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.
17.5.14
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 (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.
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.
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
9.5.14
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.
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| Diane McCarthy |
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| Gillian Lavery |
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| India Zegan |
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Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos Mermaid 2014
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| Front-back: Virginia Hilyard, Anna Jaaniste, Margaret Roberts, Beata Geyer, Gillian Lavery, Lisa Andrew |
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| Front:Orange: Beata Geyer; black: Margaret Roberts. Back L-R Criena Court, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Diane McCarthy |
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| L-R: Lisa Andrew, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Margaret Roberts |
3.5.14
ISOBEL JOHNSTON on Fair Isle 4
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.
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
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| Ioulia Terizis |
Victoria Versa Mirror (Smile)
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| Criena Court |
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| Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen |
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