Archives: Exhibitions
Life is a Dream
Life is a Dream is the title of an exhibition of two parts. Firstly it represents the title of a new series of paintings by Rius Carson that explore the artist’s emotive response to love, freedom and happiness as well as loss, anxiety, envy and disconnection. Through the cathartic process of painting Carson has created visually rich and complex works that are immediately engaging, layered in meaning, and layered in terms of the actual application of the mixed media he uses. These ‘landscapes of life’ are honest in the way the artist expresses pain and confusion and yet a positivity, a sense of calm and a love of love is ever present and comes through his unrestrained use of colour, texture and composition.
The second part of this exhibition is essentially seperate to his most recent painting series, placed in amongst Carson’s paintings are a series of ‘Long Birds’, painted wood sculptures that are over 3 metres tall inhabit the exhibition space. These iconic Carson sculptures form a part of his on-going sculptural practice and add an omnipresence, a stability, a totemic timelessness in contrast to Carson’s artistic activities relating to the heart that he expresses in his Life is a Dream paintings.
Life is a Dream runs from March 30 – April 1 2017.
Arrernte in Renaissance
Emma Stuart’s most recent work is based on the landscape of Arrernte country that she has been immersed in for several years in Central Australia. Arrernte in Renaissance is a series intimate desert paintings that explore the notion of Arrernte country in rebirth. Focusing on the burning landscape, Stuart explores the use of burning to conserve and regenerate the land and how this allows the rebirth of the land and all that lives there.
Die Gespensterstunde
The collaged works in hannah goldstein’s new exhibition Die Gespensterstunde (The Ghost Hour) is a follow up and departure from her last solo exhibition held at Jacob Hoerner Galleries in 2015. In this new series goldstein presses her main medium – photography – a step further and abandons it in part through the removal or reduction of major parts of the images she chooses to present in her work. At the same time goldstein continues to be drawn to the faceless characters that inhabit her art world and the exploration of how we can make a portrait of a person without showing the subject’s face.
“If we strip an image, a portrait to the bare minimum, what do we have left, is there a story still there to tell?”
As a teacher of photography the statement above is something that goldstein’s tries to communicate with her students. To question the power of the image has always been a great interest of goldstein and this line of questioning and interest formed the premise for her earlier 2015 body of work It’s too dark to see your face. In goldstein’s collages she strips the protagonist figure of their surroundings and much of the essentials of the image, leaving the viewer to have to fill in the gaps.
The faceless characters float over the paper almost like ghosts. In shapes and forms that may not make sense, body parts cut off in odd angels. It is as if she has tried to create an outer body expectance for the faceless characters, that same feeling that you may have in a dream. In the smaller works large objects interfere in the landscape and floating bodies head for possible death. The scenes have a dreamlike state that takes place in the Gespensterstunde. They mirror some of goldstein’s own fears of flying and water, and also reflect some of her odd moments that she experience during the Gespensterstunde.
The Blue Hour
In a place of Albert Namatjira Gums, red sand and wide open spaces, Emma Stuart’s landscapes are unusual. Stuart has called this body of work The Blue Hour. Where others have come to the desert and been struck by its majestic ochres, sharp light and hard lines Stuart’s work is more subtle. She writes, “The Blue Hour is the time when we transition from night to day or day to night. The twilight and the dawn. And with it comes a shift in energy and consciousness.” It describes how place resonates with subjectivity and vice versa. What’s immediately striking is the blue palette that dominates her painting and a keen sense of claustrophobia from cropped compositions, which allude to Stuart’s process of working from photographs to recreate scenes she has visited, or more aptly, experienced. Trunks of gums crisscross the field of view and light floods in illuminating buffel grass from undisclosed, almost supernatural, sources. In one painting you are confronted with an uncomfortably close view of a fork in an ancient river gum. It draws you in to contemplative state and there is a heightened sense of intruding on someone’s personal space as limbs become fleshy and nuanced, intimately detailed.
Even Stuart’s seascapes seem to capture this closed-in quality where calm waves and flat horizons are weighted down heavily by tumultuous clouds and the air is thick with an ambient tension. Her landscapes take on a hyper-real quality where trees, waves and clouds become figurative and emotional in their expressions and there is the sense of a deep allegory at play in the imagery. They are emotional landscapes, where colour and light are augmented through the process of painting to suggest the mechanics of what it is to experience place and position one self in it – how we draw insight and spirituality from our environment and imbue it with meaning. As Stuart describes this experience of place, “the deep human history and current cultural complex are just as much a part of this energy as its physical landscape.”
