PERIPHERAL VISIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM AUSTRALIA
Curated by Marissa Bateman
Liam Benson, Santa, 2013 Pigment in ink on cotton rag paper
Edition of 5 + 2 AP’s 150 x 150cm (59.1 x 59.1in)
Featuring:
Vernon Ah Kee, Joel Beerden, Liam Benson, Stephen Bird, Nicholas Folland, Claire Healy & Sean Corderio, Dan Mckewen, Amanda Marburg and Phoebe Rathmell
Opening Reception: May 7, 2013 | 6PM - 8PM
Exhibition Dates: May 8 – June 14, 2013
Phoebe Rathmell performance: May 15, 2013 | 4:30PM – 8:30PM
Garis & Hahn is pleased to announce “Peripheral Visions: Contemporary Art from Australia,” curated by Marissa Bateman.
This exhibition showcases the most exciting artists from Australia’s contemporary art scene. Artists include Australia’s Venice Biennale representatives Vernon Ah Kee and Claire Healy & Sean Corderio as well as Joel Beerden, Stephen Bird, Nicholas Folland, Dan McKewen, Amanda Marburg and Phoebe Rathmell.
The works in Peripheral Visions will provide a tangential narrative for Australian art, which is all-too routinely associated with landscape painting. Australian-born curator, Marissa Bateman discusses the exhibition’s intention and focus:
“Peripheral Visions” carries multiple meanings and resonances. Most immediately it refers to Australia's peripheral positioning within the international art market, of which New York is the epicenter. With London’s art powerhouses Saatchi Gallery and the Royal Academy both staging surveys of Australian art in the next eighteen months, it seemed fitting to start this international engagement with the exceptional artistic talent emerging from Australia in the partly Australian-run New York gallery, Garis & Hahn."
Each artist was selected for their unique mark making processes with peripheral materials such as Plasticine and LEGO and are all unified by the occasion of the exhibition which marks the first time each artist will exhibit in New York – an astounding fact given that three of the artists (Vernon Ah Kee, Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro) have exhibited at the world’s most prestigious contemporary art event, the Venice Biennale.
The dynamic dialogue within the exhibition escapes an overarching academic theme and expands on topics such as urban/popular culture, gender, identity and indigenous/personal history. The diverse and multifaceted work will communicate a picture of contemporary Australia that many international observers may not have seen.
About the Curator
Marissa Bateman currently resides in both New York City & Sydney. She received her Masters of Art Administration, Bachelor of Art Theory at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Marissa was the Assistant Curator at the Australian Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale and was Associate Director at gallery Rex Irwin Art Dealer. She has also worked at Sotheby’s and Bonham’s and is currently an Art Advisor with 1858 International Art Advisory.
About Garis & Hahn
Garis & Hahn is a gallery-cum-Kunsthalle that mounts exhibitions focused on conceptual narratives and relevant conversations in contemporary art. By displaying an array of carefully curated artists, the gallery endeavors to provide accessibility, education, awareness, and a market to the art while engaging both the arts community and a broader general audience.
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday 11-7
Location
263 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Gallery Contact
info@garisandhahn.com
(P) 212.228.8457
Media Contact: Danielle Grant | A&O PR
(P) 415.860.0767 | (E) danielle@aopublic.com
About the Artists
Claire Healy & Sean Corderio (2009 Venice Biennale, Australian Pavilion)
Healy & Cordeiro represented Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale in the group exhibition Once Removed. (Please see attached CV for further details). Healy & Cordeiro will be exhibiting two large LEGO assemblages in the exhibition. (Please see attached images). On one of Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro's trips to Europe they made a pilgrimage to Denmark to Legoland. Cordeiro said that the time he spent in Legoland played tricks on his mind. After a while, "You can't figure out what's made out of Legos, and what isn't'. The married couple's Lego wall sculptures have the same effect. The artist's building process with this children's toy is simultaneously familiar and astonishing once you discern that the image is of an explosion. Interested in the notion of building something about destruction Healy & Cordeiro use press photos to depict the tragedy of the Challenger space shuttle explosion.
