Archives: Exhibitions

‘The world is so mixed up when you consider all the competing desires and aspirations we all have, it is hard to make sense of it all to discover the right path… everything is becoming a commodity, a product, everything assimilated into our main stream middle class western culture as something that everyone needs and must have to attain a sense of happiness and achievement that is some how required for fulfilment.

Shadows of Self is a play on the idea that the artist is almost seen as a shamanistic being. In part it also refers to how buying art allows you to buy in to a being a more spiritually connected person….maybe it does….reality transformed into the spiritual, then transformed in to commodity, almost a piece of soul which conveys or connects us to a more meaningful way of being.

My art is a reflection of my own thought dreams dilemmas an expression of myself as I see the world, tapping into the collective consciousness that is constantly evolving. Through art I am hoping to connect people with, and reassure that in essence we are all the same just reflections of one another, I want to connect people to their feelings, to stimulate an emotive response, an understanding that we as humans are all interconnected, all part of the one earth.’

Rius Carson | August 2015

In Disconnect, Mike Portley has created a series of paintings and artworks that reflect and muse on a shift in human relationships with the environment, technology, each other and history itself. Portley’s own fascination with the changes in contemporary perceptions of the outside world are centred on the media and how personalised stories are manifested through a transformed media machine. It’s the disconnect between this personalised downloaded reality, the analogue world and society’s trajectory that Portley contemplates with both whimsy and alarm.

In Disconnect, Portley has adopted a more figurative approach in addressing the themes in the works. There are a selection of subjects that have been appropriated and reconfigured from social media, video games, art, tourism and advertising. These citations are used to underscore how our lives have been decorated with media manifestations and that much of our social awareness is funnelled in a conglomerated yet distant manner. This idea of conglomeration is referred to in the metaphorical depiction of mindsets relating to the dynamic between the environment and economies. The depleting environment is the elephant in the room offset against associated economic influences and emerging technologies that both threaten and enhance traditional roles in society. Portley questions whether the more we connect digitally, the more we actually disengage from real communication with people and our synchronicity with Earth; or perhaps these symptoms are the growing pains of a new and exciting evolution of human triumph and super connectivity?

Portley’s approach combines lyrical starting points with interpretive expression that is overlaid with detailed subjects connected to each proposition. Portley has always had a propensity for quickly boiling down complex concepts into metaphorical prose and visual tableaux. Disconnect is therefore both an autobiographical comment on transition and a social comment on change and revolution.

John Lennox was a central figure in a circle of artists, collectors and socialites that existed concurrently alongside the narrower, more canonised, academic art establishment of Melbourne during the 1970’s and 1980’s. As is evident in his more decorative work Lennox was a formally trained painter however when he deferred from painting idyllic garden or bush scenes a more existential side that reflected the nature of his eventual isolation came to the fore.

Renewed interest in Lennox’ career comes at a time when academia across the world has once again switched its attention to the place of outsiders in Art History. Lennox was undoubtedly an enigmatic, albeit charismatic, ‘Outsider’. With a combination of exceptional technical skill and a psychological depth in his work and persona, the new curated exhibition Enigma is set to prompt that Lennox and his contribution to Australian painting be looked at anew.

‘The subject of this work is broadly land – land with a long view. Where the eye reaches out as far as it can, to where land meets a sky that is stretching out too. Distance and pause – our minds follow our gaze. These paintings are inspired by a long road trip through the Great Victoria Desert – South Australia and Western Australia and down to the coast of the Bite. But beyond the places themselves the true subject is the expansiveness of nature. My intention is to bring the mental ‘space’ which nature provides, to those of us who spend more time in the cities. I am attempting to draw the viewer into a place where the mind is allowed to wander freely. Though my medium is static, time plays a crucial part. The experience for the viewer is a slowly emerging one. The mysterious quality that overlies some of the paintings is intended as an opening for the viewer to enter a meditative space, as well as forming a relationship with the work as different points of view emerge. In some of the pieces there is initially so little purchase for the eye to engage with, yet slowly the paintings yield depth and more. While creating a sense of quiet, a pause, the paintings are not necessarily peaceful. Most are derived from a desert landscape which is harsh and as liable to throw dust in your face as bring calm. Still a beauty is there, ‘beauty’, that quality which is so out of vogue in the serious discourse of contemporary art. But I suggest we have reached a moment in our human history when we need to acknowledge our absolute dependence upon the natural world, and perhaps the beauty of nature is one crook which can draw us back to this knowledge. The execution of the work involves many layers of paint and some wax applied with a palette knife. I’ve tried to suggest a certain freedom of application, almost a wildness in places, but balanced with a fine attention to detail in others. Through the layering a glow and a depth emerge.’

