Art of the Nomad: May 2012

Thursday, 31 May 2012

Arts Hub
http://www.artshub.com.au/au/news-article/opinions/arts/in-the-gap-188836

Art Almanac
http://www.art-almanac.com.au/2012/04/art-of-the-nomad/

ABC 7.30 NT story
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-23/art-of-the-nomad/3966650

Ian Hance

Section from Signals from the frontier, 2012

http://www.topendarts.com.au/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=1642&Itemid=49

Ode to those that didn't stay

The dichotomy between becoming close and letting go of people as they pass through my home town of Alice Springs, is one that any person remaining centered in the centre can become exhausted or numbed by. Some people accidently land in the place and stay for decades, and then there are those, so many of them, that move on.

In the last decade I have said goodbye to over 60 people that I have made history with. When the flow of meaningful connections with people is so constant, my burning question is always how do I shelve the memory of those connections and when do I let them depart. These people are the souls that contribute to the story of my life and this art work is a tribute to them.

Thursday, 17 May 2012

No fixed Address.

No Fixed Address.

The name of this amazing piece makes perfect sense when you know the story of its creation. The process was a very slow but fulfilling one. Davies created the two 10metre sculptures from rolls of paper and homemade ink in his studio. He painted 2-3 metre sections at a time, thinking not of what he is doing but instead what he will do next. It seemed as though for Davies, making this work was a journey both physically and mentally. Walking kilometres in the creation of this piece, Davies leaves his mark with everything from the boots on his feet to the mop from his kitchen. “You get into a zone; I never know what it will turn out like’’ Davies said as he proudly exhibited his impressive work of art.

Stantanamarie Elsmore

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Colin Holt

Bogan Twins

raftartspace

www.abc.net

kickarts.org

Crickey

www.ntnews.com

Henry Smith

Odyssey of wonder.

This paintings form part of a larger body of work that investigates the landscape, and art, from a non representational point of view. As such, they are not obviously suggestive of the theme, ‘ART OF THE NOMAD’. However, they address the theme indirectly through a deliberate process of WANDERING in the landscape looking for visual clues to make paintings. Over many years I’ve become familiar with the landscape around Alice Springs, its seasons, light, colours, textures, and compositions. My attempt has been to combine this visual information into an approach that is both a new interpretation and one I hope that acknowledges the original source.

www.nretas.nt.gov.au

Thursday, 3 May 2012

Bill Davies

No Fixed Address

drawing-revisited-bill-davies

Georgias opinions...

Here we are, at the Chan Contemporary Art Space, observing those who are discovering what it means to be, yes, a nomad through art. Personally, the most Nomad-ic artwork in the exhibition has to be by the locally famous Trevor 'Homeless Bum' Jenkins. We see it all around, in our streets, on the main roads, outside buildings.. the list goes on. It is like a 'trademark', to let all who notice that Trevor has been there and done his duties, of cleaning our small city as the well known 'Rubbish Warrior'.

Almost everyday when I drive to uni, I see Trevor. Either he will be on his knees creating another one of his thousands of natural sculptures made out of tree branches and trash, or he will be waving at passing cars on the roundabout while picking up rubbish and branches to create the artworks.

Trevor puts in hours of work into these small little sculptures, that I believe have meanings individually. Maybe he creates them to show us that one man's trash is another's treasure? Or simply to open our eyes of how we need to take care of our delicate planet. We are far too ignorant at times to see the smaller things in life, and we need to notice that anything can be art, from a graffitied shoe to a table with a large spaghetti stain from last weeks bad spill - it has plenty of different meanings and ways of turning into art.

So next time you see the artworks, maybe think of what you think it means. All are in different shapes and forms, and are almost catching every driver's attention! But also, don't forget to also keep your eyes on the road....

Until next time, Yasas!
(Thanks Greek for cya!)

Georgia

Suzi Lyon

Prayer Swag

Once my friend and I were nearly run over when we had rolled out our swag in the dark to sleep for the night. We were miles from anywhere in an immense flat desert landscape. At first light a strange pervasive sound entered into our half sleep, it grew and grew in intensity and kept growing until finally it was a massive terrifying roar and a road train thundered past us metres from our heads, the after shock of its passing flattening us and everything in its path. The sound receded emptying out once more into a stillness punctuated only by the early morning calls of birds. We had camped almost on the road.

