Sydney: Urban Myths & Modern Fables at UTS Gallery

Urban Myths & Modern Fables
Hamra Abbas (Pakistan/Germany), Khadim Ali (Pakistan), Henna Nadeem (UK), Hitesh Natalwala (Australia), Tazeen Qayyum (Canada), Nusra Qureshi (Australia), Sabeen Raja (Pakistan/USA), Naeem Rana (Australia), Amin Rehman (Canada), Sangeeta Sandrasegar (Australia), Alia Toor (Canada).
UTS Gallery, Ultimo
until 26 October

Left: Alia Toor 99 names of Amman 2004. Dust masks with cotton embroidery. Courtesy of the artist and UTS Gallery Sydney.

This exhibition of new work, curated by now Toronto-based Haema Sivanesan, features work by artists "of Indian and Pakistani background, working in Australia and the international diaspora" according to the press release. It's a fine show, and reinforces LF's perception, from travel on the Indian subcontinent, that an entirely different visual sensibility pervades contemporary art from that part of the world. The frequent appearence of 'miniatures' is a manifestation with obvious cultural origins, but there is a delicacy and restraint in much of this work that is not a common feature of Australian and much Western art, which often goes for the jugular in terms of size and conceptual ambitions. LF's standout's are Sangeeta Sandrasegar's delicate two-part installation Untitled (The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon her Sleep), Alia Toor's embroided dust mask installation, 99 names of Amman (pictured) and Tazeen Qayyum's series of 'specimen boxes' Test on a Small Area before Use .

Sydney: Linde Ivimey

Linde Ivimey
Martin Brown Fine Art, Potts Point
until 7 October 2007


Left: ©Linde Ivimey, Myra 2007. Steel armature, cast acrylic resin, stone, dyed cotton and silk, earth, natural fibre, sheep and chicken bones, feathers, porcupine quills, human hair, rabbit fur, black pearls, 9ct gold ring. Courtesy the atist and MBFA Sydney.

So much has and will be written on this superb show that we hesitate to add more superlatives. Darkly funny, spookily whimsical, sophisticatedly rustic... Ivimey just gets better. MBFA have also done a beautifully photographed mini-catalogue. Go see.

Sydney and regional NSW: Godwin Bradbeer

Godwin Bradbeer Aspects of the Metaphysical Body
Drawings
until 3 November
Annandale Galleries, Sydney

And touring;
Godwin Bradbeer The Metaphysical Body
Grafton Regional Gallery from 28 September 2007
Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery from 29 October
Mosman Regional Art Gallery from 8 December 2007

Left: © Godwin Bradbeer Imago 1 Folio 2 2006. Chinagraph, pastel dust and silver oxide on Arches. Courtsey the artist and Annandale Galleries Sydney.

Godwin Bradbeer's Imago series of giant heads makes the Dobell Drawing Prize shortlist just about every year, however it wasn't one of these that won the award in 1998. That was an almost full figure, Man of paper VII. This year's entry, Imago XVI, is still on view at AGNSW, and Imago 1 Folio 2 (pictured left) was last year's Dobell entry, and is part of the exhibition just opened at Annandale Galleries. Bradbeer is not a 'hip' artist, and not everyone likes his figure studies, but LF is a definite fan of the Imago series in particular, and of Bradbeer's sensual mark-making.

The NZ-born artist is a senior lecturer in drawing at Melbourne's RMIT, and his large, one-off works on paper have a significant collector base, however he remains somewhat undervalued commercially, and is under-represented in institutional collections. LF has at times heard his work disparaged as overly sentimental, and we can understand that some people might find the recurrent Imago series, with its androdgynous, Asian child's face, not to their taste, while others find them serene and somewhat Buddhist. They are not, we understand, drawn from life, and it's as if Bradbeer is repeatedly receating a spiritual vision that exists in his mind - it always appears to be the same child, but each head is markedly different. This is by no means his only motif, and there are many other fine works in both the Annandale and touring shows. Bradbeer is one of our great drawing talents and creates surfaces of extraordinary sensuality and depth.

Also at Annandale, in the main room: Guy Warren Still Flowing
Watercolours, Diaries & Sketchbooks Installation, until 3 November
Although certainly worth a look, LF did not especially warm to Warren's faux-naive 'Aboriginal-inspired' watercolours on the walls, but found his vitrine-displayed notebooks and journals to be fascinating, and far more indicative of Warren's huge talent.

