AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, August 7, 2010.

WHAT Dadang Christanto: Behind the Veil
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbostsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au 

Though intricately beautiful, Indonesian-born artist Dadang Christanto’s new series of acrylic-on-linen works find their grounding in the silence of grief. Part of long term point of enquiry into the effects of organised human violence, Behind the Veil’s striking, large-scale paintings tell the story of the female ethnic Chinese victims of a wave of racially fuelled violence that swept through Jakarta in May 1998, which left over 1000 people dead and witnessed the rape of countless innocent women. For the most part, Christanto’s paintings take the form of straight-on portraits, the beautifully ornate pattern, lightness and colour of the veil forging a stark contrast against the expressionless face and bleak, burnt backdrops. A common motif is that of pixelation. In the face of all the has happened, Christanto’s subjects “self-censor”. Pixels cover their mouths, ears and eyes; their trauma to be kept forever silent, their experience to remain confidential. It’s a poignant, but still incredibly life-affirming collection. Indeed, there is a true, unyielding sense of resistance here. Though victims of unspeakable acts, these women have transcended the experience through sheer resilience alone. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until August 28. Gallerysmith at Melbourne Art Fair: Stall A61, today 11am-7pm, tomorrow 11am-5pm. 

WHAT How Nature Speaks
WHERE Arc One Gallery, 45 Finders Lane, city, 9650 6710, arc1gallery.com

There’s hardly an unconvincing work amid this striking group show of Arc One represented artists. Featuring Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Justine Khamara, Murray Fredericks, Janet Laurence Sam Shmith, Imants Tillers and Huang Xu, what makes How Nature Speaks so strong is its artists’ very much singular approaches to the curatorial brief. Murray Fredericks’ vast, immersive landscape photograph Salt 304 captures a tempest of storm clouds unleashing upon a central Australian desert salt plain, the sight so alien as to seem apocalyptic. Sam Shmith’s digitally layered photo work – which renders a darkened, night time landscape from the window of a moving train – seems frame our contemporary knowledge of landscape or nature in terms of a disconnected, cinematic experience. Huang Xu’s highly detailed, isolated studio photographs of plants and refuse and Janet Laurance’s layered glass, ink and photographic works, meanwhile, point to the incursions and connections between humanity and nature. Justine Khamara’s sculptural work proves something of a standout. A glacial mountain rendered with shards of mirrored glass, it is concurrently dangerous and beauteous. But beyond that, its reflective surfaces return our refracted, fractured gaze. It is a vessel for personal, subjective, self-analysis. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until August 21. Arc One Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair: Stall F24, today 11am–7pm, tomorrow 11am–5pm. 

WHAT Julia deVille: Night’s Plutonian Shore
WHERE Sophie Gannon Gallery, 2 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 0857, sophiegannongallery.com.au 

While their engagement with Greek and Roman mythology might suggest a certain theatricality, the most affecting of Julia deVille’s taxidermy and jewellery works possess a more elegiac quality. Adorned with diamonds, white gold and other precious metals, her various creatures seem frozen in time. Though death is an obvious precursor to the works, what we’re afforded is a moment of life frozen in time. A stillborn piglet adorned with diamond-dusted snout sits proudly on a plinth; a tiny, stillborn fawn rests gently in what seems like sleep; a golden gosling, replete with diamond and white gold headpiece, surveys the room, head tilted in observation. Though anchored in the Edgar Allan Poe poem The Raven – and its reference to the Greek myth of Hades, the god of the underworld – delving too deeply into deVille’s thematic gestures proves almost a distraction. What really makes her work transcend is its remarkably sensitive treatment of a subject that has passed. Though mournful, these works quietly celebrate a life, or a life that should have been. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until August 21. Sophie Gannon Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair: Stall D11, today 11am–7pm, tomorrow 11am–5pm. 

WHAT The Stony Rises Project
WHERE RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston Street, city, 9925 1717, rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

The Stoney Rises Project represents an un-layering of place. Developed by the RMIT Design Resign Research Institute, this vast group show brings together a host of architects, designers and artists in an examination of the histories and potential futures of Victoria’s Western District. It provides several fascinating vantages. There are several highlights, including Carmel Wallace’s photographs and assemblages to Gini Lee’s layer and object strewn mapping works. Mon to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm, until September 11. 

