CAROLYN CARDINET - WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC 7

CAROLYN CARDINET

Performance installation opening

Sun 6 September @ 11 am at WINDOWSPACE

79 Main Street BEEAC

SHOW CURRENT: SUN 6 SEPTEMBER - SAT 3 OCTOBER 2015

POETIC POLLUTION

Carolyn Cardinet's work is wry - deceptively so - she deals with deadly matters.

Figures suggest that there are 8 million tonnes of plastic waste entering the ocean each year. 

At least one million seabirds, and one-hundred thousand marine mammals die each year due to plastic pollution (Laist, 1997).
Ocean pollution is a carrier of invasive species. 
The problems go on and on and Susan George was bringing this to our attention in the 1960s.

http://www.theoceancleanup.com/the-problem.html?gclid=CPzO3uPfk8cCFdcSvQod7tAL9w 

Paris-born Cardinet's touch is European, her vigour Australian.

She is a medium sleuth – no material is too humble for her gaze or manipulation. Self-described as ‘an experimental artist  … (who moves) between site specific installation, sculptural assemblage, video and painting’ Cardinet seeks out the sensorial, poetic and provocative in the nature of materials and in so doing startles the viewer with her inventive and sometimes shocking ‘repurposing’.

Her recent show, White Trash, offered just such an experience: an assemblage of single-use white plastics, the found translucent materials created a poetic lure to draw the viewer near, only to startle with the very nature of the mediums.

Coming from the home of visual wit and repurposing - think Duchamp - Cardinet now lives and works in Australia, her original 2D practice has been suspended as her obsession with assemblage burgeons.

At WINDOWSPACE BEEAC she plans to create in situ with the locally found - thus adding another layer of surprise to her provocative oeuvre.
Her installation-performance will start 11 am. Sun 6 September.

The artist will also engage members of the Men’s Shed in her Beeac work. Details shortly.

Testament to the very contemporary nature of her work, Cardinet has been chosen as a participant in next year's Lorne Sculpture Prize and is a selected-exhibitor at the Yering Station Sculpture Award 2015.

See http://www.carolyncardinet.com/ for more of Cardinet's work.

OPENING THIS WEEK - CARDINET, HELLER

Join us at WINDOWSPACE this weekend, 

Sunday 6 September at 11 am,

watch CAROLYN CARDINET install her work 

employing found local materials.

Visit Manyung and Monsalvat and see more of Brigit Heller's found-materials sculpture:

Manyung Gallery Mt Eliza would like to invite you to

view the artist’s latest collection of sculptures.

Brigit Heller

Official opening on Friday 4 September, 6 – 8pm

Preview the exhibition online http://manyunggallery.com.au/Exhibit_Detail.cfm?ShowsID=164

1408 Nepean Hwy Mt Eliza

p. 03 9787 2953 e. staff@manyunggallery.com.au

The exhibition continues until the 27.9.15

Please join me the following weekend for the Montsalvat Arts Festival:

The arts precinct Montsalvat is celebrating its annual Arts Festival. Don’t miss their extensive program of events, exhibitions and talks.

I will be exhibiting an outdoor installation as well as give a talk about “nurturing creativity” followed by Mike’s response “living with a creative”.

The Arts Festival is on the 13^th of September 2015 between 10am-4pm

For more info and the purchase of tickets: http://www.montsalvat.com.au/WhatsOn/MontsalvatArtsFestival.aspx          

LINKS - HEAR THIS: WHY WE NEED THE ARTS – TWO FEISTY WOMEN

Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith on the writer's role and responsibility

Thurs 13 August 2015 – ABC RN - BOOKS AND ARTS

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/joanna-murray-smith-on-life-26-writing/6662858

Robyn Archer: on essential art, teaching and the Gold Coast

Wed 12 August 2015 – ABC RN - BOOKS AND ARTS

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandarts/robyn-archer-on-essential-art/6680232

MIREAM SALAMEH - WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC 6

MIREAM  SALAMEH

Current: Sun 9 August – Fri 4 September 2015

Miream Salameh was wrenched from her Syrian home. After her family gathered piece by piece in Lebanon they moved on to Australia in 2013. Although much of her art, and her ‘homeland’s deep-rooted civilization’, was left behind and has been destroyed or looted, Miream carries her sensitivities and capabilities with her, ‘between the folds of her soul’. Her art addresses ‘women’s freedom and the suffering of people being crucified for loving life and liberty’ (quotes from artist’s website).

                                                       Woman in stone (2011)

Salameh’s work in clay, wood, stone, and now 2D, materially speaks to the depths of her culture and the cry of her forced transitions. Her new 2D work references the physicality of her sculpture but with the migrant’s edge, indeed the migrant’s ‘double vision’. As Homi K Bhabha puts it: ‘the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with the newness that is not part of a continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new with an insurgent act of cultural translation’ (Location of Culture, 1994, 5). Art speaks too of urgent transition, and the pain often associated with unwanted mobility.

                                                          Untitled, Video still  (2015)

Salameh’s new work in Australia has resonance with that of Mona Hatoum. Hatoum was born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents and stranded in London in 1975 when war broke out in her home country. Salameh, from Homs, is similarly unable to return to her home country, Syria.

What do sedentary locals know of it … that distance, measured not by cold kilometers, but by the breath of warm familiar forms become shadowy, forms and sounds and calligraphy become chimeric, over time … thus Mona Hatoum’s composite video, Measures of Distance, (1988, video/stills/conversation over), in which the daughter gropes for the familiar heat of the mother, the very steam of home. Where Hatoum measures loss of ‘mother’, here Miream Salameh ‘measures’ loss of the motherland, and self, pressed against a wall that will not give, in a vale of tears. Each woman yearns for the motherland – perhaps in a way only women will admit, or examine.

                                               Untitled, Video still  (2015)

In 1986 Nikos Papastergiadis observed:

‘Migration makes you more conscious of the pattern of change and the requirements that change makes of you. You continually have to negotiate the positioning of your body and its surrounding space.’ (‘Culture, Self and Plurality’, Arena, 76, 1986, 51)

Displaced misplaced replaced – over time the migrant becomes another, and might conjure another life, or might forever live in the darkness of the past, among the discombobulating flicker of memories. The pressing loss of a telling patina is particularly acute for the artist – robbed, stolen from seminal sensitivities, and familiar means and vocabulary of creation, tossed into a vortex of the unfamiliar, the artist is particularly aware of the painfully strange, the necessary insurgency.

The visual cries of Miream Salameh and Hatoum, and many others, are a looking for ‘words’, a screaming for shapes – that will fit loss and re-configuration. The two dimensional images here are Salameh’s beginning, chaperoned as it were, by one of her few sculptures from the past, necessarily small because it has had to journey from Syria to Australia, with its breathless maker.

See more of Salameh’s work at http://mireamssl.wix.com/mireamsalameh

AS   2015