1 CACH

EBlackfriars off Broadway

CACH

E 11 November - 22 December 2009

Brian Blanchflower

Robert Boynes

John Citizen

Domenico de Clario

Mikala Dwyer

Kim Yong Hun

Janet Laurence

Ruark Lewis

Anne MacDonald

Eva Marosy-Weide

Arone Meeks

Tracey Moffatt

Michael Nelson Tjakamarra

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

We would like to thank

Bronwyn Bancroft, Merilyn Fairskye and Gary Sangster

for curating the show

Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Co-operative

John Buckley Gallery Melbourne

Greenaway Gallery Adelaide

Leeuwin Estate

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney

Joyce Parszos

Anthony Wallis

and all the exhibiting artists who made Cache possible.

3

Viscopy is Australasia’s rights management organisation for the visual arts. Viscopy provides

copyright licensing services in Australia and New Zealand for a wide and varied customer base

on behalf of our members. We represent over 7,000 Australian and New Zealand artists and their

beneficiaries.

Our membership includes many famous names as well as up and coming artists. Indigenous artists

account for almost half of our membership. Viscopy represents approximately 43% of all artists in

Australia and New Zealand. We also represent some 40,000 international artists and beneficiaries

of artists’ estates in the Australasian territory through reciprocal agreements with 45 visual arts

rights management agencies around the world.

Blackfriars off Broadway is Viscopy’s new exhibition space for artists located at our premises in

Chippendale, Sydney. An annual exhibition program is planned which aims to showcase the quality,

beauty and diversity of the visual art created by our members, providing opportunities to stimulate

new licensing ideas amongst our customers. We are delighted to launch this new space with our

inaugural exhibition, Cache which features artists from every state and territory in Australia.

We should like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Gary Sangster who wrote the

essay for this catalogue and helped curate Cache. Currently a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts,

University of NSW, Gary Sangster has international experience as an art educator, curator, writer,

and museums director in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the USA. He has organised more than

100 museums exhibitions, including several groundbreaking, collaborative projects.

For more information about Blackfriars off Broadway, please telephone 02 9310 2018.

Blackfriars off Broadway

We would like to thank

Bronwyn Bancroft, Merilyn Fairskye and Gary Sangster

for curating the show

Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Co-operative

John Buckley Gallery Melbourne

Greenaway Gallery Adelaide

Leeuwin Estate

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney

Joyce Parszos

Anthony Wallis

and all the exhibiting artists who made Cache possible.

4

One question we could ask is what does a jet-black canvas painting tell us? What do we see?

How can we respond to it? What do we know by looking at it? Or what can we say of a circular

black and white photograph of a tightly arranged bouquet of artificial flowers? Or what do we

see in the ghosts and shadows of deep night paintings of French city architecture, or looking

through an image of a giant lens trained on an indeterminate landscape.

In a large painting, a figure turned away from us almost obliterated by intrusive, splotched

paint is one half of a diptych. In the other half of the picture, the representation is entirely

indistinguishable. Then there is a costumed child, posing, stock-still for the camera, situated

in a backyard with nondescript backdrop of a prosaic shed. Is it a snapshot of a child cast

member of Planet of the Apes, or a strange and sad party document, or a weird projection of

animistic substitution?

Combined in the ensemble exhibition Cache that launches Viscopy’s new gallery space,

Blackfriars off Broadway, we see a varied collation of different kinds of fictive, imaginative,

and discursive visual art. It is a group exhibition with diffident reservations about the status

of the group. There is, self-consciously, little alignment and indistinct correlations. But there

are particular statements, precise alternations, and there is a unified sense of dexterous

presence, delicate lines, seductive surfaces, visual constructions and inferences, and distinct

and indistinct material pleasures.

While there is no underlying premise or specific thematic embedded in Cache that does not

mean it is not a highly constructed and precise experience. The curatorial strategy behind

the exhibition provides an opportunity to animate the discussions surrounding the nature of

implied narrative and emergent meaning in any range of collocated visual art. The inherent

quality and success of this exhibition depends exactly on the logic and history of the artists on

display. The production of meaning and narrative intent is an emergent process in which form,

gesture, and material artifact operate semiotically to conjure memories, suggest associations,

or stimulate visual pleasure.

Art and nothing but Art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life...