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CATALOGUE ESSAY - MICHELLE TRAN
Published: Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne, August 2010.

Michelle Tran: Sky High

There is a sense of slippage to these moments. They exist between contexts. Time is loosened; ever so gently unhinged. Settings and subjects are set adrift; they levitate between states, chapters of a life. 

But moments they are. Planned and composed; highly formalised, unadorned and economical. They are this way for a reason. 

The photography of Michelle Tran represents an incursion into the fabric of personal history and identity. Flatly and evenly lit, clean and geometric – thoroughly staged – her works ripple with personal symbolism, signifiers and data. Formalism is a tool by which she loosens her subjects from their milieu, or “makes strange”.

It is a quality that extends throughout Sky High, Tran’s debut solo exhibition. Across a suite of at first seemingly disparate photographs, we witness floating points in a lineage. But these moments, these markers or signifiers, are by no means passive. There is a tension and reconciliation at work here: the self-definition of young adulthood and the relics, resonances and aspirations of an outer-suburban Vietnamese-Australian youth.

In one work, a high jumper is captured mid flight, a harsh flash illuminating her body as she twists over the horizontal bar. The gesture of a hand, the tense muscle contours of the back and shoulders, the final kick of the legs – she flies stark, bright and heroic into the flat, alien black of the night sky, free from the Earth’s surface if just for an instant. It is beyond metaphor. Tran was a competitive high jumper as a schoolgirl in Dandenong. Here, she photographs a shadow of herself. 

It is a shift. Where much of her previous work consisted of restaged self-portraits, Sky High sees her import protagonists into the frame.

A young man holds a large white pigeon, as if an offering. Though he grows a beard, his appearance seems boyish: his skin washed out by the flat, unforgiving flash, the bird huge and imposing in his hand. The fact that the pigeon is one of Tran’s father’s pets adds another layer. The image is untethered, neither here nor there. A figure from Tran’s present grips a glyph from her past.

There are further markers and relics. There is the roguish cat, held at arm’s length in childish mischievousness; there is the young woman who could be mistaken for a girl. Elaborate, garish pearl-white curtains spill to the floor, only to be mirrored, wraithlike, on spotlessly polished floorboards, their presence extended in an echo of suburban domestic pride. A waterfall tumbles from the sky, its limits seemingly unreachable.

Much of the work’s poignancy comes down to Tran’s technique. Not unlike US photographer Roe Ethridge, it is her stylistic reductionism – her bare, geometric compositions and flat, impossibly even lighting – that allows her subjects to speak in such full voice. By loosening them from context she exposes their complexity.

But this exhibition, one feels, is still very much a personal body of work. As much as anything, Sky High seems an allegory for the ambiguousness of identity. While our lives can metamorphose, we are anchored however latently to our past.

Dan Rule

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THIS WEEK IN ART - STEVEN ASQUITH: STORM CONCEPTS
Published: Broadsheet, August 4, 2010. 

Revising traditional notions of landscape painting via contemporary materiality and abstraction, Steven Asquith’s new exhibition at Utopian Slumps is a striking melange of earthly chaos. By Dan Rule.

Steven Asquith’s series of 14 new drawings hardly espouse a conventional reading of landscape. The black chalkboard enamel ‘storm clouds’, Posca pen ‘fumes’ and tiny pencil-and-ink ‘bubblegum acid rain’ that comprise Storm Concepts paint a tumultuous, abstracted vista of the contemporary experience.

Landscapes, however, they are. “I wanted to use nature as a metaphor for our contemporary psychological states,” says Asquith, one of the founding directors of respected gallery Block Projects. “Each of these little storms are a take on our current environment and nature, but also a reference to the great Western tradition and history of landscape painting and artists like Turner, who would use the skies to display emotional turmoil. By using contemporary materials, this work kind of adapts that idea to evoke the schizophrenic nature of contemporary, urban life.”

