Saturday, August 15, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Peter Madden | My Own Private Idealogue @ Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces, 2009
Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces is pleased to present a new exhibition My Own Private Idealogue. This exhibition combines the work of three artists, Joanna Langford, Peter Madden and Rohan Wealleans. Each of these artists employs a highly subjective language to describe personal mythologies, fictional histories and symbolic landscapes.
Whilst these artists employ distinct materials and methods, they are connected through their impulse to appropriate objects, artefacts and historical accounts in a highly personal manner. In their sculptural installations, the often-everyday materials used are imbued with new identities, and become implicated in vast mythological environments.
Peter Madden employs collage to distil meaning from found images, lifting creatures and scenes from National Geographic magazine and reassembling them in vast accumulations and installations. Madden instils his cut-outs with an energy that is all their own – employing the language of connotation to give movement, meaning and combustion to his dislocated creatures as they inhabit their ideographic landscapes.
Joanna Langford’s vast impossible landscapes often feature small wooden ladders and buildings that traverse billowing plastic bag mountain ranges, catering to the needs of a civilization known only to the artist.
The totems, tools and props that populate Rohan Wealleans’ work seem to have been created to cultivate a primal landscape of protrusions and intrusions, constructed from layers of paint, teeth and shark’s jaws that take on Indiana Joneseque tribalism.
Conceptually My Own Private Idealogue fleshes out the relationship between psychoanalysis and post colonialism, examining the extent to which these three artists are responding to our contemporary de-colonised position, in which symbols and histories are readily detachable, and identities and mythologies are personalised as much as they are polemic.
This exhibition features a major selection of work from across Wealleans’ and Madden’s careers and invites the viewer to contemplate the spectrum of their practice, as well as featuring a large-scale, site-specific installation by Joanna Langford.
My Own Private Idealogue will occupy both gallery spaces at GCAS, with the gallery space activated by a collaborative architectural component that will mimic and highlight the unique interplay between these artists’ innovative expressions of their personal, interior worlds.
Pat Foster & Jen Berean Open @ Ryan Renshaw
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Martin Smith | Inheritance @ ACP
Christopher Langton | Soft Sculpture @ NGA
Plastic is cheap, lightweight, flexible, ubiquitous and politically unsound—a synthetic material, derived from petroleum. Formed by industrial methods, with limited application to craft and handforming techniques, it is a perishable material best suited to mass production of cheap consumer goods. Plastic is a material of the kitsch object—a debaser of the ideals of high culture and high art.[1]
Christopher Langton uses plastics technology initially developed for the aeronautic industry.[2] The introduction of high-frequency PVC welding in the 1960s―allowing sheets to be joined with thin, air-tight seams—resulted in a huge increase in the number and types of inflatable items produced.[3] Claes Oldenburg, Jeff Koons, and especially Japanese and Korean artists subsequently employed pneumatics to a remarkable range of effects.[4] Looking at Langton’s sculptures, however, it is mass-produced toys, blow-up pools, beach balls and jumping castles that come to mind. Kitsch, sugary and sometimes spooky, irresistibly consumerist and undeniably desirable―we can’t help but want to join in the fun.
Langton’s oversized toys and other objects are bright, overwhelming and often of frightening proportions. They loom over us, crowd into our space, ignoring the traditional distance between art and viewer. Sugar the pill was originally installed in the basement of a nineteenth-century apothecary’s shop, arranged as if tumbling out of a dispensary. The architectural setting of Sugar the pill may thus be imagined as standing in for the body. The artist has remade components for the 2009 installation—a few repairs were necessary, and he also took advantage of more sophisticated techniques—and some pills are now more colourful, or composed of multiple capsules. From the classic 1960s ‘mother’s little helpers’, to an age when a plethora of substances in capsule form is available to combat anything from weight-gain to depression, we sense that the element of fun masks darker meanings. A spoonful of sugar does indeed make the medicine go down.
Lucina Ward
Curator,
International Painting and Sculpture
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
For the NGA website click here.
James Dodd @ Cast
More shots can be seen on the CAST site.