APRIL-MAY 2010
Mona Alcantara, Chris Barnes, Rachael Best, Susan Quorley, Selina Heathwood
Taycee-Lea Jones, Christine King, Amrlia Rolls, Kylie Windhorst
APRIL-MAY 2010
During the month of April Barratt Galleries showcased diverse works from the next wave of exciting young Northern Rivers artists. Do not miss this exhibition of drawings, prints, assemblages and mixed media works.
Dougal Shaw :: Lost Soul
Liam Van Dugturen, Jesse Mackintosh, Emily Galagher, Erin Falconer, Rebecca Newman : Draw the Line
CHRISTINE PORTER :: THE NARRATIVE PROJECT
The Narrative Project
An exhibition of small colour etchings - pieces selected from five recent suites including work that resulted from Christine’s University of Southern Qld McGregor Fellowship for overseas travel .
This exhibition is the official launch of the Narrative Project: a project that questions the hierarchical position of the artist as the most important curator of his or her work. It acknowledges the significance, indeed imperative, of the dialogue between the artwork and its audience : inviting collectors to impose their own narrative on this already narrated work.
Christine Porter's images: gallery 1 . gallery 2 . gallery 3 . gallery 4
Liz Powell :: Armchair Travel
This theme deals as much with journeys of the imagination as it does with the physicality of travel. An armchair traveler plays with the idea of travel rather than engaging in the practical or active aspects of it. He or she is spectator, part of the audience, not a participant in the action.
We often view our history, both cultural and personal, through an armchair traveler’s rosy glow of nostalgia and romance, which reveals more about our biases and prejudices than we might like to admit. But we also have to acknowledge the fun we like to have at our own expense, the way we laugh at old photographs, enjoy B grade films, and read old journals.
The potential of leaving the comfort zone, home and safety, the known, and getting out to experience the world is the dark but necessary side of the armchair traveller’s coin. We all have to take that first step out of the front door in our heads sometime.
ROSS MCMASTER :: RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS
This work of Ross's is very timely.
View images of Ross' work here
A Sydney collector said of this work "Its edgy. But also— righteousness clothed in the high moral ground should always be under attack!"
Of his work Ross states “My current work questions the validity of organized religion within contemporary society. In a time when we readily vilify Islam for its actions, I believe it's time for us to take a close look at the recent record of Christianity. In particular Catholicism, it’s involvement in crimes against humanity and the relationship between the Vatican and Fascist regimes in the 20th century”.
When: Opening Fri, 5th February at Barratt Galleries, lstonville, NSW by Monica Oppen
Time: 6.00pm till 8pm
Cost: FREE
More Info: Call the gallery on (02) 6628 0297 or email info@barrattgalleries.com.au
JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2101
SASI VICTOIRE :: Unfolding Narratives
Sasi Victoire (now living in Cairns) is no stranger to the community of the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. This is where she lived for fourteen years, and developed new skills in printmaking at Southern Cross University. She also taught art in the local high schools. In Unfolding Narratives she returns to her old haunts bringing with her some of the character of her new home in Queensland.
Through this exhibition, Unfolding Narratives, she shares recent themes and exploration. She showcases some of her current exploration of visual narratives using mixed media and handcoloured woodcuts and linocuts. In this exhibition Sasi will showcase 2 of her new children's books ( Moving House and Crokee's Country) as well as associated prints.
The exhibition will be opened by the incoming director of Lismore Regional Gallery, Brett Adlington.
December 2009 - January 2010
Penny Evans :: Souvenir
OPening Friday 4th December
1. something given or kept for remembrance; a memento 2. a memory
3. colloquial to pilfer (Macquarie dictionary).
Colonial forces in Australia used various means to control, disperse & exterminate Aboriginal people.
In the 20th Century ceramic souvenirs like plates and ashtrays with grotesque and stereotypical depictions of Aboriginal people were rife and helped to propagate colonial myths and fossilize Aborigines and cultural practices.
This body of work retell the narrative with a more honest take on the realities of racist Australia. The work also follows in the grand tradition of reclaiming by many other Contemporary Australian Indigenous artists.
Included in Penny’s show ‘Souvenir’ are mixed media wall pieces, ceramic and mixed media wall pieces and a series of stunning large handmade bowls and vases.