It’s a quality that resonates throughout Storm Concepts. Indeed, the strong cloud motifs that dominate Asquith’s works prove far more complex than they first appear. With proximity, layers of intricate pencil webbing and minute ink textures reveal themselves; swirls of colour entrap clusters of Posca markings, revealing – as the artist puts it – “unique psychological and ideological layers.”

But according to Asquith, who has worked with the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in London, Exit Art in New York and co-founded The Ship Gallery artist-run initiative in London, his practice is grounded in a far more primal sensibility. “To me, art’s about what you can do with the things you have in your hands,” he offers. “It’s about mark-making and drawing and painting as much as any other academic idea that’s holding it all together. Art exists in the alchemy between the artist and the materials. It’s about the variation in the mark-making and drawing and painting as much as any other academic idea that’s holding it all together.”

Steven Asquith’s Storm Concepts opens this Thursday evening at Utopian Slumps and runs until August 28.

www.utopianslumps.com

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WHERE ALL IS (NOT) FAIR AND WELL
Published: Broadsheet, August 3, 2010. 

Conceived and curated by three of Melbourne art’s finest minds, new unofficial satellite event NotFair offers an artist-focussed alternative to the Melbourne Art Fair. By Dan Rule.

Aside from flashing an almost obligatorily mischievous grin, Ashley Crawford is resolute in at least one sentiment regarding his and artists Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd’s inaugural NotFair. The cheekily named satellite event possesses nothing in the way of anti-Melbourne Art Fair sentiments.

“It’s not anti,” he urges, waving a hand by way of punctuation. “It’s an alternative approach. There’s a big difference between what the galleries do and what Melbourne Art Fair does and what we’re doing. I mean, we’re taking 10 per cent on sales. We’re not going to be making profits out of this thing.” He pauses, before giving another salacious grin: “It’s not ultimately established to rape and pillage everybody around, put it that way.” 

Billed as an event that merges the “curatorial notion of a major biennale with the commercial potential of an art fair”, NotFair’s title and raison d’être is more an assertion about its participants’ experience of the commercial art world than a stab at Melbourne’s major commercial art exposition. Featuring 32 of Australia’s most undervalued or underrepresented artists, the not-for-profit event aims to eschew the high commissions and outlays of the commercial art model and the gallery focus of the Melbourne Art Fair to, in essence, bring the artists directly to an audience.

“There is that element of NotFair being ‘not the fair’,” offers Crawford, one of Australia’s pre-eminent art writers, critics and authors. “But it is, I think we all agree, making the statement that a lot of artists’ careers are not all that fair. They have to fork out on materials, lose 40 per cent on sales to gallerists and then they get taxed on top of it, so they essentially get hit three times over.”

Held at a warehouse space in a Richmond backstreet, NotFair will see up-and-coming prospects such as Melbourne’s Camilla Tadich, Shannon Smiley and Jake Walker share space with gifted Sydney-based British artist Giles Alexander, Japanese-born sculptor and installation artist Akira Akira and performative photo-artist Mimi Kelly, among countless others. But the line-up isn’t limited to the young. NotFair is equally defined by its engagement with comparative veterans such as Bernard Sachs and Murray McKeich.

“A number of artists reach a point in their career where they’re producing really A-grade work, but for whatever reason they haven’t caught the lucky break,” says Sam Leach, now a household name after winning both the Archibald and Wynne Prize this year. “Maybe they haven’t been curated in the right show or the right prize.

“The fact that the Melbourne Art Fair is on and you have 30,000 people traipsing around in the mood for looking at art, we’re just trying to say: ‘While you’re looking at that, why don’t you look at these guys as well because they’re good too’,” he continues. “It’s just saying that there are these people out there that do great work but it’s hard to actually find their work. Maybe they show in a lot of artist-run spaces or galleries that are a little out of the way. This is just a way of making it more accessible to people.”

The genesis for the project stretches back almost two years, when Leach and Tony Lloyd were in London for the Frieze Art Fair. “We just began to pick up on the fact that there were all these events that go alongside Frieze,” he recalls. “There are satellite art fairs, but also a whole lot of group shows that happen at the same time, and it just seemed to us like there was an opportunity to do something like that in Melbourne.”