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Cache

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The world of art and the world of images exist in a complex and fertile moment that is

held in tension by unprecedented changes in access to and exchange of knowledge. In

our technology-driven society which disputes empathy, values, and meaning in favor of

reductive systems, functionalism, and instrumentality, social exchange is surprisingly and

compulsively interpretative, reiterating forms of discussion and twisting words and meanings

to classify, codify, and quantify human spirit and emotive interactions.

Art, at least since the advent of Modernism, has been split along various axes that create

seemingly irreconcilable differences. At least three kinds of division can be identified, the

first being the division between the perceptual and the conceptual. A later, more subtle

variety, exemplified by the ground-breaking work of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, divides

along an axis of the spiritual and the material. A more recent bifurcation exists between

notions of the expressive or the gestural, and the artificial or the technologized. In this

context art is no longer just a representation or visualization of the world, it is a witness

and evidentiary-based statement of fact, connected causally to a maker, a creator, an artist.

The instrumental value of art is circuitously connected, through provenance of transitional

ownership, to the originating gesture of the hand, body, and neurology of the artist. This is

the palpable fact that makes art and the control and operation of images so significant.

Cache is an exhibition that presents a range of both emerging and established artists whose

work is characterized by a sophisticated and nuanced accomplishment in traditional and

new media. The exhibition is both a cache of form and style, and an evocative display of

the artists’ commitment to their professional role within the arts economy through their

membership of Viscopy, Australia’s not-for-profit rights management organisation committed

to preserving and guaranteeing their rights as creative practitioners and producers of

materially and economically significant objects, images, and artifacts.

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John Citizen, Interior (Stacking Chairs) 2005, acrylic on linen, 101 x 101 cm.

Photography John O’Brien. Courtesy Greenaway Gallery Adelaide.

© John Citizen, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Gordon Bennett has been recognized as one of the foremost Australian artists of his

generation. He has constrained the force of identity politics and identity aesthetics in his

work. By deploying strategies of deflection, concealment, and containment in constructing

his images he has resisted the descriptor of Aboriginal artist, while never denying his

Indigenous identity. In a stylized and bland “IKEA” interior, Bennett has presented

the ordered inhabitable space of his assumed and precisely defined persona; the

unremarkable, undistinguished morality and socially repressed sensibility of John Citizen.

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Robert Boynes, Next Exit, 2009, acrylic on canvas - diptych, 120 x 164 cm.

Courtesy Brenda May Gallery Sydney. Photography Robert Boynes.

© Robert Boynes, licensed by Viscopy 2009

John Citizen, Interior (Stacking Chairs) 2005, acrylic on linen, 101 x 101 cm.

Photography John O’Brien. Courtesy Greenaway Gallery Adelaide.

© John Citizen, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Robert Boynes is a painter and print-maker, whose work engages with the narrativity of

cinematic forms in a deliberate and precisely expressive manner. His work acknowledges

the inevitability of the narrative inherent in all painting, where a picture is a single

selection from an infinite range of possible configurations of elements in time and space.

But Boynes double-downs on the contemporary experience of media-driven perceptions

of time, space, and story-lines, allowing figures in motion to be arrested in a vibrant and

present urban landscape, and creating a taut, tense vision that invites reflection within the

cryptic, crowded physicality of contemporary life.

8

Brian Blanchflower, UNNAM(E)ABLE (black on red), July/August 2005, oils, acrylic, pumice powder, silica powder, on cotton/

linen canvas, 61.25 x 41 x 3.5 cm. Photography Brian Blanchflower.

© Brian Blanchflower, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Brian Blanchflower is a painter who explores color and form in a reductive system of

painting that creates meaning by implication and visual effect. A black painting is never

entirely black, can never be entirely dark, as no defined quality of blackness can ever be

achieved. And what can be said through a black painting as hardly constrained; the notion

of darkness, death, nocturne, heaviness, depth, density, invisibility, danger, morbidity

can all retain efficacy in front of an abstract black canvas painting. In conversation,

Blanchflower has suggested “that black is the most substantial colour, yet it is the colour

of space itself.”

