Exhibitions

Fresh Cut is our annual emerging artists exhibition with artists selected from student exhibitions at Queensland art schools. This year’s Fresh Cut is a focussed show, with just five artists. Photographer Iselin Stensrud’s young sitters seem perfectly doll-like, with their mask-like faces and their generic clothes and settings suggesting Stepford-style modern perfection and alienation. Does her work critique plastic advertising imagery or exemplify it? Marianne Templeton’s slacker graphics make visual and textual jokes. Her screensaver-like video Eye Sucker is a looping animation of mindless, frenetic, attention-seeking scribble. For her video Only You Know, Chie Yamada superimposes love-letter sentiments over blurry self images in extreme close-up, suggesting an excessive intimacy. The work is seemingly addressed to the viewer: any viewer. Should we take it personally? Jennie Jackson notes that women’s fashion has long exploited a dialectic of concealing and revealing the body. Her surrealist-informed paintings of historical women’s garments suggest creatures, seeds and genitalia: it’s feminism in dialogue with fetishism. For our show, she creates a Rorschaching wallpaper work. Finally, Daniel McKewen slows down a Neutrogena television ad starring Mischa Barton, uncannily morphing the transitions between frames. If the highly produced ad sought to evoke natural beauty, McKewen’s detourned version suggests anything but: the natural has become robotic, the seductive demonic. [image: Iselin Stensrud]

New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd got her training in commercial photography. Her work draws heavily on its techniques and genres: particularly portrait, product, and scenic photographies. While commercial photographers are trained to make things look perfect, to promote a fantasy-of-reality, Todd’s images are always not-quite-right. Her images cue us for the fantasy, but deliberately fall short of the commercial ideal. As Megan Dunn explains, 'Todd avoids the hackneyed sentiments of the fantasist and the drudgery of the unmitigated realist, instead amalgamating the two to form a unique oeuvre at once erotic, nostalgic and deeply effecting.' Women are Todd’s key subject. Her oeuvre is overrun with female characters: damaged, gawky, misfit, variously hobbled or proud. All seem to exemplify some physical, psychological or sociological malaise, implicit or explicit. Todd describes her cast as a 'rainbow of affliction', stressing an oddly utopian underside to their collective or cumulative condition. Our show—Blood, In Its Various Forms (incorporating Meat & Liquor)—includes works from Todd’s three recent series (Vagrants’ Reception Centre; Blood, in it’s Various Forms; and Meat & Liquor) plus new works. We will be launching Dead Starlets Assoc., our new book on Todd’s work, with the show. It's been supported by Creative New Zealand.

Catalogue Essay

In their video trilogy Beyond Guilt, Israeli artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir toy with balances of power. In the first part, they film their encounters in toilets and bars, flirting with and seducing men, and interviewing them about their attitudes to sex. A dyke soldier engages in a Zionist rant, followed by a protracted tongue-kissing demonstration. In the second part, in a hotel room, they talk with men they have contacted through an internet dating site: they include a dominant, a submissive, and a proud well-endowed would-be porn star. The men talk about their sexual lives and their work, often connected with the military. In the third part, the artists invite a prostitute to a hotel room and have her shoot a video of them. The Trilogy reveals the impact of the communications media, the emergence of behavioral stereotypes in front of the camera, and a craving for exposure and publicity reminiscent of reality TV. But more than anything, it reveals the effects of occupation, terror, and militarism in delineating Israeli identity even in the most private moments. 

Hypnotic . . . mesmerising . . . a must-see.—The Times

The finest film at Cannes.—The Observer

Turner-Prize-winning Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (24 Hour Psycho) teamed up with French artist Philippe Parreno to create a feature-film portrait of one of the greatest-ever soccer players, French captain Zinedine Zidane. They used seventeen synchronised cameras—35mm and high definition—under the supervision of acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji. Each focuses solely on Zidane over the course of a single match between his team Real Madrid and Villareal. We see the legend in real time, in action and in repose. We follow him around the pitch, sometimes at the centre of action, more often waiting, watching. In voice-over, he broods over what he can and cannot remember from his matches.

