Per Formo, Vision 1, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 190 x 275 cm
Articulate project space, Sydney
497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt
Gallery hours Thur to Sun 11 - 6pm
Opening: 2 Mar 2013, 4 - 7 pmExhibition dates : 28 Feb to 24 March
Milein Cosman (UK), Judith Duquemin (Aus), Per Formo (Nor), Marlene
Sarroff ( Aus), Anke Stäcker (Ger), Vagner M Whitehead (USA)
Curated by: Judith Duquemin & Anke Stäcker
Written by: Dr Judith
Duquemin
Drift is a
multidisciplinary exhibition about flânerie in contemporary art.
The flâneur, first
postulated by French poet, Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th
century was a city
stroller and urban explorer. Saunterer, wanderer, drifter, the
deliberately aimless
pedestrian, has other guises in a post-industrial age.
Duquemin and Stäcker are
professional artists who assign a large amount of
research time to
international travel, interpreting and documenting the city and
adjacent territories,
within their respective fields. They have come together on
different continents to
curate Drift at Articulate project space in Leichhardt, Sydney.
For Vagner M Whitehead,
the mind’s wanderings are as important as the body in
motion, providing a
greater understanding between space and self, and, city and
identity. Originally from
Brazil, and currently Associate Professor of Art - New Media
at Oakland University in
Rochester, USA, Vagner works with time-based and
traditional media to provide
a parallel interpretation of the urban observer. Silver
Code is a multi-channel
video presentation about aspects of the artist’s life.
Refuse from the street,
industrial material, elastic, rubber, paper… , the ordinary
becomes the extraordinary
in Marlene Sarroff’s, Random Accumulations 1&2. They
are freestanding 2M high
stacks made up of wrapped personalized tablets that have
been subjected to a series
of ‘process actions’! Each stack appearing similar though
made different to resemble
life’s little metaphors.
A grown up doll takes a
walk in Berlin… for the series of photographs by Anke
Stäcker, titled: Gerda:
Berlin Revisited. She constructs a personal imaginary space
within the urban landscape
in her images that is informed by memories, research,
oral history and legends
from her childhood in Germany in the early 1950s.
Milein Cosman was born
during the time of the Weimar Republic (1919). She
departed Germany three
weeks before the outbreak of WW II to attend the Slade
School of Art in England.
There, and later in London she met and drew many leading
artists, writers and
musicians of the 20th century including Igor Stravinsky, Wilhelm
Furtwängler, Yehudi
Menuhin, Francis Bacon, Ernst Gombrich, Iris Murdoch, Barbara
Hepworth, TS Eliot and,
her husband Hans Keller… The etching Rhineland
Wanderer (1955) is an
evocative portrayal of her father walking along the Rhine.
On the physiology of
looking and seeing, Per Formo used simple rules and formal
structures applied to abstraction
to create the large digital image Vision 1. He refers
to these as visual
situations that disturb the automatism of visual perception, by
leading the eye to look
closer and longer and differently, perhaps as a result of
illusionism, complexity, intensity,
surprise, strangeness, repulsion. Visualizing he
says, is not a given. Per
resides in Trondheim, a 1000 year old city in Norway.
Travelling between the
hemispheres to observe differences in atmospheric light and
colour has been a
pre-occupation for Judith Duquemin since 2009. She has applied
her observations to the
digital projection titled: Reconstructed Painting: Red.
Diagonal grids navigate
colour and light to form compositions that creatively explore
optics, using experimental
processes that combine abstract, geometric, colour-field
painting with digital
image making.
The narrow street-like
interior of Articulate project space offers the art observer a
conscious and thought
provoking opportunity to enter into the role of the flâneur/
flâneuse to appreciate how
flânerie applies to multi-disciplinary visual arts practice in
contemporary art.