October - December 2009
Sue Reynolds:: Courting the Disquiet :: A Selection of works by Sue Reynolds
Journey into Country and Bodies - reaching into the dfecund viscera and the psychological courtship of the inside/out and the disquiet
See images HERE
Sue Reynolds : Artist Statement
Courting the Disquiet will be a selection of works by Broken Hill based Artist Sue Reynolds covering a range of media. This diverse collection of paintings, drawings, prints and mixed media works will demonstrate her practice. Reynolds’ work is an investigation into and an intersection of her core concerns. These are about the journeys of the spiritous, resonance and embodiment; of Country and the habitation of bodies. This implicates grappling with the expansiveness and ambiguity of space and scale, of detail and intense colour, of landforms and landmarks, of storied places, disturbance, distension and the sensuousness of being.
She is intrigued by the experience/s of intensification, sensorial language and the exquisite melding between our beings and place. At once reaching to represent the fecund viscera and the psychological courtship of the inside/out and the disquiet.
This show attempts to be reflective of such journeys and an aesthetic investigation into trying to touch the often brutal beauty.
The exhibition will be officially opened on Friday 23 October 2009 at 6pm. The exhibition continues to Wednesday 25 November 2009.
September
ISHTA WILSON :: Holy Mary. Mother of God :: New Works
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July 2009
Doug Spowart and Victoria Cooper :: Like Fondling Your Seashell Collection
COOPER+SPOWART
Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart are visual artists working in the fields of photoimaging, artists’ books, photobooks and education. Cooper and Spowart have collaborated on many art projects and exhibitions including the room and car camera obscuras. Their images and artists’ books are included in major national collections.
DETAILED BIOG - COOPER
Victoria Cooper’s work is included in collections including the National Library of Australia artists’ book collection, Library of Australian Fine Arts in the State Library of Queensland, Artspace Mackay, Mildura Arts Centre, Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery, Logan City Regional Art Gallery, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Winton Regional Art Gallery, Pinhole Resource (USA) and the Hirakata City Council, Hirakata, Japan.
Since the late 1990s Victoria Cooper has worked extensively with photographs imported into digital imaging environment and in the production of artists’ books. Her digital scrolls have won many awards and acclaim. For her, the computer has provided a space in which she can fully explore the potential of the photographic narrative. Along with this digital work she also finds the traditional photographic processes like the camera obscura and cyanotype play an important role in her artists’ book practice. For Cooper, the enigma of the vast and ancient Australian landscape which bears the marks of human experiences both historical and contemporary contains many unexplored ambiguities. It is from visual research into this phenomenon at many sites both local and across the country that she sources and then reinterprets into visual stories and artists’ books.
After completing Associate Diploma in Visual Art Photography at the Queensland College of Art in 1994 she reconnected with academic study in 2000 and gained a Graduate Diploma in Visual Art from Monash University in 2002. Cooper is currently working towards a PhD at James Cook University. In this study she has been researching the fragility of the resource of freshwater and how the local environment, history and the microscopic can inform this issue in the broader Australian context.
Her work is carried out in multiple sites from the physical place to the microscope and the metaphorical space of the book. Critical and intrinsic to these books is that they are deep-rooted in the narrative and visual record of place. The priority in my research is to consider each site through the narrative potential of science, history and mythology. This potential is explored through overlaying human history with the natural and the microscopic with the everyday sense of place.
The aim of this work is to pursue an alternative stream in the current public debate on freshwater. It also presents a proposal for an expansion in the context of site-specific work to include the integration and transportation of work within a site or multiple sites into the metaphorical and narrative space of the artists’ book.
DETAILED BIOG - SPOWART
Doug Spowart has an extensive range of experience in the field of photography in Australia. In the late 1960’s he began his involvement with photography in the camera club movement. After nine years employment with Kodak working in many different capacities he formed a partnership with his mother Ruby and operated Imagery Gallery in Brisbane from 1980~1995. Currently his practice includes; artists’ book production, freelance artist, critic, judge, writer and teacher.
Although being involved in these creative industries Spowart’s driving force is his devotion to the conceptualisation, creation and production of his personal imagery and the formation of this work into exhibitions, artists’ books and photobooks. This work has found its way into many private, regional and state public galleries, national and international photography and artists’ book collections including National Library of Australia artists’ book collection, State Libraries of Queensland and NSW, Queensland Art Gallery, Artspace Mackay, Bibliotheca Librorum Apud Artificem (Sydney), Mildura Arts Centre, Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery, Logan City Regional Art Gallery, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Graham Nash Collection (USA).
Doug Spowart is a Fellow, Honorary Fellow and has requalified four times as a Master of Photography of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. His competition achievements include multiple major awards in the McGregor Prize for Photography and the Muswellbrook Photographic Award. He has on two occasions won First Prize in the Hasselblad Masters Awards and has been awarded the title AIPP Queensland Professional Photographer of the Year on five occasions. He has also been a recipient of many commissions and grants for the production of artworks.
