allan's walk artist run space inc

 Bridget KEENA

26^th November – 19^th December 2009

Opening Celebration: 1pm Saturday 5^th December

Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space

Shops 5 & 7, Allan’s Walk, Bendigo

Opening Hours: Thursday & Friday: 11am – 4pm, Saturday: 11am – 3pm

Mirror, Mirror will consist of two large installations, one in each shop of Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space. The exhibition surveys a range of the artist’s work, covering some breadth of the artist’s oeuvre, including painting, photography & drawing.

Two themes are strongly observed; the first a preoccupation with the portrait and especially the self-portrait, the second the need to reflect one’s environment, and how this in turn reinforces or imbues the portraits with a greater sense of gravity.

Keena draws heavily from her “drawing” practice of photography and the collection of images. Reminiscent of the photographic work of Nobuyoshi Araki, Keena exposes her private life. From the mundane to the intimate, there is perhaps a somewhat obsessive compulsion to record and to retain the detritus of modern life.

The sheer proliferation of photographs could trivialise the work; however the artist chooses to paint from some images rather than others. This selection allows Keena to monumentalise moments, thrusting them into the canons of art history.

In the same sense that the Impressionists sought to capture the fleeting nature of light; to paint from the mirror or the photograph, as in all depictions, can only attempt to hint at the “élan” or essence of what is contained in the vignette and only as seen by the artist. The mirror acts as a description of reality however this is all the image is; it is not reality and it is not tangible.

Knowing this, the artist attempts to go beyond presenting scenes, and to instead immerse the viewer in an experience not dissimilar to the artist’s own cognition of existence. To do this the artist has intervened in the space of the gallery, installing simulacra of Keena’s private internal and external life as ontological ruminations.

Mirror, Mirror

Friday 20th November

4pm Children’s Animation Program, Campbell Theatrette, FREE

This year’s Australian International Animation Festival descends on Bendigo with a selection of program’s from the animation festival held earlier this year in Melbourne, as well as a local component featuring Bendigo animators, including award winning animator Susan McMinn.

The screenings are on Friday 20^th November at the Campbell Theatrette (next to the Library) and Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space and on Saturday 21^st November at La Trobe University’s Visual Arts Centre in View St.

Presented by Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space, La Trobe University’s Visual Arts Centre and Undue Noise, with the assistance of the City of Greater Bendigo, the program will feature a free children’s animation program, an evening of local animation screenings, talks and performance (yes, some Bendigo animators perform their works), programs of Australian, International and Digital animation, as well as a session with Dennis Tupicoff, an internationally recognised Melbourne-based animator.

The festival program commences with a selection of Children’s Animation on Friday afternoon (4pm) at the Campbell Theatrette, next to the Library. This features some of the best animated films made recently made for children, as well as a couple of films involving the work of Central Victorian school children.

The festival will be officially opened on Friday at 7pm by multi-media artist Claire Smith, who first brought the festival to Bendigo about three years ago. This opening will be at Allan’s Walk Artist Run Space on Friday evening and will highlight the work of Bendigo Animators. This free event will feature performance involving animation by Paul Fletcher, who controls his live animation presentation with a vacuum cleaner, and choreographer Megan Beckwith, who projects her own 3D animations onto her dance performance. Also will be animated films by young Bendigo Animators, Christopher Tay, Daniel Russell and Erin Ricardo, who will also talk about their animation techniques.

On Saturday the festival moves to the Theatre at La Trobe Visual Arts Centre (VAC) in View St. The day starts with a Digital Panorama at 11:30am, featuring recent digital animation. This is followed at 1pm by a session with Dennis Tupicoff, an internationally recognised Melbourne-based animator who will present his films Chainsaw, His Mother’s Voice, and Darra Dogs and talk about his animation experiences. At 3pm, there will be an International Panorama, which will feature mainly hand-drawn animation to contrast with the earlier digital program. The festival finishes with an Australian Panorama at 5pm, which will feature the best of recent Australian animation, including Susan McMinn’s award winning The Last Warhorse, which was awarded the prize for Best Australian Student Animation at the Australian International Animation Festival this year. There will be an admission charge for the sessions at the VAC, but this will be only $5 a session, which is a real bargain for such high quality recent animation.

