AMY PRCEVICH WRITES ON FAIR ISLE 5

We are introduced to this incarnation of the project by Anna Jaaniste’s You – a series of text based wall plaques intimating a one-sided contemplation. Arranged at eye-height and ankle height throughout the space, the work does not allow you to be passively curious. To fully comprehend the artist’s words you must crouch down to read the work in its entirety, inadvertently assuming a contemplative pose. 

Further into the exhibition we have the opportunity to hear the artist read aloud from the wall plaques and the work becomes less of a comprehension exercise than an aurally emotive experience. We have already read the script, but with our own inflictions, and internal dialogue. To pause as an artist pauses, and hear tone and emphasis placed on specific phrases is an addictive way to absorb the work. The physicality of the words helps us develop a quiet understanding about human relations and relationships.

Jaaniste’s second work Live Here is organic both in its arrangement and medium; comprising of an assembly of grass, wood, charcoal and ash, it binds us to a sense of people and place. Lying gently next to Beata Geyer’s stark, flat, red and orange, mdf constructions Live Here and Geyer’s Colourings create a poignant conversation between tribal anecdotes and urban landscapes.

Similarly Margaret Roberts, Blp, a nod to Richard Artschwager’s blps is sprawled throughout the exhibition space, highlighting the pleasantly parasitic nature of the install. Artschwager used his bold, black lozenge-shaped constructions to draw attention to the urban landscape, interrupting people’s consciousness through bizarrity and unexpected form. Blp maintains the integrity of the artist’s voice but in the sprawling, overlapping way it is arranged within the space it gently informs the way we think about unused corners or cornices within an architectural landscape and complements the way we look at neighbouring works in the exhibition.

In Raft drawing # 4 India Zegan’s seductive pencil drawing continues her ongoing interest in the iconic French Romantic painting The raft of the Medusa – imagining refugees from the sunken French frigate. Even without this background the work evokes a sense of bobbing and floating in a maritime landscape. It is hypnotising and  hallucinatory and by drawing on archival Fabriano paper – a material we were introduced to by Helen L Sturgess in Fair Isle week one - we are encouraged to view the work as a historical document.

At the back of the exhibition hovers Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen’s offerings of agar jelly, arranged gift-like around a tv monitor. The uv light and gentle buzz of the monitor create a very alluring invitation for the viewer to approach and find out what’s on the telly. It is an internal fight not to recoil in disappointment as we realise that approaching the work is equivalent to entering a twilight zone. Warnings about piracy and reproduction are screened in a loop, to an audience of fungal blooms eliciting a physical response to the work. The work however, is far from a disappointment, more a gentle conversation about the ethics of reproduction and its physical effects.

Fair Isle, in all its forms, has read like a relationship – brooding and thoughtful, spontaneous and intimate – and in Fair Isle number five there is a sense that we have reached a personal resolution after a series of negotiations.

Amy Prcevich

May 2014

INDIA ZEGAN on Fair Isle 5

The final movement of 'Fair Isle' at APS closed last Sunday. The benefits of this exhibition was that it enabled both emerging and mid career artists to make connections with artists and viewers outside of their usual art friendship groups. Special highlights of this exhibition includ Bettina Bruder's rubber band tango with Sach Catt's tension piece, Linden Braye's roller-pallete and white noise sound piece; and Rose Ann McGreevy's soulful, 'Interrupting the spatial plane' (2014). 

Better than television: Weekly viewings each Sunday morning (in addition to being able to attend a few of the openings) enabled me to watch the exhibition expand and contract as if it were a set of lungs. With some conversations louder than others, and other works more conceptually orientated than others, the overall effect of this jazz-like exercise was that artists from each segment of the exhibition were able to play and to test their works within the experimental framework of a larger free floating conversation. 

