AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 10, 2010.

WHAT Sam Jinks
WHERE Karen Woodbury Gallery, 4 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 2500, kwgallery.com

Although both artists would loathe the comparison, it’s hard not to reference Ron Mueck when discussing the incredibly lifelike foam, silicon, paint and human hair sculptures of Melbourne artist Sam Jinks. His works hold such a resemblance to reality that you can’t help but be immediately affected by their presence; the intricate contours of skin, the weight of the flesh and curve of the implied skeletal structure. In the same breath, what makes Jinks’ work so engaging is its delicate detours from what we might otherwise frame in terms of “hyperrealism”. The three works that perch, spotlighted, in an otherwise dimmed Karen Woodbury Gallery each offer a distinct eschewal of scale and context. As we enter the space, two gigantic snails slither together in a seemingly romantic embrace. At normal scale, the gesture would seem innocuous, but their amplified dimensions give it a kind of poignancy and gravity. To the left of the space, a tiny many crouches under a bed sheet, its fabric clinging to the protruding vertebrae of his emaciated frame. The minute scale only heightens his vulnerability. The stunning, ever-so-slightly downscaled [start italic]Woman and Child[end italic] acts as something of a centrepiece. A frail, beautiful, old woman clutches a tiny newborn to her breast. It is the embodiment of intimacy and connection. In one scene, we witness the conclusion of one life and the beginning of another in all its sadness, joy and beauty. It’s a deft summation of Jinks’ work. While our immediate fascination may be one of an almost scientific, anatomical ilk, it is his masterful twisting, shrinking and augmenting of hyperrealism – his shifting of size and setting – that grants these works their elegiac, emotive and very much human potency. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until July 24.

WHAT Drew Pettifer: Hold onto your friends
WHERE No No Gallery, 14 Raglan Street, North Melbourne, 0405 968 618, nonogallery.org

Young Melbourne photographer Drew Pettifer’s erotic portraits and video work invoke intimacy and uneasiness in equal measure. Capturing his young, handsome male muses amid the rolling pastures and spectacular rural backdrops of his youth and childhood, Pettifer effectively imposes an urban queer aesthetic onto a landscape that espouses a very different kind of narrative. In the photographs, the often naked subjects play and pose confidently against the landscape. In one, “Dan” stands, head turned, among a forest of tall pines, his erect penis jutting out, perpendicular to the rest of the scene. In another, “Dylan” lurches from rock to rock, his naked body glowing against sprawling green. The video offers a rather different vantage. Slow, telescopic zooms eventually reveal two male figures in dense forest scenes, against towering mountainsides and on empty beaches, standing straight on, a hand placed on one other’s genitals. The young men seem awkward, lost, vulnerable in the extreme, the ominous voyeuristic gaze zooming ever closer. The difference between the bodies of work is stark. Indeed, while the photographs and video seem to both offer a kind of autobiographical engagement with a place and background, they each tell a very different chapter of the tale. Thurs to Sat noon–6pm, until July 24.

WHAT Anne Zahalka: The Way Things Appear
WHERE Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, city, 9650 0589, arc1gallery.com

This new series of works by celebrated Australian photomedia artist Anne Zahalka hones its focus on art’s interface with the public. Her handsome, large-scale prints capture fragments, nooks and crannies of various major public art museums – London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales included – offering a first or second-person vantage of the just how the public engages with art. While the first-person photographs take the form of snapshots, giving an immediate sense of just what the audience observes in the gallery, the meticulously composed second-person photographs offer far more layers of interest. We not only sight the work, the viewer and a cropped corner of the gallery’s interior, but are led to consider the spatial, psychological and behavioural relationships at play in these major monuments to art. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until July 24.

WHAT Mike Parr: The Hallelujah Chorus
WHERE Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 6131, annaschwartzgallery.com

Known internationally for his often extreme forays into the testing of his physical and psychological limits, Australian printmaker and performance artist Mike Parr offers up a comparatively palatable, nonetheless visceral serve of new works over both floors of Anna Schwartz Gallery. The main focus is his massively scaled unique prints, which are rendered with a spectacular melange of raw details, scrawls and textures to form an odd strain of self-portraiture. The video work, Cartesian Corpse captures a recent, 34-hour endurance piece performed at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Tues to Fri noon–6pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until July 24. 

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INTERVIEW - OZI BATLA
Published: The Vine, July 9, 2010.

Comparative to the quality of his output, Shannon Kennedy (aka Ozi Batla) would have to be one of domestic hip-hop’s most unsung wordsmiths. Having made a name fronting sprawling Sydney collective The Herd (alongside ubiquitous partner in crime Urthboy) and dub-flecked hip-hop trio Astronomy Class, the quality of the rapper’s verse and flow can’t be overstated. Put simply, over the past decade Kennedy has been responsible some of Australian rap’s most powerful, politically charged and lyrically sophisticated moments.

Long-awaited solo debut Wild Colonial doesn’t disappoint. Brimming with gritty, narcotic loops and raw, soul-drenched Golden Era aesthetics (courtesy of former Good Buddha beatsmith Sandro), it makes for a master class of classic, New York influenced hip-hop.

On the eve of his Wild Colonial tour, we talk to Ozi about immortal hip-hop archetypes, stepping out on his own and the importance of positioning Australian hip-hop in a much wider historical and artistic context. 

Hey Shannon, how are you?

Good man, just reading the paper. How are you doing?

Good, good. Hey, I’m loving Wild Colonial…

Thanks.

It really feels like an early ’90s hip-hop record, which to me is really kind of refreshing.

Yeah, well that’s probably reflective of me and Sandro’s tastes and definitely the way Sandro works with beats. He follows a sort of process that was perfected in that time with the kind of equipment that he uses and the way he goes about finding his samples. So it’s definitely the kind of hip-hop that I still enjoy and, you know, we used that as a basis in many ways.

Did the relationship with Sandro define the trajectory of the record in the first place? Like, was he always the guy who you wanted to make your solo album with?

