Preamble [1]
'Melbourne Now' was an art exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014. It takes as its premise the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work within its midsts. The aim is to explore how Melbourne's visual artists and creative practitioners contribute to the dynamic cultural identity of this city. The result is an exhibition that celebrates what is unique about Melbourne's art design and architectural communities.
The intention of this exhibition is to encourage and inspire everyone to discover some of the best of Melbourne's culture. To help achieve this, family-friendly activities, dance and music performances, inspiring talks from creative practitioner's, city walk, ephemeral installations and cultural events that make up the public program.
This and other posts in this series will concentrate on the participating artists rather than on other features of the exhibition events (e.g., family friendly commissions developed especially for children and young audiences that aimed to encourage participatory learning for kids and families etc.)
For your convenience I have listed below other posts on thie blogspot that features Melbourne Now exhibitions:
Melbourne Now - Part I
Melbourne Now - Part II
Melbourne Now - Part III
Melbourne Now - Part IV
Melbourne Now - Part III [1]
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green with Jon Cattapan
Title: War and Peace #5: The Leopard, 2013.
Working collaboratively since 1989, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green interweave painting and photography to explore cultural representations and archival histories. Blurring the individual hand, this pair create visually and conceptually layered works that overlap and unfold. Jon Cattapan is an equally well-known visual artist who explores political and social representations of urban environment through paintings of perceptual and narrative complexity. Both Brown/Green (2007) and Cattapan (2008) were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial as 'Offical War Artists,' and the three artists are involved in a long-term collaboration.
Brown/Green and Cattapan recently embarked on new works that commence with photographs printed on Duraclear film, overpainted by Cattapan and Brown/Green in turn. This series, 'War and Peace (2013),' explores the aftermath of peace keeping and war, connecting the Australian landscape to its wider military, media and pop-culture context. Bringing together their on-site observations, screen culture aesthetics and the image flow of the internet, the pictorial strategies of Brown/Green and Cattapan are not aimed at perserving identity, but rather suspending spectacle, allowing for close analysis and arresting contemplation.
Trevor Turbo Brown
Title: Last Man Standing (2012).
Mildura born Trevor Turbo Brown was stolen from his Latje Latje family, grew up in a boy's home in Sydney's west (Australia) and then lived on the streets where, he claims that animals were his only friends. In 1981 Brown moved to Melbourne (Australia) and became a celebrity in the Koori community for his boxing at the Fitzroy Stars Gym and breakdancing street performances, which earned him the epithet 'Turbo' after one of the protangonists in the 1984 film 'Beat Street.' Brown started painting in 2001, and completed a Diploma of Visual Arts at RMIT University (Melbourne) in 2005.
Brown's contribution to Melbourne Now comprises a comforting self-portrait, 'Last Man Standing (2012)' and three spirited paintings of animals in their natural environment symbolic of the artist's vision of his 'Dreaming Country' before it was cleared by whites. Working intuitively with spontaneous brush strokes, Brown creates joyous impressions of his 'friends' - an owl, a crocodile and two goannas - and captures the verdant landscape with breakdance verve and vivid schematic distress. 'Last Man Standing,' Brown's only self-portrait, is a moving unmasking of the self, a cry of psychic pain, an exorcism and a dance of freedom.
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley
Title: Oceania Communion (2012). Detail.
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have worked collaboratively since the 1980s. Their practice often engages with the legacies of modernism and traverses a wide range of references from psychoanalysis to film to literature to feminism. It also frequently plays across boundaries of art and design, sculpture and furniture.
Shields from Papua New Guinea, held in the National Gallery of Victoria's collection (Melbourne), provided an aesthetic catalyst for the artists to develop an open-ended series of their own shields. The work 'Belief' includes shields made by Burchill and McCamley between 2004 and 2013. In part, this installation mediates on the form and function of shields from the perspective of a type of reverse ethnography.
As the artists explain: 'The shield is an emblematic form ghosted by the functions of attack and defence and characterized by the aggressive display of insignia. We treat the shield as a perverse type of modular unit. While working with repitition, each shield acts as a carrier or container for different types or registers of content, motifs, emblems and aesthetic strategies. The series as a whole then becomes a large sculptural collage which allows us to incorporate a wide range of responses to making art and being alive now.'