In recent years Spowart has concentrated on his personal work as well as academic study. He gained a Graduate Diploma in Visual Art from Monash University in 2002 and is currently studying towards a Doctorate of Philosophy at James Cook University researching the topic of the photobook in the context of the artists’ book.
For Spowart photography is a way of life
downlod full CV for Victoria Cooper here
June 2009
Angela Gardner, Gwenn Tasker, Lisa Pullen . Poetry by Angela Gardner :: Night Ladder
Travis Paterson :: See, I told you there was a storm coming
TRAVIS PATERSON See, I told you there was a storm coming The prints in this exhibition are part of an ongoing investigation into the development of queer sexual identity with particular reference to childhood development. They allegorically represent stories that were present in my childhood yet missing from the world as it was reflected back to me. This exhibition features etchings, screenprints and digital prints. Travis Paterson was recently selected to be a part of HATCHED 09 and was highly commended at this years Port Jackson Press Graduate Printmaking Award.
April 2009
Katka Adams :: RED
March 2009
Scott Trevelyan :: to fly without wings
February 2009
Lyndall Adams :: the games we play :: recent drawings
December 2008
Penny Evans :: Site
Artist statement
‘Site’ is a show of my work from 2008.
“The circle is a universal sign of site(s) and its’ appearance and presence is widespread across Australia…concentric circles are sacred creative sites…” 1. Professor Judy Atkinson introduces herself as coming from “the three I’s – Indigenous, Invader and Immigrant.” This also describes my heritage. I identify as Kamilaroi and am also of Anglo-Celtic and German heritage.
Art, for me, is an ongoing practice of processing my life. I’ve been practicing for 25 years and have built up my own visual symbolic language. Each work is a ‘site’ or location of my life experience and is an external manifestation of my coming into myself through a process of decolonising.
“Spirituality” as defined by Atkinson is “an experience of numinosity that deepens our sense of self and identity”.2.
“’Numinous’ etymologically means something that nods or beckons towards us”.3. This has been my experience of uncovering and unfolding my Aboriginality. My Ancestors, I believe, have beckoned me at various times through people, places, situations and through something else which for me is impossible to put into words.
The meanings in my work are always layered. Swarms are a regular theme in my work and refer to colonisations, whether externalised – invasions of land, or internal invasions of self spiritually and intellectually by other cultures or energies.
My paperclay masks and shells refer to masks/fronts that my family over the past three generations, have worn throughout assimilationist programmes in NSW. They also allude to our tribalism beneath the external and reference shields, coolamons and the shell of the freshwater Waraba (turtle – Kamilaroi).
The Waraba has been a recurring theme in my dreams and my work. “a dream can be numinous…I don’t understand them from the egos’ standpoint. They come from somewhere else and are manifestations of spirit, whether spirit is in nature or the cosmos itself”.3.
1. Djon Mundine Essay in ‘A Special Kind of Vision’ 2008
2. Judy Atkinson 2008 www.scu.au/schools/gnibi/index
3. James Hollis 2008 http://home.vicnet.au/~jungsoc/resources/hollis
PAST EXHIBITIONS:
December 2008
Carolyne Lewis :: The Cutting Room
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re-covered is a folio of images digitally printed from wrapped and scanned
objects and belonging with a larger body of work, idioglossia. It is one pathway in a visual arts
studio practice that is centred on making, that delights in the emergence of the unexpected, and
desiring works that extend the range of possible readings and interpretations. The word idioglossia,
points to the existence and invention of a fabricated language, utterances to be observed and translated,
a conversation with, and between a collection of borrowed and constructed ideas, memories, images and
objects, a material language and a bricolage of assembled tales told in many voices.
idioglossia began with the question what would it be like not to remember backwards, towards
the recovery of a lost object, but forwards towards its transformation and reinvention?
For my purpose as a researcher/maker, within the discipline of a studio based creative arts research project,
the notion of remembering forwards suggests a paradoxical and innovative trajectory, pointing to a kind of visual
myth making, a creative remembering and imagining, triggered in response to images and objects, and moving beyond
the embeddeness of the past while recognising its value as a resource to be re-cast and re-invented. A remembering
that suggests a desire to both remember and forget, to preserve and transform.
I am interested in the past filtered through the present, in new ways of seeing by revisiting and reinterpreting
the past, viewing things out of context and the function of memory as a mediator in the creative art process. I am
not concerned with the exactness and truth of my memories. I welcome their potential for re-invention and erasure,
making and remaking.
