2016 : 8 BARRY MOUSLEY - SEPTEMBER 2016

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC  8# 2016 

BARRY MOUSLEY, Diorama (2016)

Mixed media installation

Current: September, 2016

View at: 79 Main Street BEEAC

… a lake in the window …

Think heraldry, stained glass, illustrated manuscripts – the impetus behind medieval imagery is instructive: this is the setting, this is the story, these are the characters. If you can’t read the story, you can see it.

Corrunnen artist, Barry Mousley, cites medieval manuscripts and stained glass as formative influences on his work. These ‘early’ practices might appear at odds with Mousley’s world, his contemporary documentation of changes in a unique and fragile Ramsar Lake zone and his specialization in Australian wildlife, particularly endangered & lesser known species. How do medieval imagery and contemporary nature resolve, visually?


Like the ‘authors’ of manuscript and glass, Mousley is inspired by a desire to record, to share, to tell, to show. To wit, BM: ‘You know it’s been pretty windy. There was this awful rattle in our chimney. I thought Uh Oh. It settled and then happened again. In the still I went outside and this is what I found.’ Mousley whips out his wee camera, No 2#. There on a chimney are the angular shapes of a cormorant! Now, only now, this writer knows there are cormorants in these parts; has seen one on Barry’s chimney. Clear, informative, exciting. Expect a cormorant to appear by Mousley’s hand, soon.

While his work is literal, it play tricks – tromp d’oeil, Escher-like, but above all Mousley’s art is ‘loving’: a caress detected in the infinite subtlety of what appears such fidelity, is what sets it apart. There is a glow in the attention to subject accuracy, not slavish verisimilitude. There is a warmth and fervor in the desire to share a knowledge of what has been seen and found – in his locality – and Mousley renders this desire.

His works are not fictions, nor intellectual constructs, rather evidence of delight and joy in marvels of the natural world. Where Attenborough hugs a chimp or grovels with a gorilla, Mousley hugs the paints and grounds, shapes and colours that allow him to share with such delight what he has seen around him. His work is his ‘manuscript’ of this experience, his means to share the story of what is precious around him.

Mousley’s visual interests are anchored and informed by his practical engagement with Birds Australia, Parks Victoria, the Wildlife Arts Society and Greening Australia. His talent is to bring his interest in the natural world and his visual capabilities together in the humming unison of an irresistible story that everyone can ‘read’.

AS

2016 : 7 TONY WOODS AUGUST 2016

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC   

TONY WOODS,  Untitled,  (1966)

Acrylic on linen

Current: August  2016

79 Main Street BEEAC

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC welcomes the work of 

Tony Woods

Let’s call it ‘The Runners’ - the work is from May 1966. 

It is the first in what is hoped will be an annual series of ‘favourite paintings’.
Paintings have been almost non-existant in WINDOWSPACE which seems to lend itself to installations, and performance. By contrast ‘the painting’ is strangely static, so this change of pace will be interesting, (if taunted by the subject in this instance).

Winter is a good time to sit back and look at someone else's work. 
This favourite painting is inherited. 
For some time in the 1970s it hung in a Melbourne advertising agency on St Kilda Road, later it moved to a suburban living room and then .... 

Woods is a venerable painter - painting is what he has been doing all his life (although he also works with film and print-making). 
This dedication requires a certain asceticism but does not exclude experimentation, certainly not, in the case of Woods, whose work is the result of constant experimentation. 

This work, ’The Runners’, was painted in New York when he was there on a Harkness Fellowship. Most of his work of that period was destroyed by fire, so this painting is unusual in his oeuvre, in that following the fire, Woods returned to the relative surety of a consummate graphic, rather than expressive, manner. Wood's father was a pattern cutter and the 'tracery' of that skill must have seeped into his son's graphic passions.

It is interesting to note that ACCA  (Melbourne) is currently showing the first of a series of two exhibitions titled 
Painting, More Painting - (1#) 30 July - 28 August 2016

Artists and paint have a tenacious relationship, no matter how the world changes the urge to paint persists.  Woods had a retrospective of his paintings at ACCA  6 June - 8 July 1990

The Tony Woods' painting on show at WINDOWSPACE in August has been a constant in this writer’s life and never tires in viewing. 
It is hoped others will enjoy its stint in the WINDOWSPACE.  

AS



Woods extensive CV can be viewed here:  http://www.tonywoods.com.au/Tony_Woods_Art/cv.html

TONY WOODS AT ACCA: 19

Tony Woods, Visual sequence, 1980 (detail). Courtesy the artist

TONY WOODS AT ACCA: 1981-1990

CHASING CAROLYN CARDINET

CAROLYN CARDINET'S LATEST :

Gertrude Street Projection Festival

Past City of Yarra artist in residence, Carolyn Cardinet was a participant in in the GSPF with light installation Swarming

tp://gspf.com.au/program/atherton-gardens-precinct/carolyn-cardinet-16/

Yarra Sculpture Gallery  -  July

CSA Members Survey Show presented a range of recent artworks by CSA members, including Cardinet

AND UP-COMING SHOWS and RESIDENCIES: 

Organic Plastic - Unicorn Gallery in Ballarat 19 August - 30 September 2016

Artist Residency at Can-Serrat Spain

mid September-mid October 2016

canserrat.org

Artist Residency - art+science @ Culture at Work, Sydney

November 2016

http://www.cultureatwork.com.au/culture-at-work-artist-in-residence-2016-carolyn-cardinet/

and concluding show

Cardinet has been selected for Immerse to show across Knox City Victoria, early November to early December.