The swag is an Australian symbol of the outback, of sleeping under the stars , being free and on the move, having a bed wherever you choose to lay your head, being at one with the land, its creatures, seasons, weather. Add also prickles, flies, mosquitoes, blistering heat, bone shattering cold, and dust into everything. But nothing beats waking in the night, the fire has died down to a bare glow, nothing moves. The moon has long set, the great sweeping jewelled expanse of the milky way arcs above and a meteorite shoots from outer space into yours, meeing for a moment and disappears. You can almost hear the cosmic roar.

This is a prayer for all who sleep out, on the streets or on the land.

Links to further information about Suzi

alicespringsnews.com

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

The greatest concentrationof artists in the world per capita is not in Paris or Manhattan, but in the Northern Territory in Australia. What is not widely acknowledged is that they are not only Indigenous artists, but also include non-Indigenous artists, making the whole place into a creative crucible of hybridity.

There are three major art prizes in the Territory: the Alice Prize established in 1970, which is open to all Australian artists; the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAAs) established in 1984, and which is again a national award, but open only to Indigenous artists; and the Togart Contemporary Art Award, which is now in its fifth year, and which is open only to Territorians, or those who have had a lengthy association with the Northern Territory, and is open to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. It is the only art prize that can be viewed as something of a litmus to what is happening in the visual arts scene in the Territory.

This year’s Togart finalists, displayed as the inaugural exhibition for the brand-new Chan Contemporary Arts Space, betray a strong Top End bias with fewer artists from the Central and Western Deserts, and with the non-Indigenous artists outnumbering the Indigenous ones. That said, it is a strong show sparkling with quirky hybridity. Aly de Groot literally weaves forms out of discarded steel wool dishpan scrubbers as in Legend of the white dingo, while Merran Sierakowski, in The pointy end, has cut out quite a large aeroplane shape out of perforated galvanised steel to which she has attached, with wire nail scissors, nail files and other pointy objects which had been confiscated from airline passengers. The plane is shown precariously plunging downwards, bringing to mind all of the connotations of terrorism and the futile struggle to contain it. Rob Brown, in a naïf style with a touch surrealist flavour, shows Smoky Dawson as rocking horse hero, and Bryan Bulley, an artist of growing stature, has a sprawling landscape full of episodic humour. One of my favourites is Therese Ritchie’s Out of the window, a large triptych in the form of a digital collage, which explores in a real sense the idea that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. In the work there is just an echo of Michael Riley.

David Hancock in his aerial photograph, Two paddocks one fence, contrasts two paddocks separated by a fence, one side grazed out by a passing herd of cattle, the other remains relatively untouched. It is a very simple and effective environmental statement. There is a brilliant

TheTogart test

SASHA GRISHIN3 2 # 2 3 5 N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 0 w w w . a r t m o n t h l y . o r g . a u A r t M o n t h l y A u s t r a l i a

painted bark by Barrupu Yunupingu, Gurtha, with a great sensuousness and freedom of touch, a striking acrylic canvas by Kawayi Nampitjinpa, an accomplished bark painting by Samuel Namunjdja, Goannas, as well as a great Rerrkirrwanga Mununggurr Gumatj Larrakitj, a hollow tree trunk rendered with exquisite detail. There are two signature acrylics by Lily Kelly Napangardi and Nancy Nungurrayi. There is also one of Chris Barry’s Performing Aboriginality digital photographs with their powerful sense of presence. Barry has the unusual ability to create photographs which ambush the beholder through their understated naïve innocence but which, with further viewing, pack a considerable impact. One of the popular crowd pleasers is Anna Reynolds’s Awesome Atrocity 4 (2010), a giclée print which in a tongue-in-cheek manner laments the overdevelopment of the Darwin foreshore.

This year’s award went to a long-term Darwin resident, Chips Mackinolty, for his large digital inkjet print, Neta, Darwin 1950. Mackinolty was an important figure in the 1970s poster collective movement, where his Make life impossible poster of 1976, featuring the face of Malcolm Fraser caught with an arrogant sneer on his face and made in response to the sacking of the Whitlam government, helped mould the political sympathies of a generation of Australians. Mackinolty as an artist has maintained his rage, with a brilliant huge retrospective exhibition of his and Therese Ritchie’s prints at the Charles Darwin University Art Gallery showing the full range of their art over more than forty years. Anita Angel, who curated this exhibition, went for an effective strategy of largely avoiding wall captions to allow the posters to do all of the talking, with a checklist available for further investigation.