Not initially. I was just kind of shopping around, and obviously, I know a lot of people who make great beats just from being around for a while. But not long into it, I realised that more than half the beats I was using were Sandro’s, so it just made sense to kind of do it together. A lot of my favourite albums are done by the same production team. It just makes it a bit more cohesive musically and it just makes it really easy to work as well, because we live in neighbouring suburbs and there weren’t all these other people to be chasing up.

Yeah, it’s an odd thing these days, just how many records will have five or six producers on the beats. It can be really interesting, but often it doesn’t really feel like an album in the end; it feels like an interesting clutch of tracks instead…

Yeah, yeah, the way people listen to music is changing and I feel like that’s sort of a symptom of it. Albums aren’t really as big as they were before and with stuff like iTunes, where people can pick and choose their favourite songs off a record, I don’t know if albums are as important to a lot of listeners anymore. It’s still what I enjoy though, and the more cohesive the album the better in my mind.

What made now the right time for your solo record? Was it for practical reasons, like you had a gap in your schedule, or did you really feel that you had a lot of things to say at this point in your life?

Yeah, well I’ve had the idea up my sleeve for a few years and it’s been pretty constant with The Herd and Astronomy Class since about 2005 or 2006. But I knew that this year, The Herd would just be working on new music and Chasm from Astronomy Class was just kind of focussing on his solo stuff and his work with Vida Sunshine, so I did have a little gap. That was kind of the main reason in a way. Often you’re kind of thinking in terms of album cycles and what’s coming up in the next year for the label and you know, it was just the right time.

The record has a really personal dynamic lyrically, I think more so than your work in The Herd, which I usually think of in a more political context. There seems a lot more self-reflection on Wild Colonial.

Yeah sure…

Now that the record’s out there, is that kind of a tough thing, like you’re giving people more of a slice of yourself?

Yeah, I kind of allude to that on ‘Doesn’t Matter’, the second-last track. It’s funny, I came up with the Ozi Batla thing fifteen years ago and it does take on a life of its own to a certain extent and people have an impression of you that might not really fit who you are so much. But yeah, I enjoy it. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to fit in or hoping that your peers or whoever else will accept it or like it. I think I’m just at a point now where I prefer just to be honest on record and make music that’s art for me as well.

So I guess it is a little bit daunting, but I kind of embrace that. If it seemed like it was a little bit too raw and personal when I was writing it, I kind of decided that it was probably heading in the right direction in this case.

As a man in his thirties, as opposed to a kid in his twenties, do you feel that your relationship to the tropes of the music industry has really changed, as though there’s more of an acceptance of where you’re at, rather than always aspiring to ‘make it’ or something?

We spend a lot of time in our twenties trying to change ourselves to be what we want to be or get to where we want to get to, but when we make it to our thirties we get a little more accepting about life in general. There are some things you can’t change about yourself and the world, and that doesn’t mean that you stop striving to do knew stuff, but I suppose my need for approval from my peers or from my audience is not so great now. I’ve achieved a few of the things I’ve wanted to, so if people have come along for the ride this far, they should be able to sort of take me as I am (laughs).

Hip-hop’s still in its thirties as well and it’s sort of an interesting thing. The albums that I sort of gravitate towards, when I was growing up it was all about the fresh, young kids – and hip-hop still is about fresh, young kids in a way – but there’s also a whole generation of those guys who were the fresh, young kids in the 80s and 90s who are now making these sort of more rounded, more accomplished albums. It’s really cool; it’s like an evolution of hip-hop from being about the rawness and something really direct and in-your-face, to people like Q-Tip and Pharoahe Monch putting out two of my favourite records of last few years.

So I think it’s an evolution of hip-hop. It’s grown up and a lot of the guys I grew up listening to and are touring again are now in their forties or whatever. So that young, raw energy will always be there and will always be a driving force of hip-hop, but it’s nice that it can expand and become more sophisticated or something.

I love the Black Star pastiche on ‘Integrity’…

Oh yeah, BDP originally.

Of course, Boogie Down…

But yeah, I tried to load the album up with lots of references in the lyrics and obviously lots of movie samples as well. It’s something I love doing, putting these little puzzles or little keys in the lyrics that encourage listeners to go back and find and listen to the originals.

For sure. Something I’ve spoken to Urthboy about a lot over the years is the importance or willingness, as an Australian rapper, to place yourself in the wider context of hip-hop, where a lot of the younger kids tend to place themselves in the context of “Australian hip-hop”. There was that sort of almost nationalistic movement for a while, which was very disturbing. Your records really seem to echo with that idea that your place in Sydney, Australia informs your music but doesn’t in any way define it. You’re part of a much longer lineage…

Yeah, it’s something that I’ve noticed as well and it kind of worries me a bit. Hip-hop’s a rich culture as well as just a musical form or a style and if you limit yourself to Australian hip-hop then you’re missing out on a good 95 or 99 per cent of the history of the culture. For me, it’s not what hip-gop’s about either. It’s not about trying to close yourself off or distance yourself from other people; it’s about inclusion and if you’re making hip-hop in Australia then you should realise that you’re part of a really broad, worldwide family.

It’s another reason for putting in a lot of the references. I’d really like for a lot of the younger listeners to dig out some of those records that they might not think are all that relevant, but if they were to ask their favourite Australian hip-hop artists what they value, there would be a lot of those in there as well.

That’s one thing that seems to be getting lost with the move away from sample-based hip-hop, that sense of direct reference. While it’s really great hearing people making their own beats from their own palette of materials, it does tend to lose that historical, exploratory aspect that made earlier hip-hop so rich. For me and, I’m sure, for a lot of people, listening to hip-hop opened the door to soul and all kinds of more historical musics…

It really is a postmodern art form at its essence. It started with people rapping over disco beats, then became about sampling James Brown records, so the self-referential nature of it and the way it links to an even broader and richer vein of musical history, for me that’s always been the interesting part. I love trying to find out what the samples are on my favourite tunes and that’s always been part of its strength.

