20th Biennale of Sydney 'The Future Is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed'

Words: Jonathan Rae

Images: Jonathan Rae

It's the 20th time the internationally acclaimed Biennale of Sydney has run.

The show is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal and presented at a bunch of places around central Sydney known as 'embassies'.

The works on show encompass everything from found objects, video installations, kinetic sculpture, performance 'art' to more traditional mediums such as painting.

Rosenthal's concept for the curation of exhibition was to assign each embassy an idea of thought. For example, the Cockatoo Island venue was assigned 'Embassy of the Real' and the Carriageworks venue 'Embassy of Disappearance'.

This Biennale may be big on thought, but the ideas translate poorly in the work on show. Although each location is assigned an idea or concept, there appears to be no cohesive message or aesthetic at each location besides what we are told we are supposed to feel through vague didactics.

There are a lot of Instagram-bait works that rely on scale - like that of Lee Bul's installation that can only be described as a deflated looking circus tent mixed in with some hot air balloons and fairy lights (a far cry from her previous intricate and complex works) or William Forsythe's pendulum room. Otherwise, a lot of the work fails to stand out.

The banality of the curation is even more amplified on Cockatoo Island and at Carriageworks where the gallery space and architecture is often more interesting than the work on offer. The pieces on show often rely too heavily on buzzword loaded didactic panels and fail to convey the ideas the curator had hoped to express. It falls into something akin to university student work, loaded with supposed concepts, unloaded with presentation and execution.

Basically, the banality of the works and ideas leave the viewer with a rather flat feeling at the 20th Biennale of Sydney. If this is what the idea of the future feels like, I want off this ride.

Julian Meagher 'Alone in the Sun' at Edwina Corlette Gallery

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

I think everyone has had a moment where they become conscious, and feel very acutely, that they are a product of their parents. Maybe it’s your same fear of cats as your mother, or that you like your toast slightly burnt like your father, or that you’ll always vote Labor because they told you that’s what’s right. 

But more than these obvious, more tangible things, your parents can deeply and permanently instil in you your values, opinions and beliefs. And it’s only when you're spraying your neighbour’s Tabby with your garden hose do you realise it.

But what about their parents? And your parents’ parents’ parents? How has that influenced you?

Well, that’s what painter Julian Meagher is looking at. 

“I think we can all see traits of ourselves in our mum and dad and, then I’m looking at further, well they’ve obviously got their parents in them as well,” he told me.

“We all must inherit something and as a nation, we have these shared traits as well - our love of drinking, our love of the beach, our identity, what makes us who we are?

“And I think as you get older, you start to look back and ask, ‘Why am I, who I am? Why do I have these values? And why do I react in these ways?’”

The hero piece of this series, ‘Alone In The Sun’, is a shadowy image of a group of turn-of-the-century women. They pose for a photo in an austere style with seemingly transparent faces. It has the same feeling as Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’. It’s eerie and also distant. These women are Julian’s ancestors. 

“I was at christmas dinner and I looked at the wall and there was the really powerful ghost-like image of these women from the early 1900s and I said, ‘who’s this?’, and she [Julian’s mother] said, ‘It’s your great-great grandma who lived out in the bush’.

“I’d never seen this image and they were so ghostly, it was such a powerful image.”

Julian also looks specifically at the relationship between drinking in Australia and our ancestry. 

“I started looking at broader things around masculinity and Australian identity years ago with drinking culture and things because I like painting bottles.”

In this series there are paintings of bottles, some fallen, others acting as vases for native Australian flowers. They are symbols for our uniquely Australian relationship with alcohol.

“In other countries, for example in Italy, if you get too drunk, you dishonour the family, in Australia the more drunk you get, the more honour you bring.

“Our Prime Minister holds the record for sculling a beer, our famous cricketer David Boon holds the record for drinking 52 tinnies on a flight to London. They’re our heroes.

“It’s very engrained in our culture because Australia’s very isolated, it’s all about how tough you are, how stoic you are.”

It’s worth noting here, that Julian hasn’t always been an artist. In fact, he’s still a registered doctor. 

“The switch is easy, having a career as an artist is the hard part.

“I think it’s way harder to be an artist than to be a doctor to be honest.

“To keep creating the works, it’s such an unstable career. Art is very difficult financially, particularly in early years and it’s a very, very tough road and it’s quite a solitary thing.”

His works are influenced by his medical career. His painting is very clinical. He’s “no wild, crazy artist”. And it is evident in his clean, precise works, that really do examine history, drinking and identity.

So, are we ‘Alone in the Sun’? Really, we’re not alone. We’re the combination of thousands of ancestors, people we’ll never know, but who have shaped us.

