Past Exhibitions

Please note that the date of the official opening for this exhibition is Thursday 8 July 2010

KAREN GRAY - Memento

Through the arrangement of nests, bowls, cups and paper cranes which populate Karen Gray’s latest works, the artist investigates both the formal and symbolic relationships between various elements within the picture plane. In Gray’s serene series of oil paintings, she plays with shapes and composition within the timeless genre of still life. However throughout Memento, it is the re-contextualisation of objects into a shallow, tonally rendered space that allows for their connection to memory and restrained emotion to be quietly conveyed.

The dialectic between presence and absence that exists throughout Memento plays an important role in how we read these paintings, beyond their aesthetic qualities. The presence of humble nests and bowls are made more pronounced through the lack of their natural contents, as whether holding life sustaining food or avian inhabitants, both objects are primarily defined by what they are designed to contain. Removed from their usual function, rendered suddenly aimless and empty, each object comes into focus in its own right for both its aesthetic qualities and its symbolic associations. In this context the nest becomes a forlorn, lonely subject when the life it once nurtured has flown away - yet also one of beauty and fascination, expressing the genius found within the natural world.

Gray’s series of sensitive watercolours that depict various isolated domestic and natural objects reflect this innate human ability to transform the most average item into a coveted possession, when it acts as the bearer of meaning. As mementos these fragments bring forth memories of experiences and relationships that are now long past. A broken shard of fine bone china might immediately conjure cultural nostalgia for a genteel middle-class society of yesterday, while simultaneously referencing private memories held by its owner, but unknown to all else. Some works in Memento seem more a meditation on the endless array of unremarkable objects that fill our lives, and the disarming loveliness that the artist can draw from them. While in certain small watercolours, buttons, broken porcelain, lace and other ephemera are treated with reverence, imbued with a sense of the sacred that betrays the importance these every-day bits and pieces hold when overlaid with personal significance. And it is this quality of subdued reverence that allows these works to speak to us all - transmuting the realm of the personal toward sentiments that are universally understood.

Marguerite Brown

June, 2010

Marguerite Brown is an Arts Writer, currently completing a Masters of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne

©Marguerite Brown 2010

On Reflection

If we go there

If we go there and listen

We will hear the voice of the eternal

The eternal says that we are at the beginning of time

David Ireland  - A Woman of the Future (Penguin, 1980)

When reflecting on my travels, in particular on the aerial flights I’ve taken throughout Outback Australia, I have always been drawn to landscapes of arid, red dust.  However, a recent field trip to Kakadu and the Far North has prompted me to reflect upon both the seasonal and unusual changes in the nature and beauty of our landscape.  The transformation comes courtesy of torrents of water flowing over the land, when rivers run, waterholes and billabongs fill and, following rain, red sands mirror a huge blue sky.

It seems our Outback land is either desert or deluge. The landscape can burn one moment and, seemingly in the next, weep to overflowing.

The landscapes in this exhibition are an expression of my reflections and my response to the transformation of landscape.  I see the land as a sanctuary with special places for meditation-even the meandering pace at which the water flows offers itself for contemplation. In another time and place, the land appears confronting and mysterious.

The effect nature can have on us is so well expressed by poet James McAuley: ‘the wattle scatters pollen on the doubting heart’.   Of course, the voices of the landscape speak differently to each of us but, for me, they deliver a peace that is powerful, precious and inspiring.  Listening can lift the spirits and refresh the soul.

                                                                                Denise Campbell, 2010

Inferno is the best known section of Dante’s three-part epic, La Divina Commedia. It is a long poem - more than 14,000 lines, depending on the translation. Few make it through Purgatorio and on to Paradiso. So it is in life. So it seems in Dean Sewell’s Dystopia.

"You really have seen some awful places" the writer David Marr joked recently as he leafed through Sewell’s portfolio, pausing on the brute colour of his Hillsdale photographs. "But none more so than this place".

