Exhibitions

Los Angeles artist Diana Thater's installations address our relationship with the natural world (particularly animals) while exploring the language and mechanics of video as a medium. The highlight of our show is her new six-channel video installation Chernobyl.

In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the northern Ukraine exploded. It allegedly released one hundred times more nuclear debris than the Hiroshima bomb and was responsible for the deaths and illnesses of thousands of people. Today, the city of Pripyat, where the powerplant workers lived, is a ghost town. Although deserted by humans, wild animals are settling there. Przewalski’s Horses, facing extinction in their native habitat in central Asia, now roam freely in this post-apocalyptic, post-human landscape. Thater filmed in Pripyat, within the forbidden 'alienation zone', observing animals against the derelict architecture.  

Thater writes: 'Chernobyl is falling into ruins, but still looks like a city; there are stores, apartment buildings, schools. Even though it's deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. On the one hand, you have a perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970; on the other hand, this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living. Chernobyl represents the failure of a massive political system, a way of life, and of science. Yet nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.'

In addition to Chernobyl, we will be showing Thater's installations Peonies (2011), Untitled Videowall (Butterflies) (2008), and Pink Daisies, Amber Room (2003).

Diana Thater is represented by 1301PE, Los Angeles; Hauser and Wirth, London; and David Zwirner, New York. Chernobyl is presented with assistance from IMA Supporters.

The futuristic housing estate Le Vele di Scampia in northern Naples now looks like a shell-shocked fortress. Architect Franz Di Salvo designed it in the 1970s. With its radical tiered form, galleries, and social spaces, he felt it was a revolution, but now it symbolises the failure of Italian socialism. Even before its completion, its apartments were appropriated by squatting Camorra mafia families, and the building is now seen as a symbol of their power in the Naples region, a centre of European drug trafficking. (It was used as the set of the 2008 film Gomorrah.)

German photographer Tobias Zielony documented the building and its occupants. He animated 7,000 single images, shot at night with a digital camera, to create a nine-minute film. The film disassociates itself from real time with disruptive editing and stuttering rhythm. The architecture falls in and out of focus. Zielony captures lethargy, the transitory state between night and day, and the familiar marriage of utopian architecture and dystopian society. There is no mention of the mafia, drugs, or crime, just young, broken kids slouching, smoking, and disappearing into shadows, albeit with an otherworldly, melancholy beauty.

Tobias Zielony is represented by KOW, Berlin. The Vele project was funded by Lia Rumma, Naples.

With thousands of cards—in six different shades of blue—attached to a grid of ninety-six flip-clock mechanisms, Rebecca Baumann's Automated Monochrome constantly recomposes itself. The Perth artist's flickering colour fields may be motor-driven, but the effect is like falling leaves, evoking the random beauty of nature.

Baumann writes: 'The work explores the relationship between colour and emotion and was informed by my research into psychology, colour theory, and art history. Blue is an evocative colour, which conjures up images of sea and sky, yet is linked with sadness. Each clock remains autonomous, keeping its own time, out of sync with the others. This results in constant, apparently random change across the field, suggesting the flux in both our inner emotions and the outside world. In providing each subsequent viewer with a unique experience, it also highlights our subjective experience of colour.'

Automated Monochrome was created for last year’s Primavera exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

In the 1990s, Sydney artist Mikala Dwyer became famous for creating playful installations that provocatively conflated pedigreed modern art with the amateur, the infantile, and the feminine. Since her 2000 retrospective at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, her works have moved off in a new direction, increasingly mining the irrational, the paranormal, the occult. Dwyer has convened circles of anthropomorphic, totemic objects, suggesting seances and covens; has toyed with black-arts paraphernalia, including candles and Ouija boards; has employed palm readers and clairvoyants to serve gallerygoers; has made art professionals dress up as crystals; and has collaborated with neodadaist Justene Williams to channel spirits of female convicts of yesteryear. For Dwyer, it is always about the return-of-the-repressed. As much as formalism seeks to drive out the amateur, the infantile, the feminine, and the irrational, in her work they always come back to haunt it. Dwyer is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington; and Hamish Morrison Galerie, Berlin.

Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability, while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.—Richard Phillips

New York artist Richard Phillips has made his first short film, a ninety-second portrait of Lindsay Lohan. Known for his poppy hyperrealist paintings that draw on images of women from pornography and fashion, Phillips depicts Lohan in classic poses, nodding to iconic moments in art and cinema: Brigitte Bardot smoldering in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, the psychosexual interplay of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's Persona, even Caspar David Friedrich's painting Monk by the Sea. Shot in a Malibu mansion (and its swimming pool) by Taylor Steele, the film is meant to signal a new, less wild, episode in Lohan's troubled life. It is an advertisement for her. Provocatively, Phillips offers a shameless merger of art and entertainment. Since making Lindsay Lohan, he has completed a second film portrait, a melancholy study of former porn star, now mainstream film actress, Sasha Grey. Richard Phillips is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York.