ARCADE FIRE - ‘THE SUBURBS’
Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
****
(Spunk/EMI) 

The notion of a third chapter in the Arcade Fire oeuvre hasn’t sat comfortably for many pundits. The Montreal collective’s 2004 debut Funeral and 2007 follow-up Neon Bible were so universally celebrated that to many, third album The Suburbs was almost going to be a disappointment by default. Luckily, from the jangling piano, subtly building orchestration and haze-drenched volume of its opener and title track, this hour-long, 16-sketch epic is anything but. Indeed, The Suburbs is a record brimming with swathes of sonic, melodic and lyrical detail. But while Win Butler and co have never lacked artist bombast, this album finds its orientation seems as much in temperance and balance of potentially divergent strands as the booming, baroque projection of ideas. There are some fine examples. The maximalist orchestrations of Rococo and the flurrying strings of duet Empty Room rub shoulders with the funereal phrases and shimmering drones of Half Light I and the odd acoustic strumming patterns of Suburban War, while elsewhere, the elegiac Sprawl I (Flatland) gives way to the pulsing, Kate Bush-esque electronic hook of Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). Lyrically, too, The Suburbs walks something of a tightrope between opposing forces. Where Funeral mourned the passing of youth and Neon Bible recoiled in shock at world gone mad, The Suburbs sketches a backdrop of palce, resonance and memory. It tells a tale of the vast and the intimate, of proximity and distance, of the sense that wherever you go, you’ll always be anchored to your past.

DAN RULE 

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BLISS N ESO - EVER RUNNING, EVER RISING
Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Following the unprecedented success of their ARIA Award-winning Flying Colours, Bliss N Eso have further developed and diversified their sound on new record Running on Air. Jonathan Notley (aka Bliss) tells Dan Rule that, like fine wine, the Sydney hip hop trio are maturing with age.

Of all the potential collaborators or sample sources you might expect to find on a hip hop record, the countrified twang of Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson would have to be among the least likely. 

And Jonathan Notley, the man better known as MC and producer Bliss of Sydney hip hop figureheads Bliss N Eso, is more than aware of the incongruity. “Man, to most people’s minds mixing country with hip hop is a hell of a stretch,” he says in his softened US accent, stifling an almost guilty chuckle. 

“Even the label were really unsure about it being on the record, but we were like ‘Trust us, we know what we’re doing, this is going to work’.” 

He’s referring to Late One Night, a grimey, gunshot break that flourishes into a chorus hook sampled from none other than Chambers and Nicholson’s 2008 hit Rattlin’ Bones. It’s a track that anchors the back end of new album Running on Air and reveals quality inherent to Bliss N Eso’s increasingly far-reaching approach to the Bronx-born art from.  

“The last thing we wanted to do was to create an album where all the tracks sounded the same,” says Notley, who’s speaking from Sydney in the weeks leading up to the release of the album. “We really wanted to paint a nice, wide spectrum of colours and styles and moods, so people could jump in wherever they want and really get something out of it.” 

Trawling Running on Air, it’s hard not to agree. The rasping boogie-rock of tracks like Flying Through the City and hyped, Outkast-esque bounce of Addicted meld with the reverb-lashed blues-rock of Moses Twist and dark, jilting beats of Art House Audio. Examples of staid, conventional rap are scarce on the ground. 

“It’s absolutely important to see the bigger picture,” he says. “We’re all on this planet together and we’re making hip hop for everyone.”

In many ways, Notley’s attitude shouldn’t come as a surprise. The trio – Notley, fellow MC Max Mackinnon (aka Esoterik) and DJ Tarik Ejjamai (aka DJ Izm) – may have burst onto the Sydney underground in the early 2000s with explosive melange of raw boom-bap and gritty, street-level lyrical attacks, but their rise has evidenced a much wider vision. From underground burner Flowers in the Pavement (2004) and breakthrough Day of the Dog (2006), to ARIA Award-winning epic Flying Colours (2008) – which saw them travel to some of the poorest regions of South Africa to record the track Bullet and a Target with a traditional choir – the trio’s sound and palette has expanded to see them emerge as one of Australian hip hop’s most accomplished and widely celebrated crews. 

According to Notley, who met MacKinnon and Ejjamai in early high school after his family moved to Sydney from the US, the trio’s journey has transcended music alone. “I definitely feel like over the years we’ve matured a lot in terms of the lyrics we’re bringing and the concepts we’re expressing, and we were really kind of aware of that when we went into recording Running on Air.”