The joke, of course, is that Sewell grew up there - that this is his Paradiso, love-letter to the suburbia that raised him, and it looks like a beautiful hell. That is the strength of Sewell’s photography - the ability to wring beauty from horror. "Really?" Marr recanted. "They are wonderful pictures".

After the Black Saturday bushfires burnt out 173 lives, Sewell found Steel Creek in Picasso’s Blue Period. There, also, was the incredible resilience of man. Or at least his concrete ornaments. In one picture the Australian flag flies inverted over a flame-gutted house. It is not clear whether this is a distress signal or a show of wonk nationalism - or that there is much difference in Sewell’s mind anyway. Fire, for him, is visceral. What it leaves behind is interesting.

But in his colour studies, Sewell sails through his Purgatorio - "The little vessel of my genius now/ That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel". Shadows steal the head off a red coat. One woman’s hair is another man’s cardigan. The soothsayers, one imagines, walk backwards.

The hostile beauty of Australia, which informs so much of Sewell’s photography, becomes the disembodiment wrought by its cities - the absurdity of this land. That is what Sewell does. He revels in the Australian Ugliness. Never condescending, always sensitive, teasing out the sublime in what most judge to be awfulness. 

Erik Jensen

Statement for ‘Painting the Nameless’ 2010

I paint from memory. I do not use models or paint anything from life.

The memory of the way the world appears is in our heads, it is a language which connects us at a level much deeper than speech. These things exist only in the vision and they have no names. They are in your head and in mine and that is why this work may remind you of your dreams.

I borrow objects from the real world to construct a space.  But these, although they are painted naturalistically, they are not painted from life, they are made from generic models of the objects that I have in my memory.  Everything comes from the mind.  The objects are recognisable because we all have a visual idea, a subconscious model of what things look like; which form a subconscious language connecting our experience.  We do not have words for these ideas.  They are nameless. 

Words are always generic:  the description of light on an object can never show the uniqueness of the event. You can say, "sunlight slanted across the wall"  but that will not show exactly how it looked. Our visual experience is continuously specific and these specific experiences form models in the memory that are generic.

It is a language without words that connects us subconsciously.  So in seeing my work there is often the experience of being reminded of something personal.  Some people say that I have painted their dreams.

Sue Rosalind Vesely   May 2010

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFSjpV7XuDQ

SYDNY is a collection of photographs featuring iconic architecture of Sydney and New York.

We will also be holding the Australian book launch of  Paul Anthony Sleeman: Decade 2001 - 2010 in which Sleeman retraces in word and image the course of his photographs and memories during this decade.

Paul Anthony Sleeman is a Sydney based photographic artist with an international following, particularly in the USA. His architectural images are included in the collection of President Bill Clinton and the late Joern Utzon. The American Club has nine prints from his Gotham series on permanent display in the Manhattan Bar.

Paul commenced his career as a photo-journalist in the 60’s with rock magazines, capturing visiting groups including the Rolling Stones.

By the 80’s, he was based in SE Asia, primarily Hong Kong and Jakarta, focusing on the socio-political climate of China and Indonesia, before returning to Sydney to work as a scriptwriter.

In the 2008 Sony World Photography Awards, the industry equivalent of the Academy Awards, Paul was one of the 10 finalists selected from over 44,000 professional submissions.

Paul is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP).

Artist’s Statement

I have always been interested in images of the landscape. I was born in the Central West of NSW and I spent my early years on a farm, where my parents and grandparents owned a wheat growing property near Woodstock.  I was often drawing and observing the landscape from an early age. I was particularly interested in changing light conditions, so my drawings always emphasised the positions of shadows. As a result I’m aware of the tonal relationships as much as colours.

The main theme is the specific characteristics of the landscape as it is in the particular moment with respect to time of day, season, overriding weather pattern and land use.  I am interested in images of crops and I usually work on groups of several related images. Aesthetically the tracks made by farm machinery in crop fields are like vast drawings, forming grids and patterns that may be randomly broken by other tracks. These form interesting textures and compositional relationships when used in paintings.

