JOHNNY NARGOODAH & TRENT JANSEN - 'PARTU (SKIN)'

Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert with ARC ONE Gallery are delighted to present Partu (Skin), an exhibition of functional art by collaborative designers Johnny Nargoodah & Trent Jansen, for Melbourne Design Week.

JOHNNY NARGOODAH & TRENT JANSEN, Ngumu Janka Warnti (All Made from Rubbish), Bench, 2020, New Zealand leather and aluminium, 48 x 240 x 60 cm

Johnny Nargoodah and Trent Jansen have been collaborating in the design and crafting of collectable furniture since they met in Johnny’s hometown of Fitzroy Crossing, as part of Fremantle Art Centre’s ‘In Cahoots’ project in 2016. For that project they worked with fellow Mangkaja artist, Rita Minga to design an armchair that was their interpretation of a local mythical creature called the ‘Jangarra’ (2017), now in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, as well as the ‘Collision Collection’ (2017), born out of experimentation with leather in combination with old car panels found in the scrub around Fitzroy Crossing.

Johnny is a Nyikina man who has spent much of his life working with leather as a saddler on remote cattle stations, and Trent is an avant-garde object designer from Thirroul in New South Wales, who regularly experiments with leather and animal pelts in his collectable design work. Their ‘Collision Collection’ (2017) gave some insight into the unorthodox outcomes that might result from the coming together of these oddly mismatched sensibilities and skills in working animal skins. ‘Partu’ (2020) is the Walmajarri word for ‘skin’, and is their latest collaborative project experimenting with this combination of disparate sensibilities. This body of work is designed by Trent and Johnny and both designers have their own lens through which to view the processes and inspirations governing these works:

From Trent’s point of view, this project is an experiment in the generation of hybrid material culture. Material Culture Theory says that the artefacts we create embody the values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions (the culture) of the creator. But what if an artefact is created collaboratively by two people from different cultures? Does this artefact exhibit the cultural values of both authors? If so, how do these cultural values manifest?

From Johnny’s point of view, the project has a few different aspects to it: Making - we use rubbish, recycled frames, we make chairs and cabinets and use the leather to make it look good, to make it furniture that is usable and looks nice; recycling - it is important to reuse old rubbish we find, and the leather makes it special; history - the leather gives it a reference to the history of Fitzroy Crossing and station life. Saddlers used to come and repair saddles using leather, making twisted rope out of cowhide. This is what I think about when we are using the leather; and sensory - the smell of that leather is so good. It brings back memories, triggers those old memories of walking around the saddle room in Noonkanbah shed. There is a sensory response, that’s important.

The collaborative process and experimentation are key to this project. Trent and I work together on this, we both sketch, look at each other’s sketches and from there we mix it up. I’m really enjoying the skills sharing, learning from each other, we both have a lot of different ideas, we keep coming up with new works, keep experimenting.

Unlike their ‘Jangarra Armchair’, designed and made in Fitzroy Crossing, ‘Partu’ was developed in Thirroul on the New South Wales Coal Coast. Johnny and Trent came together three times over a period of 18 months, developing new methods for collaboration that could shape their incongruent knowledge, methods and skills in designing and making into co-authored outcomes. These methods include: ‘Sketching exchange’, a process of back and forth sketch iteration, allowing an idea to evolve with equal input from both creators; and ‘designing by making’, a method of working with materials at full scale, to design an object as it is being made. In this approach the prototype is the sketch and both collaborators work together to carve, construct and/or manipulate material, giving the object three-dimensional form as they design and make simultaneously.

JOHNNEY NARGOODAH & TRENT JANSEN, Saddle Armchair, 2020, Scandinavian leather, plywood, stainless steel, polyurethane foam and brass, 75 x 76 x 105 cm

‘Saddle’ (2020) gains its name from the first sketch that Johnny made for this collection, an elongated saddle that led to experiments in stretching supple Scandinavian upholstery leather between geometric timber and steel forms to generate new, complex transitioning forms. Sketch exchanges over an 18-month period eventually yielded an entire collection built on this beautiful capability of leather to stretch between forms and give shape to the space in-between objects.

