Review: ‘all about … blooming’ exhibition by JUNKO GO at Gallery 101, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 25th February – 14th March 2009

 

“We live in a world where high achievers are congratulated, yet true achievements are not related to what we can get done, but to how deeply we aware of how wonderful it is to be alive.

In this exhibition, flowers are not only a predominant source of visual inspiration, looking at them also engenders a kind of appreciation and wonder. The fragile and ephemeral flower provokes in me an awareness of the human condition that reveals the true nature of our existence.

My goal is to create images which are strong and soft, bold and precise, beautiful and ugly, figurative and abstract, all at once. My greatest challenge is to make art about what it is to be human … What really matters in art making to me is a kind of awareness – a being able to say, ‘I am as I am’.”

Text from the artist statement

 

 

Junko Go
‘Opium Poppy’
2008
“One person’s heaven is another’s nightmare. Seeing both sides to every story can be a blessing and a curse. Good and bad, right and wrong, purity and impurity are inextricably linked.”

 

A delicate, refined but strong presence is felt in the work of Junko Go in the her new exhibition ‘all about … blooming’ at Gallery 101, Melbourne. Nominally landscape painting about flowers but featuring thoughts and ideas about the seed, the shoot, pollen and the breath of life the work addresses the essence of what it is to be human and live compassionately on this earth in an intelligent and profound way.

Denying the nihilism of abstract expressionism each mark is fully considered by being attentive to the connection between brush, hand and meaning. Almost childlike in their use of charcoal and acrylic her dogs, crosses and flowers, jottings and dashes, rain and rivers, seeds and people show a Zen like contemplation in the marks she makes on the canvas – just so. A releasement towards things is proffered, a letting go of the ego to create an awareness of just being. There is genuine warmth and humility to this work.

In ‘Opium Poppy’ (2008, above) the darkness of the nightmare is represented by the black marks, ascending like Jacob’s ladder balanced by the mandala like poppies whose petals seem like feathers of a bird’s wing – a flight of fancy both good and bad. In ‘Pollen’ (2009) bees swarm around a sunflower leaving traces of their presence, a bird flies close to a tiny blue cloud, the sun burst forth in a tiny patch of aqua colour, and people hug arm in arm. As Go says, “Bees in a flower bear pollen unawares and play a crucial roll for the plant to survive. Our love, kindness, warmth and wisdom affect one another unawares and play a crucial roll for our planet to survive.”  In ‘New Shoot’ (2008, below) the puzzle of our existence, the nature of our existential being is laid bare for all to see.

 

 

Junko Go
‘New Shoot’
2008
“Each of us is born to fill a special place in this world. In the process, we sometimes have trouble finding our niche. Life is like a jigsaw puzzle in which we make every effort to find our own place that makes a right connection with others, with the world and even with the whole universe.”

 

In ‘Seeds’ (2008) Go reminds us that rather than being focused on what we hoped for, we must make the most of whatever opportunities we are blessed with. This means being aware of the gifts one possesses, not the distance between ‘I’ and want, need and desire – now! The seed of our experience – the calm before the force that propelled us into existence – is already present within us.

Go’s musings on the existential nature of our being are both full and empty at one and the same time and help us contemplate the link to the breath of the sublime. In the end Go’s paintings are about endings and beginnings, about being strong or not, about the infinity of the seed and about our responses to living in harmony on this planet. Through the seed, the shoot, the flower and the earth access may be granted to the sublime and this perfectly sums up the work of this artist, a reflection of her energy and radiance transferred to the canvas. I loved it.

M Bunyan

 

 

Junko Go
‘Red Hot Poker’
2009
“Push and pull our inner strength. Sometimes, we need courage to take risks in confronting pain and loss in order to gain a deep and profound experience.”
 

 

GALLERY 101 
Ground level, 101 Collins Street,
Melbourne VICTORIA 3000
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 12 – 4pm
T 61 3 96546886  F 61 3 9663 0562
www.101collins.com.au

‘Biografías’ by Colombian artist Óscar Muñoz opens at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 19th February – 14th June 2009

 

 

Óscar Muñoz
‘Biografías’
2002
installation view

 

“Óscar Muñoz is something of a gentle magician. His ‘disappearing’ drawings are poignant and beautiful, combining consummate skill with conceptual subtlety and rigour.