The legalities of it all have meant that what’s become major label hip-hop just doesn’t do that anymore. To my ears, it’s just led to a lot of same-same sounding records over the last few years.

Tell me a little about this idea of Wild Colonial thematically. There’s a strong historical thread to the record.

I suppose I was trying to draw a parallel between how I come to terms with being an Australian and how I come to terms with being an MC in both senses, you know, being a white male who is part of the colonisers of this country. So it’s about drawing on my family history of being an Australian, then at the same time thinking about how hip-hop really is a foreign culture and it’s one that I’ve been fascinated by from an early age. So I guess it’s my attempt to show respect for the originators of the culture or the people on the land who were here before me. Respect is integral to being able to understand what came before you and to do it justice and to progress it.

It might be a long bow to draw, but that was kind of my concept. It’s sort of a metaphor for how I arrived to hip-hop. It’s very easy to repeat the same mistakes. I find ideas and culture and history fascinating, so I guess I’m just trying to encourage my listeners to find it as interesting as I do.

Is that you singing on the title track?

Yeah, that’s me singing on all of them.

I thought that might have been Urthy. It had like a touch of an Aussie Screamin Jay Hawkins vibe to it…

(Laughs) Yeah, I kind of belted that one out. It was a five-Strepsil afternoon. That was late last year around the time I did the Paul Kelly tribute shows in Melbourne and I had my shopping list of guest singers I wanted on the album, but I’d sung all the demos already. A couple of friends whose opinions I value heard the demos and kind of said that I should just go for it myself and it was good, you know. I’m happy with the result.

Dan Rule

Wild Colonial is out now through Elefant Traks/Inertia.

myspace.com/ozibatla

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OUS MAL - ‘NUOJUVA HALAVA’
Published: The Big Issue #358, July 2010.

Nuojuva halava
Ous Mal
****

The debut record from Finnish composer Ous Mal, resonates with a rare duality. Across its 11 graceful, gradually unfurling vignettes, Nuojuva halava skirts both expanse and proximity, gravity and intimacy. Amid its grand, Finnish folk gestures and sweeping tones are the most unassuming of textures, melodies, static shuffles and pop minutiae. 

Much about Ous Mal’s unusual sound can be explained by his methodological idiosyncrasies. Constructed via cassette tape loops pillaged from traditional Finnish hymnal albums, whispers of live cello, guitar and glockenspiel, these works effectively recast immense, historical compositions into stunningly wonky, DIY sketches.

There are several highlights. ‘Viima’ sees a sparse guitar motif expand over a mulching static underlay, plucked strings and gentle orchestration rising like a dusk haze. ‘Vaskiset kielet’ makes for a quietly ecstatic flash of pop prettiness, while ‘Merilaulu’ sees an achingly elegiac cello and piano overture morph into a pulse of new wave pop. 

The centrepiece, though, is ‘Kumiseva’, its stirring hymnal loop rising, wraithlike, from a bed of ambience and melody before dissipating into an opaque sea of tape noise and analogue texture. It is a deft summation of Nuojuva halava’s unusual charms. It echoes with the great scope of history, but it feels close enough to touch.

Dan Rule 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 3, 2010. 

WHAT Rick Amor: I Cover the Waterfront
WHERE Cowen Gallery, State Library of Victoria, 328 Swanston Street, city, 8664 7000, slv.vic.gov.au

Much like New York photographer Anthony Hamboussi’s five-year survey of Newtown Creek, the industrial waterway that divides Brooklyn and Queens, celebrated Australian artist Rick Amor’s plein-air oils and watercolours of the Melbourne waterfront observe a city in the midst of great change and flux. Painted for the most part around Port Melbourne and the Maribyrnong River from 1993 to 2007, Amor’s works capture the rusting relics and empty, mudded acreage of a once busy portside industry. The puddles of an empty Lorimer Street lot reflect a menacing grey sky; the Westgate arcs over distant Altona smokestacks. But among these post-industrial scenes are the seeds of new infrastructure, the same developments that have since altered our cityscape so irrevocably. The towering central pillars of the Bolte rise out of an otherwise decrepit 1998 Lower Yarra scene, the uncompleted bridge deck hangining ominously in either direction. There’s a lovely sense of immediacy to these paintings, each of which were completed hastily onsite. Light, hue, texture and atmosphere take the place of finely rendered details. You can almost hear the lapping of murky Yarra, the din of traffic; almost smell the rank, oil-stained puddles. Though perhaps what is most fascinating about Amor’s paintings is their complexity of mood and sentiment. His view of the city’s polluted backyard isn’t just one of decay and scourge, but one of a fleeting phase in the city’s history. His grittily familiar vistas are alive with both memories of our past and the seeds of possibility. Wandering amongst these works, Amor’s sense of past and potentiality, one might suggest, is far more interesting and exciting than the clean, lifeless streets and the gleaming, mock-utopia that took its place. Mon to Thurs 10am–9pm, Fri to Sun 10am–6pm, until September 5.

WHAT Karl Scullin and Lauren Bamford: Two x Two
WHERE C3 Contemporary Art Space, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford, 9415 3600, abbotsfordconvent.com.au

Melbourne’s Lauren Bamford and Karl Scullin – better known by his musical moniker, Kes – bring their photographic practice to a gallery setting for the first time with this extensive series of portraits, each of which feature two indie rock scene subjects. Each artist takes a very different approach to portraiture. Scullin’s work, much of which has been lifted from album covers he’s shot of several Melbourne bands, is loose and situational, relying heavily on texture and hue. At least one his subjects, which include the late Rowland S. Howard, is often hidden, blurred or obscured from full view. Bambford’s work, on the other hand, is highly formalised. Her high-contrast monochrome prints, presented as diptychs, capture musical and artistic subjects, centre-frame, posing in their domestic or creative spaces. It’s an interesting collection from two very talented photographers, though strangely, both their styles assume a very masculine quality when recontextualised in a gallery setting. On an album sleeve or as part of a magazine editorial, these photographs would seem soft and evocative. Yet, in a gallery setting, they show just how comparatively brawny and hairy-chested the rock aesthetic is. Wed to Sun 10am–5pm, until July 11.

