Sam Holt / Video Interview

Artereal Gallery this month presents a stunning body of work by the emerging Sydney based artist Sam Holt. The exhibition, which has already been a huge success, will run until Saturday 27 June.

To coincide with the exhibition, Fergus Wilson recently sat down with Sam Holt to talk about his latest body of work and gain some insights into Sam's creative process... To view the video interview click here.

Sam Holt will also be doing an Artist Talk at Artereal Gallery on Saturday 20th June at 3pm.

VIDEO INTERVIEW / EMILY SANDRUSSI

Emily Sandrussi discusses the making of her recent body of work Domino Theory

With thanks to Naomi Doras for creating this video

Domino Theory, is a poignant contemporary ‘memento mori’ that is both very personal yet universal. It is an artifact that focuses on the passing of time, and the tracings, the trauma and the legacy of a war decades after it has ended.

The affecting suite of images is a nostalgic paean, a meditation on remembering and dis-remembering and on loss and mortality and the Vietnam War of 1962-75.

The departure images for Domino Theory are from an archive of photographic negatives taken by artist Emily Sandrussi’s stepfather during service as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

Her potent, pastel-hued photographic variations and versions were created from scanned images from the personal archive; the artist acknowledging and incorporating the spontaneous corruptions in processing and also exploiting additional manufactured digital glitches that interact with the existing disruptions on the surface and the disparate organic marks of dust, scratches and fingerprints. Integration of these blemishes, traces and accretions acknowledges the passage of time, the rigorous conditions and difficult transit from a war-zone, a history of non-recognition and re-discovery, and the imprint of a family of hands.

The process and emotional intensity of memory and the making of Domino Theory can be best accessed through the artist’s own words:

“The images that most interest me, however, are those that are entirely alien to me. Documents of the time and place a 23-year-old man (who remains unknown to me) found himself in – the Vietnam War. Upon discovery of these images, I was simultaneously fascinated and terrified. Even now, I look at them with a guilty hunger – lapping up the details, constructing my own narratives, all the while feeling like an intruder. Like many veterans of this war, my stepfather rarely spoke of his experiences. As a child I always wanted to know more. As an adolescent I came to understand the reasons for his silence. Now, with the stories finally, truly, eternally beyond my reach, I hold these clues to all those untold stories, passive under my gaze and my imagination.

The discovery of these images, and the subsequent sorting and scanning of them for personal archives, marked the beginning of a project that has stretched across the years since. Following the death of my stepfather, they were revisited briefly, but after that it was years before I gave them any further thought. In the meantime, I began to work with corruption in digital image files. I had been working with spontaneously corrupted images in order to explore notions of mortality and memory. For this purpose I considered the breakdown of digital files as conceptually similar to ash or dust. After extensive work with spontaneously occurring corruption, I became intrigued by the possibility of manufacturing corruption in image files. It was at this stage of the process that I revisited the scans I had made of my stepfather’s images of the war.

The resulting images are fragmented and disjointed, with the appearance of horizontal lines reminiscent of sedimentary layers of rock in the earth’s crust. This digital glitch, or corruption, mechanical in nature, is combined in these images with the remaining evidence of the more organic disruptions accumulated by the slides – in the form of dust, fingerprints, scratches, and even what appears to be mould. Despite the various scars and colour variances that occur as a result of the corruption process, the corrupted images still retain some of the signifiers of the original photographs. Visible through these disruptions, we are able to make out the clouds, aircraft, flora, sun, and distant cities of Vietnam, as perceived by a 23-year-old Australian boy in 1969.

I have come to regard the war as a dividing wall in my stepfather’s life, an event that permanently severed the boy he was from the man he became. A single moment in time that gave birth to one while the other died. A moment determined by a game of chance. Like many of the “young and strong and clean” men who marched into this war, my amateur photographer stepfather went armed with his camera, and the snapshots he captured endure as relics of this transformative event. Viewed only a handful of times in the decades since their capture, they offer an intimate view into the experiences of their creator, photographs innocent of political agenda and free from the weighty associations that overly familiar images may carry. As much as any photographs can be, they are a simple testament to a moment in time.

In my practice I have come to see the visual effects of the glitch as a symbol of breakdown and decay, of the transient nature of life. Mobilising the glitch in this way allows me entry to wider reflections on the nature of mortality and remembering, and the way we collectively and as individuals relate to these themes."

Emily Sandrussi is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, having completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the same institution in 2013 for which she was awarded the University Medal.

She was a finalist this year in the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne and the prize forContemporary Landscapes in Photography, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth. Emily Sandrussi is recipient of the 2013 Artereal Gallery Mentorship Award offered in association with Sydney College of the Arts, and Domino Theory is her culminating solo exhibition from that program. In 2014 Emily Sandrussi was a finalist in the Blake Prize and was the winner of the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award as awarded by the Blake Society.