Alexandra Hullah | April 2015
Coordinator | ‘Watch This Space Gallery and Artist Run Initiative’ | Alice Springs
Recent works
Gallery Open Saturday November 26 from 6-8pm
Day/Night – Tue Nov 15 – Sat Nov 26 – Window Viewing *
* Window Viewing – All works can be seen from the shop frontage (& by appointment)
Extra-ordinary paintings based on actual events
Andrew Gritscher approaches his artistic practice in a way that reflects his formal training in Chinese medicine. Allegorically, in his work and in his medical practice, physical frameworks and parameters are understood and establish form however it is through deeper exploration and reflection that he achieves a truer understanding of what is taking place in the individual and, in relation to the sociological and philosophical messages imbedded in his artistic work, in his response to the world around us. His works are, as with his patients, comprised of a sum of parts rather than individual marks or motifs that are unrelated and independent of each other.
Altered Beast
‘Two themes that I keep coming back to whilst making these works are – Thinking which sits outside of logic, a different way to thinking, an intuition, simply an understanding of things and secondly our true nature. Throughout making some of these pictures I have been thinking about Zen Koans. One of the pictures directly references a Koan, another (the largest work) is my own Koan. So below, for an artist’s statement, is an old Koan – it relates for me very well to a number of the pictures and how I think as well as the title of the show.
“The Ch’uan Teng Lu records an encounter between Tao-hsin and the sage Fa-yung, who lived in a lonely temple on Mount Niu-t’ou, and was so holy that birds used to bring him offerings as flowers. As the two men were talking, a wild animal roared close by, and Tao-hsin jumped. Fa-yung commented, “I see it is still with you!” -referring, of course, to the instinctive “passion” of fright. Shortly afterwards, while he was for a moment unobserved, Tao-hsin wrote the Chinese character for “Buddha” on the rock where Fa-yung was accustomed to sit. When Fa-yung returned to sit down again, he saw the sacred Name and hesitated to sit. “I see,” said Tao-hsin, “it is still with you!” At this remark Fa-yung was fully awakened… and the birds never brought any more flowers.”‘ – Andrew Gritscher | October 2016
Fiat
In Fiat, Mike Portley explores themes relating to the control of currency and the impact of economies on the natural world. The ubiquitous concept of fiat currency or legal tender is in itself a a token symbol for a stored unit of value; and historically relates to items or resources of value taken from the natural world. The extrapolation of the financial system, through time, has distorted the intrinsic symbolism or currency so that the unit itself has more value than the real wealth around us. Portley asks questions about the flawed logic of the monetary system and its disconnection from natural systems.
Portley infuses Egyptian symbols and Judeo-Christian mysticism to highlight the evolution and manipulation of economies via the ruling elites to the common citizen. The use of specific symbology and financial jargon are used to juxtapose their financial context with the natural world. Surviving ancient currencies such as gold and silver are used to allude to the past and to times where currency was finite and relative in value to items of trade. The analogy of flight is used consistently in the works to communicate ideals of freedom and a flight from the counter-intuitive systems that underpin many of our current problems.
Sweet
Sweet is a presentation of works on paper from the 1990’s and early 2000’s by Andrew Sibley in the second half of his career when his approach to making art shifted to a lighter emotive tone than in his early, more turbulent, years. This presentation of 8 works on paper show Sibley’s interest in exploring the inextricable highs and lows of the human condition in a more loving, compassionate, and vivacious way.
Sibley had an illustrious career as an artist for over six decades exhibiting at many of Australia’s most prestigious commercial galleries from 1961 until 2015. His work has been included in innumerable exhibitions including two significant surveys of his work at Monash University in 2003 and Melbourne University in 1976. Sibley was also a senior lecturer of painting at RMIT (1967-1987) and then Monash University (1990-1999).
Jacob Hoerner Galleries represents the Estate of Andrew Sibley and is committed to continuing to exhibit Sibley’s work and in turn research, and add original scholarship to, the existing records of his long and important career.