Ivan Goodacre

As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by light.

The mysterious play between shadow and light gains even more power outdoors. In collaboration with the landscape, light constructs huge rehearsals everyday, allowing someone to shine and someone to stay in shadow. I seek such effects in these paintings, where the proportion of shadow and light is very different in each work.

The storyline itself also becomes a metaphorical source of light, where characters create their own luminescence . "I love her shiny red hair" thinks the dog in Terracotta Moon, and it starts radiating so much light that it illuminates the bridge and surroundings.

There is a strong sentimental and personal thread through the work. Be it my daughter’s shoes, which found their way into my studio after she had outgrown them (Foot for Thought), or the cheeky magpie on an old lawnmower  accompanying the couple caressing under the grevillea tree (In Tune). But the point is how quickly the light changes…

My works are filled with joy, humour and affirmation of life, but there is an awareness of impermanence of things and the possibility of change, what some would call the darker side. I’m glad it exists in my work. It makes us even more alive.

Dmitry Kuznichenko  2010

A percentage of sales will go to Project Australia.

Project Australia is a national incubator for social innovation, helping to support and launch creative individuals and ideas in the not-for-profit space.

More than 800 works in two exhibition spaces and 3 stockrooms 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I’ve been painting since I left school and when I started art school, I thought what a wonderful place it was.  I knew right away that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life - paint and create.

I experience both beautiful and sad things through everyday life and these experiences generate a strong need to paint. 

Whenever I face a blank piece of large, good quality paper I know right away that I need to touch it and feel the quality, arrange the palettes, squeeze the paint tube and watch the vibrant oils, acrylics or pastel chalk in my hand, and know it will soon come alive in the form of a drawing or a painting.  When I start, I focus on an idea or experience and let my feelings take control.  At times the painting starts to take on a completely new direction to the initial one I had in mind, however, I am its creator and to this extent have control over the end result. 

I’m content in the realisation that everyone that sees one of my works has different interpretations, a new ‘feeling’ to my original intentions. I love that my work acquires different interpretations and appearances outside my studio.  It becomes more a child born to me.

During my development, I have been able to focus on nature and the incredible sensation I get from being able to transfer my feelings to paper or canvas.  Because at times these inspirations come to me when I’m unable to paint, I have developed an ability to store these ideas and expand on them later, sometimes in the form of a new direction.

Being an artist is my life, and in no way could I imagine being, or doing, anything else.

After completing a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 I left America to pursue painting in Japan. In 2005 I immigrated to Australia to study at the National Art School, and completed my MFA in 2007. 2009 has been a year of inland travel, seeking inspiration from the rural areas of NSW and Victoria. This pursuit has culminated in my current body of work titled ‘Shadow on the Back Block’.

Robert Motherwell said ‘I believe that painters’ judgements of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgements flowing from an ethical content. Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.”

‘Shadow on the Back Block’ is my attempt to unite my painting practice with a strong belief in a sustainable future. I think it is fair to say that the attention the media and society have placed on current environmental concerns has led to a massive re-evaluation of our individual lifestyles. My own position led me to consider how I could incorporate these themes into my paintings.

In April of this year, I set out on a 5,000 km journey through the fruit-growing regions of New South Wales and Victoria. As I travelled and painted the vineyards and orchards of the places I passed through, I realized that because of the specific topography, the paintings were functioning more as portraits than landscapes. My interest in the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the agriculture of these areas led me away from spatial imperatives, towards a more specific search for a way to define a locality’s persona.

Over the mountains and across the tablelands, the Australian landscape is alive with colour and bursting with productivity. I have attempted with this body of work to embody the fecundity of the land in bold brushstrokes and fully saturated colour, to offer a new view of what is often thought of as a dry and desolate terrain.

