GUO JIAN | CYRUS TANG | GUAN WEI | JOHN YOUNG

Not one, but four ARC ONE artists are included in the exhibition Between Two Worlds at Newcastle Art Gallery. GUO JIAN, CYRUS TANG, GUAN WEI & JOHN YOUNG are featured.

Between Two Worlds aims to promote the diversity of works of art being produced by Australian artists of Chinese heritage. The exhibition acknowledges the artists who have lived, worked and are connected to China and Australia through migration, major historical events and Australia’s agricultural and industrial developments.

On the opening Saturday, GUO JIAN will join a panel discussion that introduces the exhibition’s themes, along with curator Catherine Croll and fellow exhibiting artists Rowena Foong & Peter Gardiner.

This talk will run from 2 -3 pm on Saturday 16 November.

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MURRAY FREDERICKS

Array #1, 2019, type C photograph, 92 x 230 cm.

ARC ONE is thrilled to present, Array, the final ‘cycle’ in award-winning Australian artist Murray Fredericks’ 16-year SALT Project. These visually arresting abstract landscapes continue the artist’s emotional engagement with Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre), South Australia.

“Stay there long enough, and the landscape forces you to a place beyond the rational mind, beyond your sense of self. It’s a part of the human condition we experience when confronted by concepts of infinity, absorbed in meditation, or when confronted by our own mortality. The images are responses to that experience”.  - Murray Fredericks, 2019

Murray Fredericks has been drawn again and again to the extraordinary location of Lake Eyre in his pursuit to understand the overwhelming emptiness and powerful emotional resonance of remote land and sky. Camping alone for weeks at a time, Fredericks’ spiritual and mental experience of this environment is encapsulated in his immersive abstract landscapes that bear witness to the transcendent capacity of the natural world.

Array #15, 2019, digital pigment print on cotton rag, 120 x 160 cm.

Array is the final cycle in Murray Fredericks’ acclaimed SALT Project. In these new works the artist intersects endless space through the ethereal reflective quality of mirrors. Rather than employing the mirror as a symbol of self-reflection, Fredericks redirects our gaze away from ourselves and into the immense environment. His translations of the language of landscape verge on otherworldly; reflections hover together as geometric forms, apertures or portals, offering a dual experience of looking both into another realm and out, as the lake’s glass-like surface mirrors an infinite space above. In one moment, an ensemble of sky and surface meld into a symphony of stars under Fredericks’ powerful control. These works plunge the viewer into a mesmerising spatial gestalt as Fredericks dissolves the contours of the landscape into a limitless optical deception. Place is defined by boundless empty space, as his own reflections on landscape mediate and expand what we see. Offering the viewer an emotional engagement with the environment, we see evidence of greater forces at work. There is a sense of release as the self dissolves into the light and infinity. The residue is a signature of an artist who finds the deep layers of his work by revealing the inexhaustible depth of what is already there.

Murray Fredericks is an internationally acclaimed and multi-award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Fredericks has exhibited widely, including Fotográfica Bogotá, Museum of Photography, Bogota, Colombia, 2017; Inside the Dome (DYE2) (with Tom Schutzinger), Geelong Gallery, 2015-16; SALT, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 2016; a major Australian landscape survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2012; and two solo shows at the Australian Centre for Photography, 2010 and 2015 respectively. His work has been acquired by prestigious public and private collections internationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria; Australian Parliament House; Australian National Portrait Gallery; Artbank; The Sir Elton John Collection; Macquarie Bank; Commonwealth Bank; The Myer Collection; The Valentino Collection; and a number of regional galleries across Australia. Fredericks has been the recipient of numerous awards and is a regular finalist in Australia’s top photography prizes. In 2015, he received the People’s Choice Award for the Bowness Photography Prize, was runner up in the Head-On Festival Landscape Prize and a finalist in the JUWS Photography Award. His first documentary film, Salt, for which he was cinematographer and co-director, won twelve major international awards, played over 50 festivals and was screened on the ABC and PBS in the USA. 

LYNDELL BROWN / CHARLES GREEN

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.

JULIE RRAP

Twisted Logic, Installation view, ARC ONE Gallery, 2019. Photo: John Gollings.

ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present Twisted Logic, an exhibition of new sculptures by leading Australian contemporary artist Julie Rrap.  