WHAT Cluster and Connect
WHERE Sutton Project Space, 230 Young Street, Fitzroy, 9416 0727, suttonggallery.com.au

This curious group show from talented young curators Genevieve Osborne and Helen Hughes tentatively engages with ideas of social connectivity and its relationship to space and architecture. The show spans countless vantages on its curatorial brief, some more successful than others. Andrew McQualter’s work, in which he and a fellow participant visually “mapped” their plans for a more effective mode of government, offers a kind of discursive take on drawing. Meanwhile, Sydney artists Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s large-scale picture frame, blank except for a swathe of opaque plastic sheeting, offers a critique of contemporary minimalist architecture. Simon Taylor fragmentary collages and lurking shark fin make arcane references to the blockbuster film and its changing social function in the age of the download. A clear highlight is the striking work of Antonia Sellbach and her late father Udo. While the younger Sellbach’s work comprises modular, hand-painted triangles, which she reconfigures and installs in various environments, Sellbach senior’s layered, moveable, screen-printed acetate sheets allow the individual viewer to create their own abstract image, essentially eroding the divide between artist, or author, and audience. Fri to Sat 1pm–5pm, until July 10.

WHAT Marian Drew: All That Remains
WHERE Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, 108–110 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, 9416 3956, diannetanzergallery.net.au

There’s an inherent spookiness to Marian Drew’s meticulously arranged photo-works. Displacing formal principles relating of historical European still in a contemporary Australian setting, the large scale prints that feature in All That Remains see dead, native Australian birds photographed atop ornate, stitched tablecloths. Drew’s allusion seems clear enough. These works toe the troubling interface between a comfortable, urban, domestic existence and its inherent destruction of nature; they question just what form our relationship with the natural environment really takes. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm, until July 17.

•

STUDIO VISIT WITH SAM JINKS
Published: Broadsheet, July 1, 2010.

Sam Jinks’ astonishing sculptures eschew hyperrealism with subtle shifts in scale and dimension. Dan Rule drops by his Coburg studio to chat about his upcoming show at Karen Woodbury Gallery. By Dan Rule.

Wandering amongst the dismembered bodies, oversized snails, skulls, skeletons and power tools that litter Sam Jinks’ Coburg warehouse/studio is somewhat affronting at first. A lifelike woman’s head perches on a stand connected to the workbench; off to the right, her headless torso holds a newborn baby to its breast. The 37-year-old’s foam, silicon, paint and human hair sculptures are as strikingly human as they are subtly removed from reality. We take the tour and chat with Jinks about human and insect relationships, lineage, his unique practice and his new exhibition at Karen Woodbury Gallery. 

How long have you been in your current space?

I’ve been here for 10 months. When I got here I was doing a few editions so I didn’t settle in for ages, then we had this show, so I really don’t feel like I’ve set up the space properly. Upstairs is almost empty. I’m kind of struggling to allow myself to work up there. It’s all carpeted, air-conditioned; it’s just all wrong (laughs). No, but it’s a great studio and it’s close to my home. I was commuting from here to Collingwood everyday before I got this place. It was fine, but when you’ve got an exhibition coming up you tend to work really long hours, so commuting isn’t great in those circumstances. Now I walk five minutes.

I haven’t seen you work with animals before. Is it a very different process to working on human figuration for you?

I used to make a lot of insects, not so much mammals. I always liked the idea of doing things that were really small. Things like frogs, for example, are really quite alien, and so I always found that stuff kind of fun to make. It’s sort of like a different world.

You still have the same sort of technical issues where you’re trying to mould an object and cast it and trying to get it to look reasonably realistic. But with figurative stuff it’s harder in a way, for me, because you have to fool people, because you’re surrounded by people everyday. But working on non-human forms is kind of liberating as well, to be honest. I think you can say a lot with animals or insects that you can also say with the figure, but it’s almost easier to digest in some ways.

Where do the embracing snails, which will feature in the new show, come from?

Doing things like snails, I find it kind of poetic in some ways. You can kind of separate yourself from it all. It was a real moment for me with these works. Basically I got home at about midnight from a long day at work sculpting some figure and I was really tired. It was quite a damp night and I was just sitting there in the backyard and I just noticed these two snails and kind of watched it all unfold. It was quite moving; I was really kind of struck by it.

The relationship between two insects is almost like a really stripped down version of the relationship between people. All of the stuff is removed and it’s very basic.

I think that’s a really interesting idea – this stripped back, elemental, but equally powerful relationship.

Yeah, it’s almost an easier way to digest the world, looking at something like that, when there’s that bit of separation. It’s easy to apply to your own situation. It’s kind of tragic.

Your work has an uncomfortable, but at the same time, comforting sensibility about it. Just watching you take the baby’s head from the body before was quite confronting, I guess, because of that intense realism. How does that dynamic work with you? Do you drift in and out of connection with the work?

Yeah, I do. That’s a good way of putting it. Because, you know, there’s the practical side where you have to make something and you have to really wring its neck sometimes to even get it to look even plausible. I’ve never been one for total realism. I don’t think I have the physical energy for it and, you know, life’s too short. It’s like a hyper-realistic painting; it’s not something that’s very exciting to look at. So I always change the dimensions of bits and some bits are bigger than they should be and other bits are smaller…

But you do kind of drift in and out of connection, because you’re dealing with silicon rubber and paint and bits of hair all in isolation, then you’ve got to try and combine it in some sort of way inside a mould and as a sculpture to make it realistic. I think at the end things start to come together and you can kind of interact with the work, but only then. Like, I’m installing some of this work tomorrow and it’ll probably only be at that moment that I have that experience. Well, hopefully I have that experience (laughs).