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Domenico de Clario, Left: o (le sacre coeur and rue saint rustique), Right: i (place du tertre), 2008/09, oil and acrylic

on primed linen, 50 x 30 cm. Photography Daniel Dorall. Courtesy John Buckley Gallery Melbourne

© Domenico de Clario, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Domenico de Clario’s work is an inviting meditation on memory and evocation of

melancholy through paintings of place. Beginning with the intimate architectural and

cityscape paintings of Montmartre by Maurice Utrillo, and connecting those conceptually

to his own birthplace of Trieste, de Clario arrives at system of producing a “shadow-trace”

which is a negative imprint of a positive image. It is an attempt to turn down the light of

a visible painterly representation of space, to discard readily available information, and

to create, through deep, dark shadows, a world of more tangible substance, an ethereal

world of structural essence permeated with psychological and visceral longing.

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Mikala Dwyer, 31, 2009, couch, wood, wine, books, paint 260 × 170 × 70cm.

Photography: Ivan Buljan. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

© Mikala Dwyer, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Mikala Dwyer is a conceptual sculptor and installation artist. In her recent works she

has adopted an approach of eclectic compilation, in which forms, objects, and symbols

are collated and arranged, rearranged and reconfigured. Her work presents a lexicon

of articles and references that compose the rituals and habits of daily experience. As

much as the grammar of these systems can be opaque, yet at the same time playfully

or meditatively sensuous, she creates variable kinds of mystical, cosmological survival

guides.

11

Kim Yong Hun, Tiburonia granrojo (Still), 2009, GIF animation (continuous loop).

Photography Kim Yong Hun.

© Kim Yong Hun, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Kim Yong Hun is a younger artist whose work engages with new modes of communication

and altered forms of expression available through accessing and manipulating distributive

possibilities in developing technology. In his work Mobius, a series of infinitely repeated

loops of animated GIF’s, the artist selects one apple from three to eat, ad infinitum. It is

simplistic gesture, only enhanced by the looping repetition; performed for the camera to

erase any sense of boundary between beginning and end, start to finish, of a gesture or

experience. In this way he suggests links between binary opposites of such states as order

and disorder, beauty and ugliness, or good and evil, which make the flow between, and

transformation of, rigid states of being a potentially more fluid and productive encounter.

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Janet Laurence, THE LIE IN THE LENS ed 1 of 3, duraclear acrylic dibond mirror, 700 x 1000mm

Photography Janet Laurence.

© Janet Laurence, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Janet Laurence has developed work around imagery of the landscape that both suggests

and frames notions of the fragility of the environment. In this work, she has used

laboratory glass vessels to blur and smudge our vision of the Styx Forest in Tasmania. The

subject matter, materials, and the technique combine to raise the questions of visibility,

legibility and accountability. Laurence views the glass as a kind of scientific forensic lens,

producing evidence and clarifying visual data. But in this case the effect is reversed, and

the science, while accurate, is deeply flawed, producing an indistinct, inarticulate view of

nature.

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Ruark Lewis, AN INDEX OF KINDNESS, 2009, from AN INDEX FOR THE HOMELESS, aerosol on canvas / stencil,

100 x 200 cm. Photography Ruark Lewis.

© Ruark Lewis licensed by Viscopy 2009

Ruark Lewis has entered an arena of socially conscious, linguistically constructed work

that compresses several different ideas and reference points into single system, and

in so doing triggers a wide variety of systematic inferences and visual possibilities and

projects. So is an excerpt from a series of explorations in painting and graphics that

expose all the possible words embedded in the letters for the term Homelessness. The

letters, the words, the fragmented defining term, become modular and transportable, as

the artist explores a system for redefining and reanimating attitudes and descriptions of

homelessness. Lewis’ work operates at the edge of paradox in pursuing non-didactic

poetic forms without effacing the painful realties of lived experience and contemporary

dislocation.

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Anne MacDonald, Ornament 8.2, 2008, Fine art ink-jet print , Image 83cm, framed 93cm diameter.

Photography Anne MacDonald.

© Anne MacDonald, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Anne MacDonald frequently uses deep, rich colors and imagery of folded, draped fabrics,

or delicate fragments of lace or fragile flower petals to evoke darker thoughts of desire,

gentle memories of compassion, and most certainly the imaginary stories of lost love

and elusive passion. MacDonald’s work has the capacity to both arrest the viewer,

slowing them to a standstill, as well as being able to excite the deeper recesses of their

imagination. Her work inevitably speaks to questions of identity, about who we are and

what triggers and constitutes our compelling relationships to others.