Suffice to say, the event took on a life of its own, soon attracting an esteemed 12-strong curatorial advisory panel, including the likes Melbourne University’s Chris McAuliffe, Centre for Contemporary Photography’s Mark Feary, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces’ Alexie Glass and Utopian Slumps’ Melissa Loughnan. This board also counts the Honourable Paul Guest QC among its ranks and a host of high-profile sponsors. To top it off, NotFair will host the inaugural Arkley Prize.

For Crawford, the level interest has been overwhelming. “It was just one of those things where as soon as you started talking to people, they got excited,” he says. “It really was a runaway train and we were left thinking, ‘What’s happened?’. It really has taken a life of its own. It wasn’t calculated; it wasn’t planned that way. It was a fun little curated show that suddenly morphed into something else. People got behind it and expected us to take it seriously, so we had to.”

Indeed, before it has even opened NotFair has found supporters in places they’d never considered. “The name has really caught a lot of people’s imagination,” offers Leach. Adds Crawford: “We have a fairly mainstream board behind us now, and somebody did raise it in a meeting: ‘Doesn’t NotFair sound a little bit whingy?’ and all the corporate guys were like ‘No!’. They love it and they really understand about things not being fair to the artists. It might be surprising to some, but a lot of these guys in the banking industry and the legal industry recognised that element straight away and really wanted to get behind it.”

And for NotFair’s organisers, who already of plans for future events in both Australia and the wider Asia-Pacific region, it’s precisely the reaction they had hoped for.

“It’s a real vindication of putting these artists in front of a broader crowd,” says Leach smilingly. “We assumed that people would be interested because the art is good, and they are. To my mind, having an additional event like this can only add to the Melbourne Art Fair. It’s just another reason for people to actually go and see art.”

NotFair runs August 5–8 at 79 Stephenson Street, Richmond.

www.notfair.com.au

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 31, 2010. 

WHAT Lin Onus: Meaning of Life
WHERE Counihan Gallery, 233 Sydney Road, Brunswick, 9389 8622, moreland.vic.gov.au

This stunning survey of late Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus finds its grounding in the translation and interface of visual languages. Working across various print-based mediums throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Onus’s work pairs traditional techniques with a kind of contemporary take on landscape and naturalist painting. There are several standouts. While his early linocuts possess a potent political dimension – especially works like Quadroon’s Dilemma, which sees a man at crossroads, one path leading the bright city lights and the other to the bush – his later screenprints, created at Port Jackson Press, make for a incisive mergence of styles and cultural outputs. Works such as Garkman, Goonya na bilda and the lovely Gumbirri Garginingi see Onus use traditional rrark patterns, textures and colouration to render native frogs, turtles and fish, only to use an array of layered printing techniques and Western landscape styles elsewhere in the works. His collaborative series with Brisbane-based artist Michael Eather, which charts the far-fetched adventures and tall stories of a dingo and stingray, is another joy. Poetically and graphically, Onus’s work espouses the true potential for transcending cultural difference. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, Sun 1pm–5pm, until August 7.

WHAT Group 03
WHERE Murray White Room, Sargood Lane (off Exhibition Street, between Flinders Street and Flinders Lane), city, 9663 3204, murraywhiteroom.com

Highlights abound in this happily divergent show of Murray White Room’s represented artists. Curated to coincide with the Melbourne Art Fair, Group 03 traces a host of diverse painting, print, photographic and sculptural styles and techniques. Tony Clark’s brooding acrylic and permanent marker ink paintings tower above the far end of the space. Part of his ongoing Sections from Clark’s Myriorama series, the panelled works subvert the idealised 19th Century landscape paintings with dramatic shifts of palette and the removal of core visual cues and themes. A kind of abject horizon dominates, explosions of lurid blue staining the sky. Elsewhere, Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s series of opaque digital print and etched glass works, Alex Pittendrigh’s bronze sculptures and Lyndall Walker’s stunning pair of photographic portraits prove similarly impressive. Perhaps the most surprising suite of works, however, are Eliza Hutchison’s spectacular shredded Twilight movie posters. Comprising two photographic prints and an incredible, bouffant like sculpture, she weaves intricately hand-cut paper strands into flowing, hair-like locks, plaits and knots. In the process, she reduced Hollywood celebrity culture to an ornate rubble of disposable fragments and slivers. Tues to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until August 18.