Sydney: Multiple Personalities at MOP

MOP's move to the old Esa Jaske Gallery space has proved a good thing and cements its status as a SOCS fixture that hopefully is here to stay. It's one of the few ARI's to successfully make the transition to the 'mainstram fringe', and this is no doubt due to the commitment, taste and dedication of MOP's committee, and the consitently interesting and risky work they show. Collectors buying work by MOP's emergent artists have a good chance of making a wise investment.

Multiple Personality
Adrienne Doig, Matthew Hopkins, Robin Hungerford, Sari Kivinen, Mat de Moiser, Ms & Mr, Luke Roberts

and Anastasia Zaravinos Numb
MOP Projects, Chippendale
until 7 October

Left: © Luke Roberts, Pope Alice at Giza. Courtesy the artist and MOP Sydney.

Curated by the ubiquitous Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Multiple Personality, according to the press release "brings together artists whose work engages with ideas of persona and the multiple". It's a small show, and consequently struggles to achieve a critical mass around its curatorial theme, but this is more a comment on the space limitations than on the individual work. The Luke Roberts/Pope Alice pieces are not really a good indicaton of this artist's rich and textured installation/performance practice, and it's a shame that most of the DVD/video works rely on plasma screens (as opposed to projections), with the exception of the confronting Gallery 2 video, Numb by Anastasia Zaravinos. Whatever you think of this work, the darkened room and wall-size projection certainly enhance the viewing experience. LF's overrall fave is Adrienne Doig's Australiana series of kitsch embroidery pieces. We'd love to see this curator and these artists with a couple of floors at the MCA and a proper production budget, but until then, more power to MOP.

Sydney: MCA Spring shows

LF has received a few emails asking why we haven't reviewed the current shows at the MCA. It's not deliberate, however we do try to cover stuff that hasn't been reviewed, or is unlikely to be, focussing on smaller independent galleries and ARI's/ARS's. The Arse End? Might start using that. Messrs McDonald and/or Smee are likely to give the MCA shows a withering spray, so we weren't in a hurry to cover them. However, by popular demand...

The Trouble with Julie

Julie Rrap Body Double
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
until 28 january 2008

Left: ©Julie Rrap, Camouflage #4 (Eiko) 2000. Digital print. Courtesy the artist, MCA and Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery Sydney.

This show has been open for some time, indeed it's some weeks since LF joined the canapé-wolfing movers and shakers for the launch of the accompanying (independently-published) monograph. It's hard not to like, or at least approve of, Julie Rrap's consistently interesting and confident body of work over the last two decades, and most art followers (and, one suspects, enthusiastic adolelescent boys in school groups) know Julie's statuesque body better than their own. There is a rigorous intellectual and socio-political underpinning to be found; she is a feisty, warm and intelligent woman, and this well-mounted and conceived mid-career retrospective is a fine example of what the MCA does well. So what's not to like?

Women love it. Men, it seems, less so. The same is sometimes said of Tracey Emin. LF knows a good few women who are apalled by Emin's populist antics, yet love her art, and enjoy her jeering attitude to the tweedy British art establishment. It leads us to wonder whether, as in literetaure and movies, there is such a thing as 'Chick-Art', perish the thought? As with the notion of 'Gay Art', the soul shrivels at the very idea, yet there are plenty of examples of it in twee little galleries in West Hollywood, Miami Beach and Puerto Vallarta. Let's be clear, LF does not subscribe to such categories in any way, but the existence of such concepts is worth noting.

Back to Julie. In my singular view, there's an essential quality missing from much of her work. Despite the apparent humanism and immediacy of 'the artist's body' as subject matter, paradoxically much of this work feels to me theoretical, cerebral, driven by installation production values rather than by intuitive creative impulse. There is a lack of mystery, of complex layers of meaning, of deep psychic stirrings... we do not come away with new synapse connections, with a new way of looking at the world. Or not this viewer anyway. However that's a rare experience, and highly subjective, so let's just say that Rrap's show is a fine survey, well worth seeing.