Supported by Bendigo City Council, Allans Walk, Undue Noise and La Trobe University VAC.

Frozen in Time
Nathlie Daoust

15 October – 14 November 2009
Opening Celebration: Saturday 17 October, 3PM

Frozen in Time is a series of photographic prints which explore moments where reality and the dream-like clash. Each scene is first captured in black and white with a pinhole camera, and then hand coloured by Daoust, blending memory and introspection to create scenes of mystery and illusion.

Nathalie Daoust is a Canadian artist currently based in Montreal. Her practice is concerned with unveiling secrets which lie below the apparent stability of life.  Daoust has recently shown work at Punctum Gallery, Tokyo, Senac Gallery, Sao Paulo, Licht Feld Modern and Contemporary Art Basel, and Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul. She is in Australia to participate in the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

Frozen in Time is the outcome of a residency at the Christoph Merian Foundation in Switzerland earlier this year.

Frozen in Time
Nathlie Daoust

15 October – 14 November 2009
Opening Celebration: Saturday 17 October, 3PM

Frozen in Time is a series of photographic prints which explore moments where reality and the dream-like clash. Each scene is first captured in black and white with a pinhole camera, and then hand coloured by Daoust, blending memory and introspection to create scenes of mystery and illusion.

Nathalie Daoust is a Canadian artist currently based in Montreal. Her practice is concerned with unveiling secrets which lie below the apparent stability of life.  Daoust has recently shown work at Punctum Gallery, Tokyo, Senac Gallery, Sao Paulo, Licht Feld Modern and Contemporary Art Basel, and Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul. She is in Australia to participate in the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

Frozen in Time is the outcome of a residency at the Christoph Merian Foundation in Switzerland earlier this year.

Liberty and Death
Brad Haylock

12 September – 10 October 2009
Opening Celebration: 12 September, 3PM

Brad Haylock practices variously as an artist, writer, curator and designer. He is currently a lecturer in Visual Communication in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University, member of the Program Committee and Board of West Space, and the Editorial Committee of un magazine.

Recent solo exhibitions include Everything you never wanted to know about fashion (but were too afraid to ask, Platform, Melbourne, Crazed and Defused at The Narrows, Melbourne, and A Beginner’s Guide to Politics, Platform, Melbourne. Recent design projects include Making Space and Objects in Space. Recent curatorial projects include The Art of the Bicycle at Don’t Come Gallery, Melbourne and the co-curation with Mark Richardson of Advance/Retreat at West Space, Melbourne.

Liberty and Death
Brad Haylock

12 September – 10 October 2009
Opening Celebration: 12 September, 3PM

Brad Haylock practices variously as an artist, writer, curator and designer. He is currently a lecturer in Visual Communication in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University, member of the Program Committee and Board of West Space, and the Editorial Committee of un magazine.

Recent solo exhibitions include Everything you never wanted to know about fashion (but were too afraid to ask, Platform, Melbourne, Crazed and Defused at The Narrows, Melbourne, and A Beginner’s Guide to Politics, Platform, Melbourne. Recent design projects include Making Space and Objects in Space. Recent curatorial projects include The Art of the Bicycle at Don’t Come Gallery, Melbourne and the co-curation with Mark Richardson of Advance/Retreat at West Space, Melbourne.

 Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row)
Josey Kidd-Crowe

8 – 29 August 2009
Opening Celebration: Saturday 15 August, 3PM

In Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) Josey Kidd-Crowe contemplates desire for isolation and escapism.

For Kidd-Crowe the process of painting is as important as the finished piece, the work often appears hurried, the catharsis palpable. As well as being a form of emotional release, the paintings also have the feel that something brief and difficult to grasp is being sought.

Kidd-Crowe also installs found objects along side drawings on magazine pages. Used nostagically as mementos of the past they suggest an ambiguous sentimental value. Depending on how the objects are placed, this feeling of nostalgia is treated with either disgust or melancholy.

Illuminations approaches the desire for an escape with optimism, with the view that it may lead to positive transformations.