Tracked in a cavernous house near Hanging Rock in the central Victorian bush, the record drew much of its influence from its surroundings. “It just let us have a bit of peace and quiet and get back to creating and focussing,” he recalls. “I kind of feel like it probably did transcend a bit into the music.”

That isn’t to suggest that Running on Air, produced for the most part by Bliss, man of the moment M-Phazes and wunderkind Hattori Hunzo, lacks the boom-bap punch of its predecessors. To the contrary, so impressive is the record’s hip hop smarts that the group managed to attract guest verses from LA rap heavyweight Xzibit and burning slot from none other than Wu-Tang Clan founder the Rza on the stomping Hunzo beat Smoke Like a Fire.

Suffice to say, it was something of a career highlight for the trio. “We sent him over the track and he really dug it and was keen to get on it and we were just over the moon when we found out,” he laughs. “We’re old school Wu fans, you know?”

“To get like Ghostface or Raekwon would have been amazing, even Method Man, but to get like the motherfucker who started it all, it was jus like, ‘This is history, we gotta make it happen’.”

With Running on Air, you can’t help but get the feeling that Bliss N Eso are doing just that. “There’s the famous quote ‘The wisest man knows he knows nothing’ and it’s very true in my mind,” says Notley.

“We’re learning all the time and I think to kind of close the book on that idea is kind of a step backwards.” 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, August 14, 2010.

WHAT Nicholas Mangan: Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World
WHERE Sutton Gallery, 254 Bunswick Street, Fitzroy, 9416 0727, suttongallery.com.au 

Nick Mangan’s ongoing study of the tiny Micronesian country of Nauru assumes an almost funereal guise in his new exhibition at Sutton Gallery. Comprising an installation of coral limestone coffee tables, an ink-on-paper drawing and a stunning video work, Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World unearths the tale of a once-wealthy phosphate nation’s demise. But while essentially functioning on a level of documentation and record, it’s Mangan’s poetic presentation of evidence – his relics, artefacts and vistas of a broken down island state – that affords this body of work such poignancy. The drawing takes the form of a topography of the island, though the entire interior is left blank, rendered barren and void as if erased. The 14-minute video work captures photographic fragments of this blank world; an almost lunar landscape of coral rock spires, vacant expanses and crumbling infrastructure. The airport’s one runway remains conspicuously unused; communications satellites sit tattered, rusted and torn; beaches are empty but for the relentless pounding of the surf. It is a decaying economic empire. Footage of the dismantling of the once iconic Nauru House plaza on Collins Street acts as the final nail. Mangan’s tables – a reference to a scheme put forward by late president Bernhard Dowiyogo to turn the nation’s mined rock pinnacles into coral coffee tables in a bid to stimulate the Nauruan economy – seem to resonate with both hope and an almost cruel sense of derision. While an attempt to make something out of nothing and reclaim some sense of national identity, they also show the depths to which the supposed minnows are forced to dredge – not forgetting the “Pacific Solution” – to survive in a brutal global economy. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until August 28. 

WHAT Steven Asquith: Storm Concepts
WHERE Utopian Slumps, 33 Guildford Lane, city, 9077 9918, utopianslumps.com 

Steven Asquith’s Storm Concepts seem to represent an exchange between history and methodology. While rooted in an altogether dissimilar aesthetic, materiality and palette, the thought behind the Melbourne artist’s series of 14 new drawings seems genuinely contiguous with the landscape tradition. Creating his “clouds” via raw gestures of blackboard enamel spray paint, only to render their expanse with meticulous layers of colour pencil and Posca pen markings, Asquith’s works are cacophony of synthetic tones and textures. Streams of multicoloured rain fall amid lashings of polluted fluorescence; swarms of black clouds entrap webs of fragile colour. The resonance here is psychological as much as it is geographic. Indeed, while one could dismiss his use of materials as a kind of “dude-ist” affectation, Asquith’s spray pack and Posca pens aren’t chosen lightly. When we consider the contemporary realities of the polluted, synthetic, urban landscape, these materials seem far more relevant than paint and brush. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until August 28. 