OWEN LEONG / VIDEO INTERVIEW

Owen Leong discusses the making of his recent body of work Bloodmilk

With thanks to Veronica Habib for creating this video

Photography, video, sculpture and installation are vehicles for Owen Leong’s unsettling yet seductive ‘story portraits’ that blur the boundaries between his real and performed selves. His body is a participatory force, co-opted as image and object; an expressive medium for his politically and culturally freighted images and themes of cultural disembodiment and constructions of power and is a persuasive platform for the making and un-making of social meanings and values.

The Bloodmilk series of confronting yet poignant photographs captures self and family images as half-length portraits that explore the complexities and power of human connection, and the anxieties of belonging and not belonging.

Owen Leong, an artist, growing up Asian in Australia, enters into psycho/physical narratives of identity and displacement between cultures.

A sexual and fetishistic undertone pervades his works and is a potent metaphor for the tension and politics of gender and cultural power plays.

A vocabulary of materials: rubber hoods and masks to disguise; metal surgical restraints to discipline and control; and modeled body organs, hearts, limbs and veins fashioned from crystal, wax and leather that are hand-held, external and exposed, are charged symbols of dominance and submission.

Infinite Love, a videoed performance, depicts an intimate close-up of the artist with an oral surgical device keeping his mouth forcibly open. White liquid drips into and over his gaping mouth from a sculpted human heart cast from frozen milk. The sequence closes in a miasma of white glutinous fluid filling the screen. Leong’s positioning of an Asian-Australian body subsumed by what he terms a ‘hegemonic Whiteness” is a visceral, haunting observation on “the shifting narratives of identity, race, and power in contemporary Australia”. Leong’s Infinite Love has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious APB Foundation Signature Art Prize 2014 to be exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum.

Blood and milk, signaling family, lineage, and the corporeal are coupled for the exhibition title. Along with honey, wax and ‘embalmed’ plant forms that stand in for the body, these substances are metaphor for survival, preservation and the life force, a pervasive concept in Leong’s works. Bloodmilk is significant for the gesture towards healing carried within these materials, and the artist’s engagement with Chinese medicine, philosophy and systems of knowledge imbedded in his Asian heritage. Leong’s body is a site for the artist’s enactment of a consciousness of race, sexuality and culture and for a wider genre of the human condition.

Owen Leong has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. He has held solo exhibitions at Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney; Sherman Galleries, Sydney; Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne; and Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane. His work has been included in major international group exhibitions at the Liverpool Biennial Independents, Liverpool; National Museum of Poznan, Poland; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; and Today Art Museum, Beijing.

Recent exhibitions include Tidal Skin, Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne (2012); Infiltrator, dianne tanzer gallery + projects, Melbourne (2012); and Infiltrator, Grantpirrie Gallery, Sydney (2011). Group exhibitions include Fables of Change, Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art, Russia (2014);Phantom Limb, UTS Gallery, Sydney (2013); Make Up: painted faces in contemporary photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2013); and Magic Spaces, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2011).

Important national photography prizes include his recent selection as a finalist in both the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award and Bowness Photography Prize, and a three-time finalist in the Helen Lemprière Traveling Art Scholarship. Owen Leong has been the recipient of several awards and grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Art Gallery of NSW and Asialink. He has held residencies at Artspace, Sydney; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan. Owen Leong will take up a Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency in Shanghai, China in 2015. 

Owen Leong is also a current finalist in the Blake Prize which can be seen at UNSW Gallery until 31 January 2015.

CLAUDE JONES / BROKEN

This November, Artereal Gallery will present a new exhibition by Claude Jones. Entitled Broken, the exhibition showcases the artist’s widening oeuvre, working in ceramics in addition to her acclaimed prints, continuing her preoccupation with animal rights and the role human intervention plays in animal biology. 

“My practice is motivated by a strong conviction in the need to re-assess our relationship with other animals – to consider their sentience and to approach more ethical ways of co-existing with them,” said Jones. 

Despite the challenging and often distressing themes that inform her work, at first glance they appear innocent, playful and reminiscent of storybook illustrations. The delicacy of drawing, fragility of the ceramic material, use of soft colour and fairytale-like guise of the work acts as a potent yet grim reminder of the impact of man’s hypocrisy. 

“Our human-centric perspective of the animal world positions rabbits, for example, as both cuddly companion animals but also as meat and fur “products”. We support an industry that raises millions of pets that are accepted members of families yet trap, cage, torture and kill billions of animals annually for food. My work seeks to expose such obvious contradictions in the face of widespread, culturally ingrained acceptance of this division” she said. 

New Zealand born Jones has traveled widely, studying, teaching and exhibiting around Australia and abroad. Her works are represented in numerous public and private collections including Artbank, The Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum in the U.S.A. 

Broken will be on show at Artereal for the month of November, beginning Wednesday 5 and running until Saturday 29 November 2014. 

The above video shares a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this latest body of work. Special thanks to Naomi Doras for filming and producing this video.

SUN TO SUN / CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW AND SIMONE DOUGLAS

This September, two internationally renowned photographers; London-based Christopher Bucklow and NYC-based Simone Douglas, have come together from across continents and hemispheres to explore their shared preoccupation with the ultimate natural light source, the sun, in a new exhibition at Artereal Gallery. 