In the studio I mimic the process of remembering forwards and explore the oikotropic and the oikogugic instinct –
one keeping us homebound, safe and secure, the other sending us away, in search of the unknown.
Multifarious objects and images emerge as memories are triggered and the everyday surrounds, as hand, mind and
material collaborate. Materials and processes mesh with contemporary debates surrounding the objectness of objects,
and the thingness of things and an understanding of the exercise of memory as a material process of putting back
together scattered pieces in a way that is new and not fixed and abiding.
Through a series of porcelain, glass and bronze objects, collages and printed images on paper, fabric, metal and acrylic I explore the movement of an object as utilitarian, to the object as artefact, to the disappearance of the object, to the reclaiming of the object. Hard opaque metal becomes translucent porcelain. The object disappears and becomes a transparent skin full of holes, a fragile scaffold, or a pattern of loose hanging threads. The object reappears as eroded surface, pitted by the passage of time and memory loss.
Fearing loss, I return to the point of origin and begin a process of re-covering. The objects is wrapped, scanned and digitally manipulated. It becomes something other beyond the original. I question if the fact that I remember something assumes or proves its truth. I observe gaps, embellishments, coverings and disintegration. I contemplate the ephemerality of memory, loss of memory, the cyclic rituals of the everyday and the concept of repetition as, not identical, not as a return to, but the appearance of something similar. I question if what has been lost or erased is able to be recovered and if what is remembered entirely constructed, if re-claimed objects help us know the absent bodies and unattainable biographies.
Can objects stand in for a past that never existed? To what extent is the artefact a narrative of a process of re-claiming the lost object or a portrait of the maker?
Carolyne Lewis Nov. 2008 Idilko Hammnod :: Moments in Time: mixed media collage works on paper 
September 2008 :: Diane Longley :: Navigations: artist books & folios, and mixed media works
'Navigations - artist books & folios, & mixed media works’ will be a selection of works by South Australian Artist Dianne Longley covering a range of media. Artist books, prints, and graphic works on wooden panels will demonstrate the diversity of Longley’s practice. The ideas and images in Longley’s works relate to the history of the grotesque where strangeness is more compelling than normality. Her works are imagined spaces populated with curious and fantastic creatures, actual and bizarre plant forms, costumed figures, and symbols of chance and renewal. Her artist books explore the unfolding journey, and how the uncertain and the unknowable reveal most about the human condition. The exhibition will be opened by Jan Davis at 2pm and will be preceded by an artist talk at 1.30pm in which Dianne will talk about her arts practice in general and in particular her artist book practice which spans some 30 years.
August 2008 :: The 4th Annual Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists’ Book Award :: An exhibition of artist books
May 2008 :: The Great Equestrian Portraits :: an exhibition by Jennifer Boyle investigating the changing relationship between man and animal in our modern society...
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April 2008 :: Language of the Unspoken :: Works on Paper by Cal Mackinnon and Hilary Herrmann
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This body of work is a recall of memory and imagery of the everyday, integrating imagination and abstracted information.
The language of the unspoken concerns intimacy of the simplistic and forgotten gesture. Observation at its simplest level.... the minor details of the day that are overlooked and not considered are of little value but are essential to communication and understanding.........one of the many unwritten rules.
The language of the unspoken looks at the essence of a day, the sentimentality of a memory and the intangible changes one goes through on life’s journey.
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March 2008 :: Cutting Remarks :: Kirk Crawford-Watts :: recent works on paper
Opening: 8th March 2pm continues until 4th April
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February 2008 :: Tidal Traces L. Page
works in progress
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TIDAL TRACES
tidal traces is a collection of prints, drawings and experimental media by l page loosely based around ideas of change, impermanence and a love of nature.
I wrote once that drawing is like casting nets into the deep and shifting currents of the subconscious, trawling among flashes of thought and shawls of shared experience. As often as not though it's more like playing in the shallows.
Here at the edges, where the depths are perceived only by inference and their mystery and darkness more of a ghost is where the process is at it's most enjoyable. Most of the images in this show are from time spent on this ever shifting fractal of coastline. Here happy accidents appear and strange dialogues form between sky, sketchy scrawls and old relics with their silent stories.
Enough for the metaphors, see the pictures.. and remember la meré is french for mother and ocean.
l page 2008
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November 2007 :: Migration Story Louise Irving
An exhibition of prints
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October 2007 :: 'Surge' Craig Gent-Diver
Drawings and mixed media works
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"...I could not without heartbreaking bitterness tear myself away
from the sea, so monotonously seductive, so infinitely varied in her terrible
simplicity and seeming to contain and to represent by all her changing moods,
the angers, smiles, humours, agonies and ecstasies of all the souls who
have lived, who live, or who will someday live!”
