Artist Index

29.7.13

blackandwhite opens Friday 2 August 6-8pm

ROOMSHEET
blackandwhite is an exhibition of work by artists Brendan Flaherty, Jane Gavan, Lesley Giovanelli, Bettina Hill, Chantal Grech, Jacek Przybyszewski, Margaret Roberts and Helen Sturgess.

The works of these eight artists are shown together partly because of their common use of black, white or tones in between, and  because their interaction with each other and the surrounding architecture will be akin to a dramatic black and white drawing in space. Individually the works use a variety of materials including plasticine, paper, neon, graphite and wool, and explore a variety of subjects such as poetry, ancient architecture, ordinaria, drawing and time, and it is hoped that their location together will give a voice to the immediate architecture as well.

Open 11am - 5pm, Friday - Sunday,  3 - 18 August

Brendan Flaherty Augury 2012
graphite on Archers paper, 186x 135cm
 Augury is an attempt to understand the nature of drawing, either as a conscious act or reactionary to the marks that preceded it in an organic act of automatic drawing. The title and ultimately the work stems from poetry in particular William Blake and suggestions of the sublime with creating an object. This piece however is not in exact alignment with the stirrings of an epiphany which is a source for Blake’s imagery. Nor is it making aspersions even negating this concept of the devine, the process itself is an act of meditation. Brendan Flaherty 2013

Jane Gavan Light louvre grip B&W 2013
Glass louvre windows, CNC cut vinyl decals,
 Light Louvre Grip B&W explores rhythm and movement suggested by graphic elements in combination with site specific materials and objects. In a refinement of the previous installation, surface pattern is balanced with the soft textures of natural light moving and changing through the windows from outside as the day passes.
Lesley Giovanelli  BLACK NIGHT 2003
18th St Studio Los Angeles 

Wool pinned over paint on wall
Lesley Giovanelli works with styrofoam shapes covered in dyed and carded wool. Her piece in blackandwhite will be a vertical column surmounted by a capital, which can be read as a tree trunk and foliage or a classical architectural form. This  conflation of nature and culture through her object and materials refers back to the architecture of the ancient Minoan cities where columns were made from inverted trees.
Bettina Hill The Shape of Paper, arcs and lines 2011 
 Paper, wood, rubber, wing nuts and bolts
 270x80x35 cm
Bettina Hill sees the extraordinary in everyday experiences, everyday objects and everyday materials. Through printmaking, photographic and sculptural works, her visual arts practice locates and documents aesthetic qualities of utilitarian objects and everyday natural phenomena.  There is potential for beauty and the fantastic in such objects as a cardboard box, paper, drinking glasses and kitchen utensils, and in such actions as a splash of water, reflected light and growing grass. With delicate manipulation of and experimentation with this ordinaria, Bettina Hill illustrates the relationship between simplicity and complexity, hand-made and machine-made, and, domestic and scientific elements.
Chantal Grech Maps and Annotations: perspex, 2011

‘a single voice’ :  neon, felt, mixed media
My interest in language lies in its potential for resonance. We not only think of words but we hear, see and feel them. They exist in the physical world. When we see a word written, the way it looks affects our interpretation; similarly when placed within a physical space words lend to their surroundings a particular tone. There is an ambiguity in the nature of language. Between the written and the spoken word lies a space and it is in this space that a specific meaning is created by an individual. But a single voice belongs not only to an individual; a community, or a people, may also speak as one. It was with the issues facing us in this moment, socially and globally, that the words were chosen for this work.  Chantal Grech, 2013

The base of the world is a void (white) 
and the world is black to imagine.
 working drawing for
Margaret Roberts Occupy Kobro (SC9) 2013
Thanks to Vicente Butron.
Occupy Kobro is a body of work-in-process in which the spatial interests of Polish/Russian artist Katarzyna Kobro are explored through the remaking of work she produced in the 1920s and 1930s. She and her artist-husband Wladyslaw Strzeminski wrote about their spatial ideas using the term unizmOccupy Kobro explores ways of remaking her sculpture that allow her spatial concerns to be interpreted more overtly today, and that also allow time to be telescoped. In blackandwhite her Spatial Composition 9 is remade in 16mm white engineering felt to allow visitors to complete it by literally occupying it (bending it over their arm, over their back, etc). It is also to be remade in a large wall drawing that visitors occupy through physically being in the space. This project is also in debt to the visitor-activated work of Franz Erhard Walther, and to Lesley Giovanelli who first brought it to my attention many years ago. It is also is part of a broader project that explores relationships artworks form with the space in which they are located. Margaret Roberts 2013
Helen Sturgess Drawing Breath
(D. Breath and other stories), plastic and paper, 2012

This series of work began as a desire to inhabit the ink on paper worlds I draw and has become a part of my exploration of the boundaries between drawing and sculpture. Paper’s seductiveness is celebrated - divorced from its support role it becomes the active drawing material, scribing in space. Plasticine has all the connotations of child’s play and is one of the most basic of sculptural modelling materials. I use it in this series to replace ink in the environment, allowing the work to flow between the two and three dimensional. Helen Sturgess 2013