Glorious in its simplicity . . . Magnificently edited, and accompanied by a majestic score from Scottish rock heroes Mogwai, this is not only the greatest football movie ever made, but one of the finest studies of man in the workplace—an ode to the loneliness of the athlete, the poise, and resilience of the human body.—Edinburgh Film Festival

Suddenly, you start to notice things you never had. Looking at Zizou, you become mesmerised by his balance, his animal watchfulness and his truly compelling looks: thin face; high cheekbones; closely shaved head with widow's peak and bald patch; dark, calculating eyes. Above all, you register the strange tension between his apparent unflappability—he's cooler than Bjorn Borg—and the simmering aggression just visible below the surface . . .—Sebastian Smee The Australian

An IMA@Dendy project, organised in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Zidane is distributed by Madman. Rated G.

Australian artist Bill Henson is a passionate and visionary explorer of twilight zones, of the ambiguous spaces that exist between day and night, nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female. His photographs of landscapes at dusk, of the industrial 'no-man's land' that lies on the outskirts of our cities and of androgynous girls and boys adrift in the nocturnal turmoil of adolescence are painterly tableaux that continue the tradition of romantic literature and painting in our post-industrial age. Were it not for Henson's primary, almost devotional need to elicit empathy for his troubled human subjects, there's a feeling that nothing would prevent the black in his photographs from completely absorbing his attention and extinguishing his work.—Dennis Cooper.

This exhibition includes twenty-one recent photographs by the Melbourne artist. Thanks to Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney.

Born in 1921, French director Chris Marker has been making films since the 1950s and is a pioneer of the film-essay. His approach developed out of his early experiences making travel books, combining images with texts. His big subjects are memory and travel, which are explored in relation to his media: film and photography.

Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for its reopening in 2004. Marker's nineteen-minute eight-screen video installation—the first part of an envisaged history of the twentieth century—was inspired by a T. S. Eliot poem reflecting on Europe as a wasteland following World War I. Marker mixes texts with still photographs of wounded veterans and achingly beautiful women to evoke the hopelessness of those who lived through Europe's near suicide early last century, as war returns to haunt us in the Middle East. The atmospheric soundtrack is Corona by Toru Takemitsu, performed by Australian pianist Roger Woodward.

Marker explains: 'Owls at noon, night birds in the day, things, objects, images that don't belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff (what I'd call the Duchamp syndrome: once I've spotted 1/50th of a second that escaped everybody, including its author, this 1/50th of a second is mine). Bringing into the light events and people who normally never access it. It's from that raw material, the petty cash of history, that I try to extract a subjective journey through the twentieth century. Everybody agrees that the founding moment of that era, its mint, was the First World War, and that it was also the background on which T. S. Eliot wrote his beautiful and desperate poem The Hollow Men. So the Prelude to the journey will be a reflection upon that poem, mixed with some images gathered from the limboes of my memory.'

Marker has long been involved in exploring new media, from the crude, early video effects in his 1983 flaneur-film Sans Soleil to his hypertextual 1998 CDRom Immemory. The Hollow Men continues this inquiry, with its computer-processed photographic images suggesting watercolours, contour-maps, and petrified bodies. Further, it is not edited like a conventional linear film or video, but consists of a computer archive of images and texts that are accessed, processed, and rendered on the fly.

Alongside The Hollow Men we are showing Marker's 1962 science-fiction short La Jetee, a story of time-travel, memory, and impossible love, which has inspired many other films, including Terry Gilliam's 1995 feature Twelve Monkeys. This deeply melancholy tale is also told using black and white photographs, and also concerns the aftermath of war, an imagined Third World War.