I hope that 'Fair isle' enabled participating artists to think deeply and critically upon their practice, i.e. how does this work directly engage with the premise; what does it mean to make this object and limit the materials used to three elements (or less/ or more); what does it mean to make this piece at this point in one's practice; how actively does one engage in other artist/s' practices to conceive their own response in an exhibition-laboratory; how do you signal and/or reference one's engagement with another artist's work through materials used or conceptual frameworks; or what does it mean to remake significant elements of a work shown two years earlier. Needless to say, these types of questions are endless and ongoing if someone is thinking and reflecting seriously on their practice.

Special thanks to Project Coordinators: Sue Callanan, Margaret Roberts and Emma Wise.

India Zegan 14/05/2014

FAIR ISLE 5 OPENING

LAST FAIR ISLE OPENING FRIDAY 9 MAY AND CLOSING DISCUSSION SUNDAY 11 MAY

ROOMSHEET FAIR ISLE 5

The fifth and final iteration of Fair Isle will be open 11am - 5pm Friday 9 May to Sunday 11 May, showing the work of Lisa Andrew, Criena Court, Beata Geyer, Virginia Hilyard, Anna Jaaniste, Gillian Lavery, Diane McCarthy, James Nguyen, Margaret Roberts,  Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Ioulia Terizis and India Zegan.   

Opening Friday 9 May 6-8pm.

The discussion on Sunday 11 May starts at 2pm and aims to be a Fair Isle debrief and to also broaden to discuss broader aspects of exhibition practice. The artists, writers and general public are invited to attend and participate. The discussion will be recorded as part of the Fair Isle documentation. 

Diane McCarthy

Gillian Lavery

India Zegan

Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos Mermaid 2014

Front-back: Virginia Hilyard, Anna Jaaniste, Margaret Roberts,
Beata Geyer, Gillian Lavery, Lisa Andrew

Front:Orange: Beata Geyer; black:  Margaret Roberts.
Back L-R Criena Court, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos,  Diane McCarthy

L-R: Lisa Andrew, Alexandra Spence/Katrina Stamatopoulos, Margaret Roberts

ISOBEL JOHNSTON on Fair Isle 4

 The Fourth Dimension: Exhibition C/D the 4^th Phase

This phase of Fair Isle both brings in work of artists Lisa Andrew, Criena Court, Virginia Hilyard, Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen, Margaret Roberts, and Ioulia Terizis to the project and carries across the work of Justin Henderson, Andrew Simmons, Clara Chow, Virginia Versa, Sardar Sinjawi and John Von Sturmer.

The concept of journeys presents itself as one strand within Fair Isle and in this iteration we are presented with all sorts of forms of transport: from luxury liners to the intersections of Sydney’s suburban transport system, the rear view mirrors that follow you around the room, the ominously glowing jellies growing mold in the corner, the black shapes that punctuate your transit from one work to another, to works that allude to a journey of great fiction, kaleidoscopic doors of perception and ghosts that shadow us through deep space.

Lisa Andrew’s work juxtaposes nature and culture—bricks and mortar below pins that point to map locations with images of the growth rings of trees. Her umbrella plays off the ‘real’ and its simulacra in the transformation and substitution of material from the natural world to the manmade, and seems to float up away from us. All the while Justin Henderson’s ocean liner offers the promise of ‘minimalist luxury’ with all the extras.

Ioulia Terrizis’s quietly discrete work ‘Neutrino’ marks space in a different way, both inscribing and photographing space. Here, we see the real and a representation of it as perceived space, with three dots marking points of reference that coexist in 2 and 3 dimensions. In this elegant work, the journey is into subatomic space with the neutrino, the ghost and boundary rider, from another dimension of time and space taking us on to another place altogether.

Whereas Sanjay Sinjawi reminds us, we are all on of life’s journey. He highlights the transitory nature of life using remnants/shreds of his own clothing along with photographs taken in different locations of him dressed in their complete form from his past. There is, again, a notion of the autobiographical in Clara Chow’s video work that contains her lips and human hair, inviting us to consider identity (politics) here evoking something of the personal as political or identity politics.