Entitled Sun to Sun, the exhibition takes the form of a visual dialogue, with the enigmatic work of Simone Douglas responding to Christopher Bucklow’s acclaimed pin-hole photographic works. Marking their very first collaborative exhibition, Sun to Sun is the culmination of decades of dialogue between the artists, not only as peers but also close friends and admirers of each other’s work. 

“When we first met in 1994, we were immediately drawn to each others work. I was profoundly mesmerized by Chris’ images and way of working with light, the sun. This exhibition is the culmination of a long conversation that has continued across countries and time zones,” said Douglas. 

As one of the leading figures of the contemporary British ‘camera-less’ photography movement, Christopher Bucklow is known for his ethereal silhouettes of radiant men and women composed of thousands of pinhole photographs of the sun. His works are held within the world’s leading public art collections including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, amongst others.

Simone Douglas commented: “As I first came into view of Chris’s work, I was profoundly struck by the duality of the body as made by multiple suns. I had been working with the singular sun and here was this artist who had filled the body with hundreds of suns via a camera-less technique that for all intents and purposes was indexical. It was a continuation of a long held desire to ‘fall into the universe’”. 

Currently working as the Director of the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School for Design, Douglas has been exhibiting since the late 1980s across photography, video and installation. She has exhibited at and has work held in the collections of the Victor & Albert Museum London, The Tate Modern, London The Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, amongst others. 

In her new body of work, Douglas responds to Bucklow’s work with photographs that capture fractured snapshots of natural elements, evoking both the landscape and an almost primal connection to nature. 

“In the most remote, darkest corner of our universe, there is still light. A camera is a contemporary holder of light. I use a camera at times as it enables me to hold light as it were in my hands, to shape it. A final work might involve an image made using light and the camera conduit of light,” said Douglas. 

Christopher Bucklow commented: “While there are figures in my work, to me the spaces of Simone’s work are aspects of the human too. The landscape of the Australian interior is human, it’s a metaphor for a state of mind, almost a Zen-like field of being rather than a collected ‘particle of individual consciousness.” 

“Photography, a contemporary medium of light, has been in revolution since its inception. Even before it existed, the idea of it, the holder of light, was a radical departure from the way we saw ourselves and the world around us,” said Douglas.

Sun to Sun will be on show at Artereal for the month of September, beginning 3 September and running until 4 October 2014. 

The above video documents Simone Douglas' recent Artist Talk at Artereal Gallery. Special thanks to Veronica Habib for producing this video.

CHERINE FAHD / INTERVIEW FOR DAS PLATFORMS

Cherine Fahd talks to Nick Garner about her current show Camouflage. Several works from the series were recently included in the pictorial Masked Affect by Daniel Mudie Cunningham in Das Superpaper Issue 29, Irrational Agents: Gender, Economics and Affect, guest-edited by Alys Moody.

To watch the video interview click here.

Cherine Fahd’s Camouflage series of photographic self images runs counter to trend in this age of narcissism when the cult of the ‘selfie’ is rampant and its forms of digitally generated self portrait, typically taken with a handheld smartphone, are destined for upload and maximum dissemination via social media networks.

In a game of disguise, of ‘now you see me - now you don’t’ in her recent Camouflage works, Cherine Fahd seeks to conceal as much as she reveals of the self in a continuation of her quest since 2006 to test ideas of disclosure in portraiture.

Cherine Fahd subverts the convention of photo portraiture where the face and body are the focus. In Camouflage they are mostly hidden; concealed behind geometric planes of intense solid colours which allude to the style and visual language of painting and hard edge abstraction. The coloured expanses are interrupted with only the minimal protrusion of a part.

CAMILLE HANNAH: VIDEO INTERVIEW...

Michel Lawrence from Inside Art interviews Camille Hannah about her work and practice. Camille's work can currently be seen at Artereal Gallery as part of Paint13 until June 1st, 2013.

"Harnessing the contemporary aesthetic of mediated visuality, my paintings are contextualized by their status as a non-photographic image in a world dominated by the screen, traversing the paradox between the prohibition of touch in relation to digital technology and art – and an erotic’s of painting. From this base these works reference the history of painting and the digital as a power. Through the use of visual strategies, large- scale format, and the reversal of the painted surface, the viewer is looking through a clear plastic ‘screen’ at the reverse of the work. These paintings aim to explore alternative models of spatio-temporal representation, creating spaces where multi-layered planes of realities force estrangement, triggering a perceptual shift in our viewing of the space/time continuum. They offer a new way to respond to what the ‘visual’ is, in a context of technical images, and by doing so, position the medium as an active participant throughout our digital future." 

(Camille Hannah, Artist Statement, 2013).

 Camille Hannah_install shot_2013

 Camille Hannah_Fragment 5 - Aphrodite_2012_oil and acrylic on aluminium_240 x240cm

 Camille Hannah_Leviticus List_2012_oil and acrylic on aluminium_240 x240cm