‘Ngumu Jangka Warnti’ (2020) is the Walmajarri phrase for ‘whole lot from rubbish’. The design of this collection began with a trip to the local scrap metal yard, in a vague search for anything interesting. Johnny and Trent salvaged a selection of discarded aluminium mesh and used this found metal as the starting point for experimentation. Trent and Johnny designed these pieces as they made them, starting with a mesh substrate cut vaguely in the shape of a chair, and together beat the material with hammers, concrete blocks and tree stumps until it took on a form that they both liked. This beaten geometry was then softened by laminating New Zealand saddle leather to skin the mesh, masking its geometry and softening its idiosyncratic undulations.

Johnny Nargoodah and Trent Jansen are represented by Sydney’s Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert who are partnering with ARC ONE Gallery to bring this new body of work to Melbourne Design Week 2020. The creation of this body of work was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, the National Gallery of Victoria via Melbourne Design Week, UNSW Art & Design, the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries and Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency.

JANET LAURENCE AT TARRAWARRA

JANET LAURENCE’s work Sacred Green is on show in TarraWarra's exhibition Making Her Mark: Selected Works from the Collection.

This exhibition offers a new appraisal of the work of leading women artists held in the collection of TarraWarra Museum of Art. It presents art by women as a catalyst, as opposed to a category.

Sacred Green combines elements from the Tarkine in Tasmania and the Sacred Forest in Bhutan. Interviewed this week in The Australian, director & curator Victoria Lynn says: “Laurence is renowned as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists...her work is a call to the viewer to be both ethically and emotionally immersed in the precarity of our world.”

The exhibition continues until 16 April.

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Janet Laurence, Sacred Green, 2018, dibond mirror, dye sublimation archival print on to Chromaluxe aluminium & C-type silver halide on clear pollster and oil glaze on acrylic, 100 x 370 cm.

DANI MARTI

ARC ONE Gallery is delighted to present Blue on Blue, a new exhibition by Barcelona-born artist, Dani Marti.

Red on Red - Take 2, 2019, customised corner cube reflectors on aluminium, 240 x 357 x 10 cm.

 In his latest exhibition, Dani Marti’s dynamic woven canvases and sculptural wall pieces explore the communion that exists between the artist and his materials. Marti’s use of industrial, factory-made objects and the nature of his making process – weaving by hand at a large scale – deeply involves his body, his self, in his practice.

Skilfully woven, bent and shaped from a sensuous melange of materials such as polyester and natural ropes, metal threads, beads, reflectors and wire, which Marti affixes onto bespoke aluminium frames, these sculptural constructions have a robust sense of the physicality of their making. The artist’s full body movement is engaged, and his gestural traces are inscribed in these works. For Marti, his process “goes from seconds of ecstasy to hours of torture. It is a very meditative way of working.”

Citing influences such as Lucio Fontana, Kasmir Malevich, and Frank Stella, these works partake of their abstract visual language. In Blue on Blue Marti’s interest in the formal qualities of his materials has reached new heights as he employs a reductive approach to arrest the viewer in the surface and encourage a moment of contemplation. With their luscious monochromatic palette, rich texture, repeated geometric forms, and pure materialism these woven canvases and wall sculptures bring the beauty of minimalism down to earth.

Green on Green (Light/Mixed) and Green on Green (Dark/Mixed), 2019, customised corner cube reflectors on aluminium frame, 105 x 85 x 12 cm (each).

Dani Marti was born 1963 Barcelona, Spain and lives and works between Sydney, Australia and Glasgow, U.K. Working across video, installation and public art, his unorthodox woven and filmic works speak to notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism and geometric abstraction. Since 1998, Marti has held over 40 solo exhibitions including, Songs of Surrender, Lausberg Contemporary, Dusseldorf (2020); I AM, ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne (2016); and BLACK SUN, commissioned for Perth International Art Festival (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Coterie to Coterie, The Biennale of International Reductive and Non-objective Art, Sydney (2019); Hunter Red: Corpus, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2018); Australasian Painters 2007-2017, Orange Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales (2017); The Public Body .02, Artspace, Sydney (2017); Immerse, Sandneskulturhus, Sandnes, Norway (2016);  La Vida es Esto, Domus Atrium, Salamanca (2015); Dark Heart, the Adelaide Biennial (2014), ECONOMY, CCA Glasgow; Stills, Edinburgh (2013); Videonale-14, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2013); Let the Healing Begin, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); TOUCH: The portraiture of Dani Marti, a major solo retrospective at Newcastle Regional Art Gallery (2011) ; Social Documents: The Ethics of Encounter, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2010); Vocal Thoughts, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (2010) and Cinema X: I like to Watch, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2010).  