Virginia Hilyard’s ‘Voyage au centre de le terre’ presents us with a work recalling Jules Verne’s novel by the same name. Hilyard has scratched away the mirrored surface of the glass of this wardrobe door to reveal the shape of the glacier Snaefellsjokull as it was in 1890, almost double the size it is today. It reflects the shattered vanity in our belief that we control nature, in a work where science fiction and global warming meet in an oval looking glass. That same looking glass shape is still apparent in the contemporary rear view mirrors of Victoria Versa’s work that directs us to glimpse what is passing.

 Margaret Roberts’s ‘Blp’ indeed ‘articulates’ the space, providing a grammatical nuance in the spirit of and with reference to ‘punctuation marks’, evoking work of Richard Artschwager. Roberts’s works are scaled and positioned in relation to other works her Blps ‘Alice in Wonderland-like’ grow and shrink in accordance to their companion pieces. A large, outline version surrounds Andrew Simmons’ 607X (Riley to Barclay) and suggested, to this viewer as least, a complete racetrack. Simmons’ sections of road are made of layers of wonky felt and bitumen paint and engage us with the idea of the substructure of roads, with particular reference to those continually remodeled to adapt to the expanding population of suburban Sydney.

Peering into Criena Court’s work ‘Proposal #9’ we lose all our usual co-ordinates for gauging space. It presents us a glimpse of the coloured wonder of the world and the vastness of space where a perception of scale folds in on itself and true to its description; the work challenges our perception of both image making and reality. Kaleidoscopic it holds us in its mesmerizing space.

Glowing greenly in the corner is Jillian Campbell and James Nguyen’s work ‘Warning: Fair Use’ presented a collection of toxic mold agar jellies. This is a time-based journey, as it bloomed, grew and developed over the period of exhibition. Its growth gives a sense of accretion to John Von Strummer’s work Troubadour; its white, polystyrene surface seemed to emerge from, rather than adhere to, the wall. A tiny Blp by Roberts dialogues with another of his works ‘Found domino’—scaled to size, it sits alongside it on the floor.

If the role of an ARI can be described, but not limited to, a site for experimentation, a laboratory a launch pad and a forum, then all of these concepts apply equally to Fair Isle. As a framework, Fair Isle has allowed artists great scope through the presentation of a series of interconnected exhibitions where trace, substitution and dialogue intersect to both enable but also to frame the nature of the work that each artist brings to this event. The time-based aspect of the project as a whole will ultimately be more clearly apprehended in its documented format, as are many durational works and all great journeys.

Isobel Johnston
Sydney Art Tours
download pdf

NORA FLEMING'S RECONSTRUCTION OF DESIREE DE KIKK AND HER NOTES

The Fair Isle Exhibition - some notes from Desirée de Kikk, reconstructed by Nora Fleming.

I apologise for my dear friend Desirée de Kikk, who has gone away on a short trip (AWOL as she would say). In my capacity as Dr Regularis’ personal assistant, I checked in his diary (as you know he is in Portugal) and noted that she had offered to write a paragraph or two on the Fair Isle exhibition. In fact, she has made a few notes - a surprise in itself. Brief as they are, I will try to make some sense of them to send you something intelligible that genuinely reflects the manner of her extraordinary insights (fortunately I did see the show and was very favorably impressed by many of the artworks).

Desirée is not easily impressed. On rare occasions she has been heard to say, “I wish I had thought of that.”   Such a note appeared more than once in her notes for Fair Isle.