Taking as its central theme the historical fact that bronze artworks were often melted down to create weapons and armour with this process potentially reversed in times of peace, Twisted Logic articulates the ambiguous relationship that can exist between culture and politics. Art can be created or destroyed depending on political regimes.

Using cast sections from the artist’s body, Rrap’s bronze Arti-facts suggest an originary sculptural pose now transformed into objects that exist in an uncertain space between weaponry and armament. The artist’s body becomes the ‘material’ for these sculptural works through direct silicon moulding and casting in bronze; the effect creates an amalgam of vulnerability and strength that highlights the body ‘within’ conflict.

“Beating your Breast” Plate [detail], 2019, bronze and steel, 106 x 40 x 28.5 cm.

Existing in a suspended performative state between forming and un-forming, these sculptures embody a transformative process evocative of both destructive and creative forces. By focusing on the proposition that artworks can both manipulate and be manipulated by political persuasion, Twisted Logic foregrounds the impact that real-world situations can have on artistic outputs. These works explore the ways in which art can be a ‘tool’ both for culture’s potential complicity with, and resistance to, real-world issues.  

This exhibition brings visual expression to the ongoing struggle in which the radical possibilities of art, to question and to challenge, can be silenced and possibly destroyed; it also suggests that art can re-form from the ashes of conflict.

Julie Rrap has been a central figure in Australian contemporary art for over four decades. Since the mid-1970s, she has worked with photography, painting, sculpture, performance and video in an ongoing project concerned with representations of the body.

In 1995, a survey of her work, Julie Rrap Works 1991–1995, was held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, and in 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art held a major retrospective, Julie Rrap: Body Double, curated by Victoria Lynn. Other solo exhibitions include Remaking the World, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2015); Rrapture, Newcastle Art Gallery (2014) and Julie Rrap: Off Balance, Lismore Regional Gallery (2011). 

Selected group exhibitions include Bodies of Art: Human Form from the National Collection, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2019); Dark Rooms: Women Directing the Lens 1978-98, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2018); Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017); Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes, National Gallery of Victoria (2015); Biometrics, New Media Gallery, Anvil Centre, Vancouver (2014); Theatre of the World, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; and La Maison Rouge, Paris (2013–2014); Volume One: MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2012); 14th Jakarta Biennale (2011); The Naked Face: Self-Portraits, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2011); The Trickster, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea (2010); Reframing Darwin: evolution and art in Australia, Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne (2010); Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland, New Zealand (2008); Revolutions – Forms that Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968–2002, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne (2003); Body, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1998); Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, The Dong Ah Gallery, Seoul, Korea, Hakone Open Air Gallery, Tokyo, Japan and Oxy Gallery, Osaka, Japan (1996); and Photography is Dead! Long Live Photography, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1995).

Monograph publications include Julie Rrap: Body Double, Victoria Lynn’s book to coincide with the MCA exhibition (co-published by Piper Press and the MCA) and Julie Rrap, also a Piper Press publication, 1998. 

Julie Rrap’s work is held in every major public collection in Australia as well as many corporate and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, France, and the U.S.A.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

PETER DAVERINGTON

PETER DAVERINGTON has put the finishing touches on these incredible private commissions. In these works Daverington has engaged with the legacies of Western art history from a contemporary context, seamlessly integrating a vast array of disparate images, styles and references in an aesthetic maximalism relevant to our time.

IMANTS TILLERS

Imants Tillers, On the Pathos of the Truth, 2015, acrylic, gouache on 24 canvas boards, No 96513 - 96536, 150 x 142.5 cm

IMANTS TILLERS is featured in the current issue of Vault Art Magazine.

In the article Louise Martin-Chew writes about the artist's cumulative project, the Book of Power, and ARC ONE co-director, Fran Clark, notes that, “Every painting is like a page, all paintings are numbered and part of certain chapters. He goes in and out of these chapters. Everything is connected."

Read the full article here >

CYRUS TANG

Cyrus Tang, I wish..., 2019, 2 channel video projection.

CYRUS TANG is part of the group show The End/Future of History, open now at The Substation.

In this exhibition curated by Phuong Ngo, contemporary artists examine how rights are simultaneously upheld and violated by government. In an international system that has been dominated by Western ideology, a fundamental flaw exists with the administering of rights. It is a system where the guarantor of rights is almost always the key violator.

This exhibition explores Francis Fukuyama’s ideas on liberal democracies, their flaws and contradictions. It shows until 14 December. .

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GUAN WEI

Guan Wei, Return to the Origin, 2014, ceramic, 41 x 30 cm.