WHAT Sean O’Carroll: Psychologies
WHERE New North Editions, 15a Railway Place, Fairfield, 9018 3081, newnorth.com.au

Sean O’Carroll’s large-scale photo-works are of the body and mind. In each of the superimposed portraits that comprise Psychologies, a central protagonist is depicted at work or in their domestic environs, only to be observed by their ghostlike naked double – the bluster, fears and emotional baggage stripped clean. These are not stereotypically beautiful people, perfect people or necessarily photogenic people. They are real. Warts, hairy backs and all. But in their naked states, these are people without judgement; they are unsullied by the troubles of life. Their role seems to be one of support for their clothed, working selves. In the adjoining series, O’Carroll captures three young boys playing with toy guns, the dichotomy between childhood innocence and young boys’ fascination with fictional violence stark for all to see. Tues to Sun 10am–4pm, until August 7. 

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THIS WEEK IN ART - JULIA DEVILLE: ‘NIGHT’S PLUTONIAN SHORE’
Published: Broadsheet, July 28, 2010. 

Julia deVille’s elegiac taxidermy creatures and ornate jewellery pieces are a solemn remembrance of life. By Dan Rule. 

Julia deVille has been cast in something of an eerie light during her relatively brief but extremely active artistic career. Merging taxidermy and animal skeletal structures with classic gold- and silver-smithing techniques, her jewellery and her artwork seem ensconced in the spectre of death.

Chat with the New Zealand-born artist, however, and you’ll be left with a very different impression. “People seem to think my work is about death, but I think it’s more about life and about the celebration of life,” she says. “I like combining creatures with these materials that are seen as precious, because it poses a whole new set of questions about the value and preciousness of life. People don’t put value on a mouse, for example, but what happens if you put diamonds in the mouse’s eyes?”

Based around Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, Deville’s new exhibition Night’s Plutonian Shore – which opens this week at Sophie Gannon Gallery and also features a suite of collaborative works with jeweller William Griffiths and artist Aly Aitken – continues her fascination with Greek and Roman mythology and casts various creatures in the role of psychopomps, the animals that would guide spirits down the river Styx to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.

The pieces include a diminutive tabby kitten, a stillborn fawn, a diamond-dusted piglet and golden gosling wearing a diamond and white-gold headpiece, which was a friend’s lifelong pet. “She’d raised it from a chick and it actually thought that she was its mother,” deVille says. “So it was all pretty emotional and there was this kind of overwhelming sense of importance to that piece.”

Indeed, for deVille, who has been fascinated with taxidermy since she was child and only works with animals that have died from natural causes, there is nothing more valuable than a life. “It comes back to that question of what’s really precious,” she says. “Like with a stillborn deer, there’s this creature that sort of lost out on having its life altogether – it didn’t even make it – and there’s a preciousness and value to working with a creature like that.”

Julia deVille’s Night’s Plutonian Shore is on show until August 21 at Sophie Gannon Gallery.

www.sophiegannongallery.com.au

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BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010. 

The Roots
How I Got Over
****1/2 

The Roots are a rarity in the rap world: a live ensemble of limitless musical scope that is still very much part of East Coast hip hop’s lineage. Ninth studio record How I Got Over – led by drummer and musical director ?uestlove and MC Black Thought – is one of the Philly crew’s richest and most realised yet. Melting between swooning soul, symphonic atmosphere, arcane folk explorations (Right On even features Joanna Newsom) and raw, kick/snare signatures, the record traces Black Thought’s narrative of a man’s journey through solitude and estrangement, to eventually find glimmers of hope and promise. It’s a tragic, moving, thoroughly rewarding trip. 