Vernon Ah Kee
Vernon Ah Kee was born in 1967 in Innisfail, Queensland, and is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. Ah Kee represented Australia at the 2009 Venice Biennale in the group exhibition Once Removed. Ah Kee will be exhibiting a large charcoal on canvas drawing. According to Ah Kee, Aboriginal art should be as varied as the lives of Aborigines: "My work is about my life now… I'm expanding the idea of what it means to be Aboriginal and what it means to be human. A lot of the problem this country has with Aboriginal people is that it struggles to see Aboriginal people as fully human."
Amanda Marburg
Amanda Marburg's distinctive paintings are the end product of an extended process involving photography and model making. The process begins with the artist photographing images from film and television, and the resulting snapshots are then used as a basis for building handmade models from Plasticine. The models are themselves then photographed and the snapshots used as blueprints for Marburg's oil-on-linen paintings. The journey Marburg takes in the production of her paintings is consequently a continual process of abstraction. This detachment from a depiction of the 'real' is accentuated in the paintings by a lack of surface texture, in contrast to the malleable Plasticine models in which the artist's hand, even her fingerprints, are visible.
Phoebe Rathmell
Phoebe Rathmell’s art making process is painstakingly slow and involves a meditative state. Whether the artist is constructing ground installations consisting of thousands of dyed toothpicks or producing minimalistic paintings reminiscent of Agnes Martin, Rathmell’s works encourage a perception of perfection through the reduction of elements and materials. However, on close inspection small flaws and unmistakable traces of the artist's hand are apparent. This process is evident from the minute marks that form the dense and softly delineated grids that cover her works.
Stephen Bird
There is nothing abstract about the handmade ceramic work of Stephen Bird. The artist’s work may conform superficially to the shapes of plates and bowls, but they all possess tiny narratives – ribald, scabrous, grotesque and irreverent. John McDonald respected art critic also noted, "They are also very funny, which is a rare quality in an art exhibition... The way he manages to get the texture of a dry biscuit into a sea of smooth glazes demonstrates a mastery of materials... The way he arranges objects in deep and shallow relief on a plate comes across as an oblique homage to the extraordinary works of the French Renaissance master, Bernard Palissy.”
Dan McKewen
Working primarily in the medium of digital video, Dan McKewen's artworks explore the intersection between the roles of the artist and viewer, as they engage with and consume popular culture. His appropriations and reconfigurations of elements from film and television are blatantly honest - the audience can see that he has slowed down, for example, a Katy Perry video clip. However, McKewen transforms this ordinary film clip into an other-worldly set of images, the pixels drip into painterly strokes that are utterly captivating as they oscillate from reality to abstraction.
Nicholas Folland
Nicholas Folland’s crystal/glass assemblages and work concerned with domestic interiors are extraordinary. Similar to Healy & Cordeiro, Bird, and Marburg, Folland creates a world in that is at once familiar but instantly odd. The artist’s hand is evident in the final artwork through a two part process – firstly through the careful selection of found objects and secondly through the assemblage of objects.
Joel Beerden
Joel Beerden is a painter’s painter. His marks are honest and confident. Bound to a rich Western landscape tradition, yet tantalized by the emotive intensity of Indigenous Australian painting, Beerden plays upon the visual familiarity of traditional Western landscape codes and breaks them down into a simple visual language. Beerden’s paintings are unique and have a more difficult, alluring beauty of the rugged Australian landscape that only emerges in the work of Indigenous Australian artists, and the works have an intuitive nature of painting itself with serendipitous mistakes made in the studio.
Liam Benson
Liam Benson’s face is well known in the Australian emerging art scene for his photographic self portrait and video works which recall the visual language of advertising in order to challenge common stereotypes and notions of identity. The Sydney based artist’s self-portraits, often depicting himself in drag, highlight the limitations of existing definitions surrounding gender and Australian national identity. One of the most striking elements of Benson’s practice is the optimistic spirit that shines through each work. Benson’s exploration of identity politics and social stereotypes is not heavy-handed but seeks to embrace and celebrate the very differences it highlights.
