Artist Index

31.5.14

OBLIQUE Closing Event and Artist Discussion Sunday 1 June, 2-4pm

Please visit Articulate project space on the final day of OBLIQUE, a site-specific installation project by Beata Geyer. The artist will talk about the project in the project space from 2pm. 



12.5.14

BEATA GEYER'S OBLIQUE OPENS FRIDAY 16 MAY AT 6 - 8 PM


OBLIQUE  is then open Fri - Sun 11am - 5pm,  May 17 - 1 June 

OBLIQUE CLOSING EVENT and ARTIST DISCUSSION Sunday 1 June 2-4 pm

OBLIQUE PRESS RELEASE

see updates on facebook

OBLIQUE (adj): əˈbliːk/ 1. neither parallel nor at right angles to a specified or implied line; slanting 2. not expressed or done in a direct way.

OBLIQUE is a site-specific installation project, based around concepts of form-ation, an idea of an active and mobile form that not just is but rather does, and realised through the processes of planar, spatial and chromatic manipulations in a context of the gallery space and its architectonics. A range of varied acts of designation, accumulation and negotiation will continue during the exhibition.
 


above: Beata's facebook images of work in progress

The current project by Beata Geyer (in collaboration with James Culkin www.culkingeyer.com) is part of Sculpture at Scenic World exhibition in the Blue Mountains.  http://www.scenicworld.com.au/experiences/sculpture/

11.5.14

AMY PRCEVICH WRITES ON FAIR ISLE 5


We are introduced to this incarnation of the project by Anna Jaaniste’s You – a series of text based wall plaques intimating a one-sided contemplation. Arranged at eye-height and ankle height throughout the space, the work does not allow you to be passively curious. To fully comprehend the artist’s words you must crouch down to read the work in its entirety, inadvertently assuming a contemplative pose. 

Further into the exhibition we have the opportunity to hear the artist read aloud from the wall plaques and the work becomes less of a comprehension exercise than an aurally emotive experience. We have already read the script, but with our own inflictions, and internal dialogue. To pause as an artist pauses, and hear tone and emphasis placed on specific phrases is an addictive way to absorb the work. The physicality of the words helps us develop a quiet understanding about human relations and relationships.

Jaaniste’s second work Live Here is organic both in its arrangement and medium; comprising of an assembly of grass, wood, charcoal and ash, it binds us to a sense of people and place. Lying gently next to Beata Geyer’s stark, flat, red and orange, mdf constructions Live Here and Geyer’s Colourings create a poignant conversation between tribal anecdotes and urban landscapes.

Similarly Margaret Roberts, Blp, a nod to Richard Artschwager’s blps is sprawled throughout the exhibition space, highlighting the pleasantly parasitic nature of the install. Artschwager used his bold, black lozenge-shaped constructions to draw attention to the urban landscape, interrupting people’s consciousness through bizarrity and unexpected form. Blp maintains the integrity of the artist’s voice but in the sprawling, overlapping way it is arranged within the space it gently informs the way we think about unused corners or cornices within an architectural landscape and complements the way we look at neighbouring works in the exhibition.

In Raft drawing # 4 India Zegan’s seductive pencil drawing continues her ongoing interest in the iconic French Romantic painting The raft of the Medusa – imagining refugees from the sunken French frigate. Even without this background the work evokes a sense of bobbing and floating in a maritime landscape. It is hypnotising and  hallucinatory and by drawing on archival Fabriano paper – a material we were introduced to by Helen L Sturgess in Fair Isle week one - we are encouraged to view the work as a historical document.

At the back of the exhibition hovers Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen’s offerings of agar jelly, arranged gift-like around a tv monitor. The uv light and gentle buzz of the monitor create a very alluring invitation for the viewer to approach and find out what’s on the telly. It is an internal fight not to recoil in disappointment as we realise that approaching the work is equivalent to entering a twilight zone. Warnings about piracy and reproduction are screened in a loop, to an audience of fungal blooms eliciting a physical response to the work. The work however, is far from a disappointment, more a gentle conversation about the ethics of reproduction and its physical effects.

