extreme state. Cheng Dapeng’s Wonderful City, 2011-2012 retains to its title but has an element of black humour. The florescent-white table-top with various miniature toy-like figures is both captivating and repulsive. It is like an ocean of mutated human/animal matter, blending into what appears like man-made structures that form a city. The medium (resin 3D prints) and presentation of the work (the fluorescent-white lights) masks what is quite violent and macabre imagery, giving it an alluring softness. The work engages with the subtle but rapid urban development seen in contemporary China. It points to the danger of unrelenting urban progress with commerce at its heart. The artist, Cheng Dapeng, is an architect himself and ‘hopes his artworks will remind planners that cities are for people, not just profiteers.’[1]


These same kinds of ideas are apparent in Tu Pei-Shih’s digital media works. However intimate knowledge of Taiwan’s turbulent history would garner a more profound connection with the action played out in Adventures in Mount Yu 1, 2010, and Adventures in Mount Yu 5, 2011.  The glossy cartoon-like, colourful aesthetics and contemporary fascination with moving pictures conceals the political connotations in the works. The animated video projections are busy with action, and like television, the stylistic conventions and scattered narrative distract from the real-life themes behind the works. This is, in effect, the central idea of Tu Pei-Shih’s video projections, where glitz and glamour mask truth. The cartoon videos are a grotesque parody that allows audiences a glimpse of historical fact. In the case of artwork like this, the service gallery attendants can provide is invaluable where the historical and social context of an artwork might otherwise be missed or overlooked as a result of immediate, highly-stimulating visuals. White Rabbit Gallery deliver this opportunity for visitors to have a more intimate engagement with the artworks. For Tu Pei-Shih’s work, it was interesting to hear a wild verbal account of the action as it played out on the two screens. The attendant said Tu Pei-Shih’s works depict ‘…a genocide which has been kept secret for so long… an island not of paradise, but paradox… it must be the artists who tell the stories… and just look what’s happening, it’s got a pretty frightful history.’[2]

 Zhou Jie, CBD, 2010, porcelain and rice
 

This exhibition brings together some large impressive installation works, like Zhou Jie’s CBD, 2011, a porcelain city standing in a bed of rice, and Shyu Ruey-Shiann’s Traveller’s Wings, 2011. A sizable oil painting on canvas by Madeln is another marvellous work, with the 3D paint standing erect from the canvas like coral or cake decorations. Smash Palace presents visually playful, awe-inspiring works that have an unsettling undercurrent of political and social restlessness.
  
Smash Palace
White Rabbit Gallery
March 1 – August 4 2013
http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org



[1] Exhibition catalogue

[2] Recording, White Rabbit Gallery attendant