Thanks to Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

Catalogue Essay

In his one-take video, The Field (Part 2), a camera, with a torch strapped to its underbelly, Gavin Hipkins attempts to negotiate a field of hundreds of suspended coloured balls. Gavin Hipkins' camera navigates through the darkness prodding and probing the balls. Objects appear in the background, including a ladder, camera tripod, blackout curtain, and other studio props. With its amateurish night cinematography, the video suggests a growing sense of desperation, awakened panic, frustration, and sensory confusion. Viewers may recall fitful scenes from The Blair Witch Project.

The Wellington-based artist explains: 'I was revisiting elements from my multipart photogram work The Field produced a decade earlier. These included references to galactic travel (The Field resembled a starry field and a technological grid), and the surrealist ocular phallicism Rosalind Krauss explored in The Optical Unconscious. She quotes Maurice Nadeau on Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball: "Everyone who saw this object functioning experienced a strong but indefinable sexual emotion related to unconscious desires. This emotion was in no sense one of satisfaction, but one of disturbance, like that imparted by the irritating awareness of failure." I have attempt to activate just such a condition of failure and erotic charge. The (hidden) lens in its phallic glory probes and toys with the suspended balls in a sexually charged (and at times) aggressive manner. A rhythmical rimming and swaying occurs as polystyrene balls spill around and around the lens hood; as it were in a prolonged tease.'

Art critic Wystan Curnow once called Julian Dashper 'the champion of the underprivileged signifier, himself included'. The Auckland artist made his name in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by creating a body of work which placed the supplements and marginalia of art centrestage. His works addressed art's literal support structures (hanging devices, frames, packing materials) and its ideological ones (art history, art legends, and art criticism; CVs, slides, art magazines, invites and catalogues). Much of his work looked like self-referential, inwardly-focussed formal abstraction, but operated like conceptual art, gesturing out to its place in the art system and the wider world. At first Dashper's work was keyed to New Zealand's art history and its relation to the international art world, but in the mid 1990s he went through a gear change. He went from addressing internationalism as a fundamentally local concern to developing a more international practice. He became a peripatetic artist, making shows throughout the world. While his earlier work had drawn on the intimacy of the New Zealand art world (where Dashper could assume an audience hyperfamiliar with his work and local references), from the mid-1990s he increasingly took his work to new audiences in new places. As abstract as much of his recent work appears, a sense of the art-life remains key. Indeed Dashper has repeatedly exhibited his growing CV as a work, the ultimate work. With Dashper coming to Queensland for a two-person show with Kyle Jenkins in Toowoomba, we are taking the opportunity to stage a piggy-back project—a one week show sampling Dashper's recent abstract work.

James Angus's works combine conceptual twists with consumate craft. He takes iconic and everyday forms—classic modernist buildings, an old racing car, a soccer ball, a rhino—and inverts, twists, recolours, divides, realigns, down-sizes, distorts and otherwise transforms them. A spruce scale-model of the Seagram Building lies on its back, revealing a subtle curve. Another model of an iconic building, Lakeshore Drive, folds in upon itself, as a Moebius Strip. Angus loves paradoxes: an upside-down hot-air balloon suspended in the foyer of the Sydney Opera House or a Mack truck incongrougly parked in a gallery space it couldn’t possibly have entered. Angus often uses computer models to design his works and consults mathematicians, engineers, and biologists as part of his research. He renders a Bugatti Type 35, a 1920s grand prix car, life-size, but with a thirty degree tilt. He explores the aerodynamic properties of the Manta Ray. A mosquito and a gorilla skull rendered in tessellated parquetry suggest a mathematical order underlying the evolutionary process. Exhibition organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Supported by Visions of Australia.

Mike Parr is one of Australia's most celebrated artists. He has been working since the 1970s. He began as a concrete poet, moved into conceptual and performance art, and in the 1980s started making large scale drawing works and installations. His work is remarkable for the way it combines opposites: conceptualism (with its analytic interests and focus on language) and expressionism (concerned with the emotions, cartharsis). Parr's key concern is the constitution of the subject, the self, identity; often explored in its mediation to an audience. This video compilation gathers film documentation of groundbreaking early Parr performances, made between 1972 and 1975, where he tests the physical and emotional limits of his body through extreme actions. An inventory of tasks—including 'Hold your breath for as long as possible' and 'Hold your finger in a candle flame for as long as possible'—was made, then enacted. Parr's performances were not only hard on himself, they were grueling to witness. Parr's exemplary suffering provides us with a means to measure the state of our own psychic health.