Essay

On Liberty and Death – Brad Haylock

We meet the world not with disdain, but with indifference — and regrettably so, for disdain would at least harbour a kernel of possibility. The spectacular is no longer read as such; everything before us is apprehended as mere information, as ocular data. There is no longer any point in looking in, behind or through. In the absence of the possibility of difference, one must give oneself over, either to the seduction of differentiation or to indifference. It is the latter that prevails, and yet the distinction here is moot regardless, for the former invariably devolves into the latter. We are beyond critique because we are beyond hope. All that remains is an acerbic and ever more self-indulgent storytelling.

Comprising a body of new work in a variety of media, Liberty and Death is a rumination upon the structural homogeneity of otherwise divergent ideologies, and an expression of the circularity or impasse of politics that this is understood to engender. This body of work takes as its point of departure a flag, specifically the anarcho-capitalist flag. At first sight, this yellow and black flag represents the ultimate paradox; the conflation of ideas that it signifies strikes us as irreconcilably contradictory. Upon reflection, however, or upon a closer inspection, synergies reveal themselves. Between these habitually opposed bodies of thought, similarities abound. Both espouse freedoms of the individual. Both are evangelical in their method. Both are premised upon the possibility of utopia.

The homogeneity of these divergent canons exposes the problematic of any utopian ideal. The title of the show, however, suggests a means of resolving this paradox, a conclusion to this line of inquiry: here, death is proposed not as an alternative to freedom but as its necessary equivalent, as the definitive and singular solution to an otherwise unanswerable question. And the works here echo or advance this sentiment with respect to artistic practice — this is, in no small measure, a commentary upon the politics of political art.

If you’re not against us, you’re with us announces an essential quality of politics, namely the impossibility of apoliticism or, in other words, the complicity inherent in non-dissent. This observation, however, is non-partisan, indeed too universal to be helpful. It represents critique without end, ambiguous in respect of both object and subject. Too photogenic, too consumable, it anticipates (or perhaps revels in) the consummation of politics.

Black on black (from zero form to absolute commodity) is perversely aspirational, hyperbolic. This work proceeds from a recognition of the seductive aestheticism of Malevich’s reductivist formal language and of the historical contingency of a radicalism of form. An unlimited edition, infinitely and indeed readily reproducible, Black on black wants to be the ultimate fetish object of political art.

Daydreaming about Utopia, by contrast, is perverse in its nostalgia, but also transitional in this body of work — transitional because a self-effacing sense of humour, and therefore some semblance of meaning, can be located in its title. No such revelation is proffered, however, in the case of the untitled champagne bottle. The incomplete redaction of the bottle’s label is clearly deliberate, the resultant flag unambiguous, but the meaning, the politics, of this work is indistinct. Likewise as regards the ink and graphite works on paper. These repeat the title of the exhibition, but unnecessarily, and their titles add insult to this injury. They are derived from found images selected, admittedly, for no reason deeper than the coincidence of certain words. They are to be read as art — their hand-drawn character tells us this —and political references abound, but their meaning is slippery. The champagne bottle and these works on paper thus comprise political art only insofar as they simulate political art. These works are deliberately polysemic, expressly overdetermined. In this way, they are proposed as a critique of critique, a fatal strategy.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e), New York

—— (1996) The System of Objects, Verso, London and New York

Drutt, Matthew (2003) Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Essay

On Liberty and Death – Brad Haylock

We meet the world not with disdain, but with indifference — and regrettably so, for disdain would at least harbour a kernel of possibility. The spectacular is no longer read as such; everything before us is apprehended as mere information, as ocular data. There is no longer any point in looking in, behind or through. In the absence of the possibility of difference, one must give oneself over, either to the seduction of differentiation or to indifference. It is the latter that prevails, and yet the distinction here is moot regardless, for the former invariably devolves into the latter. We are beyond critique because we are beyond hope. All that remains is an acerbic and ever more self-indulgent storytelling.