DefJam/Universal 

Actress
Splazsh
**** 

Splazsh, the latest in a string of esoteric renderings from Darren Cunningham (aka Actress), proves an intriguing creature. Lurking amid stealthy, minimal techno introversions for much of this record – check the slow-burn luminosity of opener Hubble, Get Ohn and the mechanised stridence of Bubble Butts and Equations – the South London producer isn’t afraid to completely flip his script. Flashes of exuberance pulse from the darkness; sexed-up vocal chops shudder and stutter atop bouncing tech-funk drum lines; early ‘80s synth palettes phase, cut, scythe and refract. It’s immediately accessible and obscure, clear and opaque. Cunningham describes his own sound as “RnB contrete” for good reason. 

Honest Jon/Fuse 

Big Boi
Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty
****1/2 

Sir Lucious Left Foot is hip hop dynamism personified. From the skewed Southern bounce of opener Daddy Fat Sax and uncanny pop hooks of Turns Me On, to the sticky, synthetic funk of Shutterbug and spiking horns and surging operatics of General Patton, OutKast co-pilot Big Boi’s hugely anticipated solo debut is as wildly divergent, magnetically playful and, quite frankly, brilliant as his finest work with Andre 3000. Big Boi is electric here, plying his dense, cheeky, web-like rhyme schemes over a wild assemblage beats and hooks. One of hip hop’s revolutionary protagonists has re-emerged in the most emphatic of fashions. 

DefJam/Universal 

Eloquor
Charge
***1/2 

Eloquor does a lot right on Charge, his second long-player in as many years. His ploy – an effective one – is to keep things simple. Across a suite of classic, rugged boom-bap, the no-frills Melbourne MC talks story and conjures time and place rather than preach trumped up ethics and philosophy. And it shows on tracks like the orchestral brood of MT MF, DJ Premier-like piano hook of Pressure’s On and the sombre study of parenting and youth, Hey Folks. Charge does run a little off the rails when things get too maximal. But for the most part, this sturdy, gritty record reveals a rapper who recognises the power of understatement.

Myspherical/Obese 

Oval
O
****

Markus Popp’s latest offering as Oval is very much a sum of its parts. Across two discs, almost two hours and a whopping 70 tracks, O explores the stunning, shimmering limits of Popp’s electronic interface. Unlike his acclaimed work of the mid ‘90s, this swathe of miniatures place elemental treated guitar and fragile percussion centre stage. The results are nothing beauteous. So minimal are Popp’s sketches – so stripped of anything but the essential melodic and structural components – that they assume an almost reverential posture. This is electronic music, deconstructed and purified. O is a treat for the senses.

Thrill Jockey/Fuse 

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M.I.A. - ‘MAYA’
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010.

M.I.A.
/\/\ /\ Y /\
****1/2
(XL/Remote Control)

The abrasive, low bit-rate squall of the opening few minutes of M.I.A.’s third record /\/\ /\ Y /\ obliterates any hunch that motherhood – not to mention the runaway crossover success of 2007 hit single Paper Planes – may have tempered Maya Arulpragasam’s penchant for brazen provocation. Exploding out of the political affronts of opening skit The Message (“Hand bone connects to the internet connected to the Google connected to the Government” recites an eerily monotone male voice), Steppin Up writhes amid a tempest of chainsaws, power drills and industrial metal guitars. It says a lot about /\/\ /\ Y /. Indeed, this is far from the sound of an artist cashing in on recent chart success. While there are countless hues of light and shade here – the auto-tuned pop of XXXO and the narcotic, fogged-out groove of Lovalot included – it’s uncompromising moments like the propulsive dubstep signatures, plunging frequencies and gun shot snares of Story to be Told and lo-fi noise attacks of lead single Born Free (which features a choice sample of ‘70s New York noise savants Suicide) that characterise this challenging, intensely energised oeuvre. That said, perhaps the most uplifting track here is of an entirely different ilk. Framed by synthetic reggae-pop hook, It Takes a Muscle is the closest M.I.A. has ever ventured toward the ballad. We may know Arulpragasam as the urban music agitator, the daughter of the Tamil militant separatist, but this proves a stunning moment of emotional vulnerability amongst the bluster.

DAN RULE 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 24, 2010.

