Exhibitions

Shaun Gladwell is known for his videos of people engaged in acts of physical virtuosity. His subjects—himself and others—have typically been practitioners of urban subcultures, like skateboarding, BMX-bike riding, break-dancing, and capoeira. Gladwell slows down the action to allow us to analyse it. Suggesting a meditative state for performer and viewer, his videos attend to the body (its weight, its flexibility, its centre of gravity) but also suggest transcendence. His MADDESTMAXIMVS: Planet & Stars Sequence was created as Australia's contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale.

In MADDESTMAXIMVS, Gladwell's multi-screen work Centred Pataphysical Suite finds various performers continually spinning on the spot. Alongside, his Endoscopic Vanitas—a video camera within a rotating human skull—presents a live-feed, surveying of the space of the mind. In juxtaposing these works, Gladwell makes a deft analogy between turning in the world and turning in our heads, contrasting the abstractness of thought with the fragile materiality which facilitates it.

The heart of MADDESTMAXIMVS is a set of videos shot in the Australian outback. In Planet & Stars Sequence: Barrier Highway, Gladwell spray-paints scenes of the cosmos, then paints them out, negating them. In Interceptor Surf Sequence, he 'surfs' into the horizon on top of a black V8 Interceptor, in the manner of wing-walkers of old. In Apologies 1-6, he arrives on a motorcycle, to tend to kangaroos killed on the road, gently carrying them off for burial. The title could be a veiled reference to The Apology to Indigenous people. These deeply romantic works are haunted, not only by Australian film actors Mel Gibson (Mad Max) and Russell Crowe (Maximus in Gladiator) but also by art history: Leonardo's Vitruvian man, Sydney Nolan's helmeted Ned Kelly, and Joseph Beuys (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare).

While extremely contemporary in its format, MADDESTMAXIMVS is steeped in art history, and revisits a nationalism associated with a previous period of Australian art and the old archetype of the hero exiled to the wilderness. It is unclear what level of investment or irony prevails. Gladwell puts a brave new spin on existentialist big-themes.

Seemingly infuriated by the old avant-garde presumption that artworks should criticise and challenge their publics, their subject matter, and the art of the past, the artworld is currently enjoying what Rex Butler has dubbed a 'post-critical' turn. Pop Life, a show which recently debuted at London's Tate Modern, celebrates artists who aim to please and entertain, who embrace commercialism and populism, and want their audiences to like them. They include Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damian Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Scott Redford vs. Michael Zavros brings this idea home, pitting two local post-critical artists—both born and bred on the Gold Coast—against one another.

Photo-realist painter Michael Zavros paints beautiful things beautifully. His subjects include good shoes, bespoke suits, dandified pretty boys, pedigree horses, handbags, elegant interiors, mansions, formal gardens, and fountains. Zavros presents a fantasy world of refinement, privilege, and perfection, where the quality of his own painting style is cross-referenced with his quality subject matter. We tend to link criticality with self-reflexivity, but, although Zavros's work is not critical of its subjects, it is sharply self-reflexive: his 'trophy' paintings refer to their own status as collectibles, his 'interiors' are made for collectors to hang in their own homes, he exhibited paintings of handbags in a handbag store. Zavros is affirmative, never ironic or conflicted. Even when his works reference the vanitas tradition or the Narcissus myth, Zavros overrides any negative associations, endorsing luxury goods and self-absorption pure and simple.

While Zavros celebrates elite style, Scott Redford is more aligned with youth and pop culture. In the 1990s, he was a Queer artist, criticising mainstream values. But, in the twenty-first century, he seemed to turn his back on criticality to celebrate the Gold Coast, its bling and teen surf culture. He embraced the language and pitch of commercialism: brands, decals, fluro-colours, and industrial production. These days he doesn't mind people saying his works look like merchandise, in fact he proposed to turn Australia's pavilion at Venice into a surf shop.

Are Zavros and Redford simply affirmative and uncritical, or do their projects offer critical leverage on our desire for criticality? [image: Michael Zavros]

Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) worked with raw satellite data to make Brilliant Noise, their video portrait of the Sun. Sifting through thousands of computer files in the data vaults at NASA, they reorganised still images from Earth-orbiting satellites into time-lapse sequences. The images contain interference from a variety of natural and man-made sources. The sound is natural solar radio, with white noise coming from cosmic rays hitting the satellite camera's CCD. Embracing artifacts from the capturing process, they create a unique view of the electromagnetic universe and the technologies we use to see it. 

Catalogue Essay

This year's Queensland emerging-artists show features work by Sally Golding, Kelly Hussey-Smith, Fiona Mail, and Elizabeth Willing. Each receives $5,000 from Brisbane Airport to support making work for the show.

Sally Golding works in 'expanded cinema', combining film projection with performance and installation elements. She is currently completing a Masters at the Queensland College of Art. Recently, she has developed performance works where she projects films directly onto her body, creating live cine-sculptures and interactions. She works solo and with Joel Stern as Abject Leader. As a member of the OtherFilm collective, she has been involved in curating innovative moving-image and performance events and exhibitions throughout Australia and internationally. For Fresh Cut, she will be creating an installation using a 16mm film loop, a two-way mirror, strobe lighting, and the viewer's own body.

Kelly Hussey-Smith studied photojournalism at Queensland College of Art, graduating with first-class honours last year. She comes out of an activist-photography tradition. Over the last few years she has collaborated with NGOs such as Operation Smile, who provide free surgery to children born with cleft lips and palates in developing countries. She was editor of The Australian PhotoJournalist in 2007-8. Caged, her new series of photographs and videos, considers the tragic living conditions of animals in zoos. With this work, she hopes to prompt a dialogue about our relationship with animals and question our use of animals as decoration and entertainment.