There’s a lovely sense of possibility with these new works, especially the work with the old woman holding the baby. It’s not just the end of one life, but the beginning of another…

I guess I’ve also just had the experience of having a child and watching my mother hold the baby and just going ‘Wow, there its all is, it’s all combined in the one thing’. It’s like all the one thread. It’s all very strange, I think, and this work is kind of me trying to come to grips with that a bit. When you hold your own child, you’re sort of holding yourself in many ways and it’s a bit kind of sobering.

Tell me about your relationship with Ron Mueck.

We’re good friends and we’ve known each other for a long time, but we’ve never actually worked together. We’ve talked a lot about the work over the years and he’s given me a lot of great advice, but now it kind of feels like ‘Who’s going to do that great thing?’. I mean, Ron’s kind of the grand master because he’s been doing it for a long time now. There’s another guy in Canada, Evan Penny, who has been doing it for a long time, but there aren’t a lot of people who do it as art. There are a lot of people who pay other people to do it for them and there’s always a look to that kind of work.

So I guess there’s a kinship. Ron’s a nice guy too, which kind of makes it hard in a way. I sometimes I wish I didn’t like him so much (laughs). It would be much easier to just loathe him (much laughter). But he’s a really cool guy. He’s quite incredible too. He’s got a very rare quality.

There’s often a kind of scientific engagement and fascination with this kind of work…

Yeah, but I think it’s changing, which is a good thing. When I first started doing it as art it was really about making it look realistic. It was like ‘Look, it’s got hair’, you know, but that’s not what it’s about anymore and it’s good, in a way, that it’s moved beyond that. It’s a useful tool, but if someone can really make something beautiful, that’s the ultimate goal. It shouldn’t just be about making something look real. It’s pointless in a way and is kind of a bit of a futile pursuit in a way, because it’s endless.

I like things to look a little separated from reality. It’s nice to walk into a gallery and be transported just a little bit, as opposed to being transported back to where you already are.

Sam Jinks new exhibition opens at Karen Woodbury Gallery Wednesday June 30 and runs until July 24.

www.samjinks.com

•

WOODEN FOUNDATIONS AT NO VACANCY
Published: Broadsheet, June 30, 2010. 

The new exhibition from Melbourne creative collective Wooden Foundations eschews notions of street art and grants discarded materials a new lease on life. By Dan Rule.

Talking to Niels Oeljen (aka Nails), you soon get the impression that for Wooden Foundations, art practice and the street environment are irrevocably entwined. Not, however, in the way most of us would immediately think.

In an era where the spray can and stencil have assumed a kind of staid, mainstream cultural currency, the Melbourne-anchored collective – Oeltjen, Paul Mylecharane (aka Oh54), Scottie Neoh (aka Bonsai) and Hiroyasu Tsuri (aka TWOONE) – take a very different route from street to gallery space.

“An aim of what we do is to kind of show the possibilities of using found materials in fine art,” says Oeltjen. “Something we all do is collect a lot of recycled and reclaimed materials we’ve found walking around on the street or in dumpsters or whatever, and use them in our artwork.”

Built around ideas of personal mythology and symbolism, the exhibition at No Vacancy will see the quartet – who originally met via their mutual interests in graffiti and spray can related art at the start of the 2000s – merge print, drawing and painting practice with assemblage and installation.

“We didn’t just want to have pictures on walls,” says Oeltjen. “So we started looking at just where our artistic practices crossed over and we kind of isolated this idea of personal mythologies and how you build up your own little menagerie of animals and totems and iconography that you reuse as an artist, which become almost like shamanistic symbols.”

Indeed, for Oeltjen and the rest of Wooden Foundations, there’s a magic to the object. “A lot of stuff we find and use has reached the end of its life,” he says. “It can’t be fixed or recycled or whatever.”

“Art is one of the only things that can re-embrace these objects and reuse them,” he urges. “You can take almost anything and turn it into an artwork and make it valuable again.”

Wooden Foundations opens at No Vacancy Thursday July 1 6pm–9pm and runs until July 16.

www.woodenfoundations.com
www.no-vacancy.com.au

•

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, June 26, 2010.

WHAT Marc Freeman: Broken Canon
WHERE Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, 9804 7366, nelliecastangallery.com

Running alongside James and Eleanor Avery’s imposing Malleus Maleficarum, Marc Freeman’s new collection of abstract paint and collage works find their resonance in technique and recurrence. Across three large-scale canvases and five smaller works on paper, the Melbourne artist, quiet for some time now, revels in repetitions of materials, processes and motifs. Various scrubbed, washed and faded oils are reconfigured and recast, echoing throughout the eight works in various collaged forms; swathes of canvas from the larger pieces appear throughout the works on paper in a fascinating inversion of materials. With time, hints of figuration and gesture emerge – a skull-like shape seems of particular interest to Freeman – only to drift back into abstraction. It’s a quality that seems to permeate Broken Canon on several planes, and is particularly evident in the treatment of the painted surface. Sponged and rubbed, it would usually invoke a kind of weathered ambience, but Freeman’s arresting use of collage give the works a powerful, striking sensibility. We’re left in a kind of beauteous nowhere place, grasping at hints and clues. Freeman tests and defies his own bounds with every stroke, scrub, cut and layer. Tues to Sat, noon–5pm, until July 3.

WHAT Peter Cripps: Towards an Elegant Solution
WHERE Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, 9697 9999, accaonline.org.au

Spending time amid this first of the three episodic installations comprising ACCA’s major survey of influential Australian minimalist Peter Cripps, illustrates just how central notions of space are to his longstanding practice. There’s not a sculpture nor installation amid this collection of significant early and mid-career works, that doesn’t assume a vastly different guise or effect with proximity or distance. Navigating our way through hugely scaled works like Another History of H.B. and R.L. or past his tiny Mirror Works, there isn’t a moment in which we’re not overtly conscious of our spatial relationship to the work. Whether we’re beneath it, inside it, or a reflection on its surface, we the viewer are an integral part of Cripps’ every structure and assemblage. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun 11am–6pm, until July 25.