WHAT Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang
WHERE Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, 9850 1500, heide.com.au 

This extensive survey of late Melbourne photo-artist Carol Jerrems – alongside Sydney photographer William Yang and American contemporaries Larry Clark and Nan Goldin – makes for an incisive study of the places and company we keep. Known for her prolific output throughout the 70s before her untimely death from a rare form of liver disease in 1980, Jerrems’ intimate photographs of Australian sub-cultures possess a rare spontaneity and presence. There are many highlights. Her 1973 Redfern Life series stunningly captures her uncropped, unedited process, as do the quietly expressive domestic portraits from her 1974 publication A Book About Australian Women. Also engaging is the collection of books and publications from the Australian music scene, which includes a couple of wonderful portraits of Daddy Cool’s Ross Hannaford. By comparison, Larry Clark and William Yang’s collections are a little under-whelming, but the real star of the show here is Nan Goldin. Her 700-strong slide installation of saturated, wonderfully imprecise snapshots The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an at times amusing, frequently moving window into her world of friends and lovers on New York’s Lower East Side. Unobscured by clear technique or stylisation, it is the photographic medium at its most direct and immediate. Tues to Sun 10am–5pm, until October 31. 

WHAT Still Vast Reserves
WHERE Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, 9419 3406, Gertrude.org.au 

The second chapter in Gertrude’s latest artist exchange program – the first of which was held at Rome’s Magazzino D’Arte Moderna – Still Vast Reserves sees a host artists negotiate ideas of the body and its relationship to social and public space. While Benjamin Armstrong’s phallic glass and wax sculpture, Marco Fusinato’s visual score, Fernanda Gomes’s delicate series of micro-installations and Tom Nicholson’s photo work make for some interesting asides, it’s a video work by Laresa Kosloff that lights up this extensive group show. Roller Disco (2005) is a joy, eschewing a Central Park roller skate dance jam by the removing any trace of sound or colour, and slightly shifting of speed and ratio of the moving image. The results are genuinely engaging, more often hilarious. By nullifying the agent that brings the dancers together, we’re left to silently observe a kind of context-less, boisterous activity, giggling people darting and rolling every which way. Tues to Fri 11am–5.30pm, Sat 11am–4.30pm, until August 28. 

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THIS WEEK IN ART - GILES RYDER: LIFE WITHOUT RITUALS
Published: Broadsheet, August 11, 2010. 

Sydney artists Giles Ryder’s new show at Block Projects poses questions about art’s role in contemporary culture. By Dan Rule.

There’s a genuine polarity at play within the various works and mediums that comprise Giles Ryder’s Life Without Rituals, the last show at Block Projects’ Flinders Lane space before it moves to its new building in Richmond.

Twisting neon lights are mounted to glossy, 2Pak-coated panels and industrial aluminium frames; their refraction throws a softened spectrum of light about the space. Canvases slathered in bitumen paint perch, encased and by glass; a periphery of holographic vinyl catches the available light, creating a peculiar, inviting luminosity.

“The glass catches other elements within the room and the vinyl pulls a world into this seemingly singular object,” says Ryder.

But they are exhibits sealed away from the dangers of prying hands, of dust and damaging elements. The glass acts as an impenetrable barrier; the relationship between the audience and the work is predefined and unchangeable.

“I’m concerned with looking at art, its purpose within the world and art’s historical function and how that’s changed,” explains the Sydney-based artist. “We’re sort of in a grey area at the moment: is art just a consumer item or an object of desire?”

Referencing Yves Klein, Ryder prompts questions of value by framing such industrial materials in a museum-like context.

“I’m really interested in the museum,” he says. “So part of the reason for the framing is this idea of trying to make things last forever and thinking about the museum’s function in that, that status and so on.”

There’s also something of an autobiographical resonance to Ryder’s choice of materials. The artist worked as an industrial painter on Brisbane’s Story Bridge for over half a decade.

“Bitumen paint is basically petrol-based paint used to seal surfaces,” he says “But we all use this material. Artists use it as well, even in oil paints. We all rely on the industries to produce all this stuff.”

Giles Ryder’s Life Without Rituals runs until August 28 at Block Projects.

www.blockprojects.com

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INTERVIEW - M-PHAZES
Published: The Vine, August 11, 2010.

Melbourne-based producer Mark Landon (aka M-Phazes) is a rarity in the Australian hip-hop scene. While slow to be recognised in his home country, the Gold Coast-raised beatsmith has risen to become the first Australian hip-hop protagonist to make deep inroads into the US.

In his relatively short career, the 27-year-old has produced joints for a host of respected US artists – the likes of rap legend Pharoahe Monch, chart-topping RnB vocalist Amerie, Royce Da 5”9”, Kenn Starr, Skyzoo, Oddisee and Emilio Rojas included – and made a name as one of the international scene’s most esteemed young producers. On the home-front, meanwhile, he’s produced cuts for the likes of Bliss N Eso (with whom he won an ARIA for Flying Colours), Phrase, Drapht and a list of up-and-coming rapper too long to count.