Rudy Kistler, October 2009

Annabel Butler, 2009

Rather than writing an artist statement about this new body of work, which I have called The Built Environment, I have chosen to quote Hans Hofmann. His words, written in 1944, articulate the issues that I have been exploring.

Hans Hofmann 1944

Space and the Picture

One cannot see space
one can only sense space –
Since one cannot see space
one can also not copy space
and since one senses space
only
one must invent `the´pictorial
space
as the finale of a pictorial
creation.
Therefore one must be inventive
in using the pictorial means.
The lines, the planes, the points
these are the architectural means
with which to build space as
experienced
experienced by the senses
and not only perceived by
physical vision
because vision and space experience together
create an ‘inner vision’
in the junction
of a multiple physical
experience
with a physical reaction

Notes on Paper, Scissors, Fish

I always seem to go in two directions at once. This time one was slow and deliberate and the other quick and spontaneous. Things tend to break down and meet half way, then trade places. In the beginning the still life was for you and the collage paintings were for me. Now the collage paintings are for you and the still life is for me.

The collage paintings are a mystery. In the initial collage stage I had no idea, deliberately, about what I was doing so they surprised me completely. I was seeing black and trying to get to gold. Painting them was more like cooking than eating. I needed the still life to get away from brooding. They taught me how to paint by rapid response. And they fed me.

Bon Appetit

Melissa Becker

INTERCEPTION
New paintings by Malcolm Utley reference a common experience of live visual media - small image frames within an ever changing context of our busy world. Here they are frozen, a collision of two distinct paintings both literally (painted at separate times) and stylistically. Images collected through Utley’s camera on his journeys from the last 8 years are subject matter for the portrait paintings that intercept his earlier works (paintings completed up to 8 years prior). The result is a synergy of images, not unlike a cinema edit, to amplify and construct a new more potent and complex work.

The four snorting beasts underneath the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are not the exact same four painted here by Kinnane. But, as they say, the fruit never falls far from the goddamn tree. There is less black cruelty, certainly, less outright threat, here, safely, than in those ominous nostrils. Still, it has been many a night that the gun rattle of hooves on the stones outside has made its way into my sleep, and every time I look deeply into the lines between the old angels and the new, between the carnage of the past and that of today, there are goddamn horses everywhere and I can’t stop them coming.
It was a giant horse that took the city of Troy, one morning, years ago. At least 20 hands high, this one had been hollowed out, preserved, and its belly filled up with wood shavings and small fighting men, their blood foaming and ready to be spilled in the service of a truly mad man driven illogical by love. There were horses on the battlefields of Cannae, back in the day when Hannibal stuck it to a million Romans, wading about fetlock deep in those things lost in wars. There were horses at Gallipoli and the Battle of Siler River, and it was on their backs that young men were carried into the history books or to muddy holes. From that day to this, it has been on their backs that we have ridden to our wondrous, ridiculous, and unimaginable destinies, banners streaming behind us in the wind, cavalcades of the murderous and the love struck raising all hell in the name of The Bandit Moon and The Bastard Sun, the ruined countryside flying by like we was magic.
But I feel a little assuaged by these lanky grass eaters, the ones I see here that Kinnane has mustered out of his satchel. They are the ones that conversed with poor Gulliver, the ones that the poet rode, the steeds sent forth with a messenger and a small, silk purse to woo the long-haired maiden. I have heard about these goddamn nags. Despite their more noble breeding, it is an equally miserable history, this quest of sonnets and filtered sunlight and clearings in the forest and pilgrims with good intentions. For the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And it’s a long, long road. So how do you think we got there? Ain’t nobody walking, that’s for goddamn sure. It was them beasts that carried us, singing and howling, thrashing about like illness or scanning the horizon for silhouettes, the ruined countryside flying by like we was magic.

http://alive-sydney.whereilive.com.au/lifestyle/story/aaron-kinnanes-art…

www.aaronkinnane.com

Recollections 1999-2009 is George Byrne’s first photographic exhibition since embarking on a career as a singer-songwriter five years ago. The exhibition is an eclectic mix of images from around the world, revealing the full breadth of George’s unique talent as a photographer. Recollections 1999 - 2009 consists of 18 signed limited edition 20’ x 30’ colour and black and white prints.

