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Debut

Johanna Eustice, Cecilia Fogelberg, Kelley Glaister
Jim Hart, Eliza Hearsum, Anna-Maria O'Keeffe

20 January - 5 February 2005

Gallery One

 

Editions

Debut presents the work of six graduates who all completed Fine Arts courses in Melbourne at the end of 2004: Cecilia Fogelberg, Jim Hart and Eliza Hearsum all from VCA, Kelley Glaister and Anna-Maria O’Keeffe from Monash University and Johanna Eustice from RMIT. Their work was selected from among the fine art graduate shows that took place in Melbourne at the end of the year.

Graduate exhibitions are notoriously indigestible for their sheer size and the wildly fluctuating quality of the work on display. But they are also like an enormous bazaar where true gems lurk undiscovered by all but those willing to put in the leg work. With this in mind, we visited the numerous end-of-year shows with the purpose of unearthing some ‘finds’ and subsequently invited these six artists to exhibit with us. We believe their work merits another look, the closer look they can be afforded in this smaller, focused group, away from the razzle-dazzle circus that is the graduate show.
It would be unfair to suggest that there wasn’t plenty of other terrific work on display at the various venues. We were limited in our choice by the size restrictions of the gallery and the desire to construct an exhibition that should have its own logic. Many other students’ work showed great promise and we certainly look forward to viewing, encouraging and supporting their endeavours in the coming years, as we do those of the six artists whose work we present here.

The staging of this exhibition recognises the natural progression that occurs for new graduates: leaving studies and making the tentative beginnings of an independent practice by showing at public exhibition spaces such as Blindside. Some students even graduate with one or two of these exhibitions already under their belts. But if recent graduates are supported in the early stages of their practice by artist-run-spaces like ours, then so too do they provide support for us in turn. They are our lifeblood and the guarantee that what we do is fresh, energetic and filled with the raw excitement of new discoveries.

In selecting works for Debut, we have chosen the bolder pieces from those on display. These objects and installations were the most crisply articulated and confidently executed. They had the physical and intellectual presence that we found compelling and that allowed them to stand out among scores of works that seem to compete for our attention.

But there is nothing merely showy or meretricious about these works. They display wit and conceptual sophistication as well as technical facility in their execution. These artists wear their erudition lightly: each work manifests knowledge and appreciation of art theory and history without exercising it in a didactic, burdensome or illustrative way.

The graduate exhibition marks the culmination of several years of training and development on the part of the students, and hence celebrates those achievements that are already behind them. In titling this exhibition Debut we choose to present the work of Johanna Eustice, Cecilia Fogelberg, Kelley Glaister, Jim Hart, Eliza Hearsum and Anna-Maria O’Keeffe in the form of a launch which speaks not of what is past but rather the anticipation we hold out for their future practices.

Cecilia Fogelberg: The girl who cried wolf

Cecilia Fogelberg’s soft sculptures feature the stuffed cloth bodies, bold patterning and animal motifs of children’s plush toys. They have a humorous element consisting as they do of big squishy figures, each one asymmetrical and with a centre of gravity low to the ground. One of the two pieces seems especially ludicrous with its lumpen, pincer-shaped body complete with insect and mammalian features, even a strange red-tipped beak tucked awkwardly to one side of its body and a long drooping tail or appendage. The title of the two objects The tripleheaded wolf with company, has the quality of a cartoon caption.

The humour cannot be reduced to whimsy for it has some unsettling and abject elements. The figure already discussed is like no known creature. It is perhaps some magic or mythical beast but bears a bulbous pink gland or tumour swelling out next to its beak and a pink intestine or umbilical cord coiled against its body on the opposite side. The other figure, with its long torso, three wolves heads and multiple tails suggests the tripleheaded wolf of the title. Of course, it is no less imaginary than its companion but it is assembled together from parts we recognise as belonging to wolves. As creatures, these two sculptures seem strangely maladapted. They are even slightly grotesque: their size seems exaggerated and they have a surfeit of body parts that may even be mixed up. If they are intended as toys, someone may have assembled them together incorrectly in the factory.

If the lumpier figure is content with being merely ridiculous, something about the wolf sculpture is gruesome. An animal suspended vertically always suggests a fresh kill. It has either been hanged in execution or is a recently slaughtered carcass suspended on a meat hook, maybe intended for the dinner table. Near the wolves heads, multiple bud-shape lumps burst out from the skin as if they are the paws of animals that have been swallowed whole and are trying to claw their way back out.