Australia—and particularly our state of Queensland—iis experiencing a severe prolonged drought. Clean water is no longer taken for granted. There are massive water restrictions and a plan to recycle waste water, or 'grey water'. Another item that dominates the news is race. There is great fear around immigration tied to terrorism. We welcome people from other places if they are prepared to 'become' Australian. What that means, however, is hard to define. These two themes—the purity of our water and the purity our national essence—have become subtly intertwined. Grey Water showcases works from different cultural viewpoints that address our identification with water and address the purity and pollution of water. Hits of the show include Bill Culbert’s Flotsam—a scatter-installation, a sea of fluorescent tubes and plastic bottles—and Teresa Margolles’s sublime soap-bubble blowing machines using water used to wash down corpses in a Mexico morgue. The full line up is: Bill Culbert (Britain), Marian Drew (Australia), Lawrence English (Australia) and Toshiya Tsunoda (Japan), Roland Fischer (Germany), Peter Greenaway (Britain), Roni Horn (USA), Zhang Huan (China), Abie Jangala (Australia), Rosemary Laing (Australia) with Stephen Birch (Australia), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Vietnam), and Lawrence Weiner (USA). Grey Water is presented as part of Riverfestival. Thanks to the Embassy of Mexico. [image: Rosemary Laing]

Catalogue Essay

Philip Brophy's work spans music, cinema, and art and revolves around three centres of enquiry: the body (connecting with horror films), popular culture (manga and anime), and the relation between sound and image (film soundtracks). In the Melbourne artist's new video installation Vox, there is no dialogue between his male and female animated characters. Instead their exchange is expressed metaphorically, in the graphics and the soundtrack, as an abundance of hysterical symptoms. To quote the script: 'The sound of her voice is like an opera soprano singing a single high note, yet it contorts into alien, cyborg noise—yet all the while retaining a screaming human quality. As she sings a mutated biosonic-vagina erupts forth from her mouth in a series of lip-like folds that flutter and quiver.' Brophy describes Vox as 'a sexualised vocalisation of the popular romantic comedy genre' and 'the merger of a dick flick and a chick flick'. Vox is accompanied by an earlier video work Fluorescent (2004), in which 'Brophy invents himself as a luridly reconstituted being vibrating with Glam’s essential fakeness and plasticity. His performance portrays a transmogrified sexual monster, roaming and strutting a videosonic platform, energised by a pulsating fatsound and seething with a hunger for the bright, the shiny, and the loud.' A joint project with Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; with support from the Besen Family Foundation.

Catalogue Essay

Hobart’s Pat Brassington is famed for her perverse, photoshopped images drawing on the surrealist photography tradition. Her new series Cambridge Road plays on the haunted house genre. These documentary—perhaps forensic—images feature young women in an empty house, standing around, playing dead, wearing dust masks. There are ominous domestic close-ups: a coat hanger, stuffed toys, a bed, a closet. At times, stains or light flares suggest spectral presences, recalling spirit photography.

Catalogue Essay

A blast from the past . . . Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss's classic 1987 film The Way Things Go was the hit of that year's Documenta IIX. It is set in a warehouse or workshop, where the artists document an epic half-hour chain reaction featuring simple mundane objects—string, soap, styrofoam cups, rubber tires, pails, bottles, balloons, mattresses, and a variety of corrosive and flammable liquids. Recalling a giant Rube Goldberg device, The Way Things Go is an absurd demonstration of the laws of physics and chemistry. Objects become anthropomorphicised, operating like ideosyncratic cartoon characters. 'There are moments when instead of acting automatically, and with immediacy, the objects seem to hesitiate, as if reflecting upon what it is they are about to do: the tyre resting amongst the burning newspaper before moving on, and resting again before rolling on once more', wrote Jeremy Millar. One can only marvel at the pointless, slapstick logic and infinite comic variety of this charming-ironic parody of functionality.