WHAT Robert Jacks: Floating Points
WHERE Block Projects, Level 4, 289 Flinders Lane, city, 9662 9148, blockprojects.com

There seems a visceral, almost electric sense of instability to the works that comprise Floating Points on first pass. This stunning exhibition of historical paintings created by prominent Australian artist Robert Jacks in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1980s reveals an artist in the throes of change. Shards of colour cross and clash and intersect; various angular, geometric shapes disrupt and suspend one another. But there’s also an unlikely sense of resolution to these works. Though Jacks’ colour palette – which consists of blood reds, deep greens, jarring yellows and muted blues and greys – should seem grating, with time several of the works assume an unlikely balance and equalisation. Jacks’ attention to surface plays a prominent role here. He has lathered the paint onto the linen profusely, only to scrape it back off with the back edge of his palette knife. It gives a softened, muted quality to even the harshest of shapes and colour junctions. But it’s the show’s title, Floating Points, that acts as perhaps a defining statement. So abundant are Jacks’ focal points – so void are his works of a clear subject or scene – that they essentially drift, suspended in and around our field of vision. Threads to Cubism are offered but never fully realised. Instead, these paintings are, quite perfectly, neither here nor there. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until July 3.

WHAT Vision
WHERE Glen Eira City Council Gallery, corner Glen Eira and Hawthorn Roads, Caulfield, 9534 3333, gleneira.vic.gov.au

Featuring the cross-sectional paintings of John Cattapan, virtual architectures of Darren Wardle and digitally altered photographic works of Stephen Haley, Kit Wise and Valerie Sparks among others, this extensive group exhibition casts the contemporary metropolis as a kind of fluid space – an interface between worldly cultures, architectures and virtuality. It’s a perspective that’s reflected in several of the artists’ practices. Sparks’ photo-works merge various sites of worship, cultural and geographical signifiers into melanges that prove intermittently uncomfortable and normalised. In Wise’s Xanadu, meanwhile, we witness a metropolis of such architectural and topographic grandeur and sheen that it becomes all but grotesque. Mon to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun 1pm–5pm, until July 5. 

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NEWELL HARRY - WEAVING WORLDS
Published: The Big Issue #357, June/July 2010.

The trans-cultural, collaborative works of artist Newell Harry drift between language, custom, currency and place. He speaks with Dan Rule about his exhibition as part of the 17^th Biennale of Sydney.

There’s a particular sense of flux to the text works that comprise Newell Harry’s exhibition as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney. Perched amid the echoing surrounds of Pier 2/3 at the Walsh Bay Warf, Harry’s traditionally woven Vanuatu gift mats carry the personal in-jokes, slang, lingua franca, motifs and markings of places, people and cultural contexts seemingly far-removed. 

“NO POINT BEING KING SHIT OF TURD ISLAND”, reads one, the words woven amongst intricate patterns and configurations with twine gathered from pandanas plants in Vanuatu. “FUCK KNUCKLE UNCLE PAT”, offers another.

A large, neon anagram of the phrase “THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS”, fixed to the opposite wall, throws an uneasy light across the space. “NERVELESS RATS HESITATE”, reads one interpretation. “AS VENERIAL THEISTS REST”.

For Harry – who was conceived in South Africa, born and raised in Sydney, and has spent much of the last decade travelling and living in Vanuatu’s Shepherd Islands – the works represent not only flashes of distinct geo-cultural vernacular, but the threads that, however subjectively, bind them together.

“Travelling between Port Vila in Vanuatu, South Africa and Sydney, I’ve come to love the kind of slang that’s inherent in each of the languages,” he says. “It’s almost as if almost as if they have this kind of crude poetry to them.”

“I wanted to make a series that referenced not just the language but used the weaving to literally interweave those cultural contexts together.”

Made in collaboration with weavers from the Shepherd Islands as part of an original exhibition, Views from the Couch, which showed at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery in 2007, Harry’s wordplays, homonyms and rhymes cut much deeper than their seemingly frivolous articulation might imply. For him, they are a point of exchange between various strands of heritage, culture and identity.

“The particular language used in that series slips between Afrikaans, which is the mother tongue of my grandmother who’s mixed race South African or ‘coloured’ as she would have been classified during Apartheid, and then Bislama, which is a lingua franca in Vanuatu that I guess you could call a form of pigeon English,” explains the 37-year-old. “Then there’s just the kind of slang and in-jokes that my mates and I use.”

It speaks volumes about Harry’s work. Across a career that has stretched the best part of a decade and a half, various solo exhibitions and residencies in South Africa and Paris, he has developed a practice that draws on notions travel, collaboration and the scope for cultural and geographical interpretation and translation they afford. “Travelling between places and working with weavers or working with neon fabricators, to me, is a way of not just referencing the contexts I’m working in, but also as a means to produce work without being stuck in the one place,” he offers. “It’s a means of trying to keep the process of working far more open.”

“I like the idea not just of translating languages, but translating the language into a visual or material form via specific cultural means and tools. If you’re collaborating with someone or working with people that weave or bend glass or whatever, you’re working with them to translate the idea,” he urges.

“You, as the artist, bring the idea along and then they bring along the practical means, so there’s sort of this meshing of both those grounds to achieve some point of equilibrium, which ends up being the work itself.”

Born in Sydney in 1973 – after his mother, who was pregnant with him at the time, had fled the apartheid regime for Australia the previous year – Harry studied art at the National Art School before attaining a Bachelor and later a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney’s College of Fine Arts. While his early work explored various drawing and sculptural techniques, it was his introduction to Oceanic and tribal art that had perhaps the most telling effect on his approach. He joined the Oceanic Art Society and began travelling and collecting artefacts and objects from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific region.