Dani Marti’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia;  National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art; Art Bank, Sydney; Chartwell Collection, Auckland; City Art Gallery, Auckland and the University of Wollongong, N.S.W; MUSAC, Leon, Spain. Marti has completed significant public works including one at Westfield Centrepoint 100 Market St, with John Wardle Architects.  The first major monograph of Marti’s work was published in 2012 by Hatje Cantz.

ANNE ZAHALKA AT HAWTHORN ARTS CENTRE

ANNE ZAHALKA's work is included in You Are Here - a new exhibition of landscape photography at Town Hall Gallery, Boroondara. 

Anne Zahalka, A Quite Day at Spring Creek, 2017, pigment ink on rag paper, 26.4 x 34.8 cm

For the First Peoples of Australia, who have inhabited this country for over 60,000 years, and for those more recently arrived, our relationship with the Australian landscape is defined by both a deep cultural belonging and a history of conflict and displacement. Expanding on the longstanding tradition of landscape photography, this exhibition centres on each of the artists’ connection and disconnection to country. The works deconstruct how we occupy the land and explore ideas of home and identity within the environment informed by cultural, personal and historical narratives.

Anne's included works are from her The Landscape Revisited series (2017) in which she creates photomontages based on early Australian paintings from the Heidelberg School that seek to rewrite colonial narratives and construct a less Anglo-centric image of Australia. 

This exhibition is part of the PHOTO2020 program and runs 12 March - 10 May. 

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JACKY REDGATE AT GEELONG GALLERY

Jacky Redgate, HOLD ON #4, 2019-20, pigment ink on fabric, 197 x 203 cm

JACKY REDGATE - HOLD ON opens this Saturday 7 March at Geelong Gallery. This major solo exhibition coincides with PHOTO2020, the International Festival of Photography. 

Jacky Redgate—HOLD ON will present the most recent iteration of Redgate's mirror work in its entirety that reflects how, while continuing to make her experimental ‘hybrid' mirror works over the past ten years, Redgate has been recalling and introducing into her work the autobiographical images and subjects of her juvenilia. Embodying a cathexis on emotionally laden subjects, these photographs tease with a combination of abstraction and autobiographical mirroring that seemingly contradicts the Cartesian sobriety of her well known ‘impersonal’ works.

The exhibition runs until 17 May. 

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GUAN WEI AT CASULA POWERHOUSE

GUAN WEI has co-curated Pulse of the Dragon at Casula Powerhouse. His immense work from 2017 Cosmotheoria is featured in the exhibition.

Pulse of the Dragon is an exhibition emphasising themes of religious witchcraft, mythology, folk art and folk culture as methods for opening up understandings and perspectives of Chinese culture. It features a dynamic line-up of Chinese and Chinese-Australian artists who approach these concepts from their local and international perspectives. 

The exhibition continues until 19 April.

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Guan Wei, Cosmotheoria, 2017, acrylic on linen, 282 x 750cm, (1-42 panels, 6cm gap between each panel)

JANET LAURENCE TAPESTRY COMMISSION

The Australian Tapestry Workshop is working on a private commission to weave JANET LAURENCE's work 'Plant Song'. The original design by Laurence is a composite digital image created with her extensive archive of images of plants. The ATW weavers have selected a wide palette of lush greens to create this tapestry, including a high ratio of cotton yarns which are used to create areas of luminosity in the tapestry. 

Janet stopped by the workshop to check on the progress and was very taken with the work! You too can see this tapestry being woven during opening hours of the workshop: 10am - 5pm Tuesday to Friday. 

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Images: Work in progress 'Plant Song', 2020, designed by Janet Laurence, woven by Chris Cochius, Sue Batten, Amy Cornall and Cheryl Thornton. 

