2021 ARTISTIC PROGRAM
CORINNA BERNDT
’NOT BORN DIGITAL’
21 January - 19 February
Corinna Berndt, “Not Born Digital”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Exploring myths surrounding the transformation from physical to intangible data, “Not Born Digital” questions concepts of value, narrative, database and language produced by interactions with digital technology. Arguably, processes of digital hoarding— or the de-materialisation of physical possessions, and their transformation into digital assemblages—suggest implied narratives that are somehow embedded within the material world. The exhibition reimagines these narratives that might emerge in digital record keeping through speculating upon their continuous relationship to the material world. "Not Born Digital” explores the potential of digital scanning to enable a hybrid materialisation of bodied and disembodied information. By extension, this process also invites an examination of the kind of languages, grammars and poetics that potentially govern these hybrid forms.
SOPHIE PENKETHMAN-YOUNG
’BOLERO: A TAIL OF TECH SUPPORT’
21 January - 19 February
Sophie-Penkethman Young, 2020, Boléro: A Tail of Tech Support, Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“It didn’t work out as I had hoped”
Marcel Ravel commenting on a performance of his work Boléro.
“Boléro: A Tail of Tech Support”, 2021 is an alternate near-reality created from lights, chatbots and skate ramps. Working your way from lowly customer service rep all the way up to management, enjoy the mundanity of giving and receiving scripted support with no end in sight. Positive words help to frame affirmative phrases that can create magic. Non-affirmative words should be avoided during conversations, at all costs...
Sophie Penkethman-Young’s, “Boléro: A Tail of Tech Support” is a journey to nowhere, destined to end in chaos. Like its name-sake, let’s hope it works!
JAYANTO TAN
’RITUAL MY BEAUTIFUL CURSE (CAP GO MEH)’
3 March - 9 April
Jayanto Tan, 5950 labour of love – cap go meh potluck party, ceramic, dimensions variable, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The ‘manna from heaven’ works were created during Covid19 restrictions and responded to conversations made with the artist’s ‘friends and families’ about what kinds of work would be made during the isolation. This installation work recalls the generosity and love expression that providing to share ‘Jajan Pasar’ (Indonesian-Australian delicacies street snacks) with friends and acquaintances.
PAULA DE PRADO
‘PALLAY YUYAY: TO GATHER, TO REMEMBER’
3 March - 9 April
Paula do Prado, “pallay yuyay: to gather, to remember”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
pallay and yuyay are two words from the Quechua language family, the first means ‘to gather’ and the second ‘to remember’. This exhibition is a reflection on the interconnectedness of creative practice, plants and personal cultural rituals. By bringing into proximity what was previously scattered and seemingly unrelated, the process of gathering is a form of remembering, is a form of repair. To invoke the spirit of gathering the plant yerba maté (ilex paraguariensis) will be brought into the gallery and rosemary (salvia rosmarinus) as a symbol of remembrance. Although this is very much about the artists own path to return to ancestral and ritual connection, do Prado is curious to see what we might remember together in this space.
WEI LENG TAI
‘ABRIDGE’
CURATED BY OLIVER KRISCHER
17 April - 21 May
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Abridge explores how one can think about images of a past in an uncertain present. This project began as a series of encounters with people who migrated from Southern China to Hong Kong in the 1960s-2000s, building on the artist’s earlier project The Other Shore. But as Tay faced the dilemma of what and how to photograph, depict or record in the present, she began to revisit the corpus of images she had made while living in Hong Kong as a professional photographer for over sixteen years from 1999. In that time, the post-colony witnessed significant changes, many of which passed before her lens. However, her camera also recorded corners of everyday life, forgotten and liminal moments, which have similarly been not so much lost as eclipsed. By re-photographing and transforming parts of these images, as artefacts of a past that is present, she creates a process that parallels her initial conversations about displacements across time and space, and tangentially expresses her complex position in this indeterminate landscape. Through photography, video and audio interviews, Abridge reflects on longing, anxiety and shifting identities that navigate an entangled geography.
NEIL BEEDIE
’CHIMERAS FLUSH’
4 June - 10 July
Neil Beedie, Gales Gala (one sings, the other doesn’t), oil on canvas, 35.5 x 46cm, 2021.
Filibus (lockjawdawn), oil on canvas, 45 x 45cm, 2021.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Projections, like monsters, often come at us from behind, when we’re lost in the dark, groping for ways ahead. They’re also the perfect places to reveal yourself. A how’d-it-find-us? jumps the where’d-it-go’s only to shudder what-came-backinstead? I guess it’s always all about dissolving boundaries. Witnessing history’s guttersnipes hitching rides and wreaking havoc, snaking elision with creation myth parodies that trouble invention like a misbehaving Pygmalion. All those cautionary tales just making with the mercurial mood rings and spider dancing through time like a Lola Montez through the empires. And some Bavarian general just yells ‘demon!’