GUAN WEI is currently exhibiting a collection of works from his own personal collection at ACIAC Gallery, in a show called Essence, Energy, Spirit.

The Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture (ACIAC) is committed to enhancing cultural exchange between Australia, China, and the Sinosphere. This exhibition interlaces imagery from Guan Wei’s Chinese heritage, his life experience in Australia and his personal iconography. It reminds us of the consequences of a fast-paced, technology-driven, western lifestyle, which can be transcended if we remember our essence, energy and spirit and how to nurture them.

The exhibition continues until 21 February.

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ROSE FARRELL & GEORGE PARKIN

ROSE FARRELL & GEORGE PARKIN are included in the exhibition A Very Special Collection, now showing at Deakin's Downtown Gallery.

This exhibition presents highlights from Deakin University Library's Rare Books & Special Collections. On view is Farrell & Parkin's Owl Pair, a pair of papier-mâché busts exploring ancient personality profiling. In the 16th century it was argued that human physiognomic resemblances to animals could provide insights into a person's behaviour. This theory provided the impetus for the last body of work Farrell & Parkin created together before George's death in 2012, in which they created a series of sculptural busts and photographic works.

Each of the human pairings, like Man from Owl Pair' is made from photographs of Parkin's face which were printed onto cotton fabric, sliced into fragments and delicately pinned onto a papier-mâché support.

The exhibition continues until 13 December.

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PETER DAVERINGTON

Gail Albert Halaban, photo of Peter Daverington’s Bald Eagle, Audubon Mural Project. Photo courtesy of Aperture.

PETER DAVERINGTON's painting of a bald eagle on a shopfront in uptown Manhattan has been documented in a new photographic project by Gail Albert Halaban.

The Audubon Mural Project commissioned a spectrum of artists to create murals of imperilled birds, with each mural loosely based on the watercolours of John James Audubon, the pioneering 19th century ornithologist. Today, more than 100 bodegas, barbershops & other businesses in Harlem & Washington Heights are home to large-scale paintings of North American birds endangered by global warming.

The murals, like the birds they depict, are threatened by changing weather conditions and will soon begin to fade or disappear. Gail Albert Halaban has captured the paintings within the context of the community, before they are worn away.

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JANET LAURENCE

Janet Laurence, Knowledge (Tree of Life), 2018-19, botanical books from the artist's private library, artists sketch books, wood specimens, prints on watercolour paper, prints on opalescent paper, handwritten text, video extracts, plywood, metal, duraclear and bird's nests

JANET LAURENCE is featured in a new exhibition at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, opening today. Arboreal Narratives is curated by Louise Fowler-Smith and includes works that create an interdisciplinary experience of the important environmental subject - the tree.

There will be a public opening and symposium today, 19th October, featuring presentations by a scientist, two poets, and a musician.

The exhibition continues until 2 November.

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DANI MARTI

Dani Marti, Dust, 2019, customised reflectors on aluminium frame, 110 x 110 cm

Dani Marti is showing this new work Dust in Coterie to Coterie, the inaugural reductive and non-objective biennale event in Sydney, curated by Billy Gruner.

The Biennale of International Reductive and Non-objective Art takes place in three cities, Kyiv, Grenoble and Sydney. 'Coterie to Coterie' opens today between 2-5 pm, also marking the launch of a new venue for the arts and community use in Parramatta, The Stores Building. Over 120 artists from abroad and from Australia are presenting for this event in Sydney.

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HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT

Honey Long & Prue Stent, Supreme, 2019, archival pigment print, 60 x 40 cm

HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT are included in the exhibition ...PHOTOGRAPHERS...ARTISTS AND THE SNAP CARDIGAN , at agnès b. Galerie, Paris.

Celebrating 40 years since agnès b. first designed the snap cardigan, the exhibition features work by 60 photographers and artists from 14 different nationalities who have responded to the timeless fashion piece in their own way.

The exhibition continues in Paris until 19 October, and will then travel to Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo.

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JANET LAURENCE

Janet Laurence, The Palm at the End of the Mind installation view, The Johnston Collection, 2019, photo by Luts Photography.

JANET LAURENCE’s exhibition The Palm at the End of the Mind at The Johnston Collection has been warmly reviewed in Inside Magazine.