Kate Woodcroft and Catherine Sagin studied together at Queensland University of Technology. In 2008 they started making collaborative works under the name Fiona Mail. These works explore the dynamics of collaboration through task-based activities that often border on parody. For Fresh Cut they are studying fencing in preparation for a duel on opening night. For the next year, their collaborative works will be exhibited under the name of the winner. Woodcroft and Sagin are also co-directors of the artist-run initiative No Frills*.

Elizabeth Willing studied at Queensland University of Technology, completing a Honours degree in Fine Arts last year. Her works explore material and sensual aspects of food and food imagery. She is particularly drawn to sweets: she made wallpaper, retracing a William Morris pattern in lollies; she rendered gallery walls stucco-style in royal icing; she made a model of GoMA in marzipan; in a video, she licked her way through a pane of toffee. Willing is one of the directors of the art-run initiative Accidentally Annie St.

Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2010 opens at the IMA on Saturday 7 August. Thanks again to Brisbane Airport for their visionary support of this project. [image: Fiona Mail]

There's something rotton in the state of Ronnie. Melbourne artist Ronnie van Hout is a master of slapstick existentialism. His tragicomic works mash-up Sartre and Beckett with The Two Ronnies and The Nutty Professor. Often bearing his own features, van Hout's figurative sculptures beg to be read as doppelgangers, mini-mes, and selves from a parallel universe. In Sick Child 2 he presents himself child scale, in his PJs, one arm in a sling, the other hand down his pants—his adult face scowling. What would Hetty Johnson make of this image? Do we read it as an adult with childish features or as a child with adult features; as sick child or childish sicko? If this work is hideously abject, the iconic Failed Robot leans the other way. Apertures in its metallic-grey geometric-block body reveal fleshy human eyeballs and human-gums-and-teeth—vestiges of the organic. The frailty of the organic body is also a theme in Van Hout's cryptic installation Hold That Thought. In a clinical-white room, we find a desicated corpse in PJs scrunched up in a bathroom cupboard—like it died and dried there. Next to casts of six ripe potatoes are wrinkly casts of the same potatoes gone to seed. Alongside a molecule-like sculpture made of spheres is another of a picturesque male head breaking out in warts. In this contemporary vanitas, the viewer is left to join the dots.

The ghost of the Emperor Haile Selassie meets Idi Amin, Charlie's Angels do Rambo Foxy-Brown-style, David Lynch's Lost Highway snakes through Lagos, Ghostface Killa mutates into Fela's 'Zombie', and Dracula gives way for Blacula. Voodoo, hoodoo, and mambo are mashed up with Igbo rituals. Ahhwooooo . . . Werewolves of Lagos.
—Stacy Hardy

They say Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, releasing onto the local home-video market up to a thousand titles a year. Such productivity is only possible because the movies are made in conditions that would make western filmmakers cringe. Produced and marketed in the space of a week, they use low-cost equipment, basic scripts, actors cast the day of the shooting, and real locations. While drawing on genres and typologies drawn from Hollywood, Nollywood movies are a rare instance of mass-media self-representation. They stories—tales of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery, prostitution—speak to the experiences and values of their audiences. The narrative is overdramatic, and deprived of happy endings. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted. Pieter Hugo became intrigued by Nollywood's fictional worlds where the everyday and the unreal intertwine. He asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets and photographed them. The resulting images recreate the stereotypical characters that typify Nollywood productions, including mummies, satanic demons, and zombies, all casually posed in the backlots of Enugu. Thanks to Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, and Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

Brook Andrew is of Wiradjuri and Scottish descent. Although he is concerned not to be pigeonholed as an Aboriginal artist, his work nevertheless centres on Aboriginal politics. Conflating contraries, it confounds clear political readings.

One of his most recent pieces—Jumping Castle War Memorial in the current Biennale of Sydney—is a generic war memorial in the form of an inflatable jumping castle decorated with a graphicised Wiradjuri/op-art motif. Jumping Castle War Memorial presents itself as an ethical connudrum. It sends out mixed messages: should we stand back and regard it respectfully, as a mechanism of mourning, or should we pounce upon it and have our fun? Is it about memory or amnesia?

Andrew's follow-up work is even more oblique. The Cell is a twelve-by-six-metre inflatable room, decorated inside and out with Andrew's now trademark Wiradjuri/op-art pattern. Is this 'padded cell' punishment or playpen—for us or against us? To enter, one must first don paper overalls covered in the pattern. The overalls recall those worn by forensic technicians to avoid contaminating—and being contaminated by—crime scenes. In wearing them, are we donning 'the skin of the other', to merge with his environment and feel at one with him? Or, conversely, are the overalls camouflage or disguise, protecting us from our new environment, allowing us to lurk? Indeed, might they even be a form of masquerade—cultural drag?

Andrew says, 'The original idea for The Cell is an extension of my wall pattern installations, where one is immersed in the pattern and experience. You are immediately transformed once you don a costume and enter. You become an inmate, a cellular astronaut, or asylum seeker.  Experiences of loss, asylum, and genocide are turned on their head. The Cell is a conundrum; a monument to such stories; a space for quiet contemplation, disorientation, and spectacle.'

Commissioned by Sydney's Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and presented in partnership with the IMA, The Cell debuts at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sydney (8 July—18 August 2010) before coming to Brisbane. The project has been supported by the Nelson Meers Foundation