Oz blog

Bermagui is a small town (population 1500) on the south coast...that is, south of Sydney, Australia.  Seven hours south of Sydney, eight hours north of Melbourne, three hours east of Canberra. It is reasonably remote (it's my family's home). There is art. Surprisingly there is a small art community that is fighting to be thriving.

One of the places I have visited is Narek Galleries. The building was originally a church built in 1899 (that is old for Australian history) and is now a gallery that supports and displays established and emerging artists. Karen O'Cleary, the owner and curator, moved to the area, already established in the gallery world, with connections and an established clientele. She wanted to prove you can run a high quality gallery in a remote area.

                                         

She bought the space saying you need to own your space if you're going to make it as a gallery/ studio. Also, the road was about to be paved- travelling to the area was made easier. Tourists from Melbourne and Sydney were starting to make the trek. There was a group of artists practicing in the area. Reasons, she believed, that would support the venture.

Like all small towns keeping talent in the area is a problem. People typically are heading off into the wild blue yonder in search of opportunity. Karen, along with five or six interested art entrepreneurs got together and wanted to do something to lift the game of arts in the area- they created created the Living Artist Award.

The Living Artist Scholarship was set up to provide on going support for talented artists from the Far South Coast. The major objective of Living Artist is to provide opportunities for visual artists to develop excellence in their practices by providing mentorship, education, and financial and marketing support in a bid to retain them in the region whilst they work towards supporting themselves from their own art practice!

Approximately $30,000 is raised in the local community every two years. This is not done with grants or government assistance- it is purely with the assistance of other artists, donors, sponsors and volunteers.

The artist has 12-18 months of assistance and then has an 'outcome' event or show.

The artists who have received the award are ceramicist Poppy Benton, print maker Tanja Riese and painter Matt Jones.

Poppy Benton

Matt Jones

Tanja Reise

I'm inspired by the art community creating their own opportunities- worldwide.

Jenny Robinson Prints at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery

The Capital City Arts Initiative is currently presenting prints by San-Francisco-based printmaker Jenny Robinson at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery in Carson City.


I interviewed Robinson and wrote an essay for the show – here's the intro paragraph:

The exhibition Elapsed in Time, featuring work by printmaker Jenny Robinson, has a genuine sense of majesty. The prints she has on display are large, most of them over 30 by 50 inches – much larger than the usual print. They command the space they are displayed in, showing off a real technical brio. For Robinson, the scale is mostly a matter of format meeting subject matter. The prints at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery display big, mostly neglected structures: Gasometers, highway underpasses, abandoned rollercoaster tracks, water towers. The structures are massive, but they are also, in the context of their environments, generally unnoticed – hidden either by design or by obsolescence. Robinson’s prints reveal how these giant structures appear after they have stopped being looked after, and stopped being looked at (of course, Robinson herself is still looking).

Read the rest here.

Ensor's Appalling Parade

Sanford Schwartz had a good article on James Ensor in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, titled "The Mysteries of Ensor." I'd seen a few examples of Ensor's work before -- including a couple of his skeleton pictures, like "Skeletons Warming Themselves" and "Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring" (both reproduced below), which offer riffs on the medieval "Dance of Death" sequences that showed Death leading people from all walks of life into the grave. I'd come to the "Dance of Death" out of an interest in comics -- they're an early Western use of images deployed in sequence; probably the most famous of these sequences was done by Holbein the Younger -- several of those images are linked on this page from a site organized around the theme of Death in Art. Ensor got himself into the death game with his etching "My Portrait in 1960" (he was born in 1860):
But Ensor's work wasn't restricted to turning the "Dance of Death" into morbid comedy. Schwartz describes Ensor's work further:

Ensor is... known, of course, for prying open, as it were, the lid of propriety on the box that holds our most impish and irregular thoughts. His best-known images present a kind of nonstop Mardi Gras, where goblins peer from behind furniture or swarm around us as we sleep, skeletons in top hats and overcoats try to warm themselves near a stove, and Satan's hairy-tailed helpers drop down from above to round up various locals. Jurists, prelates, the Belgian king, military men, and officials of every sort (some of whom we learn are members of the art establishment) turn up as ogres. In the print Doctrinaire Nourishment, these upholders of society's moral values squat on a ledge and defecate (each stream reflecting the relative heft of the man's buttocks) into the open mouths of the horde waiting below.

In other words, Ensor's work is right up my alley, and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to really know something about him. Comical, grosteque, scatalogical, proto-surrealist: what's not to love? Reading the article sent me on a Google Image Search to dig up as many hi-res versions of his work as I could -- I've culled my favorites below. Click on them for larger versions.

Fractured Phobia

Melissa Swanson's BFA show, "Atychiphobia," opened today. The show featured prints, animation, and installation pieces composed of dried rose petals.


The prints hanging on the wall were "reduction prints" -- which also go by the name "suicide prints," if the printmaker is in a black humor mood. The printing block is gouged for the first color, then gouged away further for the second color, and so on, until eventually getting whittled down for the final pass. It's a bit of a tightrope process, since there's no going back. The block has to get killed for you to reach the end of the print.




For Melissa, the technique is tied to the show's title, which means "fear of failure." As Melissa put it, "Atychiphobia" isn't your everyday run-of-the-mill fear of failure -- the kind of fear everyone has, "the same way everyone has a fear of falling out of an airplane" -- but rather, it's a paralyzing fear. A fear so pronounced, it negates the ability to even try. Because if you try, there's that chance you'll fail, and then it will be confirmed: you really weren't good enough. It's better to not even put that on the table.




The floor of the gallery was strewn with rose petals that had images or words printed on them. They crunched nicely underfoot.



Three sheets of rose petals had been sewn together and printed on; at the opposite end of the gallery there was an animation, composed of several printed rose petals that had been scanned before they were discarded for the floor. The same image was printed on several petals, and the animation ran through the printed petals frame by frame: the repeated image remained fairly stable, while the rose petal forms themselves flickered out around them, their veined textures leaving faint impressions on the eyeball as they ran headlong through the projector. The printed imagery revolved around forms of birds and cages. Their silhouettes pulsed with a kind of brittle insistence.

Bruno Schulz's coerced murals

There's a good article and slideshow in the NY Times today concerning Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew best known for his dreamlike, Kafkaesque short stories. He was also an accomplished draughtsman, who created eerie (and oftentimes somewhat grotesque) tableaux. His artistic talent forestalled (but ultimately did not prevent) his death at the hands on the Nazis when they occupied Poland. A Nazi officer, Felix Landau, initially kept him from being shot or forced into hard labor, so that Schulz could paint murals in a riding school and in a nursery for his children. But another Nazi officer, upset that Landau had had his Jewish dentist shot, killed Schulz in a perverse tit-for-tat, reportedly telling Landau: "You killed my Jew. Now I've killed yours."

The article details the exhibition of what remains of Schulz's murals, excised from their walls, and now preserved in a state of arrested decay. There are several small details of subversion in the paintings, tiny acts of mental freedom executed under duress.

I've admired Schulz's drawings and prints for some time, and especially cherish his short stories, published in the US in the two collections "Street of Crocodiles" and "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass." They are incredibly dense, poetic works which take you deep into the subjective realities of a sensitive, observant mind. I can't recommend them highly enough.

"Street of Crocodiles" was used as a jumping-off point for the great stop-motion animated short of the same name, created by the brothers Quay. I showed it last year in my animation class. There's more on Schulz and the Quays here.