240. Jack Frawley | No literature on a dead planet
29 June – 3 August
Jack Frawley is a man. He’s a wise and observant man. A teacher of teachers, who gently reminds us that our first responsibility is to our planet. And he’s a punter, whose totem is the jockey, which doubles as the logo of Muruntani Books. That’s - Whitefeller Books, the publisher of these not so fictitious adaptations of classics drawn from the high school English reading list.
For me these gentle puns, through their elegant precision conceal in plain sight a gravitas that is entirely appropriate to the issue they address. Climate change. And by inference the exceptionalism that permits our politicians, our so-called leaders to avoid addressing, this all to burning issue. That when it isn’t burning, is washing us away in persistent floods.
241. Charlene Walker + Glenn Harrison
3 August – 6 September
“Yes, that’s the title, yet there are moons everywhere” is how Charlene Walker began a short conversation about this show that she shares with her partner, Glenn Harrison. They share a house, a business venture, a studio and a website that markets their art as both “originals” and “art prints”. Speaking of their collaboration Charlene commented ”we are one and the same and share almost everything, for the last 34 years”.
And about the moons? Charlene said they speak of cycles in life and rebirth. An idea dismissed by Glenn in a manner
suggesting that he prefers for the work to be his voice. Here it is tidiness that pervades. A rigid tidiness that proposes isolation.
The common ground of these artists is well documented on their redcactus.com website. It is the landscape. Moreover, the rhythms and abstract patterns that can be extrapolated from a schematic representation of the landscape. As their website states, it is a landscape that Charlene hopes “to imbue…with a reflective intimacy, a deeply personal reaction to (her) environment” while Glenn sees himself “combining abstraction of the observed world while allowing for whatever subtext might emerge spontaneously”.
In a realm of such subjectivity applied narratives quickly fade leaving the compositional ploys of the picture exposed as the subject. Boorishly repetitive or gracefully varied the subject evokes a shared reading of what seems right in the image. What works and what doesn’t, which is of less consequence than the sheared understanding of such judgments. This is the basis of a language construct that is intuitively understood by us all. As to the merit of this work or its lack of merit, your guess is as good as mine but its existence, like its corresponding language construct speaks of humanity. It’s the flickering candle that like the moon may trace the cycles in life to a rebirth.
242. Shani Nottingham
7 September - 11 October
This arrangement of colourful stupa is more a collection of bread tags than an allusion to Buddhist reliquary, these tiny talismans are far more common and sinister in their abundance.
Bread tags are the plastic clips that fasten plastic bags of bread purchased from supermarkets. With the abonnement of the paper bag that once delivered bread from bakeries, these clips have become collector items. The fetish objects of eco- warriors in a movement, according to Shani that began with a single man on the west coast of the USA. He identified the
various genera and sub genera of bread tags giving them all Latin names, in the manner of pioneering botanists whose environment the bread tag is progressively strangling.
Shani’s engagement with the “movement” has been long. She is a high-profile contributor to its social media dialogue. She has a global network of colleagues who supply her with tags that apparently display design differences between countries and share a rudimentary language. For example, the different colours indicate the day of baking. But moreover, Shani is an artist. Her bread tag collection is applied to art, where it serves the double purpose of personal expression and eco-statement. It also acts as a
kind of sequestration of these environmentally dangerous bread tags. Shani’s art is environmental direct action that underlines the obvious fact - if we insist on making everlasting items that are momentarily useful our responsibility for them is everlasting, not momentary.
More than the craft of her art making Shani seems to be progressing towards the codification and classification of her medium. The form that her work takes is more a pragmatic response to the demands of the space she is exhibiting in than any particular image imposed on her media. Increasingly her subject as well as her medium is the bread tag. It opens her artwork to a broad meditation on the nature of our homogenised consumer culture that locates the concept of effortless abundance in an ecosystem where it is clearly unsustainable.
243. Glenn Locklee
12 October - 15 November
Glenn Locklee has turned his back on the arcadian beauty that occupies most Australian landscape painters in favour of our city and its streets. Here in a landscape that is perpetually under-reconstruction Glen finds what he calls, subliminal images. Meaning “images that we walk past without noticing, that rest in the mind” where they act as the triggers of Glenn’s
contemplation. He identifies a pile of building material, a tree in its “organic” form encased in a protective sheath of planks, a tree in its “inorganic” form, and the faceless monolith, the Concrete core of a building taking form. On our streets Glenn is an observer.
A conversation about Glen’s art inevitably turns to a discussion of Sydney’s art galleries, where Glen, the observant visitor documents their offerings in photographs published on his Instagram page, The Sydney rounds. So favoured by his vast audience that you might think some people keep track of the art scene by simply reading his photographs. He is quick to point out that his criteria
for inclusion is varied, ranging from the meritorious to artists
friends he would like to support, perhaps identifying himself as an enthusiast rather than a connoisseur of art galleries. He is everywhere.
Along the streets that offer a subject to Glen’s art-making the galleries and their attendant artists offer a narrative. This is the story of our landscape, the sprit of our place that is as accidental and ad-hoc as the automatic sculpture Glenn identifies as art. A collage of happenstance rendered as observation, it is provisional, a culture under construction. Like the city it serves, caught between nostalgia for a past and the optimism of a future it offers an inadvertent truth.
This is Glenn’s art, pictures of objects in transition, something that is taking form about us in a manner that we have no control over. It is an analysis of the landscape claiming ownership of us as opposed to the traditional idea of the individual claiming ownership of the landscape by making a picture of it.
244. John Vella | Lynparza
16 November - 20 December
John Vella was born in Blacktown. He went to school there. Then as a promising student it was time to choose a career and he was persuaded to study architecture. It didn’t last long, he travelled through Europe to arrive back in Australia for study at the National Art School. “Three years of never being asked what I was doing” is how he affectionally described his foundation in art making. The promising student became a promising artist, then with a partner, travelling and painting until someone suggested an honours year in Hobart! There was some teaching, then an MA, more teaching, a family growing up. And in Hobart he stepped back to paint, which is more or less where this story began with an attempt to describe the work.
These are paintings of an unfolded and flattened cardboard box that once contained the cancer medication, Lynparza, hence the show’s title. Each picture is of the same box, painted again and again, each offering a different result. Although more correctly each painting began in the same way but found a different conclusion. Each proposing a question about representation and abstraction in painting. Are these abstract paintings or are they portraits of an unfolded, flattened cardboard carton?
One idea is that pictures have a beginning in representation, that is - something that is given. As each picture progresses it evolves into something that is an invention. It is a painting irrespective of it looking like
something recognisable or something apparently unrecognisable. It is paint that has been fashioned into moods reflective of ourselves. Here we are caught in a loop of tumbling where difference arrives at sameness through repetition. With the energy of one thing pushing forward against something falling back these many pictures are held in a single matrix, representational of nothing other than itself.
Towards the end of our conversation John commented that the merit of an artist choosing a motif was that it removed the need to know where to begin. I think he meant that the painter of landscapes and the painter of unfolded and flattened cardboard cartons have a similar beginning point. Both are more or less arbitrary. Art can be anywhere and found in anything. Art is not found in the choice of subject matter or its virtue but in the various aspects of humanity encountered through its making.
Here then are some marks, made by someone and if it is to be summarised by nominating a subject, perhaps it is a picture of how someone thinks.