Primavera
Young Australian Artists
until 4 November

Left: ©Briele Hansen Untitled 2003-04. DVD projection, queen bed, white sheets, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and MCA. Photo: Briele Hansen

Hmmmm... last year's was better? Primavera's such an easy one to knock, but we don't intend to do so. What defines this annual (national) survey of emergent artists is that it is selected each year by an also-emergent young curator, artists are under 35, and with no more than ten or so exhibited, selections are inevitably highly subjective. LF is tempted to describe this one as a particularly 'Ikea' year (half-assembled furniture etc), but that would be glib and unfair. Amanda Marburg's ("MacLean Edwards on bad drugs") small paintings are terrific, as are Patrick Doherty's large, energetic, unstretched canvasses. LF was also impressed by Briele Hansen's silent DVD/intsllation Primavera, Untitled consising of a vertical DVD projection onto a queen-sized matress on the floor, covered in white sheets. Video footage of a slowly moving form, apparently 'under' the sheets, sets up an absorbing and dreamlike visual illusion. This work has a fresh simplicity of vision that is so much better than a lot of very laboured video art by more renowned practitioners. Honour Freeman's delicately ironic ceramics rate a special mention, as do Justine Khamara’s 'photo-sculptures', but the rest is pretty dry conceptual stuff for the most part.


CROSS CURRENTS: FOCUS ON CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN ART
until 26 November 2007

Left: ©Tobias Richardson, paintings, installation view. Courtesy the artist and MCA.

Contrasting with the young Turks in Primavera, this (again national) survey show by guest curator John Stringer features works by 16 established artists of some repute, including some quite venerable figures. It's a great show with something for everybody, with some of LF's standouts being Ah Xian's (not new, but always breathtaking) ceramic busts, Elizabeth Cummings' monoprints, and Darwin-based Tobias Richardson's whole room installation (pictured left), which repeats a vigorously painted (with enamel paint?) box motif over and over again. Stuart Elliott's architectural fantasies made from industrial detritus are also impressive. There's a high proportion of solidly good painting on show and it's on for the next 2 months.

A toute a l'heure.

Sydney: Michelle Ussher

Michelle Ussher
The Last Great Wilderness
Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo
until 6 October 2007

Left: The colour of concrete 2007, watercolour, pencil & acrylic on paper, courtesy tha artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

There's nothing slick about Michelle Ussher, but there are moments when she sails perilously close to a kind of hippy-dippy fantasy art, and this may be what makes her so interesting. Watercolour is her medium, and her approach is painstaking and 'descriptive' (as opposed to gestural and expressionistic), yet she is not seeking to document the world around her in any literal sense. This series of (mostly large) works on paper exhibits a fascination with built structures, monolithic statuary and architectural order, yet the resulting paintings have a translucent delicacy, as if she is peeling away an outer skin to reveal a slightly dreamlike world within. In the wrong hands this could fail terribly, but Ussher displays an honesty of observation and a refusal to make glib marks, and this visual 'sincerity' is what makes her work stand out from much of the work of the genre. There is undoubtedly a worldwide resurgence in both drawing and watercolour, surprisingly coming from youger artists, and the watercolour medium can impart a samey-ness, which Ussher thankfully transcends.

More images at: http://www.darrenknightgallery.com/artists/ussher/110907/index.htm

Sydney: Pulp Non Fiction

DEVILS IN PARADISE: Nine artist on the trail in Tasmania
JOANNA BRAITHWAITE, LUCY CULLITON, NEIL FRAZER, DAVID KEELING, CHRIS O'DOHERTY (aka REG MOMBASSA), EUAN MACLEOD, ADRIENNE RICHARDS, LEO ROBBA, DAVID USHER
Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern
Until 29 September

Left: Federal Greens leader Bob Brown, fresh from the Senate, addresses the opening night crowd.

Le Flaneur has always thought of Damien Minton as a man with heart, and this show is further proof that he's not afraid to tangle with tree huggers and environmental poitics, all the while upholding the highest artistic standards. Bob Brown is certainly not shy about linking art to politics, and his opening night address, while acknowledging the 'genius' of the artists, became something of an impassioned Senate-style speech denouncing the proposed Gunns pulp mill project in the Tamar Valley, and old-growth logging in general. His audience was pretty much the already converted, and one could well imagine Tasmanian loggers dismissing them as effete, chardonnay-swilling (why is it always chardonnay?) Paddo socialists that have never set foot in an old-growth forest. It's partially true, of course, but we were struck by how diverse the crowd was for a 'serious gallery' opening. Packed to the rafters, with a fair number of chunky-knit sweaters, ponchos and pony tails in evidence, hordes of kids, and a sausage (organic, of course) sizzle on the street, it felt more like something you'd attend in Launceston than Sydney.