At the top of her list she wrote after coming upon Margaret Roberts’ black rectangles, “What the f.... is going on here?”  In her inimitable way, she prowled around these dark objects waiting for the sense of them to come to her. (Dr Regularis often calls her, affectionately, “Wittgenstein’s predator.”) During this “tour of duty” she took in commentaries made by other viewers who were actually wearing some of the pieces, which were at those times transformed from the inanimate into living shields or “... exoskeletons for the paranoid” as her notes tell us. (I’m sure this is a thinly veiled barb for the oversensitive Noel Farina - another artist in the “stable” of Dr Regularis). At times they were like slabs of gigantic, impossible jewelry - dark baubles of an iniquitous nature. Then they popped up all over the place. No longer hard board slabs - sometimes outlines and even “... a nasty looking fur thing.”   And “what was that tiny one doing hassling a stray domino square? Surely, all the domino tile wanted to do was strike up a conversation with the large gridded wall pieces” by Barbara Halnan.

Another “What the f....?” appeared in her notes. I have noted in the past, that grids of all kinds are particularly irritating for Desirée. “I like to construct my own systems of constraint. Yes, my own rules of engagement.” However, after discussing Barbara’s Sodoku walls -  a puzzle and a solution, I could see the flickering light of recognition in her eyes. She was struck by “the sheer perfection of the endlessness of mathematical possiblility.” Aha! What sweet little intruders, the domino square and its tiny Artschwager friend!

Now, I could tell (from the urgency suggested by her untidy writing) that Desirée had understood the conceptual sense of the Fair Isle exhibition. “I wanted to hunt down some more intruders.” I believe by that she means, other works that interact with their neighbours. Margaret Robert’s dark slabs could physically move among other artworks. John von Sturmer’s domino tile had silently slipped into place pitching a small missile at its Goliath.

At this point in her notes, the paper is heavily stained by a large slosh of red wine, her remarks are particularly barbed. A few weeks ago I over heard an argument between Desirée and Vicky (Versa). Desirée was giving her young colleague a tongue lashing about the levity of the humour in the texts etched onto each mirror piece. Now however, after her Fair Isle experience, Desirée could see the connection between humour and the possibility of an “accident” popping up in unexpected places. Her notes conclude with this comment: “Just the same, I would have done it quite differently!”

FAIR ISLE 3 OPENED LAST NIGHT

and open 11-5pm, sat and sun 26 and 27 April. 

Clara Chow

above Photos Alexander Vine

above 3 images: Peter Murphy

ROOMSHEET FAIR ISLE 3

FAIR ISLE 3 OPENS WEDNESDAY 23 April 6-8pm

FAIRISLE3 ROOMSHEET

The second FAIR ISLE opening is 6-8pm Wednesday 23 April with work by: Linden Braye, Sue Callanan, Sach Catts, Clara Chow, Brigitta Gallaher, Barbara Halnan,  Justin Henderson,  Andrew Simmons,  Sardar Sinjawi,  Vicky Versa, John von Sturmer and Skye Wagner. This is the third iteration of FAIR ISLE, and will be open 11am - 5pm  Sat - Sun 26 - 27 April.

Clara Chow BUST (CHONGKWONG)

Andrew Simmons JERK (detail) 2014 

Justin Henderson Redfern Gold 2014

John von Sturmer Turtle's Head 2012

JOHN VON STURMER - DIARY OF AN ART EVENT

Hanging by a thread, or Fair Isle on the line (April - May 2014) 

Part 1

Wednesday 16 April: The idea of the homunculus, the little man, remains. A fixed element that has emerged slowly – but it was there from the start, more or less. The initial impetus was the ‘sleeve’ I found on the street – and then there was another sleeve, both made of brown paper, beautifully. I thought they were for flowers but I think T’s guess is correct: the prototypes of sleeves and thus suggestive of arms. We go from there to other body parts and the body itself. And the notion of the figure as an element of design.

Knit me a cardigan, please do, and knit me a cardigan

Later I would understand that the body is what dominates and shapes the room. Architecture is the art of the body. And so to enter architectural space …

And then the notion of pattern, the many layers of the epidermis …

It took one look at the room with the objects in it, many of them well crafted, one of them (Sturgess’s paper piece) beautiful: refined, elegant, I could stick it in the elegant apartment that I don’t have. Here, in my actual apartment it would join the general high-class grot!