Penny Byrne
Title: iProtest (2012-13) Detail.
Penny Byrne is both a visual artist of repute and a highly respected and sought-after ceramics conservator. Using techniques employed in her conservation work, Byrne creates contentious works of art from recycled mass-produced porcelain figurines and toys. Her often satrical modifications of these coy figurines are not obvious: by tinkering with their kitsch aesthetic, Byrne creates a shock of the familiar being used in unexpected ways.
While at first iProtest (2012-2013) resembles a display of endearing souvenir-style figurines hanging on a wall, its potency is revealed on closer inspection. Each figurine is personalized with details relating to one of the many conflicts driven by mass protests around the world. Nationalism is referenced by faces painted with flags; acts of violence leave bodies dismembered and bloodied; and the cutest figures are in fact riot police, wielding guns and dressed as clowns. The omnipresent symbol of Facebook is also ingeniously added to the work. Byrne's crowd of modified figurines explores the way social media has become a significant tool for coordinating protests around the world.
John Campbell
Title: Dunno (T. Towels) (2012) Detail.
John Campbell has been a fixture on the Melbourne art scene since he first began exhibiting paintings of suburban youth culture in the 1980s. Over time his practice has evolved to become one of the more complex examples of Australian 'Pop Art.' Sourcing his materials from a seemingly endless cache of overlooked suburban motifs, Campbell uses the seductively familiar materials and techniques of commercial art and design to foster an audience for these symbols within the hallowed spaces of the contermporary art gallery.
For Melbourne Now, Campbell presents DUNNO (T. Towels) (2012), a work that continues his fascination with the vernacular culture of suburban Australia. Compromising eighty-five tea towels, some in their original condition and others that Campbell had modified through the addition of 'choice' snippets of Australian slang and cultural signifiers, this seemingly quotidian assortment of kitsch 'kitchenalia' is transformed into a mock heroic frieze in which we can discover the values and dramas of our present age.
Maree Clarke
Title: Men in Mourning (2012).
Swan Hill (Victoria, Australia) born Maree Clarke lived for some time on Balranald mission in Munatunga mission Robinvale (Victoria), before settling in Mildura (Victoria), and is connected to the traditional lands of the Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta and Boonwurrunga Aboriginal peoples. Clarke has developed a profound and meditative multidisciplinary practice that reclaims and celebrates precious elements of Aborignal customary ritual, language and art, lost during the British colonisation of Victoria.
Clarke's site-specific installation, Ritual and Ceremony (2013), render palpable the unconscionable loss and sorrow experienced by Victorian Aboriginal people as a continuing legacy of colonization. The artist's brooding and poignant photographic images of forty-five men and thirty-eight women bearing ritual markings of mourning create a memorable symbol of collective grief for missing people, stolen Country, lost languages and silenced culture, as well a resilient survival. Moreover, Clarke's video interviews with the individual subjects enable the frozen portraits to come alive, thereby challenging stereotypes of Victorian Aboriginal people as 'inauthentic,' and humanizing their experiences. Resonant with the courageous voices of Koori leaders the installation becomes a healing space inviting multicultural contemplation, sharing and the possibility of reconciliation.
Bindi Cole
Title: EH5452 (2012) (still photograph).
Bindi Cole is a resilient indigenous Melbourne-born photographer, curator and new media artist of Wathaurong Aboriginal descent. Cole's early interest in photography was curtailed by a descent into depression and drugs caused by the trauma of her mother's heroin addiction and death from cancer. During a transformative prison term, Cole found Christianity and recaptured her self-belief. Her deeply personal and powerful artistic practice questions the way settler Australians circumscribed and misconstrued contemporary Aboriginal identity and experience.
Cole's, 'A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing' series (2012) explores the tension between Christianity and Aboriginality, a conflict between different understandings that has resulted in acts of violence and cultural silencing. The artist has been profoundly changed by the revelation of Jesus, but she struggles with the notion that so many 'wolves in sheep's clothing' ran missions in Victoria (Australia) that, in the name of God, participated in the decimation of indigenous culture and languages. The legacy of this difficult history, a longstanding resentment for the atrocities committed under the banner of Christianity, lingers in the Victorian Aboriginal community, and moreover, throughout the world with respect to the indigenous communities.