Muñoz is a senior Colombian artist. He plays an important role in mentoring younger artists but his own work is very focused on a personal language that is closely tied to the body and its disappearance. His work has always combined traditional drawing skills with video in a completely original and surprising way.

Although Muñoz is not assertively political, his work is more about mortality than specific acts of violence but it is impossible not to look at it in the context of Colombian life. A common technique for social control has become the ‘disappearing’ of people. The work shown in this exhibition, Biografías 2002 is structured to reflect this pervasive theme of disappearance.

Biografías is one of a series of works in which portraits slowly disappear, reflecting the disappearance of people on a regular basis in Colombia. Muñoz has made silk screen portraits of people but instead of forcing ink through the screen onto paper he has dusted fine coal dust through the screen onto a flat basin of water. The portrait in coal is then transferred to float on the surface of the water. After a while the water starts to drain out of a plug hole in the basin causing the image to begin to distort. Eventually the image is compressed becomes unrecognisable and finally disappears down the drain. 

Five such portraits are shown in Biografías by projecting video of the performed drawings onto screens on the floor complete with plug holes beneath which you hear the sound of water running down the drain.”

 

 

Óscar Muñoz
‘Biografías’
2002

 

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

‘What is This Life?’ by Michael Leunig

What a wonderful invocation of life, to life!

 

 

 

Michael Leunig on Wikipedia

Review: ‘Ocean Without A Shore’ video installation by Bill Viola at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

“Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then break through an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realise that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.”

Bill Viola
25 May 2007
Text © Bill Viola 2007

 

 

 

The work was inspired by a poem by the twentieth century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:

 

Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they’re in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

The dead are never gone,
they’re in the breast of a woman,
they’re in the crying of a child,
in the flaming torch.

The dead are not in the earth:
they’re in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they’re in the forest, they’re in the house,
the dead are not dead.

 

Text from the Ocean Without A Shore website www.oceanwithoutashore.com/ 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Viola
‘Ocean Without A Shore’
2007
Original installation at church of San Gallo

 

 

Originally installed inside the intimate 15th century Venetian church of San Gallo as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale incorporating its internal architecture into the piece using the three existing stone altars as support for the video screens, the installation has been recreated in a small darkened room at The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

And what an installation it is.

Deprived of the ornate surroundings of the altars of the Venetian chapel, altars that Viola has said “that as per the original development of the origins of Christianity these alters actually are a place where the dead kind of reside and connect with those of us, the living, who are here on earth. And they really are a connection between a cross, between a tomb and an alter – a place to pray,”1 the viewer is forced into concentrating on the images themselves. I believe this is no bad thing, stripping away as it does connotations of religious institutions responses to mortality.

In the work Viola combines the use of a primitive twenty five year old security black and white analogue video surveillance camera with a high definition colour video camera through the use of a special mirror prism system. This technology allows for the seamless combination of both inputs: the dead appear far off in a dark obscure place as grey ghosts in a sea of pulsating ‘noise’ and gradually walk towards you, crossing the invisible threshold of a transparent water wall that separates the dead from the living, to appear in the space transformed into a detailed colour image. As they do so the sound that accompanies the transformation grows in intensity reminding me of a jet aircraft. You the viewer are transfixed watching every detail as the ghosts appear into the light.

The performances of the actors (for this is what they are) are slow and poignant. As Viola has observed, “I spent time with each person individually talking with them and you know when you speak with people, you realise then that everybody has experienced some kind of loss in their life, great and small. So you speak with them, you work with them, you spend time and that comes to the surface while we were working on this project together, you know? I didn’t want to over-direct them because I knew that the water would have this kind of visual effect and so they were able to, I think, use this piece on their own and a lot of them had their own stories of coming back and visiting a relative perhaps, who had died.”1

The resurrected are pensive, some wringing the hands, some staring into the light. One offers their hands to the viewer in supplication before the tips of the fingers touch the wall of water – the ends turning bright white as they push through the penumbrae of the interface. As they move forward the hands take on a stricken anguish, stretched out in rigor. Slowly the resurrected turn and return to the other side. We watch them as we watch our own mortality, life slipping away one day after another. Here is not the distraction of a commodified society, here is the fact of every human life: that we all pass.