Quaternary exhibition at QUT Art Museum

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae
Artworks: Bianca Beetson, Chantal Fraser, Rachael Haynes, Natalya Hughes, Alice Lang, Gemma Smith, and Jemima Wyman

Bianca Beetson says “we were all born pink, even when a dark baby is born, it’s still pink at first”.

And it’s that colour, which is so deeply imbued with meaning, that underpins Bianca’s work.

“I was a bit of a tomboy growing up and my mother, I remember her, as a last ditch attempt putting me in this pink bedroom,” says Bianca.

“It had pink clouds on the wallpaper and on the bedspread. And I really don’t like the colour pink.

“I ended up reclaiming pink in many ways and my hatred for pink became about anger and how pink’s not necessarily this insipid colour that’s associated with girls it can actually be quite powerful.”

Bianca’s self portraits at QUT’s Quaternary exhibition are bathed in fuchsia, blush and coral. Her costume changes from soldier, to barbarian to bohemian. It’s kind of this strange journey of mercurial magenta identity. And Bianca’s wrestle with identity is inexplicably linked to her aboriginality that of course is steeped in complex history and politics. 

“I always struggled with this thing of, who am I? and being pigeon-holed and people expecting you to act and behave in a certain way.

“And I think back to my uni days and I’d turned up nearly every day dressed as a completely different person because just when someone had thought that they had got me figured out... where to put me, I would shift.”

The pink in Bianca’s practice extends beyond femininity and self-perception. It looks at the “artificiality” of Australian history and “the way that pink sort of signifies this candy-coating”.

“I talk about sugar-coating poo and you can even sugar-coat poo that much and make it palatable.

“And at the end of the day it’s still poo.

“‘Let’s cover it up, let’s sweeten it’, but the problem doesn’t go away.”

Bianca has looked even further into that richly emblematic colour and found the concept of assimilation. Bianca’s grandmother was a domestic in Cherbourg where she “was taught to be a good woman, a good cleaner, a good cook, to stitch and sow and do all of those domestic things”. For Bianca, this represents the assimilation of her culture, heritage in family.

In the end, history, gender, identity: they're not white washed, they're pink washed.

Amber Wallis and Ari Athans at Edwina Corlette Gallery

 
Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

The uncanny was a concept first characterised by Sigmund Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche. It’s that feeling when something looks simultaneously distinctly familiar and distinctly unfamiliar. It’s probably how you felt when you watched The Polar Express or saw a RealDoll or maybe that time you went to Madame Tussauds.

Within Amber Wallis’ work the uncanny takes on a different shape. In her paintings you catch glimpses of recognisable forms - a cactus, palm trees, clouds. But at the same time they look totally alien; like the landscapes have been melted, contorted and warped.

“A lot of people can read what they want into it and they might see objects or land or sex or what have you,” says Amber.

“And I think that’s an interesting place because it’s kind of neither here nor there. So then it’s not super obvious.

“I find straight portraiture or straight landscape, I just get a bit bored of it. If I’m painting myself, it’s something that gets a bit stuck for me.

“So I do like that space where things are a little bit confusing.”

Amber’s works tread the precarious line of representation and abstraction. Forms often fall off the precipice of reality into a more visceral interpretation of the objects or landscapes. It’s also a method of Australian artist Ken Whisson.

“I just love the way he composes his imagery and especially his earlier works.

“There’s just something, that line between abstraction and representation, and once you’re going down that path it does become about the painting and the formal qualities of it and I just think he nailed it, I just think he’s an amazing painter.”

Inherent in Amber’s works is her emotional state. Her mother died a few years ago and that grief has been laced through her process.

“Well you go through big heavy grief stuff you get very aware of the preciousness of life, the fragility of it.

“I think thematically, I was thinking of my mum and a lot of the objects she used to have around the house.

“She used to be a ceramics artist and in the back of my mind, I was sort of thinking of that stuff.

“I don’t think it shows in the work that much, but I know that it’s been created in that space.”

In validation of her talent, Amber was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.

“It meant that I have continued to have an art career one way or another.

“It really changed my life, enabled me to travel and be funded while I travel and make art for the first time in a full-time capacity for a certain amount of time.”

Now Amber is preparing for the Sydney Contemporary in September. But for now you can see her exhibition at Edwina Corlette Gallery. And really, you can see whatever you want in the uncanny. 

Anthony Lister on toilet democracy, living hard and what's new?

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

I've done hundreds of interviews in my life, but none as strange as with Anthony Lister. He's somewhat of a deity in the street art realm. He's achieved international success and has, arguably, helped redefine the concept of low-fi art. I spoke to Lister, on loudspeaker, while he was driving, and navigating through traffic. I couldn't hear him very well, or sometimes make out what he was talking about. So here's how it went:

SE: What have you been up to recently?