WINDOWSPACE is happy to disseminate news of exhibitors' work.

2016 : 6 ANNA SANDE JULY 2016

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC  

ANNA SANDE, Enough (2016)

Pale textiles, rods of various dimensions

Current: July,  2016

79 Main Street BEEAC

In the 1970s I sewed some of my favourite old clothes into shapes that made the letters

M E M O R I E S. Then I stuffed them, cushion-like and hung them up. For a while they were on show with the Victorian Sculptors’ collective, in Melbourne’s CBD. A tradesman came to my house soon after that show – my stuffed clothes were now hanging on my wall. He remarked that he had seen them in the city. It’s not just women who feel something for old clothes.

In the 2000s I wrote an article for the Craft Victoria magazine, an issue devoted to textiles.

Order and sentiment – the ambiguous place of the flag. It began:

What textile is it that drapes the dead, warns of pestilence, rises in celebration, confers rank, is at the fore in war, is inverted in distress, lowered in respect, dipped in deference, planted in possession and principally worn or borne by men?

Flags dress the body of the nation. They promote cause and presence. Flags are the precursors of logos and branding, those frontline images that lurk in the subconscious and only flirt with the realities of the whole. (Full article: anna-sande.com.au)

I had been inspired to write about flags because for many days I passed an exhibition outside the Melbourne Museum, a collaboration conceived and created by local artist Glenn Romanis and British-born, Angus Watt, the Lines of Place banner installation was to be in situ for 60 days, (in fact it remained for longer).

In 2005 I had a show at Conical, Fitzroy, Did I leave anything behind – T-shirts I had made and images of the locations where I made them.

Now I have a strong urge to reach for textiles again – to make a statement about much of what is going on in the world today – improvised white flags.   AS

noun: white flag;

a white flag or cloth used as a symbol of surrender, truce, or a desire to parley.

Thank you to Tony Carlon for assistance with installation, and thank you to Marion Gaylard, Suzanne Frydman and Ean McDowell for textile contributions.

2016 : 5 EMIL TOONEN JUNE 2016

2016 - 5    EMIL TOONEN

    

CONTROLLED FALL

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC   JUNE 2016

Emil Toonen’s work could be a slow process. First objects have to be sighted, (they are not on the shelf), then pondered, possibly allied with others, and then ultimately coaxed into being – this requires serendipity, an eye, contemplation, awareness of the nature and capability of materials, a feel for weird combinations and finally there is the making, or shaping, of a ‘work’. Many of Toonen’s objects do ‘work’ – they blink, whirl, spin, nod and make you laugh.

Toonen’s thinking is wry and his media exceptionally various. Since he grew up in the Strzelecki Ranges in south east Victoria – mirror location to the volcanic grassy plains and salt lake area of south west Victoria – could it be, that accustomed to the natural environment, his eye responds with greater alacrity, analysis and wit to the ‘unnatural’. That rather than ‘bin it’ he pokes and prods ‘waste’ to see what it’s worth, what it gives up, where it sits in his firmament of senses, sentiment and response. Politics are not free of his estimation either.

Consumer Pillar, 2015

There has long been an Australian sculptural school that thrives on the found – Robert Klippel and Rosalie Gascoigne, come to mind – their work usually with a focus on a particular material. Toonen upends that safety somehow, (developing Duchamp, a Fountain that moves?) It is as though he refuses to accept the staus quo: this is not that, it could be this, think about it, play with it, let it play with you … Toonen describes himself as ‘a Melbourne-based artist working with the manipulation of consumer detritus for creatively liberating outcomes’.

Toonen’s fun is deceptive, to this writer’s mind. It blinks at darker matter, while making us laugh (uncomfortably?) in recognition.

Untitled, petrified wood, 2016

In no particular order, a list of some works might illustrate the complexities Toonen brings play:

Ski Table, (2013), 930x1290x380mm

Skis, plywood, paper pulp

Concrete Symbol, (2015), 400x530x250mm

Cement paper

Light Projector, (2012), 55x200x55mm

Lens, led downlight, electrical fittings, aluminium bottle, aluminium tape

Consumer Pillar, (2015), 1170x120x120mm

Plaster aluminium paint

Camera Graft, (2009), 117x90x137mm

Digital camera, VHS camera lens, plumbing fittings, polymer clay, aluminium tape

Resort Sign, (2013), 107x354x30mm

Sardine Tins, Paint, El Wire, Power Supply

Bin Idol, (2015), 1230x330x300mm

Resin pigment, glass, electronics, pump, water, steel, paint, rubber

Kettle Motor, (2012), 720x360x130mm

Electric kettle, soup tin, steel pipe, pneumatic fittings, silicone, synthetic paint

Of his recent political observations made palpable  –  a row of white pickets bearing prime ministerial portraits Argh, 2015 (ongoing)  –  Toonen makes the comment: By combining … portraits of Australian prime ministers the piece becomes charged and open to interpretation: is this a comment on keeping out ‘boat people’? Are those hats some kind of cult regalia or is this a row of laughing clowns? Or conversely is it a feeble nationalistic embellishment to accompany a house flying the flag? The title Argh an acronym from Abbott, Rudd, Gillard and Howard steers the reading towards a expression of anguish with the state of recent Australian politics.

Artist concern regarding current politics is burgeoning - it is not hard to imagine why. For another example see Ben Quilty's soon to open show at Tolarno, The Stain.          AS