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP AT THE AGNSW

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS & JULIE RRAP are featured in the exhibition Shadow Catchers, opening today at the AGNSW. This exhibition investigates the ways shadows, body doubles and mirrors haunt our understanding of photography and the moving image.

Eugenia's Diglossia (2009) series is on display, along with Julie’s Body Double (2007).

The exhibition runs until 17 May.

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PETER CALLAS IN SURVEY OF AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART

PETER CALLAS is featured in Cognitive Dissidents: Reasons to be Cheerful, now open at Griffith University Art Museum. The exhibition examines the experimental practices central to the development of the video medium in Australian from the 1970s to the 1990s.

"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Callas' work was often cited as a paradigm case of 'postmodern aesthetics' whereby video and digital technologies provided a means for the rapid, freewheeling interrelation of all kinds of imagery; this was supposedly aid and abet the developments of that shrinking, borderless, increasingly multicultural, globe. And it's easy to see how Callas' videos embody this potential, as they set in train elements drawn from various cultures, side-by-side, overlapping, fast and furious throbbing montage. Callas himself cites Japanese advertising as the protean form of this burgeoning aesthetic..."

- Stuart Koop, 2002

The exhibition continues until 9 April. 

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GUAN WEI: A CASE STUDY

Guan Wei, Salvation No.1, 2015, bronze, 33 x 19 x 32 cm

The MAC (Museum of Art & Culture Lake Macquarie) has just opened Guan Wei: A Case Study - an exhibition of Guan Wei's work with an accompanying case-study publication geared specifically towards Year 12 Visual Arts students. 

The exhibition runs until 5 April. 

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DANI MARTI AT MUSAC

Dani Marti, The Stamp Collector [cropped video still], 2007, video 6’40min

DANI MARTI's work The Stamp Collector is part of the exhibition Five itineraries with a point of view at MUSAC (Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León). This exhibition celebrates the 15th anniversary of MUSAC and explores five themes that have guided the museum's acquisitions and programming since 2013.

In this video work we see a close-up of a man in a leather suit engaging in a chat exchange. The character remains anonymous - we hear only the sound of the keyboard and see the screen reflected in his glasses. Conflating the genres of portraiture and social documentary, the work displays many of the defining features on Marti's video practice - constrained scale, focus on the body and an intense concentration on an everyday scenario. "I call them portraits as a starting point, as a reference...but these portraits go beyond the person being portrayed - the individuals are just vehicles for something else. It is a search for some kind of abstraction, or maybe you could call it emotion," says Marti.

The exhibition at MUSAC runs until 7 June. 

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EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS WORK IN VENICE

Eugenia Raskopoulos, Rootreroot [video still], 2016, HD digital video, single channel, colour, stereo, 8:45 min;

EUGENIA RASKOPOULOS is exhibiting 'Rootreroot' in 'The Body Language', an international exhibition at THE ROOM Contemporary Art Space in Venice. 

In this video work, the artist is filmed from above as she drags an olive tree clockwise is the upper section, and a wattle tree anticlockwise below. Where the circles fleetingly intersect, we glimpse a moment of completeness between Raskopoulos' Greek & Australian identities. "Whether gestures are recorded or photographed, my body becomes a means for mark-making during performative acts that involve translation, transformation and fragmentation," says the artist. 

The exhibition continues until 12 March.

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PAT BRASSINGTON AT MGA

Pat Brassington, Untitled VII , 1980–2002, printed 2010, pigment ink-jet print, 370 x 249 mm

PAT BRASSINGTON has three works featured in the exhibition Dressing up: clothing and camera, closing soon at the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA).

This exhibition draws together photographs from the MGA collection that feature dress or clothing as a significant element in their making

The exhibition will close this Sunday 9 February.

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PETER DAVERINGTON COMPLETES MURAL IN SOUTH MELBOURNE

PETER DAVERINGTON has completed a large-scale mural at South Melbourne Primary School, the first public vertical school in Victoria.

Featuring an Australian landscape of banksias and verdant growth interrupted by geometric, hard-edge line work continued from the building's facade, the mural will be enjoyed by students for years to come.

Watch Peter at work in the footage captured by Danny Ronin here.

Peter Daverington, Coxsakie mural, 2019, South Melbourne Primary School, Victoria.