The effect on the viewer is both sad but paradoxically uplifting. I cried.

 

 

 

 

A friend who I went with said that the images reminded her not of the dead temporarily coming back to life, but the birth of a new life – the breaking of water at the birth of a child. The performers seemed to her to behave like children brought anew into the world. One of my favourite moments was when the three screens were filled with just noise and a figure then appears out of the beyond, a dim and distant outline creating a transcendental moment. Unfortunately there are no images of these grainy figures. As noted below Viola uses a variety of different ethnic groups and cultures for his performers but the one very small criticism I have is they have no real individuality as people – there are no bikers with tattoos, no cross dressers, no punks because these do not serve his purpose. There is the black woman, the old woman, the middle aged man, the younger 30s man in black t-shirt: these are generic archetypes of humanity moulded to Viola’s artistic vision.

Viola has commented, “I think I have designed a piece that’s open ended enough, where the people and the range of people, the kind of people we chose are from various ethnic groups and cultures. And I think that the feeling of more this is a piece about humanity and it’s about the fragility of life, like the borderline between life and death is actually not a hard wall, it’s not to be opened with a lock and key, its actually very fragile, very tenuous.  You can cross it like that in an instant and I think religions, you know institutions aside, I think just the nature of our awareness of death is one of the things that in any culture makes human beings have that profound feeling of what we call the human condition and that’s really something I am really interested in. I think this piece really has a lot to do with, you know, our own mortality and all that that means.”1

 

These series of encounters at the intersection of life and death are worthy of the best work of this brilliant artist. He continues to astound with his prescience, addressing what is undeniable in the human condition. Long may he continue.

 

 

 

 

Bill Viola website

National Gallery of Victoria International website

 

1. TateShots. Venice Biennale: Bill Viola. 30 June 2007.
www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/episode.jsp?item=10088

‘Momentum’ 2009 new body of work by Marcus Bunyan

A new body of work  - the first of 2009 – is now online at www.marcusbunyan.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All 30 images can be seen on my website or as a set at Flickr.

‘The best is often the Memories: Photographic Portraits of Romy Schneider’ exhibition at Museum Fue Kunst Und Gewerbe, Hamburg

6th February 2009 – 13th April 2009

 

 

Will McBride
‘Romy Schneider, Paris, 1964′

 

 

Peter Bruchmann
‘Romy Schneider, Munich, 1968′

 

“Herbert List, Max Scheler, Roger Fritz, F. C. Gundlach, Will McBride, Peter Brüchmann, Werner Bokelberg, Helga Kneidl and Robert Lebeck took photos of Romy Schneider in quite different ways, as a young girl, in her film roles, together with her children, apparently unobserved in everyday situations or in set poses and dressed up in various costumes, merry or pensive, beautiful and fragile. More than 140 pictures will be on show, of which about 40 are being exhibited for the first time.

 

 

Roger Fritz
‘Romy Schneider, Paris, 1961′

 

 

Herbert List
‘Romy Schneider, Munich, 1954′

 

Hardly any other star has left us with so many different and conflicting images as Romy Schneider. She was photographed thousands of times – and yet she always remained enigmatic. Some of the photographers whose work is presented in this exhibition only met Romy once– Herbert List, for instance, captured her as a teenager around 1954 on pictures which remained unknown until recently – or accompanied her throughout her life, like Robert Lebeck, who succeeded in taking disturbingly personal pictures of her from the 1950s through to shortly before her death.

 

 

F. C. Gundlach
‘Romy Schneider, Hamburg, 1961′

 

 

Werner Bokelberg
‘Romy Schneider, London, 1968′

 

These snapshots conjure up once again the legend that was Romy, while at the same time making a powerful statement which reveals the transitoriness of existence. Because that is the core of what a photo does: it creates an image in order to bear lasting witness to an event which happened – yet at the very moment of capturing the image on film, it is no more than the proof that the fleeting moment has passed. 
The photos by Herbert List, Werner Bokelberg, Peter Brüchmann, Roger Fritz and Max Scheler are being shown publicly for the first time. This also applies to the majority of the photos by F. C. Gundlach and Will McBride. The pictures by Helga Kneidl and Robert Lebeck have already appeared in books about Romy Schneider. These volumes are however now out of print.”

