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This Saturday @ NGA

You have just this Saturday to catch Jan Hogan’s exhibition Becoming at the ANU School of Art Gallery – open from 12.00 to 5.00. This is an exhibition of prints and drawings which are the culmination of the artist’s various modes of engagement with and imprints from the land of Gundaroo Common made during her candidature as a PhD student at the School. The work above is Becoming, 2009 (woodblock matrix on floor, Japanese woodblock with Sumi ink and builder’s pigment on Kozo paper affixed to wall with rice glue, 448 x 732cm).

Jan has written about her approach to representing the land in Art Monthly Australia (June 2009): “My aim is not to draw a landscape but to find a new way of drawing the land.  I think of it as an open dialogue with materials, thoughts, the elements and the process of drawing all contributing.  The land and I need to come to some sort of understanding.  I want to feel my way in using all my senses rather than looking at the land using my perception and analytical skills.  Is it possible to convey the smell, the wind playing with the hair on my arms, the shifting shadows and the weight of the land in a drawing?

The work above is from the Emergence series, 2006-9, (Sumi ink, charcoal and Gundaroo dirt on Rives BFK, 80 x 80cm). “I lay the paper on the ground in the shadows of a large Yellow Box Tree.  The damp paper moulds itself to the indentations left by cows wallowing in the shade.  The roots of the tree make their presence felt under the paper and the shadows of the branches make extraordinary patterns on the surface.  The white paper no longer stares back awaiting a mark.  Instead it acts like a mark in the land.  My foreign piece of paper has gone and made the first step in the dialogue.  It reveals the traces of other presences and the encompassing nature of the tree…

“The paper retains traces of the land, the tree, the cattle, and the events of the day but what about human traces?  This is meant to be a dialogue after all, with as much input from the all elements as possible.  I start to put fingerprints on the paper.  I rub my finger on some compressed charcoal and then press on to the paper, accentuating the dark areas.  Gradually the fingerprints build to a multitude, acting like great crowds of people drifting across the land.  The ghostly quality of the prints as they shift in tone suggests that this is a reflection over time.  The drawing has made the past present in the now.  Generations of people have come and gone and left traces on the land.

“Something has begun to happen in the drawing, I am becoming aware that this piece of land has been traversed for centuries and continues to provide sustenance for both the community of people and the wider community of the environment.  The fingerprints amongst the dirt are poignant reminders of our eventual decline back into the earth.  What traces will be left of us?”

More images on iconophilia

By now all readers should be subscribing to Artdaily, yes?

Each year the full-time postgraduate students who are enrolled in one of the Coursework or Research degrees of the Visual Arts Graduate Program are invited to apply for one of five ANU School of Art Graduate Materials Awards of $1000.00.

Two of these awards are funded by the Legislative Assembly Art Advisory Committee, another two awards are made by longstanding School of Art patrons Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris, and one funded through the generosity of Peter Barclay’s “King O’Malley’s Irish Pub”.

The first Legislative Assembly Art Advisory Committee Award ($1000) is awarded to James Christian a Master of Visual Effects student to enable him to better render his drawings, and to enhance his cinematographic techniques.

The second Legislative Assembly Art Advisory Committee award will be used to enable a Master of Design Arts student to employ high quality plywood in his chair designs. The awardee is Kenichi Sato.

The Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris award will enable a PhD student in Painting to develop a new suspension system for her painted forms. The awardee is Nicky Dickson.

The second Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris award will enable a PhD student in Textiles to enhance the scale of her work in laser cut fabrics. The awardee is Meredith Hughes.

The Peter Barclay “King O’Malley’s Irish Pub” Award will enable a PhD student in Painting to construct an apparatus which will enable her to safely control the decomposition of deceased animals and the transfer of the resultant materials to Belgian linen – the only material that will withstand the complex chemical processes involved in this process.  The awardee is Vanessa Barbay.

Congratulations all.

ARTE is planning an ARTE Video Night, which the channel will broadcast on Saturday 24 October 2009 (85 videos from all over the world).

Alongside this event, SFR and ARTE will launch, for art school students and amateurs from the Web, the ARTE/SFR Video Mobile Awards.

To participate, your students must submit, between 18 June and 7 September next, one or more videos (3 maximum) to website www.sfrjeunestalents.fr/prix-concours-arte-sfr-videomobile2009/ made using a mobile phone, on the theme: “WHO WILL YOU BE IN 20 YEARS?”
To be considered, entries must not exceed 3 minutes and feature no speech (or be subtitled in French), though a soundtrack is allowed.

The ARTE/SFR Video Mobile Awards will designate a Judges’ Pick and a Web users’ Pick (3 equal winners), and the selected works given broad media coverage, both by ARTE and SFR. To that end, you will find attached a document of presentation.

If the launch of the ARTE/SFR Video Mobile Awards is of interest to you, please spread the word widely to your students and fellow professors.

To learn more and enter the competition: www.sfrjeunestalents.fr/prix-concours-arte-sfr-videomobile2009/

PS check who owns copyright!

What does it take to push the limits of performance art? Or are we on a manic quest to identify the next boundary? And what are the implications of the institutionalised context for such adventures? Read The Art Newspaper’s account of the forthcoming Marina Ambramovic retrospective at MoMA.

Read the blurb at Artdaily.org. Who was talking about the “through the wall”, “the wall is the frame” device becoming a cliche? This is Shaun Gladwell’s, MADDESTMAXIMVS: Planet & Stars Sequence, 2009, installation view, Australian Pavilion, Giardini 53rd International Art Exhibition. La Biennale Di Venezia. Photo: Josh Raymond, courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery. Now read about the real competition…

How many other examples of this device can we think of?

If you can bear any more on this topic. Click here.

…beneath the radar. Opens 3 June… Curator Ria Vlavianos writes: Radar brings together 5 artists who share connecting points of interest through the activity of painting.  The title of this exhibition pertains to the group rather than suggesting a grand narrative.  A key consideration amongst the 5 artists is the relationship between reductionism and representation in painting.  An investigation of this relationship enters into a visual dialogue that seeks to accentuate the most essential elements in a painting in order to resonate an idea. This approach considers painting and its processes as investigation into the multiple possibilities that sustain painting as an open dialogue. At the same time the materiality of paint remains a core element for each artist.  During discussions about painting, it occurred to us that it is both the amplification of paint and paint as an amplifier that allows for meaning to be layered on and imbedded within the surface of the canvas.  The distillation of the subject through the materiality of paint provides a visual vibration of meaning that may be seen and felt rather than described in its entirety.  Once again, this approach to painting invites the viewer to participate in the experience of looking in order to open up other possible readings of the surface.

This is Catherine Chalier in an essay: The Prohibition of Representation

at this interesting site…

“Because it arrests time and substitutes the immutable for the fugitive, art constitutes, for its despisers, “a caricature of life”, it causes a fall into the night without allowing the hope of a dawn, because it withdraws from any promise as from any future. This is why, according to Levinas, art belongs neither to the order of revelation nor to that of creation “whose movement continues in an exactly opposite direction.” The image and the sculpture indeed proscribe the creative surge of life; they immobilize it within a moment suddenly metamorphosed into an unsurpassable destiny. “Eternally the smile of the Mona Lisa that is about to blossom, will not blossom,” eternally the future will remain suspended. The painted or sculpted faces are thus locked up in their destiny, or in their powerlessness to force the future; impervious to the least quivering of life, they remain subjected to the order of an impersonal and blind necessity.”