When animals – or their heads – come in threes, you know the scene is taking place inside a myth or fairy story. Children’s stories often feature characters in triplicate, as in the tales of The Three Little Pigs or The Three Billy Goats Gruff. But the dog Cerberus from Greek mythology also had three heads and according to legend his tail, like those hanging from the tripleheaded wolf also partly suggest, was made up of snakes.

Fogelberg’s work depicts mythical, legendary and fairy tale characters and serves to expose the darker and sometimes perverse narratives of lust, violence and revenge that are often concealed beneath the guise of myths or fairy stories for children. Among other folk tale characters, the motif of the wolf is a part of her personal mythology as she grew up in a small village in a forested area of Sweden. The wolf’s habitat is confined to the Arctic circle and the sub-Arctic regions of the world and this animal looms large in the folk stories of Northern Europe but is also widely disseminated throughout the West in fairy tales.

In fairy stories wolves often act the role of foil to or combatant with another character: a fox, a sheep, or a child such as Little Red Riding Hood. In these stories the wolf often figures as a pagan predator, the bogeyman held out as warning within a Christian story of Christ the Good Shepherd tending his flock. The title of Fogelberg’s artwork tells us that the wolf has company, but a wolf is not normally thought of as a companionate animal. Wolves get about on their own (the proverbial ‘lone wolf’) or in packs, but the one-on-one relationship mostly eludes this particular beast except in the special rapport that exists between predator and prey.

Fogelberg does not rewrite the old stories but reveals unseen elements or tells us things we already knew but had somehow forgotten. There is no simple message or alternative narrative for us to decode in these grotesque creatures. Plush toys offer familiarity, security and comfort to a child and in their way, these soft sculptures comfort us with the familiar but also frightening territory of childhood, the land where creatures come in threes, monsters abound, wolves eat little girls, animals are cut open and their bellies filled with stones.

Jim Hart: 35 Pedestrians

Jim Hart’s work presents multiple signs in a grid formation. Each is based on the black-and-yellow council signs that can be seen on any street corner where there is road works underway. The messages they spell out are made up from recombining the letters in the word ‘pedestrians’. Hart reminds us that the appearance of the word ‘pedestrian’ in our environment partakes of the very meanings it signifies: it is ordinary, everyday, mundane and proliferates everywhere.

Hart’s signs reproduce the claustrophobic crowding of messages in our environment by being massed busily one on top of the other, each competing with the next for our attention. In this dense grid, the strong colour contrast of black figures on yellow grounds has an electrifying effect on the retina and introduces the visual deceptions and distortions we associate with op art. It seems impossible to take it all in. While we’re not immediately certain what the obstacle, prohibition or danger is, faced with the urgency and insistence of these high-key messages we know we should be alarmed or at least alert.

Yet the messages do not seem to carry the warnings, prohibitions or directives we expect from council signs. Designatory (DR PEE STAINS), exhortatory (SEND PIRATES) and descriptive (NEAT SPIDERS), these messages read like a nutter’s mad scribblings. If they are alerting or alarming us, the dangers they spell out are mostly sentimental (I SPEND TEARS) metaphysical (DEEP STRAINS) or paranoid (PEDANTS RISE).

There is a sense in which Hart forces us to unlearn what we thought we knew about the modernist grid. Typically a grid is thought to impart equivalence and homogeneity to the information it organises. It possesses regular, uniform, generic and interchangeable parts that submit to the rules of order and logic. Hart’s signs are arranged in a grid pattern but there is another internal grid in operation. The word ‘pedestrians’ is itself a grid of sorts: made up of multiple units in the form of simple alphabet letters with infinite recombinatory potential. Each letter is one element in a permutable system wherein one letter is equivalent to and interchangeable with the next.

Hart’s grid is neither generic nor homogenous though. Instead it expands to multiplicities of genre: the sentimental cheek-by-jowl with the pragmatic. In this grid, there is room for pragmatism (STEEP DRAINS, SPEED TRAINS) melodrama (PEN DISASTER, NEED RAPISTS, PARIS TENSED) whimsical nonsense (DESSERT PAIN, RAN SIDESTEP) delightful juvenile wit (DESIRE PANTS, DR PEE STAINS, PANTIE DRESS, and TED PINS ARSE) deflatory messages (SENT DESPAIR, ANTIDEPRESS, DENTS PRAISE, IDS ARE SPENT) and sentiment (DEAREST SNIP, I SPEND TEARS). Rather than containing what it circumscribes, this grid seems to generate expansions and multiplications over which it has lost control.