Reference
[1] T. Ellwood, Director, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia).
'Melbourne Now' was an art exhibition mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014. It takes as its premise the idea that a city is significantly shaped by the artists, designers, architects, choreographers, intellectuals and community groups that live and work within its midsts. The aim is to explore how Melbourne's visual artists and creative practitioners contribute to the dynamic cultural identity of this city. The result is an exhibition that celebrates what is unique about Melbourne's art design and architectural communities.
The intention of this exhibition is to encourage and inspire everyone to discover some of the best of Melbourne's culture. To help achieve this, family-friendly activities, dance and music performances, inspiring talks from creative practitioner's, city walk, ephemeral installations and cultural events that make up the public program.
This and other posts in this series will concentrate on the participating artists rather than on other features of the exhibition events (e.g., family friendly commissions developed especially for children and young audiences that aimed to encourage participatory learning for kids and families etc.)
For your convenience I have listed below other posts on thie blogspot that features Melbourne Now exhibitions:
Melbourne Now - Part I
Melbourne Now - Part II
Melbourne Now - Part III
Melbourne Now - Part IV
Melbourne Now - Part III [1]
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green with Jon Cattapan
Working collaboratively since 1989, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green interweave painting and photography to explore cultural representations and archival histories. Blurring the individual hand, this pair create visually and conceptually layered works that overlap and unfold. Jon Cattapan is an equally well-known visual artist who explores political and social representations of urban environment through paintings of perceptual and narrative complexity. Both Brown/Green (2007) and Cattapan (2008) were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial as 'Offical War Artists,' and the three artists are involved in a long-term collaboration.
Brown/Green and Cattapan recently embarked on new works that commence with photographs printed on Duraclear film, overpainted by Cattapan and Brown/Green in turn. This series, 'War and Peace (2013),' explores the aftermath of peace keeping and war, connecting the Australian landscape to its wider military, media and pop-culture context. Bringing together their on-site observations, screen culture aesthetics and the image flow of the internet, the pictorial strategies of Brown/Green and Cattapan are not aimed at perserving identity, but rather suspending spectacle, allowing for close analysis and arresting contemplation.
Trevor Turbo Brown
Mildura born Trevor Turbo Brown was stolen from his Latje Latje family, grew up in a boy's home in Sydney's west (Australia) and then lived on the streets where, he claims that animals were his only friends. In 1981 Brown moved to Melbourne (Australia) and became a celebrity in the Koori community for his boxing at the Fitzroy Stars Gym and breakdancing street performances, which earned him the epithet 'Turbo' after one of the protangonists in the 1984 film 'Beat Street.' Brown started painting in 2001, and completed a Diploma of Visual Arts at RMIT University (Melbourne) in 2005.
Brown's contribution to Melbourne Now comprises a comforting self-portrait, 'Last Man Standing (2012)' and three spirited paintings of animals in their natural environment symbolic of the artist's vision of his 'Dreaming Country' before it was cleared by whites. Working intuitively with spontaneous brush strokes, Brown creates joyous impressions of his 'friends' - an owl, a crocodile and two goannas - and captures the verdant landscape with breakdance verve and vivid schematic distress. 'Last Man Standing,' Brown's only self-portrait, is a moving unmasking of the self, a cry of psychic pain, an exorcism and a dance of freedom.
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have worked collaboratively since the 1980s. Their practice often engages with the legacies of modernism and traverses a wide range of references from psychoanalysis to film to literature to feminism. It also frequently plays across boundaries of art and design, sculpture and furniture.
Shields from Papua New Guinea, held in the National Gallery of Victoria's collection (Melbourne), provided an aesthetic catalyst for the artists to develop an open-ended series of their own shields. The work 'Belief' includes shields made by Burchill and McCamley between 2004 and 2013. In part, this installation mediates on the form and function of shields from the perspective of a type of reverse ethnography.
As the artists explain: 'The shield is an emblematic form ghosted by the functions of attack and defence and characterized by the aggressive display of insignia. We treat the shield as a perverse type of modular unit. While working with repitition, each shield acts as a carrier or container for different types or registers of content, motifs, emblems and aesthetic strategies. The series as a whole then becomes a large sculptural collage which allows us to incorporate a wide range of responses to making art and being alive now.'