K’s remark was decisive: ‘Make it yours’. Not only did I take that on board, abandoning the ‘sleeves’ but gradually converting whatever I was to produce into my own history. All art is biography, I might say – and so it is. But it doesn’t come automatically, as it were; it’s not auto or self in that sense. But it does come unbidden

Thursday 17 April: The room as I saw it yesterday is a mess: confusion, a tangle, competing egos. The wall still dominates – for indeed it is a space in which the wall does dominate. Sue’s concertina pipe (Sue Callanan, Fixtures and Fittings) has the virtue of adding width to the space as it ‘worms’ around, ‘knitting’ the room together. Otherwise it is a mad jumble sale, all competing for attention. Alone much of the work would be good but with these odd juxtapositions in which there is no real communication, everyone heading towards their own Godhead!

But isn’t that how it is, the modern condition, the gaggle-babble insistence of voices all broadcasting on their own special frequency – and a sense here that everything is enlarged beyond what it or the room can endure? Too big too big too big, the death of intimacy – and control. Incomprehensible. And we, those trying to take it all in, uncomprehending, confused, alarmed even. It’s disconcerting. When I left the room I said to myself ‘space debris’.

Mostly when I leave a gallery – certainly the AGNSW – even with its mediocre or fatigued art - I look afresh at my world, the world, the world out there. All becomes art. In this case it wasn’t that the outside provided unexpected artistic pleasures – but it came as a relief. I’d escaped the abattoir, the slaughtered carcases of ideas that, smaller and less aggressive, might have appealed. What might have thrived as bilbies became monstrous charolais, a scene from Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (1978). In the actual abattoir the bodies of the slaughtered animals create a sort of seriality – so that they get reduced into themselves – and into the ‘row’. There is a rhythm: tick tock, the dread metronome of death rings out, tick tock tick tock. And we are driven to look at Man Ray’s metronome with a new – if again uncomprehending – eye. For in the metronomic the repetition is in the action, a sort of reverse pendulum – not in the object itself. It reduces all time to a simulacrum of itself

Maybe this is true of all objects

Ah, the room, space. There are the walls, the floor, the ceilings, the ‘cubicle’ that is created by these elements. Three surface spaces (look up, look down – but principally look across) and a space that things fold or disappear into, die almost like tombstones. This is why I like Sturgess’s work: it is a flue, it sends some vapour up into the air. All the better that this vap’rous substance is invisible - an untainted if not entirely safe exudation. (No exhalation is entirely safe!) It creates a flux in itself, it lives and breathes. It’s stillness is only apparent. It may even speak – a silent voice but not mute, not by any means. An extended sigh – or a secret growl

I look for a fourth dimension – even though I may have found one: the cubicle with its heavy air at the bottom and its lighter air at the top. For mostly everything seems wedded to the wall – or the floor. I think if I had my choice again I might just put in a concrete pipe – one of those Hume pipes, diameter about 4’. The fourth – or is it a fifth? – dimension is a passage, a moving through: a liminal space, some might say, a worm hole, a tunnel, the sort of cave speleologists are so fond of, a tight squeeze which cannot be too cluttered. In this respect Sue’s piping only has exteriority: we can follow it with the eye but we can’t place ourselves inside it. We cannot experience the interiority of the pipe, of being enclosed in that half-exuberant blood vessel …

There is a sort of echo of this outside: a bathtub in the shop window of an establishment that sells bathroom items. Just across the road. It’s an elegant shape. Across the bottom in large regular letters it says PARADIS. Maybe for someone. I treat it as an anagram: SID A RAP, RAP SAID, PAR SAID, PARSED, PARSLEY, PERHAPS … The shape and run of associations, the gradual deformation and re-working of the original impulse which – paradoxically – only emerges later, virtually at the end of the day. We in fact work backwards, towards the original impulse[1]