Counter to what we expect, this grid also fails to guarantee order or logic. It proposes both the impossibility of meaning, and also its plenitude and excess. The simple system of moving letters around throws up irregularities, absurdity, anarchic meanings, and chaos. From this innocuous grid, poetry erupts as from a volcano. In two senses, Hart is a DANTE PISSER: He spouts poetry in a torrent, and we can imagine his efforts might piss Dante off.

Eliza Hearsum: Fill in the blanks

Eliza Hearsum has created an installation from flat panels that slot together to create not so much a room as its diagram. This scene can’t quite shake off the fact it was conceived and executed in two-dimensional drawings, the planar nature of its elements suggesting it was dragged off the page only reluctantly.

In fact, like a pop-up scene, bits of it may still be attached, stuck behind on unseen hinges. And if a pop-up can commence life in two dimensions but pivot out into the third, it can perform the reverse too. It represents a collapsible world, something apparently solid but that could all too easily slip out from under you. The flat white surfaces eerily mimic the gallery’s own walls. If they were to spontaneously dismantle they might even fold back into the walls they operate as a mere extension of.

The entire room retains its template quality as if it is not a real room but a representation of a room and even then, a generic or idealised one: a room as conceived within some model or theory. In fact we are prevented from seeing the space in its full three dimensions since its own two-dimensional diagrammatic logic seems to block the view, superimposing itself between the viewer and the scene.

Standing next to it, the room seems sealed-off as if behind the invisible barrier of some pictorial convention. You can’t quite enter the scene, not only because it is crowded out with furniture but because its space remains hypothetical and imaginary, as if its still part of a kit representing what is potential rather than what is actual. Its title The Winter Snow Scene explains its whiteness, as if the room’s blankness is caused by a layer of snow that blankets the scene. If Hearsum’s entire installation is a blank scene set against the two walls and floor of Blindside then the colour-by-numbers painting on its wall is the blank scene on the wall of the blank room. A mise-en-scene as mise-en-abyme.

The installation suggests something more than an image to look upon but something less than a space to enter. If most artworks can be cleanly divided between those that exist in either two or three dimensions then this art work might best be described as two and a half, with one foot in each camp.

To stand in front of the room is to realise that the overall dimensions are almost appropriate for an adult body but nothing is quite big enough. Individual measurements such as the level of the chair base are slightly wrong. Scaled up from dolls house kit furniture, its proportions remain awkwardly stuck somewhere between the miniature and the real world. If its form places it indeterminately between two and three dimensions, its scale situates it uneasily between the real and the miniature. The scene it describes adopts the conventions of the domestic setting but the spatial ambiguities it gives rise to generate the effect of the uncanny.

Kelley Glaister: Wiping out the competition

Kelley Glaister’s work begins as a three-dimensional cast of the artist’s own signature formed in paint and ice. During the course of its display it performs material and spatial transformations according to its own entropic logic. As the temperature of the icy painting lowers, the paint crackles and spits onto the surrounding surfaces. This painting paints itself, and paints itself out, in all of the performative, exhaustive and destructive senses this implies.

In the manufacture of a painting, the transformation from liquid paint to solid surface normally takes place in the studio, away from viewer, and with the resultant chemical change presented as a fait accompli. Any suggestion that the paint’s physical state might continue to change – as when it cracks and flakes on the surface of an art work – becomes a conservator’s nightmare to be halted or reversed. By contrast, Glaister’s work commences with solid paint and becomes hyper-liquid before drying solid again, but with an in-between phase of projectile spluttering that suggests it is vaporising. Neither its pristine state when it emerges from the freezer nor the splotches and puddles that trace its explosions afterwards are what constitutes the art work but rather the mad performance in between.

If this painting of a signature proceeds to dematerialise it can only do so because it is so hyper-material to begin with. Thick, substantial, solid and weighty when it emerges from the freezer, it seems to commence life as more than a painting and end its existence as less than one. Like the preserved signature of a person who is already dead, its aftermath remains as the index of a life force that is spent.

Freezing the painting institutes a reverse crackpot cryogenics: as long as it remains frozen it achieves death before life. It remains intact and delineates the strokes and curve’s of Glaister’s signature only when buried in the deep freeze. Not until it is removed does it come into being as a work of art.