“In many ways that stuff influences me more than contemporary art,” says Harry. “I’m drawn to the functionality of tribal art and its kind of sense of power. It’s not something that’s made for a white cube; it’s work that has a social significance and has been made for specific rituals, which is what gives them their strength.”

Harry first travelled to Vanuatu in 2004, where he and colleague Carl Amneus collaborated on a printmaking project with a young chief of the Mataso community, Jack Siviu Martau. It was in this context that Harry was introduced to the notion of the gift mat.

“They’re called gift mats because they’re exchanged as gifts and mats are actually a form of currency,” he explains. “Like Jack, who is getting married soon, was complaining to me recently about how he has to get something like fifty mats made and get together a whole bunch of pigs that will be given as a bridal dowry.”

“I became really interested in how, by putting them in an exhibition in a Western context, that form of currency shifted and changed and began circulating in a different economy. So the mats aren’t just about wordplay but about value and currency as well.”

But it’s perhaps the personal threads that run through Harry’s work that make it so engaging. 2008 body of work Fish, or Cut Bait? (2008) featured a disparate palette of cultural and personal cues and traces. The nest-like, wall-mounted sculpture Voodoo Ray was woven from a trail of found materials and ephemera from Harry’s life and travels. Garden hoses, cable ties, jute twine, doilies and shredded Mother Hubbard dresses from Martau’s older sister in Vanuatu were woven to create a personal and cultural melange. The installation Ovid/Void, meanwhile, featured an old photograph of Harry’s mother before leaving South Africa mounted on the wall above a scattering of fossil-like found stone vessels and concrete pavers, the neon anagram “OVID” set on the wall beneath the photograph and “VOID” laying amid the vessels on the floor, seemingly intimating Harry’s impending birth in a new land and the family’s abandonment of their life in South Africa. 

Indeed, Harry’s fascination with his own family lineage has occupied much of his recent work. His 2009 exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre, Lloyd Triestino, comprised found family photographs from his mother’s voyage to Australia on the ship of the same name and her curious wedding to Harry’s stepfather.

Harry takes up the story: “The strangeness of that particular event is that my stepdad, who was a knockabout, AFL-loving bloke from Western Australia, happens to be an identical twin and that both identical twins, living on different sides of the country at the time, ended up meeting and then marrying coloured South African women,” he laughs. “The chances of that are just crazy.”

“They had a double wedding, and in the photographs, you can see the ANZAC memorial and these coloured brides with these very Australian identical twins,” he giggles again. “It’s so strange that I’m sure many people would have seen it as a fabrication, but of course, it was a true story.”

For Harry, it’s exploring such linkages – connecting such threads – that gives his resonance.

“I really try to load my work with personal content,” he says. “Like with the mats and the types of slang and types of phrases, they all have personal connections.”

“Some of them reference family and place, and then some of them are just silly slogans that me and my friends use, like ‘No point of being king shit of turd island’,” he laughs. “There’s always a personal element that runs through things.”

Newell Harry shows at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay Warf until August 1 as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney.

bos17.com 

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EXILE - FROM CENTRE STAGE TO CYBERSPACE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, June 21, 2010.

An Australian production aims to be the world’s first iPad opera. But is this device an appropriate medium for the lavish artform? Dan Rule investigates.

Helen Gifford doesn’t claim to be tech-savvy. Put simply, the veteran Melbourne composer is of a different era.

“I don’t have a mobile phone, let alone a computer,” she says with a gentle laugh. “I don’t even have a microwave. I find it simpler to live without these things.”

The notion that her never-performed work Exile, which had laid dormant in the archives of the Australian Music Centre since she and librettist Richard Meredith lodged the score in 1985, would be commissioned to become perhaps the world’s first iPad opera came as a surprise to say the least, but hardly an unpleasant one.

“Oh, it doesn’t worry me at all!” quips the 74-year-old of the production, the musical element of which will be recorded in front of a live audience at Iwaki Auditorium on Tuesday night. “I’ve even thought I could wander into the Apple office in Camberwell and try to do some catching up.”

The work - a collaboration between Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera, multimedia arts organisation Aphids, Amsterdam digital art clique Champagne Valentine and Speak Percussion - defies what many of us might consider a staid medium. After being recorded live with soprano Deborah Kayser, an ensemble of clarinets, percussionists and piccolo, as well as antiquated reel-to-reel recordings of a women’s choir and a mandolin guitar from Gifford’s own archives, the work will be filmed on location at Point Nepean and digitally recast by Champagne Valentine to create an iPad app that is an “interactive music video”.

For David Young, a respected composer and the artistic director of Chamber Made, the production seemed a logical step for a largely traditional medium. “The idea of doing a conventional production was never of so much interest to me,” says the 40-year-old, who previously built a reputation for cross-platform performance projects as artistic director of Aphids.

“To us, the idea of making it an online opera is absolutely the future. We want it to have a reach that’s as wide as possible … I almost want people to go away after seeing one of our works and going, ‘That’s not opera!’ or ‘Why is that opera?’ “

Brisbane-born multimedia artist Anita Fontaine is one half of Champagne Valentine and will be responsible for the work’s regeneration as an app. She frames Exile as “setting a new agenda with a new type of experience”.

“We aren’t merely trying to replace opera,” says the 30-year-old. “We are enhancing it and extending it into the realms of virtuality.”

Young agrees. “You’re not going to press start and it plays like a movie,” he explains. “It’s going to be an environment that is inhabited by Helen Gifford’s music and these poetic visuals. You’ll be able touch parts of the screen and engage and trigger the work.”

Exile’s narrative is based on Euripides’ story Iphigenia, a myth that fascinated Gifford when she started work on the piece in the early ’80s. “Here was a woman who has no real control over her life and has been banished,” she says of the protagonist. “This was a woman whose life had been absolutely denigrated by this terrible occupation … It was really quite an affecting story.”

