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The BodyThe Printmaking Summer Residency Exhibition26 November - 14 December 2007Curated By Richard Harding Alexander Carroll |
images
Summer Residency Prints
Damon Kowarsky |
Linda Erceg |
Antonietta Covino-Beehre |
Alexander Carroll
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Shane Jones |
Deborah Klein |
Steve Cox |
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Essay
The Body: The Printmaking Summer Residency Exhibition 2007
As part of the annual School of Art Galleries calendar The Printmaking Summer Residency Program has begun to align the program's yearly premise for selection with the School of Art's Research clusters. This year's residents were invited to participate in the residency/exhibition as their practices are linked through their interests pertaining to 'the body'.
"Bodies are the debt that culture owes to nature, the matter, attributes, energies, the forces it must make and make over as its own."1
When people talk about, 'the body', a flurry of images can go through your mind: are they talking of the model, Elle Macpherson?2. Maybe Miss Marple's3 attempts to convince the police of a murder she saw on a train? Or even a CSI4 style camera zoom to reveal the trajectory of a weapon. The human body continues to astound and baffle us. It constitutes a resilient yet fragile conglomerate, operating in many forms, from the physical to the psychological.
Alex Carroll's drawings and prints utilise processes to reinforce his conceptual base. The work is developed through the notion of time and movement that relate directly to the action of the body or as Carroll explains, the work "is shaped by, the challenging of the mental and bodily resistances promoting a metonymic confrontation between the physical and the psychological."5 The cinematic qualities of his blurred drawings slow time to the point of intrusion. The body is being observed and objectified on a grand scale. By employing this 'slow-motion version of thought'6, his intent is to make sense of the self by sifting through the accumulation of confusion and experience. Coupled with what seems to be almost psychopathic rubbing, scratching and wiping, Carroll's drawing process is both an additive and subtractive procedure, enabling a path towards the construction of meaning.
Print and photography based artist Antonietta Covino-Beehre's current work focuses on hands as a part of the body that relates to how we communicate and are identified. Hands assist in emphasis for oration or for the sign language of the hearing impaired. The interpretation of the movement and placement of the hand(s) has a long history in Art. Covino-Beehre's imagery references this history while aligning it to contemporary cinematic motifs7 through the depiction of antiquity-style framing and photographic scanning. In this instance the notion of identity has a forensic relationship with romance.
Damon Kowarsky's print works reference real and imagined architectural constructions that reflect another time and place. The monumental figures situated within some of the work underlines the connection of the body to architecture, both physically and psychologically. This combination of elements evokes thoughts of cultural and personal identity. Kowarsky aligns his mask references to 'The Day of the Dead', Carnival and Venetian masquerade balls, stating, "they are a fascinating barometer of social and cultural change and the varied tides of migration and integration."8 But who is the man in the foreground? Why is he there and what does he want? Is it the same man that is masked with a companion found in Spare Room gallery or some other being? "The subject, (or in Kowarsky's case, the man) is not simply 'behind' its (his) mask nor in front of others. It (he) can only be found 'within' the non-place of the mask itself."9
When viewing Deborah Klein's, Iron Butterflies [2007], the spectator needs to consider the history of her art practice. Klein, originally a print-based artist, now moves easily between mediums and the demarcation of art and craft disciplines, defying notions of high and low art. Klein's current work sits comfortably within the unsettling arena of post-feminist discourse. Klein has constructed an aesthetic space using personal iconography in relation to an ongoing dialogue with feminine strength and allure. The focus on details of hair and ornament move her work from the grand narratives of the past10 to a Hitchcock-style close-up in works like Notorious(2) [2007]. Body and hair are united in a deadly rendition of an unidentifiable femme fatale. The comb as an extension of the body is also the 'safety latch' that is flicked off, allowing the hair to cascade down the body to distract the viewer/victim as the comb converts to a weapon.
The 'play world' of Linda Erceg investigates childhood role-play narratives through games and toys. As Susan Stewart observes: "The toy is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative."11 Theatrically styled, Erceg's digital works create an eerie illusion of 'fun times' through constructed narratives from disparate sources. Stewart again notes: "To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts, none of which is determinative."12 In this instance Erceg is toying with the viewer's notion of real and virtual through child-like fantasies in order to question gender codes, mythologies and social constructs.
In an attempt to transcend the corporeal, Shane Jones utilises depictions of the body and objects in order to represent various psychological spaces. Jones' use of shadow in works like Struggle [2007] transcends sex/gender constructs to question definitions while the two chairs in Absent [2007] reference coupling that are non-gender-specific, allowing the viewer to read multiple meanings. Although Jones uses straightforward methods, such as simple-line work, the imagery engages the viewer in the complex field of identity. By combining traditional life drawing with everyday symbols, the work merges the physical with the psychological.
Works on paper have dominated Steve Cox's practice since the early 1990s, combining drawing and painting to facilitate an organic mode of production. Although Cox delineates two main areas of his figurative work13 they relate closely to each other, being characterized by observational interpretations that are both representational and psychological. The hybrid nature of Cox's work 'plays nicely' with an anti-politicised Hyper-Masculine Queer (H-MQ)14 and the Darwinian evolutionary tree. During the residency Cox explored his preoccupation with 'fictionalised reality'15 using Rosa Kleb's16 dagger-tipped shoes in conjunction with the fictional hybrid, Dandenong Dave [2007]. Is this a deadly 'Dorothy' taking on an ocker H-MQ?
Richard Harding
Coordinator of Printmaking
RMIT University
Footnotes:
1 Grosz, Elizabeth, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, (p98) MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London England 2002 (2nd Edition)
2 Elle MacPherson was nick named 'the body' in the 1980s after appearing on Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue.
3 Murder She Said, (George Pollack; 1961) [UK] (A fi lm adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel, '4.50 from Paddington')
4 Crime Scene Investigation: An elite team of police forensic evidence investigation experts works their cases in Las Vegas. First screened 6 October 2000 (USA) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247082
5 Alex Carroll, Artist statement [2007]
6 William Kentridge, cited in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in conversation with William Kentridge, Phaidon Press Ltd., London, 1999, p.8
7 In James Cameron's Titanic [1997] when the boy meets girl romance is consummated in the storage area the climax is indicated when the girl's hand hits the window and pushes against the glass.
8 Damon Kowarsky, Artist's statement [2007]
9 Wigley, Mark, Untitled: The Housing of Gender, Princeton Architectural Press, New York USA 1992
10 Deborah Klein, derived from Artist statement [2007]
11 Susan Stewart, On Longing; Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University
Press, London, 1993 p. 56
12 Ibid
13 Steve Cox, Artist's statement [2007]
14 According to Dustin Goltz in Laughing at absence: Instinct magazine and the hyper-masculine gay future? The constructed identity of the Hyper-Masculine Queer is still evolving though key identifying factors can be attributed
to them: youthism, anti-political, shunning of social responsibility, and the use of ironic or sarcastic humour to defend and empower.
15 Steve Cox, Artist's statement [2007]
16 Rosa Kleb is a character in Ian Fleming's 1957 James Bond Novel (later fi lmed by Terence Young in 1963) From Russia With Love.
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