Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 48 i Artist Profile

There’s so much happening in your paintings, but at the same time your style is very minimal – the colours are washed out, the lines simple and clean. Is that a conscious choice, does it come from somewhere? Yes totally. I’m aware that my work is pretty, sort of, minimalist. The process of painting for me is like a process of elimination. Compositionally I prefer my artworks to be quite sparse. I always end up painting over objects to make way for more open space. Is there a significance to your objects? They started out being significant; I was really interested in the symbolism of feminism through the representation of domesticity. However, since then it’s become more about painting those objects because of their aesthetic quality, transforming into more of…

How would you describe your practice to a stranger? I’m an artist who tries to look at the politics and the social situation that technologists design and put us in. I’m an exhibition maker who tries to bring ways of interrelating with space, imagery, objects and form into some sort of meaningful experience … it gets bigger and bigger the further I go on! Were studying at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts (2001–2005) and then at Frankfurt’s Städelschule (2007–2009), formative times for you? Very. My first teacher, the guy who opened my eyes to Contemporary Art, was Michael Parekowhai, an incredible artist from New Zealand. As a young student at Elam, Michael’s work not only alerted me to the complicated interrelations with Indigenous people in New Zealand, but also…

In her 2002 series ‘L.A. Bloom’, made while living in Los Angeles, Joyce Campbell obliquely interrogates the politics of water availability and poverty through thirty-two Ilfachrome photographs. Swabbing plants from a broad range of Los Angeles neighbourhoods, Campbell cultured these swabs to produce bacterial growths from which she made direct contact prints. The resulting body of images, at first glance an experiment in photographic abstraction, instead function as a material transcription of place. The organic processes used to create these images allowed the organic world to assert its own presence, mapping the relative bacterial health of a city in which water is a contested and politicised resource. Access to water is a fraught issue, too, in Aotearoa New Zealand, where it is inflected sharply by the forces of colonialism and…

Amber Wallis is a painter who breathes her soul into her work. As she prepares for a solo show in Brisbane and a group show in Los Angeles, I get the sense that her practice and her life is hers, and hers alone. Much has been written about Wallis’ past personal journey – the childhood abuse and grief over her mother’s death – and how she has used these experiences as an undercurrent in her work. As she takes on the new role of single mother, she continues to use painting to explore her own femininity and life. Defiantly, Wallis now talks more openly about her personal issues, not allowing them to define her but fully exploiting them in her work. While she has been successfully showing her paintings down…

In Gagosian on Madison Avenue, the dazzling and vibrant works of the Papunya Tula artists were hung uniformly within a white cube space, far from the Western Desert of Australia where they were created. In this first exhibition of Aboriginal art at Gagosian, they joined an impressive legacy of artists shown in the same method of display, such as Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. Across Australia and the US, the monumental significance of this show being a part of the exhibition program of the gallery giant – which has seventeen locations internationally – has not been lost. Louise Neri, Director at Gagosian New York, remarks, ‘The moment we sent out our press release we had a flood of response – from the US, from Australia, and from other…

How did you start painting? I grew up watching artists from my family, like my grandfather Whiskey Tjukangku, making paintings in the Iwantja art centre. I was always spending time in there, working on arts and crafts projects. It has always been a place where I go to have fun and spend time with friends and family and is a good place to keep busy. Over the years, more and more people have started paying attention to my work and there’s more and more recognition and opportunities for me as an artist, which is wonderful. What are your influences? I love music (country, pop, rock ‘n roll) and performers who wear the best outfits, like Tina Turner, Dolly Parton and Cher. I am also influenced by film clips (I love…

What informs your work? I’ve been painting for a long time now. I finished art school in my mid-twenties and more or less lived on Bruny Island until moving to Hobart about seven years ago. Sailing, fishing, family and painting have been my life since then. I paint about being on the water and living by the water, but also about the reflection of these experiences – the memories and feelings of those times. My paintings have a lot to do with the edge of land to sea to horizon, and to the landforms that border those spaces. Your dad was a fisherman. Did you spend a lot of time at sea as a child? Yes, my parents built a boat when I was about two. We sailed from Queensland…

Your first public appearance as Director of the MCA was to launch an exhibition at the Penrith Regional Gallery in 1999. You spoke about making contemporary art accessible. Looking back, what has Western Sydney meant for the MCA? There’s an untold story about how Western Sydney saved the MCA! In those days, when the Museum was accused of being elitist and irrelevant, I really wanted to challenge that misconception. From my early career taking art on a bus around Scotland, I have been passionate about breaking down the barriers that prevent people from all backgrounds having access to contemporary art. I made lots of contacts in Western Sydney and we began to help Blacktown develop its own arts centre. We developed a partnership which included the Blacktown Festival running buses…