But after lodging the score and recording the mandolin guitar and women’s choir excerpts in her Kew flat, “real life intervened” and the work remained buried in the archives until May 2009, when Young stumbled upon the opera.

“The librettist and I had to hurriedly begin looking back at the work and reminding ourselves of it,” she says. “When you’ve put so much into a work, it’s often something you want to forget.”

But can the iPad do it the justice it deserves? Indeed, is the much-hyped device really a valid platform for the grandeur of the operatic form? Or is this just technology blindly leading culture by the nose?

Soprano Deborah Kayser thinks not. “Wasn’t opera always a vehicle for exploring new technologies?” she asks. “It used to be a vehicle for technological investigation and creation in its time, so in a sense this just extends that.”

“With opera, you already have a context in your head for what that’s going to entail. But this just reappraises opera and what it’s about and who it’s for.”

And for new Aphids artistic director Willow S. Weiland, this is the appeal. “In terms of the iPad, the potential isn’t really known yet and that’s exciting,” she says. “It’s part of our challenge to make sure these technologies reach all these different audiences, rather than keeping them only utilised by the few.”

Gifford, who will celebrate her 75th birthday as the Exile app launches later this year, echoes that. “My nephew tells me that the iPad is for the technologically illiterate who can’t manage the more involved technology of previous things that have come out.” Another quiet laugh. “So perhaps there’s some hope for me yet.”

Exile will be recorded live at Iwaki Auditorium, ABC Southbank Centre, on Tuesday at 8pm. Admission is free. Places are limited. 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, June 19, 2010. 

WHAT Justin Andrews, Anna Finlayson, John Nixon, Masato Takasaka: Composition
WHERE Conical Inc., Level 1, 3 Rochester Street, Fitzroy, 9415 6958, conical.org.au 

Notions of extension and connection abound in this divergent group show at Conical. What at first might seem an obtuse scattering of objects, artworks and installations begins to assume a kind of cartography of linkages between ideas and application. Indeed, the sense of “composition” to which the show’s title refers isn’t one of completion, but of process, creation and practice. John Nixon’s work – which consists of a vitrine filled with unique records, flyers and ephemera related to his ongoing experimental music project The Donkey’s Tail and a pair of silver enamel and found material paintings – prefaces Anna Finlayson’s extension cord sculpture, which hangs from a ceiling beam, unwinding in gradually looser loops. While Nixon seems a draw a direct line between two manifestations of his practice, Finlayson’s work seems to allude to the teasing out of ideas. Masato Takasaka and Justin Andrew’s works, meanwhile, make for something of a topography of thought and studio process. Takasaka’s floor piece of takeaway sushi containers, books, records and images sees hair-metal posters rub shoulders with books on minimalism, and funnies sit alongside unsmiling art theory. Andrews’ shard-like, geometric sculpture perches beside various developmental diagrams adhered to a false wall, behind which reveals a cache of Andrews’ studio tools. It says a lot about the show’s premise. Composition isn’t the presentation of an endpoint, but an exploration of the dynamism that is practice in motion. Wed to Sat noon–5pm, until June 26. 

WHAT Niels Oeltjen: Biolume
WHERE No Vacancy Project Space, The Atrium, Federation Square, city, 9663 3798, no-vacancy.com.au 

Niels Oeltjen’s illustrative and sculptural assemblages echo with a seemingly contrary clutch of resonances. Taking the form of quasi-totemic wooden sculptures, geometrical prints and spray-painted light works, the Melbourne artist’s new series Biolume seems to reference the cleanliness of typography and graphic design as much as the organic repetitions of folk art and the colour variations and gradients of graffiti culture. It’s an intriguing melange. One could view Oeltjen’s work as an attempted reconciliation between such forms and ideologies. Though he visits seemingly disparate stylistic terrains, Oeltjen’s work exhibits a cohesive and convincingly realised visual language of its own. Tues to Sat 11am–6pm, Sun noon–5pm, until July 4. 

WHAT Lyndell Brown and Charles Green: The Wire
WHERE Monash Gallery of Art, 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill, 8544 0500, mga.org.au 

The works that comprise Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s The Wire assume numerous vantages on the logistical and psychological mechanisms of contemporary warfare. Taken behind the walls of various Australian and coalition military bases and barracks throughout Iraq and Afghanistan after Brown and Green were appointed official war artists in 2007, these photographs invoke war as a kind of colossal infrastructure. We witness makeshift roads, tent cities and airports bordered by dust, raw concrete and razor wire; we see engineers at work on giant aeroplane propellers and coalition troops training local civilians. All seems orderly enough. It’s only when we take a closer look – notice the motifs, slogans and motivational tools – that things turn a little more sinister. A replica statue of the World Trade Centre towers sits in the courtyard of a coalition base café as inspiration, flawed logic or no. Gaudy, muscled, superhero-like divisional mascots adorn walls and barracks, urging “controlled violence”. While we never witness the midst of battle, Brown and Green afford us glimpses and echoes of war’s macro and micro management. Running alongside the expansive Icon & Archive: Photography & the World Wars exhibition. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun, noon–5pm, until July 11. 

WHAT Kibel/Ryder: The Payback
WHERE Utopian Slumps, 33 Guildford Lane, city, 9077 9918, utopianslumps.com

This collaborative offering from Jeremy Kibel and Giles Ryder seems to find its basis in the recasting of cultural capital. Taking the vinyl LP and spray-can as their chief means, the artists lather the vinyl surfaces with lurid rings of paint, finishing each of the works with the unsettling motif of the smiley face. Hour upon hour of music – Bowie, James Brown, Sonic Youth, Blondie – is erased via a sheen of mute, stupid colour and that ubiquitous, hollow smile. It’s like a garish graveyard of cultural iconoclasts, their legacies trivialised. A sparse, atmospheric sound work by legendary Melbourne experimentalist Ollie Olsen echoes about the space, the empty non-sounds of the cultural void. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until July 3. 

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