Text from the Museum Fue Kunst Und Gewerbe website

 

 

Helga Kneidl
‘Romy Schneider, Paris, 1972′

 

 

Helga Kneidl
‘Romy Schneider, Paris, 1973′

 

The legend that was Romy!
I have never know the filmography of Romy Schneider, never come across this actress before sad to say. But now I do. What great photographs. What a beautiful woman: sensitive, vivacious, stunning. A soul I would have liked to have known.

 

All images copyright of the photographers.

‘Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes’ opens at The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, Alberta

February 7 – April 26, 2009

 

One of the great photographers of the world. Enjoy some of his images below and visit his website for more photographs at www.edwardburtynsky.com/

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia 2007′

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Tanggu Port, Tianjin, China 2005′

 

“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California 1999′

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Nickel Tailings No. 31, Sudbury, Ontario 1996′

 

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

Text from The Whyte Museum website.

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Nickel Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996′

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Feng Jie #4, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2002′

 

“These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear,” said Edward Burtynsky, photographer. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.” 

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Shipbreaking No.1, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000′

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Bao Steel #2, Shanghai, China, 2005′

 

Speaking of his “Quarries” series, Burtynsky has said, “The concept of the landscape as architecture has become, for me, an act of imagination. I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there, because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass I knew that I had arrived.” 

 

 

Edward Burtnysky
‘Iberia Quarries #3, Bencatel, Portugal, 2006′

 

 

Edward Burtnysky
‘China Quarries #8, Xiamen, Fujian Province, 2004′

 

 

Edward Burtynsky
‘Dam #6 ,Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, 2005′

 

Below is the trailer for the film ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ in which Jennifer Baichwal documents Edward Burtynsky doing what artists do – making art, in this case photographing Bangladesh and China as he observes the “manufacturer to the world”.

I haven’t seen the film but I am hanging out to do so! Anybody seen it please?

 

Review: ‘Bowerhouse Blues’ exhibition by Mary Newsome, Gallery 101, Melbourne

February 3rd – February 21st 2009

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘Bowerhouse Blues’ installation photograph with ‘The Bowerhouse’ centre
2009

 

This is a slight bouffant of an exhibition by Mary Newsome at Gallery 101, Collins St., Melbourne.

“The exhibition consists of separate collections to do with blue, centering on the Bowerhouse with its beckoning light. The ideas came from several different directions.”

And what directions they are!

Firstly the idea of the lonely male bowerbird at the Museum of Victoria, given blue biros as solace after killing his last mate. Then Oscar Wilde trying to live with his blue china toying with Yves Klein and his uber-dimensionality, the invisible blue becoming visible. We have finger painting as a child upgraded to paste painting “which is finger painting under a more adult name”; poetry, yes! by famous poets, sandwiched with shells and cans and bits of glass and plastic and pottery and pegs all offered up to the god of the azure.

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘What Bliss There is in Blueness’
Extract from ‘Laughter in the Dark’, 1989 by Vladimir Nabokov
2009

 

Artefacts litter the floor around the edge of the gallery, media wash across the walls. A silkscreen here and a painting of blue and white china there, watercolors of a view out of a blue curtained Cornish cottage, a blue seascape, the Royality of a blue tampons collage, three-dimensional objects, acrylics, crayon, pencil, oils and stencils. The Bowerhouse like a blue ‘red light’ house with flashing blue light inside and heart on top. And so it goes.

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘Royal Tampons’
Collage

 

There are some interesting small single-pigment blue acrylics that have geometric and anamorphic shapes painted upon them with stenciled names of the colour along the spine of the canvases. There are also a couple of competent oils and silkscreens of tea sets in a dresser with cups hanging from hooks.

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘Blue Colours’
2008

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘Bowerhouse Blues’
installation photograph 2009

 

 

Mary Newsome
‘Bathroom Sink’
1992

 

The works date from 1980 to the present day – and “without fully realising it” the artist has looked through her work over the past 30 years and come across lots and lots of blue. Any artist worth their salt knows their oevure indelibly from front to back. It seems inconceivable to me that this epiphany has occurred without the artist not fully understanding the importance of the colour blue to their art practice before now.