‘Squaring the circle’ – ‘rhythmic structure’ – ‘cosmic configuration’ – ‘astronomical possibilities’ … Roger Kemp spoke another language – it was his language – and he tried to explain it to us. It was very complex. It seemed to be about his concept of an enigmatic cosmic order that had a structure which he was constantly developing in his paintings. It was very difficult to comprehend. Sometimes he would try to explain by drawing a gestural circle and crossing it, making various diagonal lines on his diagram – then, pausing to show the significance of certain line formations. If you showed any interest he was patient in explaining it to you – and he seemed to assume that you were there with him. However, if you were struggling to understand,…

The ‘River’s Edge’ exhibition, which featured portraits and simple documentary photographs by Kim Guthrie, boldly captured this unique community. The artist presented us with fifty-six Giclée prints — hi-res inkjet photos — of varying sizes, plus a video, Kim’s Still Life (2008), which revealed, among other things, Guthrie’s love of this style of image making. His work, he says, is ‘a self-portrait: Australia and Australians; the Australian character’. About his subjects he likes to ‘get a feeling that they’re the genuine article’, he explains. ‘Australians are always looking outward’, yet ‘we’re exotic to other people’, so Guthrie sets out to persuade us that the ordinary is nothing less than extraordinary. How successful we feel he is in this, is the measure of this exhibition. Guthrie is a prolific photographer who’s…

Ever since John Adams gave us Nixon in China in 1987, the possibilities for opera have been limitless. Unlike the Greek tragedians who were obliged to set every play in a mythical age of Gods and heroes, contemporary composers have drawn subjects from the news cycle, and from the tawdry lives of latter-day celebrities. Elena Kats-Chernin’s Whiteley was never going to be Greek tragedy. The closest parallel might be Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), about a celebrity stripper who was never out of the tabloids. Brett Whiteley (1939–92), despite his reputation as an important Australian artist, was another tabloid favourite. The classic operas are often simple melodramas with a clear, unmistakable storyline. Madam Butterfly’s fate is spelled out in the first Act, as Pinkerton reveals his frivolous attitude to the…

As an academic discipline, the history of art is predominantly taught through the medium of painting. Specifically, it is the development of figurative and representational painting which forms a fundamental part of Western art historical pedagogy. To teach the work of Michelangelo or Manet (one would argue) is to ensure that students understand the social and political value painting once gave to the Western world as its dominant mode of visual expression. The broader rationale, of course, is for students to sharpen skills in visual analysis through discerning the work of artists now deemed as masters. Yet, beyond the confines of institutionalised learning, figurative painting has for centuries beguiled the imaginations of many others. It is not a stretch to say that the ability of painters to transform canvases into…

Steven Joyce of Despard Gallery has shown Patrick Hall’s work at the renowned Chicago art fair, ‘Sculpture, Objects, Functional Art’ (SOFA), on a regular basis. In 2001 Hall became the first non-American artist to feature on the cover of the SOFA exhibition catalogue. The reason Hall (born in 1962) was a hit at this fair may be the same reason he has not been pursued more avidly by Australia’s leading (non-Tasmanian) art institutions, aside from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Gallery of Australia. Quite simply, he has been viewed as a maker of furniture rather than sculpture, and therefore beyond the scope of galleries that don’t have dedicated collections of applied arts. His work is an unclassifiable hybrid of many different disciplines. Hall studied furniture making and printmaking at…

Working at the intersection of art and technology, Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde is a pioneer for clean energy art projects, through which he designs solutions for a better world. Fuelled by ingenuity and imagination, the artist strives to connect audiences with the world around them. His award-winning lightscape Waterlicht is set to do just that when it is exhibited in Western Australia this November. A mentality of change drives Roosegaarde, whose creative design solutions show the potential for a greener world. Developing projects that merge technology and art in urban environments, Roosegaarde puts clean energy at the forefront of his vision for a new global landscape. Through his namesake social design lab, Studio Roosegaarde, the artist works to epitomise ‘Schoonheid’, the Dutch phrase that couples the notion of ‘beauty’, from…

Framed through Friedrich Engels’ 1872 observation that adequate housing for the masses is the only way to stave off anti-bourgeois revolution, ‘The Housing Question’, curated by Julie Ewington, reflects the political urgencies of the contemporary global housing crisis while weighing up the historical losses and gains of more than 150 years of socialism, activism and architectural innovation. With palpable tension, this is realised as a series of stand-offs of political substance versus the seductions of affluence and style. To this end, core themes are presented as a series of provocations and reminiscences, with the exhibition taking its political cue from Helen Grace’s large banner depicting feminist housing struggles. Functioning as both a celebration of past victories and a current call to arms, this banner recollects the protest staged by women…

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Kaldor Public Art Projects, a testament to the persistence of a Hungarian migrant who needed to share his obsession with an entire city, if not a country. The birthday celebrations will continue to spread the Kaldor gospel via an unorthodox retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), and a feature-length documentary titled It All Started with a Stale Sandwich. There have been thirty-four projects in total, the first being Christo’s Wrapped Coast of 1969, widely viewed as the event that launched the era of Contemporary Art in Australia. The most recent, in May this year, was Asad Raza’s Absorption, which consisted of 300 tonnes of specially curated soil lovingly tended for a fortnight. Samantha Lang’s documentary devotes a lot…