Anything to sidestep the ‘natural order’. What a busted paragon. Derek Jarman says history, with its pointed lacks and omissions, is mutable in the imagination. Like dream logics, lit with Magick Lanterns, a stage door on meta-loop or the dizzy spell of a film flashback. Cutting in. Redefining focus. Divining backwards with forward motion and shaking up the stacks to pilfer in the fallout. When Parker Tyler said he’d wear an everchanging chiaroscuro in his picture house, I wonder if he knew that I was there, in the beams, trying them on too, just to see what fit. Kicking up in this constant sense of disintegration and play is disorientating, but isn’t half the point just finding your feet again?
KIERAN BRYANT & SAMUEL HODGE
‘THE SMUSHING’
4 June - 10 July
Kieran Bryant and Samuel Hodge, The Smushing #25, plaster, glue, dye, eyelet, dimensions variable, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The Smushing, a new collaborative project between Kieran Bryant and Samuel Hodge, consisted of mixed-media installation and print-based work. It investigated the merging of collaborative processes that aim to smush and experiment. It also dealt with the fictional trope of the ‘Queer Crazy Scientist’. The expansion of these two colliding practices explored both artist’s methodologies of working with the archive and composite image-text production respectively.
JANA HAWKINS-ANDERSEN WITH AINSLIE TEMPLETON
‘STEEL MAGNOLIAS’
22 July - 28 August
Jana Hawkins-Andersen and Ainslie Templeton, Steel Magnolias, installation view, dimensions variable, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Fragility in art is a value-signifier. Like a currency digitally encrypted to be non-reproducible, fragility captures the exclusivity of a moment in time. It speaks to the interplay between, on the one hand, the moment of the artist’s creation, bounded by their lifetime and labour—better if briefer, more prolific—as well as their Zeitgeist and material underpinnings, and on the other, increasingly valuable metrics of exclusive viewer (user?) experience. Being in the presence of an exclusive object is emphasized by unique, crafted fragility. The object is more of the moment, a Ghost in the Shell, exceptional, impossible… or just possible. Just hanging together. And therefore the whisper of mortality.
SETH BIRCHALL
’HEALTH AND HAPPINESS’
22 July - 28 August
Seth Birchall, Health and Happiness, 155 x 122cm, oil on canvas, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Seth Birchall’s paintings create meditative worlds that look both inward to psychological states and outward to the natural world. His works draw upon romantic notions of landscape as depicted throughout art history, presenting a contemporary twist on impressionism’s gestural brushwork and colour play. Containing fictitious landscapes composited from photographs, his scenes reflect a biophilic urge - to maintain connection with other life forms in nature. Alongside trees are reoccurring motifs of suns, moons, orbs and flowers that form mirrored compositions, sometimes across multiple canvases. His painted environments invite a moment for pause and self-reflection, coaxing us to examine the interior spaces and wanderings of the mind. Within the energy of Birchall’s paintings lies a place of serenity.
‘USU CREATIVE AWARDS’
CURATED BY EMILY ROEBUCK
14 October - 28 October
Olga Svyatova, I love you. I still love you, embroidery on calico, 150x74cm, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
Open to all students of the University of Sydney (USyd), the USU Creative Awards is an amazing opportunity to showcase artistic works to peers, industry professionals and the local community at the USU’s contemporary art space, Verge Gallery.
CASEY AYRES, MARIIA ZHUCHENKO, MONICA RANI RUDHAR, AND SZYMON DORABIALSKI
‘saʊˈdɑːdə’
11 November - 10 December
Monica Rani Rudhar, ..And Since Then I Didn’t Grow Anything There, single channel video, soil, bricks, 7:42 mins, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The word Saudade comes from the Portuguese language. It is a word used to express an emotional state encompassing a longing for someone, something or somewhere that is absent; for the unattainable; or for the very presence of absence itself. It differs from nostalgia in that it can be a yearning for something that may never have existed in the first place. The artists came across this word repeatedly when trying to find a way to explain a feeling they all share as a result of migration. A certain longing for a place - geographical but also cultural, emotional and in time - which may not exist anymore, or had ever existed, which formed so strongly each of their identities yet in many ways feels so foreign.
The artworks in this exhibition give an insight into each of the artists’ personal sense of being in the world. They share the common ground of otherness; with one foot testing the waters of the dominant culture, and the other in an imagined ‘mother country’. The works emerge from the excavations of familial mythology and personal experiences in an effort to acknowledge what came before and a desire to create a place for oneself, existing between multiple places and times.