“Living and working in Spain I from time to time feel a little homesick for the Australian landscape. So many of these pictures have been painted from memory to salve this pain. Then there are several European pictures inspired by the wonderful valley views that capture me every time I walk out of my studio door.”

This exhibition WOODCUT is a vision of relief printmaking by four established artist printmakers. From methods of creating the images in wood to their transfer onto paper, contemporary applications of traditional, Asian, and innovative Western techniques are employed. In these works the artists reveal their respect for the wood itself, and give expression to their creative processes, both intimate and expansive, grounded in the best traditions of the woodcut in communicating spiritual journeys.

Ritual is a protocol, a guide, for that most fundamental of human needs: meaning.
But when protocol loses meaning, snubbed out by the distractions of life, it is merely repetition. Baptism becomes bath, marriage a party with rings. And so on the Western world ¬¬ambles, away from what was once the light, out into the secular unknown.

One wonders, in this state, if bath can become baptism - if, on meditation, the mundane can take up meaning and repetition become ritual. This is the margin I seek to explore: the contemporary quest for purpose, rite in the Australian landscape.

Ritualism delves into the shared desire to understand our existence and our mortality, the purpose ritual holds in explaining moments of life, to mark them and imbue them with meaning.

This exhibition includes two recurrent themes in my painting, fascination with the sea and the continuing importance of still life. I was drawing and painting furiously when I was 2 years old, and creating images has been a constant throughout my life. My subjects vary, and although they come from direct experience they often conceal much of their personal significance for many years.

The seascapes originated in New Caledonia in 2001 when, after too many cocktails, the sea drew me into it in all my clothes in the moonlight. As dangerous as it was, it mesmerized me and I haven’t stopped looking at the ocean and reliving the experience in my paintings since. Working on these paintings now, I still feel like a Siren going home to rest.

Four years ago, I relocated to a small town near San Francisco, all rose gardens and antiques, and I started to paint what was for me a new and fascinating environment, a long way from the Australian bush town that provided me with my early landscape paintings. Old, worn objects next to the ephemeral beauty of flowers and fruit, lit by candle light or daylight, were an unending source of material for creating emotion and meaning from my visual experience. I worked fast and focused, to attempt to capture that fleeting first recognition of the significant and beautiful before the mind can make it mundane. These still lifes keep me conscious of the importance of living in the moment, of appreciating now.

Jarek Wojcik’s previous solo exhibition, born from a journey to his native Poland in 2007, renewed his interest in the imaginative recreation of experience through memory. In his new exhibition Deserted Places he further develop his ideas of the artist’s creative reimagining of place and experience.

“Art is a journey, and for me every work is the beginning of that journey.
I’m visiting places which are not necessarily actual locations or even physical sites. They can be places within one’s self. This is a mental landscape, part of my response to what is around me through the study of history.
Every object, every destination initiates a process of conversation with reality and produces a fascinating collection of stories, messages and experiences.
I’m asking questions, and to find the answers one has to travel… but not too far.”

John Lendis has been a professional artist for over thirty years, exhibiting regularly both in Australia and internationally. He has received an Australian Post-Graduate Research Award, and grants from Arts Tasmania and The National Association of Visual Arts. After completing his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 2006 he has been working in England, and has recently been Artist in Residence at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. He is currently working towards exhibitions in Canada and the UK.

This exhibition is about the idea of a city: a city made up of memories, experiences, images and dreams of many cities; a city that is known and owned by one person; one person walking streets at dawn, before the city wakes, when its buildings and streets and roads and rivers can be possessed and filled up with songs and memories and love and sadness. A city where everything dissolves into everything else; where walls become trees, where icebergs float down a river, and where cathedrals tower below secret rooms that let you look out across a world that you have created, a world that is yours alone.

