Entries Tagged 'EXHIBITIONS' ↓

see the London Design Museum exhibition: Less and More via designboom.

Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of good design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

It’s The Week of the Vessel on Iconophilia. The most intense expression of this theme is to be found at Patsy Hely’s exhibition “around & about” at Helen Maxwell Gallery in Braddon, Canberra. Not only does Hely make exquisite cast and surformed porcelain vessels, she then uses them as the support for her elegant and engaging genre paintings (in under & overglaze colours). The forms, colours, and translucent materials of her objects/images cohere in a beautifully distinctive way. Hely records her subjects like a visual diary – the images that catch her eye from a wide range of sources and experiences find their way onto her evolving vessel repertoire.

But it was this example Jug: Gwynn Hanssen Piggott, 2009 which particularly caught your Iconophile’s eye: here Hely renders Morandi via Gwynn Hanssen Piggott. And hey presto! in Hely’s work the origins of all this homage action comes full circle: only now are the still lifes of crowded vessels rendered on the surface of a vessel. Hely’s impressions on a twin-lipped jug comes fresh from viewing GHP’s exhibition at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, which I reported in The Not Morandi Effect

The specific function of a watering-can seems to have stimulated designers to stretch the limits of plasticity. But how does it feel to water your plants with an award-winning icon? Especially one made of extruded plastic? Dutch-born Monika Mulder’s award winning Vallö (2001) (above) is currently part of Democratic Design: IKEA at the International Design Museum in Munich.

The great Danish designer Erik Lehmann Hansen seems to have seen the humble watering can as an excuse for a playful exercise in style, echoing the geometric purism of his predecessors. But somehow he has exaggerated those characteristics to produce a postmodern object which seems to make fun of its origins: part oil-can, part Constructivism. I haven’t been able to discover the date for Lehmann’s watering can (Rosti #5173), but Lehmann was Rosti’s chief designer from the mid-70s. Although most of his classic designs were cast in melamine, his watering can is extruded silver thermo-plastic.

If the too-much-plastic thing is worrying all you 21st century readers, now check out this nifty award-winning recycliste design by French-born Swiss designer Nicolas Le Moigne seen here at designboom… His minimal use of plastic, part-recycled, maximises functionality, minimises consumption.

Well as it happens, John Kaldor has been busy outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Here you will find two blue boxes which at first glance look as if the two equestrian sculptures by Gilbert Bayes (1923) are undergoing conservation.

But no, these are works by the latest John Kaldor sponsored artist Tatzu Nishi (aka Tazro Niscino, Tatsuro Bashi, Tatzu Oozu), who has created a living room and bedroom which accommodate both details of the The offerings of peace,

and the whole of The offerings of war trampling a double double bed. Bravo! Scooped up by roslynoxley9 where you’ll see his drawings…

Anish Kapoor: Memory, 2008

Cor-ten steel, 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48m  Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim
Installation view: Anish Kapoor: Memory, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, November 30, 2008–February 1, 2009 Photo: Mathias Schormann
© The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Now see it from the other side on Transit Lane. Or, thinking form and space…

here’s Sputnik 1, (at the UN Building in New York, photograph contributed by Jan Luedert).

“Tackling The Field” @ AGNSW: “a period which would threaten the “death of painting” altogether”. Infelicitous title. Dopey commentary. Maybe only one or two of the artists (Ramsden, Burn) had this kind of agenda in mind? At least the curator Natalie Wilson doesn’t take this position, quite. The scholars among you can read her essay online. A vast bibliography, curiously minus Ian Burn and The Iconophile’s Purity, Style, Amnesia from The Field Now, Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1984, or the exchange between Patrick McCaughey and Mel Ramsden . Why might that be?

Canberra readers have just tonight and Saturday to experience Hanna Hoyne’s installation and video performance at Cosmic Recharge in The Multi-Faith Chapel at Burgmann College (Building 45B, Daley Road, ANU campus). She was the Sun Girl a few weeks ago, remember? Well this is how it all ended up…

is the title of an exhibition of digital photographs at the National Film and Sound Archive. The images are derived from David MacDougall’s latest film Gandhi’s Children – the Canberra premiere of which will be held at 2.00pm this Sunday at Arc Cinema. Gandhi’s Children was filmed in late 2005 at the Prayas Children’s Home for Boys, in Jahangirpuri, New Delhi.

What do we think of when we talk of “stills”, and how we might think of the framed prints on the wall, extracted from the imagery on screen? There’s still a photography gallery in Sydney called “Stills”. Seems to me it’s almost an outdated concept. “Still photography” still invokes the mystique of “the decisive moment” – being in the right place at the right time – remembering to have your camera with you – alert to the circumstances, finger on the button. But recently, this has become a less auratic concept, now that Robert Capa’s famous image of the death of a young Republican militiaman in the Spanish civil war has been proven – seventy years later - to be a work of fiction.

That will never be the case with these images. Here we are experiencing the distinctively 21st century condition of photography, where digital technology enables an editor to distinguish between images at the rate of 25 frames per second. Despite the capacities of Photoshop to distort the truth of an image, in this instance the authenticity of the original will never be in question. The original is no longer just “in the can” but on half a dozen servers.

