175. Ho Bo Jo | Vision river

It isn’t his real name.

More correctly, it wasn’t his name when I first came across him. But when real is divided into: what was, what is and what will be, it’s the present we pay attention to. Change is accommodated, necessitated even expected, Art has pummeled the idea of real. Words like, illusion and reality, original and reproduction, facsimile and symbol - have been thrown together often enough for us to realise that everything is real however some things are more precisely named than some other things.

Ho Bo Jo is exhibiting jpgs, objects from cyber space that were once 

photographs of something. Along the way they became an idea that proposed other ideas and so on. They became a train of thought, a Vision river perhaps. Look at one of Ho Bo Joe’s images and you will see a jpg, look at a 100 and you will see an embryonic language.

These language-like sequencers of images discuss art. As a set of painterly abstractions while others consider pictures hanging on gallery walls. They mingled into a single story that is a complex consideration of the mysterious romance of art. It’s not a movie; there is no beginning, no end, no running time. Look at it for 20 seconds or look at it for an hour, you will see much the same thing. But with an hours viewing the more nuanced this meditation on the ideal of art becomes.

At the end of an email, Ho Bo Jo informed me that his name is a “3 word poem”, a kind of onomatopoeia perhaps, a name that describes as much as it identifies, unlike his images that identify rather than describe.

Bryan is a neighbour. He is the Fitzgerald of Chee Soon and Fitzgerald, a shop along Regent St. He’s the guy who sweeps the street in a wide arc around the shop. He delivers the same aura of calmness to our street that his shop exudes. And he’s a photographer who observed Raam, a friend making his way to Redfern Station to catch the Last train to Banksia. And among his photographs he threads the idea of patina.

Patina is the surface texture of things that visually convey mood. It’s the shine on an old car’s chrome-work that labels it classic, the faint echo of paint on a wall that preserves a past rather than proposing modernisation. It’s the beauty born of time and the passage of hands. And it’s the romance of walking down a street alive to every sensation, the patina of life lived. This is the mood that Bryan Fitzgerald captures in his photographs of our streets.

He was born in New Zealand and living there in timber houses he says he learnt about patina from his great aunts. “With a single sweep of their hands they cleaned, making no distinction between inside and out. Timber was scrubbed, the weatherboards painted”, lino was no doubt mopped, week in week out imbuing each surface with life. Small changes, incremental 

differences building across the passage of time into a surface patina are savoured in these photographs of Raam.

Bryan offers us the gift of pause. It is a moment of stillness. Watching some perfect moment of light and shade across a surface that is gone in the time it takes to perceive it. Then again that might simply be a friend rushing to catch the last train home.

Mollie Rice was born in remote Australia. She spoke of Katherine, Lightening Ridge where her Dad was an opal miner, the unstable Australian bush and of small towns where she got good at listening. By the time she had a drivers license she was gone. First to Bathurst for study then to Sydney for work, next London, travel, husband, 2 children and then back to Australia. But WHY?  And with out a thought she replied, “the big sky”.

She wondered how location affected an individual? For her Sydney delivered another child, a life threatening illness then COFA to study textiles. It was a language that became drawing and the observation, “drawing permitted things to be, without being a statement or an answer”. For Mollie Rice drawing seemed to be the business of listening to a location.

The works here were made in response to the walk across the Domain from the Art Gallery of New South Wales towards the city that for Mollie is the walk into a wall of silence. She watched it through her sketches made on the spot. Drawn blind as she said tracing the cities contours on to her page without lifting her eyes from her subject. And she listened, making a drawn record of the silent cities sounds, blind again, with out lifting her ears from her subject.

Her paintings render those filed recordings in a shallow slippery space where foreground and background merge. Here it’s tempting to think of her subject, our city as an unidentified place, enveloped by “the big sky” where only the sounds of place remain to give us a sense of location.  