Beaudelaire – “Already!”, Paris 1869
All I know, all I have seen, all I have learnt, all I am, disregarded,
forgotten, seduced by eternity, infinity, again. Carried away in the transparent
blue surge of tranquillity and fear, committed to a decisive line of which
there can be no choice but to take, once it has begun. Lost. Suddenly, awareness
of a shoreline rushing towards me, terra firma, where I await my own return,
demands explanations of where I have been and why I leave all those important
things lying around? “Caught in the moment, in a dream, at the
point of a pen, again.”
Craig Gent-Diver 2007
September 2007
'Postcards from the artist': Adrienne Flemming
'Postcards from the artist' will include works on paper across media.
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Postcards draw a dialogue between conceived and perceived existence. So
I set about creating my own postcards. In the form that we know them, 6ins
x 4ins, single or double sided postal cards, they act as a bridge between
here and there, between sender and receiver. They are carriers of text and
image, across boundaries of region, culture, gender, and class. They are
readily available. They provoke questions of existence, production, appropriation,
consumption and collection. Postcards are primarily ephemeral pieces of
visual culture imposing an interpretive and dominating gaze on a particular
place in time. Postcards are popular genres that attempt to colonise our
vision organising visual subordination and compliance. But there are layers
of meaning beyond tradition of pictorial heritage and interacting text.
This exhibition is the nexus between my understanding and visual heritage
as I come here and go there, the unfolding communication. With digital technology
these texts are readily available, able to be perpetrated instantly and
reproduced a multiplicity of times for whatever audience. Recording images
that surrounded me through photography, drawing (as historically considered),
painting, collage I constructed postcards validating my existence here or
there. I say postcards because the texts that I created were limited to
the defining form of 6” x 4”, and sent on to other places. But
as ephemera they dispose of themselves in multiple ways. They can remain
as pixels within a digital matrix, or printed across variations, be collected,
sent or discarded. While the struggle was to build visual dialogue with
a place, through this process, the realisation is that “ nowhere is
now here”.
Adrienne Fleming 23 July 2007
August 2007
GROUP SHOW :: TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
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An exhibition of prints and artists' books by local and regionally based artists.
Artists’ books may have been around for over a century, but only
in recent years have they been actively collected in Australia, suddenly
moving to centre stage, following trends in Europe and America, where the
market is thriving with art investors.
(Australian Art Review – July 07)
The artists represented in the exhibition are:
Rochelle
Summerfield
Susanna Pohlen
Jenny Kitchener
Travis Paterson
Delma
Corazon
Stephen Spurrier
Darren Bryant
Joanna
Kambourian
Wendy Rolls
Jennifer Boyle
Loius Page
Scott Trevelyan
Julie Barratt
John Smith
Shelagh Morgan
Kate Holmer
Christine Porter
Richard
Tipping
Michelle Kershaw
On Saturday the 11th August Barratt Galleries in Alstonville presented
a morning symposium with Sydney printmaker and artist book collector Monica
Oppen. Monica’s artist book collection consists of over 100 books
with such artists as Peter Lyssiotis and Angela Cavalieri included in the
collection. Monica spoke about her collection and her own arts practice.
Her prints and artists’ books are included in such collections as
the Australian National Gallery.
July 2007
JAN DAVIS :: TERANIA
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Pages From Terania
Jan studied printmaking at Phillip Institute of Technology in Melbourne and graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in 1981. She completed a Master of Arts at Southern Cross University in 1995 where she currently holds the position of Associate Professor in Visual Arts.
Jan mounted the first of four solo shows at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne in 1988. She is now represented by Grahame Galleries + Editions, Brisbane. She is nationally recognised for her work with new print technologies and artists’ books and in 1995 she won the Fremantle Print prize with SOLOMON, a seven-volume artists’ book. Her works are included in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian National Library, and many State libraries.
Since 2003, she has been working on a series of prints and drawings based on the landscape around her studio just north of Lismore. The works in this exhibition, all completed in 2007, particularly engage with the way light can change the way we experience a place. Whilst we know we stand and gaze upon the same place, the changing hour of the day and the season of the year can transform the space into something new each time. The drawings and prints are like fragments of sensation rather than representations of particular places. They describe the resonating presence of Terania valley in her day-to-day life. The drawings are ink and wash, a medium that is well suited to recording elusive subtle moments of time, and the prints are sugarlift etchings
