The Far Country, installation view ARC ONE Gallery, 2019. Photo: Andrew Curtis.
ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present The Far Country, a major exhibition by Australia’s foremost artist collaboration, Lyndell Brown & Charles Green. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday 9 October, 6-8pm.
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s extensive practice has long been informed by the nature of memory and an investigation of how events intersect with the legacy of the past and with art history to inform our experience of identity, place and landscape. In their latest exhibition at ARC ONE, The Far Country, the artists speak to the contemporary condition of turbulence by mapping images across continents and centuries. Drawing on psychedelic anthropologist Carlos Castaneda’s book, The Eagle’s Gift (1981), which turned the depiction of a shaman’s mentorship into the superimposed juxtaposition of networked times, spaces and narratives, this exhibition explores the ways in which memory attracts pathos and how single images derive from the virtual recollection of a panorama of events unfolding in time. Narrative is a decoy.
The Far Country, 2019, Oil on Transparent Digital Print on Duraclear Film on Perspex, 200 x 143 cm. Photo: Andrew Curtis.
In these fifteen new works, images from different contexts and timeframes—sourced from the artists’ encounters with museums and research centres, from books, journals, postcards, electronic media, as well as their own personal travel photographs and family archives—are exquisitely re-created, layered, and collaged to form new, woven realities that trigger new memories and old meanings. References ranging from Gerhard Richter’s painting of 9/11, a pair of now vanishing Gouldian Finches, a ship carrying young Australian soldiers to war in 1941, a snapshot taken by Green’s father during the bombing of Darwin in 1941, refugees fleeing across high Kurdish mountains, and a photograph taken by the artists in 2014 at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, Timor-Leste, recording the site of a massacre, all float in meticulously painted, superimposed trompe l’oeil. Deliberately difficult to read as narrative, this flow of information and images presents us with the beauty of the physical world and human forces that collide against it. The artists’ personal memories are juxtaposed with contemporary and historical images of conscience and humanitarianism, exploring the way in which our experience frays alongside collective memory. In The Far Country, Brown and Green, create new resonances between spaces, times, histories and memory. They note that to move forward, we must constantly concentrate on peripheral vision, but then we may turn into phantoms, become invisible and fly across shimmering spaces and times.
The Black Range, 2019, Oil on linen, 155 x 155 cm.
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked as a collaborative team since 1989. Since then, all their art has always been made together. Working across mixed media on paper, oils, photography and overpainted photographs, they have held more than 40 solo exhibitions and have been included in more than 50 curated exhibitions. In 2007, they were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and between 2011 and 2019 worked on a follow-up project in collaboration with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by two Australian Research Council Discovery Grants) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). In 2017 Brown and Green were commissioned to design a major tapestry, Morning Star, woven by the Australian Tapestry Workshop, to celebrate the opening of the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneaux, France. Brown’s and Green’s art has been extensively written on. Their works have been included in a number of museum surveys and are in the collections of most of Australia’s public art collections and institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Australian War Memorial, as well as in many major private collections in Australia and overseas. Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne and Lyndell Green is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. They are based in regional Victoria and walk that country every day. This exhibition is supported by the University of Melbourne and the Australian Research Council. The artists acknowledge their masterprinter, Chris Pennings, at Fini Frames.