Mackinolty’s winning entry harkens back to an age of innocence when in post-war Darwin Neta performed in a domestic setting on a ukulele. It is a striking image of warmth and innocence with an arresting presence. Mackinolty, who is mainly known as a screenprint artist, has mastered the digital process to simulate perfectly the screenprint’s crisp flat planes of colour and subtly fading colour hues, which are a hallmark of Mackinolty’s screenprints. He explained to me his process:

It’s down to using Photoshop at a probably very basic level … I tend to work with only one or a limited number of layers in general, and often just a single one for the main image … [I] work at a very fine level – down to the use of pen tools at as little as three to nine pixels wide to achieve the ‘sharp’ edges … rather than the more painterly/photographic way most others do it. It’s bloody painstaking. I tend to use distinct and simplified CMYK colours [cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black] that are consistent across a whole image, rather than random shades. A lot of people use RGB colours [an additive colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours] but as I always think about what it would look like as offset, I tend to go for what I know.

It is interesting how many comrades associated with the radical poster collectives of the 1970s are now finally receiving recognition. Alison Alder, who heads Megalo Print Studio in Canberra, was awarded the Alice Prize in 2010, while Michael Callaghan has just completed his term as Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU.

No sooner than being awarded the prize, the startled Chips Mackinolty promptly returned the cheque asking that the $15,000 prize money be distributed to three struggling live music venues in the Northern Territory: Happy Yess, the Railway Club, both in Darwin, and Winanjjikari Music, a Barkly Arts project in Tennant Creek.

Togart was the brainchild of Ervin Vidor, the chairman of the Toga Group of companies (best known for their Medina, Travelodge and Vibe hotel chains), who decided to donate 1% of their total building budget from their vast multistage Darwin Waterfront development to public art programs, including Togart. This will amass over the years to a multi-million dollar contribution to the arts. Arriving amongst the postwar refugees from Hungary, he has become a significant benefactor of the arts in Australia. On hearing of Mackinolty’s generosity, Vidor immediately decided to throw in another $5000 to the live music venues nominated by the artist. Could this happen anywhere but in Darwin? b

The Togart Contemporary Art Award 2010 was exhibited at the Chan Contemporary Arts Space, State Square, Darwin, 2 September to 7 October 2010. The winner of the People’s Choice Award is Darwin artist Anna Reynolds for her digital photograph Awesome Atrocity 4.

Professor Sasha Grishin is the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History, Australian National University, Canberra.

Sarah Pirrie

sarahpirrie.blogspot.com.au

www.togartaward.com

www.lindenarts.org

www.youtube.com

www.artguide.com.au

Franck Gohier

The Bucket

Links to information about Franck.

franckgohier.blogspot

www.abc.net.au

cdu.edu.au

Siying Zhou

Temple Export

Links to information about Siying

singmedia.wordpress.com

www.artshub.com.au

www.artabase.net

www.artwhatson.com.au

Hayley West

So Far

Links to information about Hayley

thecarrotjoke.blogspot.com.au

www.artabase.net

www.visualarts.net.au

Rupert Betheras

rupertbetheras.com

alcastongallery.com.au

www.artshub.com.au

Rod Moss

Big Rooster

Links to information about Rod Moss

rodmoss.com/

The Hard Light of Day

NT Senior Australian of the year

readings.com.au

The Guest room ABC local radio

fireworksgallery.com.au

caasinc.wordpress.com

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Bump in at Chan

Chris Raja writes about the first few days of bump in at the Chan for the Art of the Nomad

Wednesday: Day one at The Chan

I’m with Leanne Waterhouse, Siyang Zhou and Sarah Pirrie at the Chan Contemporary Art Space. The space is large and bare and over the next seven days it will need to be filled. I’m one of six curators for this show. It’s my first time curating and I am approaching my task with trepidation.