We see our place in the world through the filters of our culture, experience, values and expectations. The viewer sees suggestions of form in my works through the veils of collage, colour and texture.

In 2002 I travelled through Italy and was enchanted by its culture, people and golden light. It enticed me back in 2004 to live in Florence, near the Basilica di Santa Croce. Each day I walked to art classes past the Galleria degli Uffizi and through the Piazza della Signoria. I also travelled, finding the regional galleries and working with and learning from local artists inspired by both their history and contemporary culture. The country’s history is everywhere, walls rich with layer upon peeling layer of past centuries, many with no attempt at renovation or repair.

Living in Italy inspired me to produce two bodies of work which were shown simultaneously in galleries in Italy and Australia in 2005.

This exhibition, La Dolce Vita, is the result of my subsequent, and inevitable, return to Italy. I have added to my memories with photographs of textured walls, graffiti, mysterious alleyways and enticing doorways, with the maps that guided me through the narrow laneways where I lived, and with old burnt papers saved from a villa under restoration. I have used these, together with other public and more personal imagery, to evoke a place, an episode, or a moment in time.

“Paul Anthony Sleeman’s colour and black and white photographs are unashamedly a celebration of the beauty of female form. Sleeman concentrates on expressing the weight and texture of female flesh essentially as a landscape, veiled by shadows. Sleeman’s pictures embrace carnality but still manage to invite us toward an unsentimental, yet romantic experience of one of fine-art photography’s most enduring genres - the female nude.” Robert McFarlane
Sydney Morning Herald Photography Critic

The exhibition has been extended to 21 March 2009.

Steven Sallybanks has been a scenic artist on many of Hollywood’s biggest films, from Titanic, to several James Bond, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.

Sallybanks paints by memory, starting en plein air with oils and adding layers to the canvas when he returns to his studio. His technique of applying multiple layers of thick oil paint enhances the play of light and dark on the painting, resulting in a three dimensional surface of semi abstract quality.

Charles Hewitt Gallery is delighted to be taking our exciting artist Benedict dos Remedios to New Generation, Art Sydney, 2008 (stand N2). If you would like a complimentary ticket please contact the gallery.

ARTIST STATEMENT

‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know’
Diane Arbus

The medium of photography is a wonderful tool for capturing a moment. These images are echoes of private moments conveyed using the moods and elements of landscape. I’m continually drawn to places with vast open spaces and sparse vegetation, places that give me access to thousands of miles of sky. The sky with its ever-changing light and transient moods balanced by the permanence of landscape. Fleeting versus fixed. The present versus the past.

I like to build my images by either emphasising or subduing certain aspects thus enabling the image a clearer voice – even if that voice is merely a whisper. What the camera actually sees is simply the starting point, what the mind sees is the more interesting journey.

Ultimately, what engages the viewer in my images will depend upon their experience, hopefully there is a hint of the contemplative, the still, the calm. As that is an important part of the process. Chaos versus calm.

Stuart Humphreys

MONO NO AWARE
Mono no Aware continues Marcella Kaspar’s fascination with the ephemeral beauty of flowers. Opening on 18 September, her latest exhibition comprises flower paintings showcasing her characteristic obsession with the perfection and repetition of nature. However, for the first time the artist weaves fresh-faced geisha girls and Japanese landscapes among her usual tapestry of petals.

After numerous visits to Japan, the artist was struck by the Asian culture’s love affair with flowers as a reflection of the impermanent beauty of life. The exhibition title, Mono No Aware, is a phrase used (in Japanese culture) to express the connection between nature and its transient, inevitable passing. The philosophy perfectly mirrored the artist’s own interest in flowers as a metaphor for life itself: beautiful and luminous, yet fleeting.