As to the art, it's a hard show not to like, given the love of landscape that lurks in every Aussie heart, and appeared to be pretty much sold out. We wondered if it was in fact a fundraiser, but the materials do not say so, and its interesting that many of the artists appear courtesy of their regular commercial galleries as part of this special group show - further evidence of Minton's unusual approach in the brittle gallery scene perhaps? LF's standouts were Euan McLeod's sombre landcape studies (on paper), Joanna Braithwaite's tongue-in-cheek renderings of Tasmanian Devils at play (perfect for the kids bedrooms!) and, surprisingly, Reg Mombasa's iconic little studies - his vision is starting to transcend his signature style and just gets better.

Not unmissable, but heart-warming and unusual.

Latino Visons #6: Doris Salcedo at White Cube and Tate Modern, London

Doris Salcedo
White Cube, Hoxton Square
until 20 Oct 2007

Complementing Salcedo’s installation (from 9 October) at Tate Modern, WC presents a mini retrospective of sculptures made in the last ten years. According to the press release: 'In her ongoing series of furniture sculptures – eleven, including three new works, will be exhibited at White Cube – Salcedo alters found wooden objects such as beds, chairs and wardrobes, transforming them into sculptures that take on the resonance of something lost, broken or mended. Apertures are closed in – what were once drawers or glass doors are now filled with fragments of clothes and concrete – as if the objects were suffocating or suffering from an act of violence as things are forced unexpectedly, brutally together. They bring to mind loss as much as survival and, like emergency architecture, evoke a sense of making-do, a desperate reconfiguration of fragments to enable one to keep going.'

More at: http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/ds_exh_hox/

Also: Tate Modern: The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo, 9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/default.shtm

Campbelltown: News from Islands

News from Islands
Campbelltown Regional Gallery
Campbelltown Arts Centre
until 28 October 2007

Below left: ©Sam Tupou, Anniversary Skulls (detail) 2006, image courtesy the Artist, CAC and Artbank.
Below right: ©Newell Harry, Untitled (gift mat #I) Cape Malays / Cape Malaise, 2007, Pandanas and dye, courtesy the artist, CAC and Roslyn Oxley 9 gallery.

Les flâneurs et flâneuses uncharacteristically found themselves in Campbelltown on a warm Friday evening, to witness the opening of this important contemporary show, curated by Aaron Seeto at the ever-interesting CAC. It was a night where the local Islander and Aboriginal communities sucessfully met with the world of high art, and the courtyard acted as an amphitheatre for an excited and lively family crowd, to witness hakas, song and storytelling, and Michael Tuffery's superb interactive projections (onto the 'sails' of the Arts Centre's facade), all part of his First Contact installation.

The exhibition in the exceptional spaces of the Campbelltown Regional Gallery encompases diverse artists (with 'island' connections) from Australia and the Asia Pacific region , from the late David Malangi (Manyarrngu), Ganalbingu elder Johhny Bulunbulun, established artists as Simryn Gill (Aus/Malaysia), Guan Wei (Aus/China) Dadang Christanto (Aus/Indonesia) and Michael Tuffery (NZ), to emergent talents such as Dachi Dang, (Aus/Vietnam), Newell Harry (Aus), Rueben Paterson (NZ) and Samuel Tupou (NZ), as well as work that has emerged from community history projects and arts workshops. All the work is well worth seeing, with LF's standouts being Guan Wei's impressive whole-room installation, Newell Harry's woven gift mats (different ones to those exhibited at Roslyn Oxley earlier this year), Sam Tupou's acrylic Anniversary Skulls, and some superbly 'contemporary', anonymously decorated shields from Papua New Guinea, collected by the eagle-eyed Newell Harry.

You can find the full program at: http://www.campbelltown.nsw.gov.au/default.asp?iNavCatID=491&iSubCatID=2469