Fair Isle, in all its forms, has read like a relationship – brooding and thoughtful, spontaneous and intimate – and in Fair Isle number five there is a sense that we have reached a personal resolution after a series of negotiations.

Amy Prcevich
May 2014

10.5.14

INDIA ZEGAN on Fair Isle 5


The final movement of 'Fair Isle' at APS closed last Sunday. The benefits of this exhibition was that it enabled both emerging and mid career artists to make connections with artists and viewers outside of their usual art friendship groups. Special highlights of this exhibition includ Bettina Bruder's rubber band tango with Sach Catt's tension piece, Linden Braye's roller-pallete and white noise sound piece; and Rose Ann McGreevy's soulful, 'Interrupting the spatial plane' (2014). 

Better than television: Weekly viewings each Sunday morning (in addition to being able to attend a few of the openings) enabled me to watch the exhibition expand and contract as if it were a set of lungs. With some conversations louder than others, and other works more conceptually orientated than others, the overall effect of this jazz-like exercise was that artists from each segment of the exhibition were able to play and to test their works within the experimental framework of a larger free floating conversation. 

I hope that 'Fair isle' enabled participating artists to think deeply and critically upon their practice, i.e. how does this work directly engage with the premise; what does it mean to make this object and limit the materials used to three elements (or less/ or more); what does it mean to make this piece at this point in one's practice; how actively does one engage in other artist/s' practices to conceive their own response in an exhibition-laboratory; how do you signal and/or reference one's engagement with another artist's work through materials used or conceptual frameworks; or what does it mean to remake significant elements of a work shown two years earlier. Needless to say, these types of questions are endless and ongoing if someone is thinking and reflecting seriously on their practice.

Special thanks to Project Coordinators: Sue Callanan, Margaret Roberts and Emma Wise.
India Zegan 14/05/2014

7.5.14

LAST FAIR ISLE OPENING FRIDAY 9 MAY AND CLOSING DISCUSSION SUNDAY 11 MAY


The fifth and final iteration of Fair Isle will be open 11am - 5pm Friday 9 May to Sunday 11 May, showing the work of Lisa Andrew, Criena Court, Beata Geyer, Virginia Hilyard, Anna Jaaniste, Gillian Lavery, Diane McCarthy, James Nguyen, Margaret Roberts,  Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Ioulia Terizis and India Zegan.   

Opening Friday 9 May 6-8pm.

The discussion on Sunday 11 May starts at 2pm and aims to be a Fair Isle debrief and to also broaden to discuss broader aspects of exhibition practice. The artists, writers and general public are invited to attend and participate. The discussion will be recorded as part of the Fair Isle documentation. 
Diane McCarthy
Gillian Lavery

India Zegan
Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos Mermaid 2014
Front-back: Virginia Hilyard, Anna Jaaniste, Margaret Roberts,
Beata Geyer, Gillian Lavery, Lisa Andrew
Front:Orange: Beata Geyer; black:  Margaret Roberts.
Back L-R Criena Court, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos,  Diane McCarthy
L-R: Lisa Andrew, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Margaret Roberts

3.5.14

ISOBEL JOHNSTON on Fair Isle 4


 The Fourth Dimension: Exhibition C/D the 4th Phase

This phase of Fair Isle both brings in work of artists Lisa Andrew, Criena Court, Virginia Hilyard, Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen, Margaret Roberts, and Ioulia Terizis to the project and carries across the work of Justin Henderson, Andrew Simmons, Clara Chow, Virginia Versa, Sardar Sinjawi and John Von Sturmer.

The concept of journeys presents itself as one strand within Fair Isle and in this iteration we are presented with all sorts of forms of transport: from luxury liners to the intersections of Sydney’s suburban transport system, the rear view mirrors that follow you around the room, the ominously glowing jellies growing mold in the corner, the black shapes that punctuate your transit from one work to another, to works that allude to a journey of great fiction, kaleidoscopic doors of perception and ghosts that shadow us through deep space.