JOHN YOUNG AWARDED ORDER OF AUSTRALIA

A huge congratulations to JOHN YOUNG AM, who last week became a member of the Order of Australia. John has been recognised for his significant service to the visual arts, and as a role model.

Since his first exhibition in 1979, Young has had more than 70 solo exhibitions and over 160 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. He has devoted a large part of his four-decade career towards regional development in Asia, and recently focused his work on transcultural humanitarianism. Young was seminal in establishing the Asian Australian Artists’ Association (Gallery 4A) in 1995, now 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, where he has been a board member since 2009. Young was also a lecturer in painting at University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts has undertaken residencies and fellowships with the Australia Council for the Arts and is a trustee of McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery.

As evidenced by the career highlights above, this is truely a well-deserved achievement. Congratulations John!

ART AUCTION FOR BUSHFIRE RELIEF

ARC ONE artists JANET LAURENCE, HONEY LONG & PRUE STENT, NIKE SAVVAS and ANNE ZAHALKA are among sixty leading contemporary artists who are working in solidarity to raise funds for the Australian bushfire crisis.

On Wednesday 12 February, the National Art School will host a silent art auction event. Raised funds will be donated to nominated charities The Climate Council, Firesticks Alliance Network and WWF Australia.

The artworks for sale can be previewed now via the Home Bushfire Relief website.

Live auction on 12 February from 7-10pm. Register your attendance here!

JANET LAURENCE AT ‘NUIT DES IDÉES’

Janet speaking at the opening of Continuous Regeneration in Shanghai.

JANET LAURENCE will join a panel of artists and scientists for La Nuit des Idées (Night of Ideas) at the Sydney Opera House this Thursday 30 January.

Founded five years ago in Paris, La Nuit des Idées has grown into a global celebration of arts, culture, science and philosophy. In 2020, for the first time, Sydney will be part of this international festival. The theme "Being Alive" promises vibrant, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary conversation about life and the universe.

Janet will be joined by Dr Thierry Hoquet, Professor of Philosophy of Science, writer Olivia Rosenthal, composer Eryck Abecassis, artist Richard Bell & academic Karlie Noon. 

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CATHERINE WOO’S FACADE FOR THE RITZ CARLTON

Catherine Woo has created a facade for the newly developed Ritz-Carlton hotel in Perth. Her work titled Cascade was designed to evoke shimmering water, referencing the nearby Swan River and the falling water of the famous Kimberley Gorges of Western Australia. 

Woo's original work was scanned into a 3D model and developed at monumental scale using virtual reality technology. Cast in recycled aluminium, the rippling surface comes to life under the changing light of day and creates a powerful physical presence through scale and reflection. 

Built by UAP in collaboration with the artist and the construction team at ProBuild.

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Photos by Robert Frith - Acorn Photo.

ANNE ZAHALKA

Anne Zahalka, installation view of Wild Life, Australia at ARC ONE Gallery, 2019 featuring Sea Bird Colony, Admiralty Rocks with turbulent seas, Lord Howe Island, 2019, pigment ink on adhesive paper, 275 x 375 cm (Source: Australian Museum)

ANNE ZAHALKA is featured in the exhibition Sublime Sea: Rapture & Reality at the Mornington Peninsula Gallery, opening this Saturday 14th December.

The exhibition is a spectacular immersive exhibition about the power of the sea in human imagination. It combines art and the natural sciences to chart the evolution of a ‘sublime’ perception of nature and the sea’s benevolence as a primal source of life. Contemporary works reflect new realities and insights into human interaction with the sea, the tragic voyages of refugees, threat of plastic pollution and alienation from natural forces.

The exhibition continues until 23 February.

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CYRUS TANG

CYRUS TANG's solo exhibition Golden Hour, previously shown at ARC ONE in 2018, is being exhibited at Galerie Oasis in Bangkok.

Opening today, this exhibition comprises a suite of photographic works that continue Tang's project of paradoxically reconstructing and recording ephemeral mental images and sensations in permanent materials. The title is inspired by the multiple meanings of the term 'Golden Hour' - sometimes referring to the narrow margin of time for treating casualty patients in trauma yet also used by photographers to refer to a brief moment of time just before sunset or just after sunrise.

The exhibition continues until 12 January.

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