The very thing that gives life to this work of art – its removal from where it is unseen in the freezer to where we might look upon it in the ambient temperature of the art gallery – sets its destruction in train. The work is melted away by the temperature of our gaze. Not until we hear its first wheezes and sighs can we be sure it’s alive; the minute we do, we realise these sounds are actually the coughs and splutters of its death throes.

Paradoxically, it exceeds its own boundaries even as it retreats from them by evacuating out from the form of the cast signature and splattering across the room. The distribution of the paint is hyper-energised, random and entirely automatic. In the perfect solution to the problem faced by every painter --– How do you begin to make a painting? Where do you put the first mark? The second? and so on – because it paints itself.

It recreates aspects of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings but removes the body of the artist from the performance; as well it might for the work has no need of the artist when her signature stands in as a proxy. Like the temporal pattern played out in Glaister’s art work, a signature is itself just a system of performance, with a stain left behind as a trace. But a signature is also personal, a mark of authentication, uniquely attached to an individual identity, the trademark of the artist. With her signature writ large, an artist announces, “Here I am”.

There is a sly strategy behind all of this, carried out with such good humour and bravura you can’t help but admire it: What better way for an emerging artist to launch herself than to display a painting that spits in all directions, with other nearby artworks needing to duck for cover? What better way to announce her arrival, to get the art world to sit up and take notice, than with an attention-seeking signature that declares, “Here I am” and proceeds to wipe out the competition by quite literally crapping all over it?

Johanna Eustice: Taboo

Johanna Eustice presents a video that demands our body mirror some of what is played out in front of us. We are invited to sit on an armchair and witness a scene unfolding on a screen situated on the floor at our feet. The elements portrayed are very simple: a woman’s legs, a pair of stilettoes, an armchair and a fluffy rug. The shot is tightly framed so that her legs appear roughly life-sized and we can imagine viewing our own actions in a mirror, despite the scene playing out in black and white. Very little happens in this narrative. The incidents are quiet and intimate. This woman makes several attempts to put on a pair of shoes. They crack, crumble and melt under her feet. It gradually dawns on us that they may be made of chocolate.

There seems to be a battle taking place between the woman’s body and the material of the shoes, and we wait to see which will triumph. The woman is intent on wearing the stilettoes and makes these several attempts, each time entering the screen from the side as if coming to look at herself in a mirror or coming on stage to act out a part. These multiple attempts represent her persistence but the false starts also self-consciously reflect the multiple outtakes of the filming process. If it’s not working – if the shoes continue to crack up, trip the woman and melt in a puddle – its not from her want of trying; her task may be a modest one but her failure is heroic.

Everything seems to centre on these shoes. They loom large in the woman’s own mind and in the narration of the incident. Like one of the Ugly Sisters, she keeps trying to delude herself that it is working, that the shoes are on. And like the glass slipper in the Cinderella story the shoes have the dimension of psychoanalytic motifs, heavily laden with symbolic meanings.

In myths and fairy tales, characters are often set tests that demand the achievement, proof and self-awareness of their sexual maturity. Like in a fairy tale, this woman is set a test but it results in her defeat. The title of Eustice’s work seems to pose a question “These shoes were made for...” as if we are expected to complete the sentence. To wear a pair of stilettoes is to exaggerate one’s sexual signalling because the shoes lengthen the calf, tuck the pelvis under and thrust out the buttocks. A simple reading informed by feminist theory would suggest the woman attempts to adopt an impossible role and hobbles herself, she tries to give a convincing performance of her own gender but it proves to be restrictive. But this reading fails to give any account of the material from which the shoes are formed.

Shoes are about boundaries. They mark the outer limit of the body and represent a barrier between us and the ground beneath our feet. When the chocolate melts on screen, the resultant soiling is more than just tracking in dirt underfoot. Everything that takes place in the video, and in front of it, is low to the ground because the theme of the work is the body’s more base functions. To all appearances the liquefied chocolate smeared on the legs and the feet might be shit. When the shoes melt, the protective barrier disappears and nothing comes between the body and the dirt. An instant transformation takes place that needs no fairy story magic wand to occur: what commenced as food takes on the appearance of shit. In this scene, when food becomes shit in front of us, (in two senses of the expression: we look upon it and it takes place outside our bodies), it collapses together the functions of consumption and excretion in a deliberate breach of all of those social taboos that seek to keep them separate, however much they may form a single biological process. In the confrontation between the body and the material of the shoes, we need no longer ask which has triumphed. They are one and the same. It is an image of the body struggling against itself

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe: Difficult Landscape

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe’s work takes the form of a diptych. Two chunks of three-dimensional landscape are presented at right angles in a corner of the gallery. The leftmost piece recreates a shard of mountain complete with a covering of live moss that gives it the quality of a primeval wonderland, the piece on the right a crumbled piece of bitumen road surface from which a chunk threatens to break off in a suggestion of destruction or decay.