What David has done in this exhibition is to reverse the mad contemporary proliferation of images, in a world where Flickr expands exponentially, in a world where most of us are carrying a video camera in our pocket. As of last night there are two billion images on Flickr, all of which have been recorded (or uploaded, made accessible) since it started less than five years ago.

Sometimes, for an artist, the trick is to learn how to surf the wave. However art also happens when you swim against the tide. So how has someone like MacDougall reversed the direction of this digital tsunami, slowed down the flow of data, in order to produce images we can comprehend, that we can reflect on? In a form that enables reflection, rather than just momentary exposure?

Analogue film, 35mm film, had it built in. You could separate the frames with a pair of scissors. Video is much more slippery. There is still the editing process, by which you agonize over the formal conjunction of transitional frames, in that subtle and almost invisible formalist play of transitions. But these images are not edit points in that sense at all – they are rather images which are chosen to evoke the before and after, the continuity of the moment, confirmation for us of the sequence, the flow from which they have been selected, the continuity of both the author’s and the subject’s common experience.

Recognition of the flow has a quite different aesthetic consequence to that of the decisive moment. The image taken from the flow connotes Realism in its original art-historical sense – imagery which says, this is how it was, not just how it looked. It is through these images that David’s subjects tell us about more than the look, rather they convey the context, the existence of each individual subject, the moment, and all it connotes – fragility, survival, yet also hope and a future, and a certain post-traumatic dignity.

The ethic at work in David’s films, and now in these photographs, is one which is moving, compelling and convincing.  Somehow David has extracted from the mass of his video data a series of individual frames which has slowed down experience to the point where we might take heart from the resilience of these children, and children anywhere.

P.S. for the curious, the print size is about 285 x 505, printed on A2 Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper at the ANU School of Art. They are video stills from HDV (high definition video) recordings, exported via Quicktime to Photoshop and de-interlaced, colour-corrected, level-adjusted, etc. before printing.  None are cropped — they are all the original full frames.

Am I alone in feeling overwhelmed by the proliferation of the Morandi effect/affect in contemporary art? Despite her own acknowledgement and admiration for Morandi – and there’s nothing wrong with acts of homage – the work of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott attracts the most attention. The current exhibition, at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, is in a small room raked by the bright light of a Canberra winter, with about 20 of GHP’s trademark still life ensembles, all encased in rather clinical plastic vitrines.  Unfortunately, in this display, it is as if the air, the space itself, has been sucked out of these plastic boxes, such that the potential of these forms to make music with each other has been vacuumed away into silence. Each grouping of beautifully formed and glazed ceramic wares, sometimes so clustered together that the virtual frame between them gets a bit fuzzy, now seems so arbitrary it has become more like the exercise of taste than some magical tension of forms in space. And there’s too many of them. You look and try to understand what is meaningful about the arrangements – which tend to occupy a flattened linear space along their shelves – and you can’t help but make the pictorial associations with the master. But I don’t arrive at any conclusion! Are the spatial arrangements meaningful in any particular way? How are the variations between sets to be understood? How critical is the space between the elements of a set? And how would you feel if you owned a set, and got them muddled?

If Rosalie Gascoigne achieved her breakthrough as an artist by working away from the delicate art of ikebana – assisted in no small part by the discovery of the modernist grid – then it seems that GHP has moved in the opposite direction. It is as if by aspiring to the pictorial paradigm of the still life – thus effecting a conceptual migration from fine craft to fine art – she ends up detracting from her original aspirations to perfect form. But the Morandi effect is unrepeatable, except perhaps in the white heat of her kiln. And certainly not in the rather medical ambience of this display. Am I alone?

Here’s the conventional account:

GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT

20 August–20 September

“Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is an internationally celebrated artist whose years of dedication to ceramics and her deep study of particularly the oriental traditions of pottery have produced highly refined surfaces and forms and delicately nuanced glaze colours. Her harmonious still life groups are beautiful in themselves, but they also work to subvert at a very sophisticated level the old art/function dichotomy that has traditionally so divided the visual arts community. She does this by creating sets that have great wholeness and yet are composed of individual vessels that are manifestly both useable and of the highest aesthetic quality.”

Key words: celebrated, dedication, deep study, highly refined, delicately nuanced, harmonious, beautiful in themselves, subvert, sophisticated, the old art/function dichotomy, great wholeness, highest aesthetic quality.

work out of the the great show of mobilia titled Reflex at M16 (curated by Geoff Farquhar-Still, which opened last weekend and runs until until 16th August), for me it would be this work by Chloe Bussenschutt Water 6.30am.

The mechanism rotates the words FLOATING and FOG in and out of focus, interrupting her two projected photographs. Both photographs were taken on foggy mornings on Lake Burley Griffin and the Murrumbidgee River, and their watery atmospherics (very evocative at this time of the year) are interrupted by the rotating texts, which shifts your focus back and forth, from the image to the mechanism, pulling the eye back to the whole apparatus of the paired slide-show projectors.

ArtWranglers liked her last work, at Sculpture on the Edge, and iconophilia will be interested to see what happens next. Click across to TransitLane to see more snaps from the show…