We head towards Body Parts …

continued -  PDF of Diary of an Art Event parts 1,2 & 3

John von Sturmer

e-mail: johnvon@bigpond.com

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[1] From PARADIS we might have gone down a different route: PARADIS … PARODY … PARODIC… PARDON! There are threads – and threads

FAIR ISLE 2 open Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 April 11am - 5pm

L-R: Rose Ann McGreevy, Sue Callanan (artwork& person),
John Von Sturmer (person), Helen L Sturgess, Brigitta Gallaher
photo Brigitta Gallaher

front: Sue Callanan, back: Alan Rose

Bettina Bruder

L-R: Rose Ann McGreevy, Barbara Halnan, Sue Callanan

Barbara Halnan, Helen L Sturgess

Skye Wagner

FAIR ISLE - first iteration with Amy Prcevich

Fair Isle: take one

Taking its name from a traditional knitting technique used to create patterns with multiple colours, the works in Fair Isle form a tapestry of conversations around fluidity and structure.

Bettina Bruder’s Diagramatic Entanglements is an ensemble of elastic bands stretched to their limits and connected to each other and the corners of the building. The work gently directs viewers to draw their gaze to the periphery of the artwork and on to the structure of the building. The audience is encouraged to touch, pull and play with the bands causing them to bob, shudder and bounce. The viewer induced movement and mutation of the work makes us ponder the moments of fluidity and spontaneity that can occur within a fixed structure.

Fiona Davies’ Memorial/One shift November 30 presents a field of red crosses embroidered with buttons onto kitchen strainers and is coupled with Blood on silk: surgery – a woven stream of red ribbon. The latter is reminiscent of brick work or DNA strands, depending on whether your focus is drawn to the wall on which Blood on silk rests or its relationship to the accompanying work. Together the works are a prelude to a sense of medical emergency with a contingency plan already set.

Helen L Sturgess’ Another Life is quite literally a drawing with paper. High quality drawing paper cascades from the ceiling in a graceful crumple and the work hovers in a state of contemplation. What form have we just missed? What will evolve next?

In Rose Ann Mcgreevy’s work a sculptural cluster of wooden panels and pegs is arranged on the floor and interrupts our movement through the exhibition space. On opening night it was an olfactory as well as visual experience. The delicious aroma of newly assembled building materials calling to mind the very process that was involved in constructing the work. Knowing Fair Isle is only in its first of five incarnations this work seems a perfect entry point into ideas and forms to re-explore and build upon in the coming weeks.

Fiona Kemp’s selection of digital images make reference to water conservation in the Lockyer Valley. In one image a deep red gush of colour bursts forth from a sprinkler, in the other an assembly of water sprinklers are captured ‘at attention’ calling forth ideas about defence and weaponry. In humanising the simple technology at the heart of a water supply system the work has an almost visceral effect as it mimics the primal anxiety which comes from a threat to a precious, all-encompassing resource.

Alan Rose’s two panel light installation is a soft, gentle explosion of colour. The seamless transition from hue to hue in arrangements of angulated spheres across stark black boards is so subtle and sublime that it is more than dream-like, but meditative or hallucinatory.

At the heart of all these works is a curated conversation about states of transition and in each form we get the sense that we are merely looking at one point in the life-span of an object or idea. As viewers we have the responsibly to be imaginative and contemplative in order to create ideas about the past and future based on these momentarily fixed states that form a connection between what is and what will be.

Amy Prcevich

Alexander Vine - photostream of Fair Isle 1 opening

Lean Richards - alt media

Bettina Bruder

right: Fiona Davies

Fiona Davies

Luke (left) and Alan Rose (right)

mid: Helen L Sturgess

Rose Ann McGreevy

Fiona Kemp

Photos: Fiona Kemp

ROOMSHEET