WHAT Bindi Cole: Sistagirls
WHERE Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, 9804 7366, nelliecastangallery.com

Melbourne-based Wathaurung photo artist Bindi Cole has built a reputation on her performative, often highly personal traversals of identity. Set amid the remote Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, new series Sistagirls proves one of her most visually lush and surprisingly sensitive bodies of work yet. The show captures members of Tiwi Islands transgender community – which apparently makes up around two per cent of the 2500 strong population – adorned in full, glamorous garb and lit-up with studio lighting against a seemingly dichotomous series of island backdrops. “Jemima” poses relaxedly, one hand on a hip, a parasol in the other, on the bank of spectacular waterhole; “Bimbo”, dressed in a loose white frock, reclines on the sand of a deserted beach, a pair of what appear to be Tokwampini bird sculptures beside her; bikini-clad “Frederina” poses suggestively beside an odd, toadstool-shaped fountain. What makes Cole’s photographs so effective is their eschewal of expectation. Her stunning subjects – “Buffy”, cheekily glancing over her shoulder as she wanders across the local footy ground or “Ajay”, gazing longingly from her veranda – ever so beautifully complicate their surroundings. The aesthetics of glamour, let alone transgender glamour, are not at all part of mainstream descriptions of Tiwi Islands life. This visually rich, unmistakably tender collection adds another layer. Tues to Sat noon–5pm, until July 31.

WHAT Greatest Hits: New Basic
WHERE The Narrows, Level 2, 141 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 1534, thenarrows.org

Melbourne art-dude trio Greatest Hits – Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn – seem to have achieved a level of fandom so breathless it’s almost toxic. That said, they tend to deliver the goods, whatever those goods might be. This new exhibition at The Narrows follows countless recent shows around town and numerous choice moments, including their plastered door and cigarette-smoking rock at West Space, resin-entombed Hawaiian shirt at CCP and giant wax rainbow as part of the recent Next Wave Festival. Suffice to say, it’s filled with their usual scattering of confounding, nonetheless amusing objects and oddities. In what seems at least a material (and perhaps phonetic) continuation of the wax rainbow, a wax Rambo – a life-sized cast of Silvester Stallone’s head – sits proudly in the middle of the space. Elsewhere, a half-inflated globe filled with Listerine emits a minty-fresh aroma, while a computer screen plays a video of another computer screen playing different videos. There are some prints too; spray-painted postcards scanned and blown up to create lurid, fluorescent holiday images. It’s hard not to laugh, but in a good way. The waft of Listerine all about, New Basic is the result of three boys with an art education playing muck-about. The rest is up to you. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until August 14.

WHAT Shannon Smiley: Ordinary World
WHERE Lindberg Galleries, Level 2, 289 Flinders Lane, city, 0403 066 775, lindbergcontemporary.com.au

There’s the suggestion of an almost menacing darkness, a kind of anxious unknowing, to the dense, wild undergrowth of Shannon Smiley’s Unknown World. The young Melbourne artist’s incredibly detailed, beautifully rendered large-scale canvases are without horizon. Knotted, entwined plant-life fills all but meagre glimpses of sky and space. But it’s these precises glimpses – of depth, of setting, of context – that afford Smiley’s paintings their significance. These untamed scenes are, in fact, of an urban ilk. We begin to notice the section of chain-link fence all but consumed in the twisting branches and foliage, the thin strip of asphalt inching into the foreground. Indeed, Smiley’s works capture not the unknown of the wilderness, but the corridors of knotted green that shadow Melbourne’s train lines, stations and forgotten spaces. It makes for an interesting about face. Where these works might cast the creeping vegetation in an ominous and threatening light, the sense that the undergrowth is in the process of reclamation gives them an entirely different psychological weight. Nature is not something to fear. It just is. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm, until July 31.

WHAT Kain Picken & Rob McKenzie: A History of Manners
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com

It’s difficult to find an orientation amid this scattering of works by longtime collaborators Kain Picken and Rob McKenzie. Two hammocks, made by Colombian weavers, hang on adjoining walls, the phrase “A History of Manners” emblazoned horizontally on one work and repeated on the other. McKenzie’s trio of compact, abstract acrylic and pencil drawings seem to repeat a kind of loose, woven pattern. Like the hammocks, Picken’s lone painting – an oil-on-canvas recreation of a fabric swatch that he gave to another artist to complete – sees him remove himself from the process of production. It’s one motif from a body of work that for the most part seems little more than abstruse. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until August 7. 