A picture is often thought of as being of something. It might be a picture of a person, or a building or a landscape. But the idea of a picture’s subject is complicated by symbolism. In religious art, an image of Christ is not of a particular man but a picture of people’s humanity, the Kaaba, which is not a building shrouded in black cloth but the essence of Islam. And in Sydney we have a wrapped thing, the landscape at Little Bay packaged in 1969 by Christo into an idea of contemporary art. We keep these images in our memories where they cease to be pictures of particular things instead becoming symbols that stand for all we know about a particular thing. The picture then is not of something, but it is an invention. Often fashioned with regard to a particular culture permitting our pictures to be read as language. 

For some a stick is a stick is a stick while for others a stick was a tree that became a magic wand. In either case the subject is made and then remade each time it is read, eventually becoming, a sort of mirror reflecting our understanding or lack of it, a mirror of the self, the enduring subject of all art.

I have come to think of this as the method of making or inventing art. It is the experience through time of making and remaking a single thing that automatically evolves each time it is made. For example, this constructed work was made in 1989, remade in 1997 and remade again in 2016. The process was articulated metaphorically, codified as language and identified as myth. 

Evolving in this manner it could eventually be reduced to pattern. There are precedents in art making of legible patters, for example the crosshatching or rarrking in Aboriginal bark painting and the geometrical arrangements of polygons in Islamic art and architecture. 

My drawings are of similar patterns. And if this constructed work could be seen as a figure, each drawing would be seen as a portrait or more correctly a visage, an expression caught in ripples that connect the past with the future as language.

Tony Twigg

Pamela Leung is a Hong Kong born Australian, who came here about 40 years ago. Like most people who live some distance in kilometres and years from their birthplace there is a sentiment reserved for the homeland that isn’t reasoned and never forsaken.  This is the filter through which Pamela has watched the demands of students in Hong Kong for democracy with in the Chinese Republic and their repression. Demands that stretch into the future, beyond the 2047 horizon of the Chinese one country two system regime that replaced Hong Kong’s British colonial rule in 1997.

The outlawed black face-mask, the essential uniform of the Hong Kong 

protestor has become Pamela’s motif. Transformed into a flower and repeated with fragile insistence, like the Hong Kong student civil disobedience, across all available space. While we might wonder what the outcome of the protest movement will be Pamela has taken the dismal view that it will be squashed under the weight of China’s central government.

Symbolism, politics and sentiment collide as art in Pamela’s piece, Blossom everywhere posing a question of the artist’s intent. However it is not that the artist is entering a particular debate about the political situation in Hong Kong, it is that in blinding outrage she is living with a meditation on a confrontation that is reconfiguring her idea of home and being.

Sandra Winkworth’s piece is made from detritus. But more correctly it is made from litter and imagination. 

She describes her day beginning “with morning walks spotting birds, inspecting home garden fronts and what remains after busy days and nights in the city.” And every Sunday since April those walks have been through Redfern. There was “no planed journey” instead, a “turn from laneway to road side to crossing” into memories that “revisited the streets” of “skatey/mod/rocknroll days…the 80’s”, ”the gentrified to the old school” collecting “mementos with hawk-eyed intent”. 

Sandra Winkworth picked up quotations from our streets then glued them into an essay with her imagination that speaks of now, memory and art.  The gems assembled into her opal like offering are grazed by speed. Flattened to perfection by the uncaring pragmatism of progress. And forsaken, the once essential no longer required, abandoned beside an urgent road carelessly heading towards tomorrows dim recollection. These things are held for a moment in Sandra’s imagination, turned this way or that, then cross-referenced somehow intosomething with a pang of emotion that feels like places I like a lot, here and art.

So delicately and thoughtfully crafted is this piece that we need to be reminded of the time it spent on the road, as a kind of refugee from our material existence. Now with a revised citizenship of the art world its collective emotive power far exceeds the mood proposed any single item. Is that down to the artist’s hand - her orchestration or is she simply the conductor of an emotive coir?

This is the voice of voices, it's the Palace of Montezuma, Aztec Emperor, “he who is angry in a noble way”, it is a cloud but it is far from a miasma, it is our hope.