Recently I have been reading a book called ‘Distraction’ (Young, Damon. Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008). The book surmises that distraction is often a matter of what one values in the world and it demonstrates that patient, sensitive, and thoughtful attention to the world suggests that the opposite of a life of distraction is one of grateful appreciation. Here is a perfect example of this distraction: the noise of the collective work has subsumed its individual charm. The work seems forced into a conceptualization not of it’s making. Everything seems labored to the point where all the fun has been squeezed from it and in the end, it left me feeling the blues.

M Bunyan

 

 

Photographs by Tim Gresham

Images courtesy of Gallery 101

GALLERY 101  Ground level, 101 Collins Street, Melbourne VICTORIA 3000
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm, Saturday 12 – 4pm
T 61 3 96546886
F 61 3 9663 0562

www.101collins.com.au

‘Utopia: Qiu Anxiong’ exhibition opens at Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

6 February – 22 November 2009

 

 

Qui Anxiong
‘Staring into Amnesia’
2008

 

A dream has come true. ARKEN has opened the first of three contemporary art exhibitions under the heading UTOPIA.

“The first UTOPIA artist is Chinese Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972). His work Staring into Amnesia (2008), an enormous original Chinese train carriage from the 1960s, is the principal work in ARKEN’s exhibition. Documentary video clips and poetic silhouettes have been added to the carriage taking us on a journey into China’s past, present and future.

In recent years Qiu Anxiong has received great international attention with his poetic and moving video works which span from big and complex installations to hand painted animated films.

The exhibition is the first presentation of Qiu Anxiong’s works in Denmark.

 

 

Qui Anxiong
‘Staring into Amnesia’
2008

 

UTOPIA & DYSTOPIA
Qiu Anxiong belongs to a new generation of Chinese artists who bridge Chinese culture and history and today’s globalised contemporary art. Cultures arise and perish, and the yearning for the perfect society is closely followed by the utopia’s antithesis: an oppressed, conflicted dystopia. In a poetic and sensual idiom Qiu Anxiong raises the issue of which new utopias may provide the clue for today’s globalised reality.”

From the Arken Musem of Modern Art website

 

 

Qui Anxiong
‘Staring into Amnesia’
2008

 

“The train carriage is the principal work of the first exhibition in the museum’s large-scale UTOPIA project. A project that is to raise the issue of the grand shared notion of the perfect society. Whatever happened to it? Does it still exist today? Have the international financial crisis and the American presidential election made it more topical? And if it does not exist, what has taken its place? Individual dreams of the good life, notions of globalisation, small enclaves of communities?

In the 1960s and ’70s it ran in northeastern China. Ordinary Chinese people sat on the hard wooden seats and were transported to and from work, on family visits, tours and holidays. Now it stops in ARKEN’s Art Axis with the purpose of making Danish museum visitors think about the dreams and values that drive them and the world they live in.

Qui Anxiong gave the train carriage an artistic makeover after it had ended its career as a means of public transportation, transforming it into the work Staring into Amnesia (2007). A work of art which invites us on a journey even though the carriage is motionless. A journey into China’s past, presence and future. For when the guests come aboard the train and sit down on the hard wooden seats, they journey through China’s history. Video clips of documentary and propaganda films from China from 1910 until today pass by the windows as fragments of memories alternating with silhouettes of everyday scenes: a girl waiting by a ventilator, two people playing chess, groups of people in processions, riots, struggles or celebration. What has been is juxtaposed with what is. And with the train as metaphor for movement in time, it raises the question of which destinations await us up ahead. Is the next stop Utopia? What do we hope will come, what do we dream of? ”

Text from the Artdaily.org website

 

 

Qui Anxiong
‘Staring into Amnesia’
2008

 

Qui Anxiong artist website

Images courtesy of  Boers-Li Gallery and ArtShortCut

‘Melbourne firestorm’ photographs by Marcus Bunyan

Melbourne’s hottest day ever 46.4 degrees. Firestorms to the north of the city, Port Phillip Bay completely obscured, very strange light seen from 48th floor. In the future I will use the images in a new body of artwork.

 

 

 

 

 

More images from the set on Flickr website