O’Keeffe’s conception of landscape is framed in terms of the problems this category poses. It is not easy to begin to understand these objects or locate precursors for them because they break so deliberately with the conventions of their genre. Indoors, landscape is usually two-dimensional. When it extends into the third, we are less likely to be looking at a work of art and more likely to be viewing a terrarium, part of a toy train set, an architectural model or a museum diorama. O’Keeffe’s objects constitute ‘scenery’ in the sense that they recreate the appearance of parts of the outside world. Constructed according to the techniques of model-making they are small in scale but somehow manage to defy the rules of the miniature by achieving a sense of majesty.

There is also the problem of their torn and abruptly discontinuous edges and their indeterminate relation to one another. A two-dimensional landscape normally features limits or a border. Sometimes, as in the dominant picturesque tradition, the framing device may mimic a window, a scene imagined through an archway, or may even be vignetted. In either case, the edges of the image are simply a convention of the genre and need not appear as an abrupt truncation. In O’Keeffe’s work, there are no natural or conventional limits to the two objects, no framing device with which to understand and interpret the torn edges of the territories they describe. By a process that we cannot know, they appear to have been carved from some greater landscape.

Perhaps a more appropriate framework for interpreting this art work is provided by the hunting trophy. Like these two fragments, hunting trophies represent chunks of the natural world brutally severed from something larger and mounted on the wall. But if we might consider them trophies, neither of O’Keeffe’s objects was targeted, shot cleanly and then bagged. These are the gardening equivalent of road kill. None of their traumatic butchering is politely concealed by taxidermy.

There is the strange problem of what relation they can have to one another, these two irreconcilable fragments. They are not a diptych in the sense of two images each describing a space that might be imagined as part of one continuous environment. Nor are they two views of the same image under different conditions like Monet’s paintings of cathedrals or haystacks. They are even incommensurate in the scale each adopts. Surely one is not intended as a close-up or detail of the other? The work fails to situate these two realms at all let alone collapse or compress them into one continuous space. It announces the very impossibility that they can co-exist. There is the further question of where we might be standing in order to look upon such a scene. A space that cannot quite allow for a human scale serves to evacuate the human presence.
Seen together, the two pieces conform to the binary oppositions of natural and industrial, pristine and ruinous, alive and dead, variegated and uniform. Perhaps in these oppositions we may extrapolate a representation of the beginning of the world and its end.

If the beginning of the world is conceived in terms of the biblical with its blanket of live moss and hint of fresh-minted creation, the end is cinematic. If you’ve seen the Mad Max films and Peter Weir’s The Cars that Ate Paris, you will know that the end of the world will take place somewhere in central Australia and it will happen with neither a whimper nor a bang but with the steady engine drone of a fast car on an otherwise empty stretch of highway. This car burning up the road is not the moment preceding the end; it is the end itself being played out. O’Keeffe’s horizontal shelf of road is commensurate with this kind of finish: an eternal ending, wherein the ground continuously slips away beneath our wheels.

Up to this point, I believed these two fragments were removed from a larger structure and displaced from elsewhere but I now see they may never have budged; they may be the last pieces left standing, everything else having crumbled away. All that is left is the loss and the void it creates. Here is the beauty of the work: between the world’s beginning and its end is a gulf the art work cannot bridge. Flooding in to this breach comes the sublime. The work is not so much about the fragments that remain as everything else that is gone, reminding us of the concept of vast that lies within the word devastation.

If I have struggled to write about these landscapes, wrestling with them as a series of questions and propositions, it is because the work addresses itself to the problems and impossibilities of the landscape. O’Keeffe shows she has learnt that most Australian of art lessons: try to take the measure of the landscape, admit it is a failed project, and be content to work it through in terms of its “difficulties”.

Christine Morrow
January 2005

 

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