Comprising a body of new work in a variety of media, Liberty and Death is a rumination upon the structural homogeneity of otherwise divergent ideologies, and an expression of the circularity or impasse of politics that this is understood to engender. This body of work takes as its point of departure a flag, specifically the anarcho-capitalist flag. At first sight, this yellow and black flag represents the ultimate paradox; the conflation of ideas that it signifies strikes us as irreconcilably contradictory. Upon reflection, however, or upon a closer inspection, synergies reveal themselves. Between these habitually opposed bodies of thought, similarities abound. Both espouse freedoms of the individual. Both are evangelical in their method. Both are premised upon the possibility of utopia.

The homogeneity of these divergent canons exposes the problematic of any utopian ideal. The title of the show, however, suggests a means of resolving this paradox, a conclusion to this line of inquiry: here, death is proposed not as an alternative to freedom but as its necessary equivalent, as the definitive and singular solution to an otherwise unanswerable question. And the works here echo or advance this sentiment with respect to artistic practice — this is, in no small measure, a commentary upon the politics of political art.

If you’re not against us, you’re with us announces an essential quality of politics, namely the impossibility of apoliticism or, in other words, the complicity inherent in non-dissent. This observation, however, is non-partisan, indeed too universal to be helpful. It represents critique without end, ambiguous in respect of both object and subject. Too photogenic, too consumable, it anticipates (or perhaps revels in) the consummation of politics.

Black on black (from zero form to absolute commodity) is perversely aspirational, hyperbolic. This work proceeds from a recognition of the seductive aestheticism of Malevich’s reductivist formal language and of the historical contingency of a radicalism of form. An unlimited edition, infinitely and indeed readily reproducible, Black on black wants to be the ultimate fetish object of political art.

Daydreaming about Utopia, by contrast, is perverse in its nostalgia, but also transitional in this body of work — transitional because a self-effacing sense of humour, and therefore some semblance of meaning, can be located in its title. No such revelation is proffered, however, in the case of the untitled champagne bottle. The incomplete redaction of the bottle’s label is clearly deliberate, the resultant flag unambiguous, but the meaning, the politics, of this work is indistinct. Likewise as regards the ink and graphite works on paper. These repeat the title of the exhibition, but unnecessarily, and their titles add insult to this injury. They are derived from found images selected, admittedly, for no reason deeper than the coincidence of certain words. They are to be read as art — their hand-drawn character tells us this —and political references abound, but their meaning is slippery. The champagne bottle and these works on paper thus comprise political art only insofar as they simulate political art. These works are deliberately polysemic, expressly overdetermined. In this way, they are proposed as a critique of critique, a fatal strategy.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e), New York

—— (1996) The System of Objects, Verso, London and New York

Drutt, Matthew (2003) Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Essay

Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) – Josey Kidd–Crowe

By Susan McMinn BVA Hon Visual Arts

Josey Kidd–Crowe’s exhibition, Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) consists of three components where, painting, installation and video takes you through a fragmented journey of memory and thought. Occupying two gallery spaces, paintings are intimately shown in the small space, whilst an installation of both video and small objects and relics are exhibited within the larger space, located opposite. The positioning of the different components is just as important as each art work. The paintings intend to capture random images of present thought whilst the ephemera engage past memory. The video offers a means of escape from the possibility of painful collective memory.

At first it would appear that the work of Kidd-Crowe throws caution to the wind. His loosely rendered paintings are executed with similar rapidity in which ambiguous thought and imagery enters and leaves the mind. In his paintings, Kidd-Crowe merges reality with the imaginary. His paintings are created quickly to emphasise the intensity of an emotional experience.

There is certain abstraction and yet an alluring figurative element to his work. The paintings are not fussed over and yet they are considered. Kidd-Crowe comments, ‘Though they are confused’ they are ‘decidedly confused’. On the small hardwood surface a raw narrative of primal of human emotion is expressed within the painted image. For Kidd-Crowe the painting process becomes personal. As he paints, he leaves behind a portrayal of imagery illustrating a yearning to capture the unknown. A succession of marks plays out a loosely rendered surreal narrative that engages with both the figure and elements of abstraction. Within the expressive mark making, he passionately explores subconscious thought associated with feelings of love, hate, regret and disgust. This is evident in the central painting, Untitled #3, 2009, where red hued vortexes thought spew forth to the edges of the picture plane; eyes gaze back at the viewer. Palpable iconography particular to the female body explores sexuality. Kidd-Crowe unashamedly reveals those very thought processes that would otherwise be kept hidden.