AL: I've been traveling to New York and Paris. Now I'm back in Australia.

SE: I know you do travel around a lot. Do you feel like the different places you go to perhaps influence your practice?

AL: I guess everywhere influences my practice.

SE: I noticed recently you were talking about cleaning up graffiti. You might know in Queensland here we've got the 'Tag Them Back' campaign and I spoke the guys from Jugglers and stuff about it a while ago. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on this kind of campaign against street art?

AL: I don't know what that campaign is about.... I don't know anything about that campaign. You want to talk to me about it? Are you an advocate for that shit?

SE: Basically it's about, they've got all these signs everywhere on the trains and everything and it's basically saying, 'if you see someone doing any kind of graffiti, you should report them'. And it's kind of got all these stereotypical portrayals of people vandalising things. And when I spoke to the guys from Jugglers they were pretty upset about it because they felt like it was perpetuating a pretty bad stereotype.

AL: Yeah exactly. Look Brisbane's just been all about stereotypes from the get go. 

SE: Is there anything you're working on at the moment in particular?

AL: What am I working on? I'm working on a bunch of paintings for a show in London...

SE: What's the themes throughout the paintings, if there is one?

AL: The themes there always about famous quotes from history - Martin Luther King, guided message, misguided men.... Even Chopper Read. There famous quotes that all make all this work out of it. I don't know, what am I interested in? I'm interested in freedom of visual speech, I think it's quite ironic and very contradictory of any governments to get rid of graffiti when the very act of them advertising it is graffiti. The sort of contradictory propaganda that goes on about creativity. I can't see anything more sickening than someone stealing someone else's fun from them. 

SE: Is there anything in this particular series that you're trying to get across or that you're focusing on?

AL: Well, yeah. Women in roller skates, shadow, reflection in mirrors. I'm interested in black rooms as much as Matisse was interested in red rooms... It's just a conversation about the history of our species. As far as the freedom of visual speech goes. It's part of the public intervention this visual public intervention. It's only been illegal for 30 years you know, our species has been alive on this earth for eight thousand years. So I don't know what we're talking about.

SE: Now this is something my photographer was really interested in, he wanted me to ask you about the kind of distinctive style that you use. And he particularly interested in the faces that you paint and he kind of wanted to know what was behind the face, and what led you to depict people in that way.

AL: I don't know. You should just put this online as a recording. Honestly, I don't know if you've looked at my work or anything. I don't know, have you read any interviews and shit that I've done before? Because I've kind of said a lot of this stuff before. I'll tell you what's behind the face, it's just more paint, it's just other faces. The faces change, you know. I don't make work that's pretty, I'm not interested in making things pretty, it's just about process you know. Things grow on you.

SE: What do you want to to talk about then?

AL: I'll talk to you about anything. I'll talk to you about new things. Let's talk about new things.

SE: Well what's new in your life, what are you interested in outside of your art?

AL: It's not about my life. Let's talk about the people... What's new in the world? Let's talk about legislation changes, let's talk about activating change. I'm very interested in activating change. Not that I have any power to do it. We're powerless people. You know what I do when I go to a public toilet? I write 'vote here' above the toilet roll. I mean, it's one devil or the other... It's got to start in education. We spend so much time at school. I just knew what needed to happen... Too many people are just living soft and partying hard. 

SE: So what do you want to see happen, what legislation are you interested in? What do you think needs to happen?

AL: I'm interested in land rights and culture. I'm not interested in sport... It's only interesting if you're interested, I guess. I'm not really even concerning myself with these things. It's just too sad, there's too many tragedies in the world. You know something's gone terribly wrong when a disaster is dressed as entertainment... You know something's gone terribly wrong when public art is dressed... when terror is dressed as public art. There's a car here in Sydney that's been crushed with a rock, and it's public art. Apparently, in a private public space. I don't know how that exists. This rock, and calling it art. In a lot third world countries right now they're war torn and children are dying at the hands of these pigs with weapons. They dress up a car here in Sydney and call it art. I mean Sydney's great... but it's got a leniency towards acts of public intervention, creatively. To put all that art and take some kid to court of give them jail for popping a tag on it, it's ridiculous.

SE: Is there anything else you want to add, is there anything you want to talk about, is there anything you want to get out there?

AL: No, not that I haven't said before. I didn't need to do this shit, but I said yes because I thought there'd be a new question. But it's alright... I'm not really sure what the world's going to get out of me being set up with reading about myself.