With his much-anticipated all-Australian debut record Good Gracious out via domestic hip-hop powerhouse Obese Records and his album launch tour in progress, we spoke to Landon about giving back to the local scene and the real and perceived barriers between the Australian and US markets. 
 

Hey Mark, how are you doing?

Good man. Just working away behind the computer before heading out on tour.

Yeah, I’m interested to see how this tour will work out. It’s a rare thing in Australia for a producer to drop a solo record, let alone tour it.

I guess so. There have been a couple of producer solo records. Like Jase had one out on Obese a few years ago and Plutonic Lab has put out a couple of projects, but the touring aspect of it is definitely a bit different. I think Chasm, from Sydney, did a few shows but I don’t know if he did a whole tour. So yeah, it’s a bit different.

I really enjoyed the record and reviewed it positively, but it was kind of interesting to me that it was so full of local rappers. There was an Australian rapper on virtually every track. Was this record always going to that way? I kind of expected more instrumentals and perhaps some US guests…

Right. Well, I went into the project with nothing but Australian artists in mind. That was kind of the goal I had and I wanted each song to have some kind of fullness to it and not leave too much room. I mean, you mentioned the instrumental aspect, but I really saw this album as a collaboration album, so to have any instrumentals on there wouldn’t have really made sense.

As far as the Australian aspect, it really was what I set out to do. The only exception on there are expats that currently live here, like Nine High and Haunts, who are from England but live here now, so they kind of made it through the filter. It was just sort of about giving back to the Australian scene and doing something different. I mean, it would have been easier for me to just go and get a bunch of international artists, but I think it was just more of a challenge to do it just with Australian artists because I really haven’t worked with that many.

Sure. I guess, there’s that classic scenario where so many Australian crews will go out of their way to try track down a few international guests…

Exactly, and I didn’t want that to be the drawcard. I wanted the music to be the drawcard and I feel like we have the standard of artists in Australian hip-hop where you should be able to hold an album in that regard, without having to ring in for international guests.

You’ve been one of the lead Australian artists to make inroads into the US scene. As someone who has made a bunch of beats for US artists and spent time there, has that really informed the way you think about the international market?

Sort of, I mean if I hadn’t already worked with so many American artists it might have swayed my decision on who to put on my album. Like, I might have gone for a bunch more international artists. I think I’ve reached a point in my career where working with guys from the States isn’t really going to change – I’m always going to be doing that – so for my debut album I just wanted to do something different that nobody would expect. I mean, I don’t think anybody expected an all-Aussie line-up on my album. Like I said earlier, I think we have the standard of artists that can really hold down a whole album. I didn’t feel like I needed to go out and get international collabs so people would buy my record.

At the same time, having that purely Australian presence and that lack of any instrumental tracks, it does really tie record to a specific time and place.

Yeah, I guess that was always going to be the case, being Australian hip-hop as opposed to Australian rock or something. If you put Jet on or someone in the States they won’t sound too different, but with Aussie hip-hop it’s a bit of a different thing. You can’t really mistake them. But I’ve got a lot of projects that I’m working on with international artists and I think for my next production album I might go for a bit more of an international sound, whether it is reaching out to international artists for guest spots or collaborating with a broader range of artists within Australia who aren’t necessarily from the hip-hop world. Like, I think I really want to do something different for my next album and not be tied down to hip-hop in general.

It’s interesting that you mention stepping outside of hip-hop, because on the record and a bunch of your more recent production work there has been a shift towards a more compositional dynamic. These aren’t just grooves or hooks anymore; these are track with a hell of a lot of layers and dynamics. Does that aesthetic kind of mirror how your approach has been evolving?

Definitely, for sure! I mean, my sound has sort of progressed from that of a typical hip-hop producer who used samples and pretty much looped everything from start to finish and didn’t have many change-ups in terms of key and chord progressions. I mean, it’s funny, I always kind of envisioned that I would be this hip-hop producer or this RnB producer who would do that. But I guess in the last couple of years – and I really accredit this to moving to Melbourne and being around such amazing musicians and producers – I actually have found myself shifting towards more of a songwriter/composition/live instrumentation sort of producer and that’s started to take a lot more of my interest than typical hip-hop production is.

I mean, it’s something that I’ll always find hard to escape from, that element of hip-hop in my production…

But that isn’t something that you should be necessarily trying to escape from.