Whilst his paintings convey a catharsis of emotion, Kidd-Crowes ephemeral installation suggests the source. Found and made personal objects collected over time, and relics particular to the past, form a narrative of ones personal history touching issues of memory and the self. These are juxtaposed with portrait drawings on National Geographic magazine paper and a video. The way in which these three elements are arranged places emphasis on past memory and our desire to escape to another world. For me, on the one hand, entering this room made me feel as though I had entered a cosmos of privacy. Not unlike entering into someone’s bedroom, I felt somewhat like an intruder. And yet once I was ‘in’ I felt compelled to look and engage with the relics as they tapped into my own memory.

The objects and relics in Illuminations convey their own ambiguous story and embody unseen past memories and experience. Inherent in these objects is the suggestion of a previous owner and the representation of a personal history contained within. For the artist, inclusion of the object alludes to the absence of the figure and something that cannot be grasped:

‘Maybe if the elusive truth these objects contain could be grasped, the vague yearning for the unknown could be satisfied…perhaps the paintings are an attempt to exorcise the objects meanings’.¹

Here, contained within these objects and relics is another life and a personal past history that may never be revealed. Moreover, not unlike his paintings, Kidd-Crowe arranges these objects selectively. A string of pearls could suggest gender as does a worn pair of men’s leather shoes. Burning candles are placed atop of each shoe, perhaps suggesting the loss of a former generation. Leaves protruding from a wooden object suggest nature whilst a skull adorned with pearls and green glass fuses human-animal relationship. A broken fence picket and a small family photograph depicting mother and child, the ideal of family and melancholy. Small, yet dim lights positioned throughout the installation illuminate that which is hidden in our collectables and memories.

The feeling of nostalgia experienced within the space was disrupted however, with portrait drawings on glossy magazine paper placed alongside the objects and relics. Kidd-Crow utilised the typically remote, yet beautiful landscapes particular to National Geographic, to appeal to his audience a means of escape to an ideal ‘otherworld’. According to Kidd-Crowe the drawings are symbolic of our yearning to connect with ‘nature’ and the natural world. The drawings are surreal portraits with psychological connotations. Extraordinary figures loom from sublime landscapes and beaches. The raw emotions of thought evoked within the portraits are expressed in the paintings.

Similar to the desire for escape, evoked by the placement of the portrait drawings on lush landscape backgrounds, a video installation titled ‘Climbing’, 2009, explores the unsatisfied desire for the sublime. Through nature and the natural world, the film begins with serene imagery that begins to snap and jump as the film journeys through a chaotic array of movement, transcending into still calm of blue sky and cloud. Watching ‘Climbing’, I was captivated by the appearance of the void created by the close filming of the tree branches and distant sky. This is enhanced by particular movement created during filming such as the transition of sudden jerky circular motion to tranquillity.

Kidd-Crowe acknowledges an influence from American painter Forrest Bess and Swiss installation artist Carol Bove. He is attracted to the obscurity conveyed within the work of Australian painter Ian Fairweather. In the same way Kidd-Crowe rapidly paints thought and imagery as they come to mind, Bess terms himself a visionary painter and ‘makes no conscious effort to paint’. He closes his eyes and paints colour line pattern and form, copying them as they come to mind ‘exactly without elaboration’.² For Kidd-Crowe, Carol Bove’s interest in the sense of history contained within an object is not unlike his own desire to imagine the collective personal history or memory hidden within his own installation of objects and relics.³

Illuminations is a collective reflection of thought and memory presented in figurative abstraction. Although the figure is not present within the installation, the remains of the figures memory embody the space. Kidd-Crowe challenges the viewer with self examination as his works conveys a catharsis of emotion, a narrative of a collective personal past, and a means of escape. This exhibition touches on human primal emotions through the exploration of that which most of us would secretly keep hidden.