Who said curating was about long, boozy lunches? It is more about building walls, moving panels and addressing existential questions. Will you carry that panel over there please? At this moment the most important person in the gallery seems to be Stewart, the carpenter who is drilling nails into the panels and attaching them together to make walls. It is physical labour and essential but I’m looking forward to seeing the art. Having been in Alice Springs I am not sure what the other curators have got. Will the other curators/artist’s work fit in with mine? Has the art work arrived safely?

Thursday: Day two at The Chan

More panels. More moving. Building walls. Chips Mackinolty, whose speech at MAGNT was the catalyst for the exhibition, breezes into the gallery for a chat. In his speech he asks the question: Who is a real Territorian and how should they be represented in a Territory that is the domain of Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal artists? Mackinolty is here with Frank Gohier from Red Hand Prints. Mackinolty argues that we, non Aboriginals, are now the real nomads in the territory. We come and go as we please.

As the other artists and their work arrive we unwrap the art like greedy children ripping apart packaging. It is an eclectic collection of work. In Temple Export, Zhou builds a prayer room inside a wooden shipping crate. The crate is decorated with the image of Ma Zhu, a goddess with the power to control the ocean and to whom Chinese sailors pray before taking a long journey.

I’m please the work sent from the artists I’m working with arrived undamaged. As I unpack Rod Moss’s Big Rooster I’m surprised to learn Moss hasn’t had a major show in Darwin. Certainly, it’s time for him to have a retrospective here!

Sia Cox’s work looks magnificent and delicate. Her fabric sculptures have travelled well from Alice Springs to Darwin. She is certainly about to make an impression. Rupert Betheras who has already made an impression in Darwin as a footballer, having played for St. Mary’s Football Club and Collingwood, will be hard to miss. His muscular, three-meter long, Australian Line of Spiritual Salvation once stretched is too big to bring to the gallery. We need to hire a large vehicle.

Friday: Day three at The Chan

Suzi Lyon, the other curator from Alice Springs, has arrived. It’s nice to have two curators from Alice Springs interacting with artists in Darwin. The divide between Darwin and Alice Springs is palpable. This is a good opportunity for us all to interact and collaborate. Being a writer I am acutely aware that there isn’t much dialogue between territory artists and few opportunities like this for collaboration. Ian Hance begins creating his on-site installation Signals from the frontier using etched and inked zinc plates, motor vehicle parts, enamel paint, maps, acetate and red velvet plush cording with chrome bollards.

Saturday: Day four at The Chan

Looking around the gallery most of the art works are actually addressing similar themes and considerations. It seems road trains, transport in various forms, drinking, ecology, land, rubbish and rest, albeit unsettled rest, seems to me to be the major preoccupation. Amongst the artists and curators, there are also a number of different cultural backgrounds and influences here.

The history of migrants in the Northern Territory hasn’t been documented enough. In particular, I’m thinking of the Afghan Cameleers, who were really Indians and Pakistanis, who helped the early explorers and pioneers settle this country. The fact that the exhibition is in the Chan gallery makes it hard to ignore the Chinese influence on local history.

Sunday: Day five at The Chan

Mackinolty and Gohier are setting up their area. They are creating an installation that includes a bar and a tongue-in-cheek, history of Bogans. Included here is Colin Holt’s, Boganopoly, 2012, acrylic paint on wood and glass, Holt’s Bogan World, 2012, an acrylic on board, Mackinolty’s, Bogan kids’ names and Franck Gohier, The bucket, 2007, an acrylic on board that is clearly a reference to a popular fast food chicken outlet. They are thorough in their critique and their installation includes Queensland Rum, eskies and a critique of Bogan names. For those that are unclear, the term Bogan is Australian vernacular, usually pejorative or self deprecating, for an individual who is recognisably from a lower middle class background. On the other side, of their bar is Sia Cox’s work, Resting and Love at the Gap View Hotel. Suzi Lyon’s, Shaped like a bird, 2012, digital sound recording of a road train can be heard. Underneath is a dusty red swag. Nearby, Siyang Zhou is busily putting the final touches to her prayer room.

The territory is a wonderful place. It is full of spirituality, alcoholism, madness and spectacular beauty. So there is little wonder it attracts artists.

Louisa, an ABC reporter and her cameraman, from 7:30 NT arrive and interview several artists and curators. After being interviewed, Suzy Lyon flies back to Alice with three more days to go for the opening.

Art of the Nomad