"As an exhibition The Palm at the End of the Mind is an experience par excellence...Each room has been infused with the artist's imagination and the interior has been brought to life in a fresh and sometimes unexpected way. New sits beside and within the old and there in texture and layering as is the inimitable style of Laurence," writes Jan Henderson.

Inside (Issue #107) is available in stores now.

PAT BRASSINGTON

Pat Brassington, The Wedding Guest, 2005, pigment print, 84 x 62 cm.

PAT BRASSINGTON is featured in the latest edition of Art Collector Magazine, with her work The Wedding Guest.

"At her best, which she is most always at, Brassington's images strike like lightning and then in the aftershock seep into us with he bloom of an infection, or burrow in like a worm...At it’s best, as in The Wedding Guest, her photographic work is visionary but as a stolen glimpse of something unacceptable, unpalatable, the taste for which is fuelled by a cocktail of phobia and fascination", writes Edward Colless.

Art Collector (OCT - DEC) is available in stores now.

JOHN YOUNG

Portrait of John Young by Leah Jing

JOHN YOUNG is interviewed in Liminal Magazine. Speaking to Cher Tan, Young unpacks the Asian-Australian identifier, the new paradigm being evolved by the culturally-orientated, the problematic indolence of the contemporary art viewer, and his current playlist!

"My early periods of making art were based on constant re-invention and re-interpretation of my own life condition...What drove me then was having seen or stumbled into, on occasion, the possibility of making a work that makes everything in your life make sense—something that prompts things to fall into place with immense clarity."

-John Young

Read the long-form interview here.

GUAN WEI

THE MCA has just opened Guan Wei: MCA Collection, an exhibition of works by GUAN WEI from the MCA Collection.

This exhibition brings together four works from the MCA Collection; ranging from significant suites of early works on paper, which look at life and the political landscape in China in the late 1980s, through to the large-scale mural painting Feng Shui, which is concerned with a harmonious relationship between all living things and the planet. The more recent Paper War, comprising of animated video and an accompanying work on paper, explores war as an experience mediated and understood through symbols and signs.

Over the past 30 years artist Guan Wei has developed a distinctive style and personal language of symbols and metaphors that explore his Chinese cultural heritage and many influences of the West. Working across painting, sculpture and site-specific installation, his reflections upon the human condition engage with critical contemporary issues, including climate change, questions of identity, migration and exile.

The exhibition continues until 9 February 2020.

More information >

The Guardian review by Joanna Mendelssohn > (also appears in The Conversation)

The Australian review by Nicholas Jose >

Sydney Morning Herald review by John McDonald >

Arts Hub review by Gina Fairley >

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LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN

LYNDELL BROWN & CHARLES GREEN, along with fellow artists Paul Gough and Jon Cattapan, have put together an exhibition at Domain House in the Botanic Gardens. Turbulence, Conflict and the Garden of Remediation explores the ways in which gardens and plants have unexpected relationships with times of turbulence.

Gardens have offered refuge as places of rehabilitation and healing. The plants growing within have figured as talismans of home, as medicines and now, as harbingers of conflict-driven climate change.

The exhibition opens today and continues until 3rd November.

The artists have also curated a symposium featuring presentations and panel discussions on the place of gardens within the movements of humans caught in turbulent flows. This is a free event happening across 25th & 26th October. Register here.

Lyndell Brown & Charles Green with Jon Cattapan, Afterstorm 2 & Afterstorm 1, 2019, oil and acrylic on digital print on canvas, 175 x 240 cm, courtesy of ARC ONE and Station Gallery.

JOHN YOUNG | CYRUS TANG

Join JOHN YOUNG today for a panel discussion with artist CYRUS TANG, historian Karen Schamberger and curator Michael Do on the use of archives in art, and the stories presented in The Lives of Celestials.

1:3- - 3 pm today, at the Boroondara Arts Centre.

This is a free event, but bookings are essential.
Book here >

John Young, The Lives of the Celestials installation view, Hawthorn Arts Centre, 2019

NIKE SAVVAS

NIKE SAVVAS is the cover artist of Art Monthly Magazine, October. Accompanying the cover is an insightful essay by Savvas herself, detailing the inspiration behind Finale: Bouquet', her major installation at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongawera.

Savvas explores the history of ticker-tape parades and her work's relationship with the domain of abstract expressionism. In particular, Savvas mentions her unexpected affinity with the work of Lee Krasner, and how painting may exist in a post-medium condition no longer tied to traditional materials.

Pick up a copy of Art Monthly to read the full story now.