Robert MacPherson has been a pivotal figure in Australian art since the 1970s. His work spans formal abstraction and conceptualism. It also blends internationalism with an interest in things distinctly local. His installation Popov and the Lost Constructivists (1982–2007) exemplifies this by juxtaposing his assemblages in the Russian Constructivist idiom with newspaper death notices, as if uncovering evidence of a legion of emigre Russian modernists who may have been exiled in Australia, continuing to work unknown. The show also includes Mayfair, Peerless: Ice Cream I may have Eaten, but Shirts I've Never Worn: For Little E.E.W. (2005–6) which covers MacPherson's thoughts on his 'Higher Colour Theory' and the psychology of colour. Robert MacPherson is a key figure in the history of the IMA, having shown regularly here throughout his career. With thanks to Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney.

Catalogue Essay

Indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee is known for his incisive critiques of White Australian culture. In Cantchant he takes on the iconic subject of the beach, and casts a critical eye on its special role in forming Australian identity. As the Cronulla riots demonstrated, racism remains deeply-rooted in the Australian psyche. Casting themselves as indigenous, white yobbos, wearing such slogans as 'We grew here, you flew here', attacked more recent immigrants from the Middle East. Cantchant pushes aside the commonsense of the beach as a destination for leisure, relaxation, and fun, and presents it as a cultural battleground. This exhibition may surprise those familiar with Ah Kee’s previous works, his chic polemical wall-texts and traditionally drafted realist portraits. Cantchant includes surfboards painted with north Queensland rainforest shield designs and a three-screen video installation featuring dead boards (waterlogged surfboards) blasted by guns, and Aboriginal surfers.

Catalogue Essay

In November last year we were shocked by the loss of our friend, artist Jeremy Hynes. Hynes had been a key figure in Brisbane art in the early to mid 1990s, when, as a young man, he presented a series of audacious performance works. Many of these occurred at the IMA and at the artist-run space ISNT. Video was always important for Hynes. He used it to document his performances and in his performances, and went on to create an Aria-nominated computer-animated video clip for Regurgitator's pop song Polyester Girl. Hynes left behind a trove of videotapes. With help from Hynes's friends, Ben Wickes has created a compilation of recordings of his performances.

Hynes's performance work looked back to the logic and formats of 1970s post-object art while moving into more contemporary forms of interactive new-media theatre. It combined a belated punk aesthetic (Hynes was constantly burning and breaking things) and a New Age sensibility (with images of psychedelia, rebirth and cleansing). Hynes's favourite motifs included smashing mirrors, purgative fire, and rock'n'roll swagger. He seemed to tread a fine line between embracing these images and dealing with them as cliches. Although his smashing mirrors in I Am Genius, I Am God might be read as an attack on his self-image, Hynes certainly had a romantic idea of the artist as outsider. He cultivated a kind of James Dean attitude—he looked good smoking. Hynes was also critical of the artworld. He video-projected his face up large to deliver a menacing indictment of a local critic and, in The Cleansing, he dumped a truckload of water on the doorstep of the old Museum of Contemporary Art (he wanted to pour it into the gallery).

Hynes's work was confrontational. He was interested in exploring questions of personal space. He locked his audience into ISNT and menacingly swung around a lamp on a cord, pressing them to the edge of the room. In a later performance in the same space, he walled himself in, away from the audience, to live and work alone for three weeks. He also occasionally confined his audience in taxis, creating drive-in art. Surrealism was also a big influence. In his street-theatre piece Pigeons, Hynes lay on the ground motionless, as birds picked at bread held in a cage around his head—it was pure Magritte. As was his performance The Water Piece, where, in his trademark suit, he swam down a twenty-metre tube of water, cutting himself free, only to be washed away by the torrent he released.