Penny Byrne
Penny Byrne is both a visual artist of repute and a highly respected and sought-after ceramics conservator. Using techniques employed in her conservation work, Byrne creates contentious works of art from recycled mass-produced porcelain figurines and toys. Her often satrical modifications of these coy figurines are not obvious: by tinkering with their kitsch aesthetic, Byrne creates a shock of the familiar being used in unexpected ways.
While at first iProtest (2012-2013) resembles a display of endearing souvenir-style figurines hanging on a wall, its potency is revealed on closer inspection. Each figurine is personalized with details relating to one of the many conflicts driven by mass protests around the world. Nationalism is referenced by faces painted with flags; acts of violence leave bodies dismembered and bloodied; and the cutest figures are in fact riot police, wielding guns and dressed as clowns. The omnipresent symbol of Facebook is also ingeniously added to the work. Byrne's crowd of modified figurines explores the way social media has become a significant tool for coordinating protests around the world.
John Campbell
John Campbell has been a fixture on the Melbourne art scene since he first began exhibiting paintings of suburban youth culture in the 1980s. Over time his practice has evolved to become one of the more complex examples of Australian 'Pop Art.' Sourcing his materials from a seemingly endless cache of overlooked suburban motifs, Campbell uses the seductively familiar materials and techniques of commercial art and design to foster an audience for these symbols within the hallowed spaces of the contermporary art gallery.
For Melbourne Now, Campbell presents DUNNO (T. Towels) (2012), a work that continues his fascination with the vernacular culture of suburban Australia. Compromising eighty-five tea towels, some in their original condition and others that Campbell had modified through the addition of 'choice' snippets of Australian slang and cultural signifiers, this seemingly quotidian assortment of kitsch 'kitchenalia' is transformed into a mock heroic frieze in which we can discover the values and dramas of our present age.
Maree Clarke
Swan Hill (Victoria, Australia) born Maree Clarke lived for some time on Balranald mission in Munatunga mission Robinvale (Victoria), before settling in Mildura (Victoria), and is connected to the traditional lands of the Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta and Boonwurrunga Aboriginal peoples. Clarke has developed a profound and meditative multidisciplinary practice that reclaims and celebrates precious elements of Aborignal customary ritual, language and art, lost during the British colonisation of Victoria.
Clarke's site-specific installation, Ritual and Ceremony (2013), render palpable the unconscionable loss and sorrow experienced by Victorian Aboriginal people as a continuing legacy of colonization. The artist's brooding and poignant photographic images of forty-five men and thirty-eight women bearing ritual markings of mourning create a memorable symbol of collective grief for missing people, stolen Country, lost languages and silenced culture, as well a resilient survival. Moreover, Clarke's video interviews with the individual subjects enable the frozen portraits to come alive, thereby challenging stereotypes of Victorian Aboriginal people as 'inauthentic,' and humanizing their experiences. Resonant with the courageous voices of Koori leaders the installation becomes a healing space inviting multicultural contemplation, sharing and the possibility of reconciliation.
Bindi Cole
Bindi Cole is a resilient indigenous Melbourne-born photographer, curator and new media artist of Wathaurong Aboriginal descent. Cole's early interest in photography was curtailed by a descent into depression and drugs caused by the trauma of her mother's heroin addiction and death from cancer. During a transformative prison term, Cole found Christianity and recaptured her self-belief. Her deeply personal and powerful artistic practice questions the way settler Australians circumscribed and misconstrued contemporary Aboriginal identity and experience.
Cole's, 'A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing' series (2012) explores the tension between Christianity and Aboriginality, a conflict between different understandings that has resulted in acts of violence and cultural silencing. The artist has been profoundly changed by the revelation of Jesus, but she struggles with the notion that so many 'wolves in sheep's clothing' ran missions in Victoria (Australia) that, in the name of God, participated in the decimation of indigenous culture and languages. The legacy of this difficult history, a longstanding resentment for the atrocities committed under the banner of Christianity, lingers in the Victorian Aboriginal community, and moreover, throughout the world with respect to the indigenous communities.
Reference
[1] T. Ellwood, Director, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia).
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