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KELE OKEREKE - PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WIEGHT
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010.

With Bloc Party on indefinite hiatus, the debut solo record from frontman Kele Okereke reveals an artist in the throes of change. He tells MAG’s Dan Rule how The Boxer represented a chance to explore the world of electronica, and himself.

Talking with Kele Okereke is a little like walking on eggshells. One wrong move and the floor falls out from under you, awkward silence pervading. Tap into a vein of interest, however, and the 28-year-old will unload, streams of garrulous explanations, digressions and descriptors ricocheting every which way.

Luckily, today, there is far more of the latter. “I’ve always enjoyed dancing,” he states plainly, if not suddenly. “It’s something that I think is important, dancing, and that’s not necessarily dancing to house or techno or any of the more serious kinds of dance music,” he launches back in, talking at a million miles an hour.

“I just think going and dancing is something is something one should do as often as possible, because it’s something that’s good for you. It clears out the mind and it’s a good way to relax,” he pauses for a breath. “In this day and age it’s almost like a meditative exercise. I think it’s an important thing that people should do socially.”

In his own roundabout way, Okereke – who is chatting from New York, where he is doing press for his brand new solo record The Boxer – is justifying his renewed engagement with electronica, a quality strewn throughout The Boxer’s clutch of driving, dance-orientated rhythms and cut-and-paste aesthetics. Indeed, while Bloc Party’s thee records (breakout 2005 debut Silent Alarm, 2007’s A Weekend in the City and 2008’s more deconstructive Intimacy) have always kept electronics within earshot, Okereke’s solo venture embraces it with open arms.

“The appeal of electronic music to me is that idea that you can create anything and you’re only limited by the power of your imagination,” he urges. “It’s like there’s a million options out there.” 

Recorded in London with Glaswegian production prodigy Hudson Mohawke and in New York with Spank Rock affiliate XXXchange, The Boxer ripples with exploratory flare. Where opener Walk Tall detonates searing drones over gunshot kicks, cuts like On the Lam and Tenderoni has Okereke crooning over buried house and techno inflections, while Unholy Thoughts sees a wiry, vintage Bloc Party guitar line expand into a sea of opaque, synthetic atmospheres. It’s a trip to say the least. 

“There’s that idea that rock music has a certain authenticity in conveying emotion and that’s totally valid – the power of a great, visceral rock show is that it’s very immediate – but I think there are other things you can do and there are other ways you can convey ideas through music.” 

“I’ve never wanted my expression to be limited,” he continues. “It’s something I’ve learned not to be frightened of.” 

Okereke, however, sees the record as more of an artistic progression than a dramatic reinvention. “I feel that making Intimacy definitely paved that way for making The Boxer,” he says. “Half that record, we recorded in a really similar way, with just me and the producer editing the band’s takes together rather than us all being in a room and playing as a band.”

“So having attempted that with Intimacy, I kind of felt that with The Boxer the process was very similar. It was just me and a producer in a room, editing stuff together. So it didn’t feel that radically different.”

With Bloc Party on an indefinite break, it was more challenge of going it alone that buoyed Okereke. “Making this thing by myself was really quite rejuvenating and quite inspiring to me,” he offers.

“I didn’t know if it was going to be possible, you know. I’d never made a record by myself, I didn’t I was going to be able to do it. And there were times when it was difficult, of course, and I kept on going and I learned a lot about myself during the process.”

While many have suggested that the record’s title – and the fact that Okereke started training in kickboxing earlier in the year – was a response to an alleged racist assault by members of John Lydon’s (aka Johnny Rotten) entourage while backstage in Barcelona, Okereke refutes the suggestion, in a manner of speaking at least.

“I think the image of The Boxer has came from the idea that you have to keep going and no matter what life throws at you, you have to keep your head up high and you have to be strong,” he says.

“I think that a lot of our previous stuff as Bloc Party was more about regretting the past, where this record is about looking to the future,” he pauses. “It really feels like an optimistic record to me.”

The Boxer is out now via Wichita/Shock

Visit: iamkele.com

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