No, no, sure. I’m not trying to escape from it, but I’d love to incorporate different types of musical production into my own style. So that’s what I’m trying to focus on at the moment.

It’s a really positive thing, in the same way that an older Melbourne producer like Plutonic Lab has been able to develop his sound to a point where he can drop a record like that Ivens album…

Yeah, yeah, which was this really kind of underground hip-hop record and then go and do the Jess Harlen record, this full-band soul record. And I think he’s working on a real soulful, sort of ’70s throwback, old 45” vinyl-sounding record with a band. Actually, I think it might just be him and someone else, but it sounds amazing. He played me some stuff when I was in his studio a while ago. But yeah, he’s a perfect example of where I’m heading. Not in the sense of similar styles, but just musicality.

I guess that’s what’s happened with that whole generation of guys we grew up listening to – like Q-Tip and Mos Def and Talib. They’re still making hip-hop but there’s just a more sophisticated musical element to it, whereas Australian hip-hop still really has the straight up and down, rugged aesthetic to it for the most part.

We’re behind on pretty much everything and there’s no exception for hip-hop. People have discovered this ’90s sound of New York and have decided they should try and mimic that, and it’s almost become a little too overbearing for me personally. Everyone who releases a song here, with the exception of a few, sounds like they’re still in the ’90s. I love ’90s hip-hop, don’t get me wrong, but I’d kind of like to leave that era back then. All these groups feel like they need to make that sort of hip-hop just to be real or whatever, but I just look at it as being a bit lazy in my opinion. If you’re not trying to innovate then it loses a lot of the excitement.

I mean, I’ll still make a track like that every now and again, but I don’t feel like that should be your only musical point of view.

Do you think that relative cultural isolation of growing up on the Gold Coast was crucial for you in terms of building your own style?

Definitely! That’s sort of what spurred me onto work with Americans and use their scene over there as my influence and my goal in terms of the way I looked at music. A lot of people in Melbourne, because there is such a thriving scene and it’s been like this for a few years now, people tend to just look to their peers and try and match what they’re doing, whereas I was forced to use the internet as a means of working with people - people in the States specifically - [and it] really sort of forced me to really look at what was happening over there, as the bar I had to reach.

As someone who’s done a lot of work in the US, do you feel that barrier between the Australia and the States is more a perceived one from an Australian perspective?

A lot of Aussie artists settle for what’s good over here, but what’s good over here isn’t even given the time of day over there. You can’t put a producer from Melbourne up against the Justice League or DJ Quick or DJ Premier, who were doing stuff that people are maybe just starting to touch on now 10 or 15 years ago. So I feel like a lot of Australian groups or producers or rappers just settle for being good on an Australian level and feel like they can’t exceed that and so they get engulfed in the local scene. I don’t really believe in that; I believe you should always strive to be on par with the rest of the world, you know.

It’s definitely not a resource or an access issue in the sense that you listen to what’s coming out of LA at the moment with Flying Lotus and that whole Low End Theory scene. There are kids like Shlohmo and Nosaj Thing, who are in their early twenties, with no cash, making amazing beats out of their bedrooms.

That’s exactly right. I mean, my set up is nothing. I’ve got a computer, a midi-keyboard and some speakers. I don’t have any crazy outboard gear. If people are saying that that’s the reason they can’t do this or can’t do that, it’s bullshit. There’s technology out there.

I mean, not to diss the Hilltop Hoods because I love the Hilltop Hoods and think they make great music, but they’re not going to get looked at in the same way as a big artist in the States. Their music isn’t going to stand up in that environment and neither are a lot of the big groups from over here, you know? And I don’t mean to diss anyone – I’m sure a lot of people will take that as a diss, but it’s not – it’s just that the production values are very basic and very thin-sounding compared to a lot of their US counterparts.

I agree entirely. You listen to a lot of this stuff and it doesn’t sound like an international release; it sound’s inherently Australian.

Exactly, like, you listen to something like Jet and that sounds like they could have been from anywhere, but there’s just something with hip-hop in this country where we can’t seem to break free from that Aussie sound. I think maybe the closest to doing it in a major scale is Bliss N Eso and that’s probably because Bliss has an American accent (laughs). But no, it’s the sonics that give it its life; the way it just blasts you in the eardrum. A lot of Aussies don’t quite get that sound and they don’t take the time to try and master that.

Dan Rule

Good Gracious is out via Obese

mphazes.com 

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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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