15

Eva Marosy-Weide, Still from SETS OF CIRCUMSTANCE-FERRYMAN © 2008, single channel video, stereo

sound; 3 mins 10 secs, looped. Photography Eva Marosy-Weide.

© Eva Marosy-Weide, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Eva Marosy-Weide is a photographer and video artist, with training in psychology and art.

A poetic narrative that reveals the undertow in our connection to place, identity and space

underpins her visual work. Her video Sets Of Circumstance-Ferryman explores the act

of beginning a journey. In slow-to-stalled motion, an unseen internal rhythm enacted by

the water dragging backward and forward hinders visible progress, holding the audience

in a kind of mesmerizing stasis. The oar pushes into the current and there is a sense

of urgency, but the ferryman maintains a gentle pace. The result of the process is not

entirely clarified and there is a hint of danger in this entropic enterprise.

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Arone Meeks, This Healing Place, Screenprint (4 plate), Edition 45, 57 x 76 cm.

Photography Kerry Colrain.

© Arone Meeks, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Arone Meeks’ work in the exhibition, The Healing Place, combines Aboriginal motifs and

narrative forms with echoes of modernist form, especially post-war surrealism. The logic

of connecting Indigenous interpretations of spirituality with modernist notions of physic

interpretations of dream-space provides an evocative channel to connect traditional

imagery with contemporary experience.

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Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Bushfire Dreaming, 1986, Tapestry, Atelier Pinton Aubusson France 2007,

Private Collection, 170 x 253 cm © Clifford Possum Estate. Licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency & Viscopy

2009, Photography by Richard Glover.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is one of Australia’s most acclaimed Indigenous artists.

His graphic style exemplifies the Papunya Tula dot painting that has gained remarkable

credibility for its capacity to negotiate a position within western aesthetic while maintaining

a compelling representation of Indigenous identity. Tjapaltjarri’s work is grounded in the

spiritual and cultural systems of belief that revolve around the notions of The Dreaming

which constitutes Aboriginal law, history, and lore (dreaming stories.) The large tapestry

work included in the exhibition, Bushfire Dreaming, narrates a natural, recurring, and

regenerative environmental event in Australian and Aboriginal history, and as an artifact,

is an interesting example of extending his imagery into an exquisite aesthetic/functional

product.

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Tracey Moffatt, Planet of the Apes, 1973, Backyard Series, Off set print on Natural Snow Gum paper using light fast ink 44

× 35.5cm, Edition of 60. From the Boomalli Collection. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney, Photography Richard Glover

© Tracey Moffatt, licensed by Viscopy 2009

Tracey Moffatt is an internationally recognized artist working with video and photography,

whose work has proved adept at negotiating the politics of race and class in subtle and

evocative ways. Her work is emotional without being emotive, and she has imbued much

of her best work with poignancy and sadness, without conflating the underlying savagery of

social and cultural dislocation. This lifeless snapshot image of a child in a creepy Planet

of the Apes costume, taken from her painfully wistful Backyard series of down market

images, contains a redolent sense of sadness; of the inevitability of succumbing to the

fictions of Hollywood-dreaming in an improbable, inhospitable environment.

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Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, New Country, 2002, acrylic on canvas 121 x 151cm.

Courtesy Boomalli Collection. Photography Richard Glover.

© Michael Nelson Tjakamarra, licensed by AAA and Viscopy 2009

Michael Nelson Tjakamarra’s astonishing visual skills and sense of form and color in

constructing traditional Aboriginal narrative forms have ensured he is viewed as one of

the finest traditional Indigenous artists. His work consistently explored visual fields and

color planes that have readily extended and transcended the structured formal elements

of traditional Aboriginal motifs and strategies. In this way he has opened up the language

of Aboriginal painting for a far broader range of expert and casual audiences, curious to

discover the elaborate spiritual and tribal messages embedded in the prosaic beauty of

Aboriginal cultural forms.

© Gary Sangster 2009

CACHEViscopy

1 Blackfriars Street, Chippendale NSW 2008

ABN 98 069 759 922

Phone : 02 9310 2018

Fax 02 9310 3864

Email: Bob@viscopy.com