Lisa Andrew’s work juxtaposes nature and culture—bricks and mortar below pins that point to map locations with images of the growth rings of trees. Her umbrella plays off the ‘real’ and its simulacra in the transformation and substitution of material from the natural world to the manmade, and seems to float up away from us. All the while Justin Henderson’s ocean liner offers the promise of ‘minimalist luxury’ with all the extras.

Ioulia Terrizis’s quietly discrete work ‘Neutrino’ marks space in a different way, both inscribing and photographing space. Here, we see the real and a representation of it as perceived space, with three dots marking points of reference that coexist in 2 and 3 dimensions. In this elegant work, the journey is into subatomic space with the neutrino, the ghost and boundary rider, from another dimension of time and space taking us on to another place altogether.

Whereas Sanjay Sinjawi reminds us, we are all on of life’s journey. He highlights the transitory nature of life using remnants/shreds of his own clothing along with photographs taken in different locations of him dressed in their complete form from his past. There is, again, a notion of the autobiographical in Clara Chow’s video work that contains her lips and human hair, inviting us to consider identity (politics) here evoking something of the personal as political or identity politics.

Virginia Hilyard’s ‘Voyage au centre de le terre’ presents us with a work recalling Jules Verne’s novel by the same name. Hilyard has scratched away the mirrored surface of the glass of this wardrobe door to reveal the shape of the glacier Snaefellsjokull as it was in 1890, almost double the size it is today. It reflects the shattered vanity in our belief that we control nature, in a work where science fiction and global warming meet in an oval looking glass. That same looking glass shape is still apparent in the contemporary rear view mirrors of Victoria Versa’s work that directs us to glimpse what is passing.

 Margaret Roberts’s ‘Blp’ indeed ‘articulates’ the space, providing a grammatical nuance in the spirit of and with reference to ‘punctuation marks’, evoking work of Richard Artschwager. Roberts’s works are scaled and positioned in relation to other works her Blps ‘Alice in Wonderland-like’ grow and shrink in accordance to their companion pieces. A large, outline version surrounds Andrew Simmons’ 607X (Riley to Barclay) and suggested, to this viewer as least, a complete racetrack. Simmons’ sections of road are made of layers of wonky felt and bitumen paint and engage us with the idea of the substructure of roads, with particular reference to those continually remodeled to adapt to the expanding population of suburban Sydney.

Peering into Criena Court’s work ‘Proposal #9’ we lose all our usual co-ordinates for gauging space. It presents us a glimpse of the coloured wonder of the world and the vastness of space where a perception of scale folds in on itself and true to its description; the work challenges our perception of both image making and reality. Kaleidoscopic it holds us in its mesmerizing space.

Glowing greenly in the corner is Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen’s work ‘Warning: Fair Use’ presented a collection of toxic mold agar jellies. This is a time-based journey, as it bloomed, grew and developed over the period of exhibition. Its growth gives a sense of accretion to John Von Strummer’s work Troubadour; its white, polystyrene surface seemed to emerge from, rather than adhere to, the wall. A tiny Blp by Roberts dialogues with another of his works ‘Found domino’—scaled to size, it sits alongside it on the floor.

If the role of an ARI can be described, but not limited to, a site for experimentation, a laboratory a launch pad and a forum, then all of these concepts apply equally to Fair Isle. As a framework, Fair Isle has allowed artists great scope through the presentation of a series of interconnected exhibitions where trace, substitution and dialogue intersect to both enable but also to frame the nature of the work that each artist brings to this event. The time-based aspect of the project as a whole will ultimately be more clearly apprehended in its documented format, as are many durational works and all great journeys.

2.5.14

FAIR ISLE 4 OPEN TILL 5pm SUNDAY 4 MAY


Open 11am - 5pm Friday 2 May - Sunday 4 May

Front L-R: Lisa Andrew Andrew Simmons Margaret Roberts

Victoria Versa Mirror (detail)

Lisa Andrew

 Front-back: Margaret Roberts Andrew Simmons Criena Court
 FrontR-backL: Andrew Simmons, Margaret Roberts,Virginia Hilyard, Sardar Sinjawi
Ioulia Terizis
Victoria Versa Mirror (Smile)

Criena Court
Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen