235. Penny Coss
5 January – 8 February
Penny Coss answered the question, where did you begin, by saying that she had always been an artist. After leaving school at 14 to study at TAFE, she became a primary school teacher, studied art for a year at St Martins College of Art in London then settled into Sydney as a student at the UNSW School of Art and Design, that had been COFA and before that Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education where Syd Ball, a long-time teacher and hero of the painting school was the voice that spoke to Penny.
The paintings of Syd Ball, a major figure in Modernist Australian Art swung from rigidly formal abstraction to a haptic lyricism where paint was poured onto his canvas from cans and buckets. His two painting methods were apparently polar opposites. Penny encountered Syd’s poured pictures in the 1980's when, as she says, Post
Modernism was being taught at UNSW. This is the idea that the landscape an artist works from is our accumulated global culture. Or at least the portion of our culture that the artist is aware of.
Post Modernism was probably the last of the “ism’s” that chart a history of Modern Art from Impressionism to Expressionism to Minimalism to Conceptualism and so forth. It might also prompt the question – what’s after Post Modernism? And the answer is probably - art, which is where it seems that Penny Coss began. Her work in SLOT, that is a still life, a tableau, a sculpture, a kind of collage of objects that accommodates a considerable amount of air, might also be a
shopwindow display. Something that is not immediately apparent is the video. It is literally a veiled record of the work being made and its placement beside a traffic choked Botany Road. It is also an image of the artist's self-consciousness – a consideration of the process of making the work. Here the artist is making the work and the artist is also watching the artist make the work. As such this art work exists as it is set out before you and within a language of precedents drawn from our history, our interest and our education. This landscape of art, according to Penny Coss, is a re-visioning of what has already happened, where among other things we would find the lyricism of Syd Ball if not the polar opposites of his process.
236. Tina FiveAsh
9 February - 15 March
The photography of Tina Fiveash is an examination of the afterlife. Not born of religious faith or personal experience but rather the reported experiences of others. For example - Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb was in a coma near the end of his life when he woke up, saying to his wife “it’s very beautiful over there” before abruptly dying. Like all mystic experiences we might read it literally or with scepticism. Tina Fiveash has chosen to read it as art, which is probably somewhere between the two.
In another quote drawn from her large collection of remembered after life experiences she proclaims – “There is a light that never goes out” with the aim she says of alerting people to the question, is there life after death? A question that Tina answers, “Oh absolutely, consciousness continues after death for up to an hour”.
The ultimate question - is life after death eternal? Is in Tina’s view more complex. She separates brain activity from consciousness and compares consciousness to energy that can be neither created nor destroyed. It can however change form, the first law of thermodynamics. And in this our experience of life can be seen as a portal to “THE UNSEEN WORLD”. It can be crossed and recrossed. It is mystic of course, but it is also the subject of these photographs by Tina FiveAsh.
For Tina mysticism is reflected in her medium, photography. It is both a scientific process and an artistic consideration that has undergone significant evolution across its two centuries of existence. From the irrefutable fact of pictorial evidence to the poetry of digital rendering. Here in these “illusion-based works” that appear to represent reality Tina says her question is “where do my photographs send people?”
As existence stretches out across life it’s easy to understand existence for granted. While as the years roll by it’s the miraculous vision of existence that seems to take over. Truth evaporates from fact into illusion, from tangible objectivity into vaporous subjectivity – and at the edge, on a little rise between this world and that, there is a rough scaffold supporting a neon sign that is blinking promise, which is where I have been sent by these photographs.