Alison Binks | 2015

Songs of the Plants is an exhibition of new work by Melbourne based artist Jewels Stevens inspired by a journey, both literal and spiritual, to the steamy Upper Amazon Basin of Peru in early 2014. For several weeks Stevens lived in a remote native Indian community working with plant medicines carefully administrated by Shipibo shamans. Entrusting her guides Stevens cast off her preconceptions and assumptions of the way in which the world works and explored new ways of understanding life, the world around us, and the inner realms that the plants allow access to. As a part of the ritual that accompanies this age old shamanic tradition her Shipibo shaman teachers sang to her to calm her mind and body as she went through these intense transcendental experiences. As Stevens herself describes, these songs – or Icaros – were unlike anything she had heard before and their effect profound in allowing her to push through the physical, mental and emotional transformation she underwent brought on in these sacred ceremonies.“I had never heard such beautiful and yet alien sounds, they were so unique and organic – otherworldly.”

As an artist Stevens has always sought a clarity of vision in her work and through the effect of these plant medicines and the sound of these Icaros she has discovered a clearer reality, a sense of harmony and has tapped in to her unique pattern that the shamans helped to align. Amidst the abundance of life in the rain forests of Peru this new perception of far more abstract concepts and constructs than our western learning teaches us has been transposed, Stevens has shifted her centre and grasped new ways of being that she freely shares in anecdote and in her art.

As with in her 2010 exhibition Jewels of the North that was based on her observations of the landscape of Iceland and the phenomenon of the Northern Lights during a residency in Reykjavik, Stevens continues to draw influence from a multiplicity of sources from across the globe as well as from within.

An Ocean Inside is a dynamic exhibition of new work by Jewels Stevens in which she continues her bold exploration of inner worlds. Stevens’ unique visual language is inherently bound to a process of evolution and in this series we see a new found freedom of expression and a deeper understanding of her creativity. These exhilarating ‘internal landscapes’ are profound in their honesty, their impact immediate and visceral. Stevens allows the paint to flow in a symbiotic dance with her subconscious without holding back or censoring her deepest intuition and raw creativity. This powerful transcendental expression realises itself through vivid explosions of colour and subtle gradations of tone reminiscent of moving through many layers of consciousness, at once deeply mysterious and powerfully revealing.

‘The first time I met Andrew Sibley I was not aware of his extensive reputation. I met Andrew in 1975 as an RMIT student and I was coming of age at the tail end of Whitlam-era experimentation. It was a glorious unhurried time and along with Andrew were Jan Senbergs, George Baldessin, James Meldrum, Peter Clarke and Les Kossatz as his formidable teaching colleagues. I did not yet know that he was a significant Australian artist who from the late 1950’s was regarded as a prodigious talent. Nor had I yet encountered his unique ability as a teaching artist to raise in his students a curiosity for the ironies of life and the psychologically dark terrains of human nature. By the time I had met Andrew he had already moved well beyond the simpler narrative and expressionist impulses of his early works and was completely absorbed in developing ambitious multi-layered human entanglements painted on sheets of Perspex. To us, his work looked all at once powerful, innovative, funny, tender and kind of dangerous. He was a huge figure in our young lives – a mischievous and charismatic force.

By 1980, the earlier 1960’s paintings of Andrew Sibley such as those presented here at Kick Gallery became of increasing interest to our artists’ cohort. Unexpectedly the world of contemporary art began to turn back to painted expressionistic images, utilising the figure once more. The early eighties zeitgeist was such that many young artists world-wide had embraced a version of what became known variously as ‘neo-expressionism’, ‘trans avant-garde’ and ‘bad painting’. For those of us who at the time followed Andrew’s work as ex-students we found a prescient quality in these early works. In particular, there was Andrew’s unwavering commitment to painting itself, to painting the human condition (in the face of dominant formal abstraction and conceptual art) and his obsession with what he referred to half-jokingly as ‘the gestalt moment’. And yet Andrew was not particularly feted or even included in this important wider return to figurative painting. Perhaps with an artist like Andrew Sibley the singularity of style and vision marked him forever as a lone wolf. He was not one for shifting even slightly to align with the times.

Looking back now on a work like ‘Couple’ from 1968 for example, I can see clearly how influential he was for us in terms of marking out the joys and sorrows of human encounter and yet the work seems entirely of its own world. The biomorphic forms, the proscenium-like space and the moment of trepidation before touching another human being are forever his. But also there was also and continuously an underlying sense of acute simple observation. And so, turning to the very late drawings presented here, coming as they have right at the end of a very long life of making, we see the artist re-setting and returning to a much earlier mode of looking and putting. Sad as the circumstances of their making are, these drawings properly close the circle. They are immediate, beautiful and insightful renderings that show to the very end his ever-present desire to draw out inner psychologies. Andrew used to say that ultimately painters make the same picture over and over again. He may just have been right.’

Jon Cattapan | Artist | September 2015