SE: Well I think a lot of people look up to you. Particularly in Queensland here. Come on, what have we got around? There's not many people saying they don't like sport, so you've certainly broken that mould.

AL: Awesome, I like it.

SE: Well you're legacy will be the only Queenslander who didn't like sport. Trust me, you're already my idol.

AL: Yeah baby. Have you seen my new book? I've got a new book out.

SE: Oh yeah? What's it all about?

AL: It's called 'Adventure Painter'. So I don't know if it's in book shops yet, but you can order it online. And it's a big hard cover book.

SE: Well good luck, thanks for chatting with me. And I'm sorry if I bored you with my questions.

AL: No no no, you didn't you didn't you didn't. You're great.

China’s reformations at White Rabbit Gallery

Words and images: Saskia Edwards

China’s modern history has been punctuated with reformations.

At the turn of the century, the Xinhai Revolution ended centuries of imperial rule in China. The Qing dynasty was overthrown by rebellion uprisings across the nation.

In 1949 Mao Zedong created the People’s Republic of China - a communist nation - an event that has ultimately shaped much of modern China. Mao’s legacy is one of ultimate control, indoctrination and force.

Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping reformed China to a market economy, opening the nation to the rest of the world and infiltrating China with Western products and concepts.

Thus, in a century, China has seen its country in a flux of reformation and continual transformation.

The Reformation exhibition is explored through three levels – modern forms, sex and visual illusions.

The initial level is scattered with robotics and modern technologies. While the forms are decidedly new, the pervading ideas often stem back to ancient mythology or historical behaivour.

As viewers progress to the middle room, the concept of sex permeates the works. Sexual interaction in China, much like many societies, has followed a history of particular and obscure etiquettes. From the titillation of deformed feet, to the current one-child policy, sex in China has been shrouded in connotations of suppression, pure recreation and shame.

These themes are apparent in works like a sculpture constructed from bondage apparatus, video works of stylised sexual acts and anatomical photographs of body parts.

On the final level there is a focus on projections, optical illusions and a reshaping of traditional art. Oil paintings on canvas have been cut out and weaved into a chain of decapitated heads and wooden antique film apparatus projects video of historical photographs and footage.

Overall, the White Rabbit Gallery illuminates the spectrum of contemporary work by artists from China, a country better known for its traditional art forms. While freedom of expression is limited in the communist state, modern Chinese art is still prolific around the world.

A rabbit often symbolises rebirth, sexuality and innocence. And perhaps it is these concepts that underlie much of modern Chinese history and the work of current Chinese artists.

Visit the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale in Sydney.

(All photographs are taken on 35mm film)

Greer Honeywill at QUT’s Wood exhibition

 
Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

Street after street, the same house after the same house. Modern society has given life to a world of homogenous products with absolute, manufactured predictability. Nothing typifies this more than the housing estate; as if each house came in the same packaging.

Greer Honeywill’s the housing estate is not to scale #2 captures this monotonous zeitgeist. The work seems to look down from an aerial view over an estate and its super fractal precision.

Greer explains: “So that little piece, the optimism is, ‘It’s a housing estate, wow!’ Really good position, nice little houses.

“It’s not exactly to scale, but it’s a little bit like you’re buying off the plan, apartments in buildings, before they see it.

“Sometimes it’s extremely hard for people to visualise even in two dimensions, but visualise in three dimension.

“And so they’re often quite disappointed with what they end up with, because they imagined something completely different.”

The work is part of an exhibition at QUT Art Museum entitled Wood: Art Design Architecture. It aims to explore wood as medium in contemporary Australian art. The works range from wooden surfboards, luminous hollow tree trunks and artisanal furniture.

But permeating the whole exhibition was the wide spectrum of timber’s natural colours.

Greer’s piece varied in colour through raw wooden tones.

“I decided I wanted to have like a painter, a palate of colours, so I went off to the wood yard and spent a long time in the sample room.

“And eventually came out with three timbers, Huon pine, which is pale, American cherry wood and American redwood.

“So if you like, that was light medium and dark.

“So there was three distinct tones, which you actually see in that work.”

Wood is imbedded with symbolism: nature, progress, stability. It’s separated from its origin – trees – to represent something that is created. And in that sense wood is inherently about production. However, wood has endured centuries of use because of its beauty.

For Greer, the mere aesthetics of the wood are what attracts her to the medium.

“When you cut wood and you do not surface it, it is for me, unspeakably beautiful.

“So I don’t finish any of my works, they are raw, so that they can change over time.

“And I say that if a work sat in a room over time, it will change in response to the air that we breathe and the air we exhale, everything affects the timber.

“But the change is so slow that it’s kind of a metaphor for life and death.”