Debut II

Debut II features works selected from Melbourne’s major universities Fine Arts Graduates of 2005. They have been selected from the graduate shows held by Monash University, RMIT University and Victorian College of the Arts. Attending these graduate shows can be overwhelming, with the sheer volume of work displayed.

Work that commands attention beyond an initial glance therefore displays excellent technical ability, is innovative in its treatment of subject matter or simply has something a little magical about it.
Each of the works chosen for this exhibition addresses a threshold, be it literal or metaphorical. They grapple with fantasy and reality, perception and confidence. Through the use of photography, sound and video media and techniques such as embroidery, carvings and casting the selected artists produce works that are challenging, poignant and humorous.

This annual exhibition presented by Blindside Artist Run Space aims to support and showcase artists at the very beginning of their careers. Blindside would like to take this opportunity to again congratulate these artists and wish them the best of luck for the future.
The artists of Debut II are: John Gilmore (Monash University), Peter Gurry, Emelie Plunkett, Francis Jerome Russo, Don Tassone and Jo Todd (all from RMIT University).

Jo Todd, Liminal Navel Days, 2005

Jo Todd’s ‘ Liminal Navel Days’ photographs speak of hope, struggle and ineptitude. The first image in this hang is of an idyllic sunset (or sunrise). The sun dances across the wooden structure leading to the water’s edge. It skims the woman’s figure so that we can just make out that her attire is swimwear. However most importantly, it illuminates her board. In the next picture, it becomes clear that the woman is by the water’s edge with a wooden ironing board. In some kind of desperate daydream, this woman is trying to fulfil a fantasy with an object that cannot and will not yield. Her task or vision is impossible – ludicrous, however, she persists. By the shore the woman steadies herself and stands. The moment at which she stands she is transformed. Her demure black fifties swimsuit has become a snazzy red and white bikini. Whether the costume change is the artist’s way of consoling the character (she may never really surf, but she can still look the part) or a way of signalling that this is another day, to suggest that the attempt is an ongoing mission, is unclear.

The surfer wannabe wades out into the water with her dysfunctional board, but there are no waves. The second last image in this sequence shows the woman sitting on the board, at first glance she is just looking back across the water, but on closer inspection her body is straining to stay afloat, her jaw is set with determination. By the final image in this set the heroine is back in the demure black swimsuit and she sits on the board by the water’s edge looking out to the horizon.

Photographed from behind, the woman never addresses the camera. Instead of being voyeuristic there is a sense of parody in this series of poses. The woman acts as if trying out for a role. Maybe she didn’t really want to ‘surf’, but just wanted to see what the idea of surfing would be like: to experience the open air, the cold water, the sunset. Its as if there she has an understanding of what surfing should look like so has gone about combining the components that make up surf. The woman illustrates what surfing might look like in an equation or recipe: beach, water, board, bathers etc. except the quantities and ingredients are all muddled up. She delivers a semi-convincing performance as a surfer girl. The look is right. She could have stepped out of “Hawaii 5 –0”, the posing – earnest enough, but the lack of waves and the clumsy wooden board just won’t allow her to transcend the surfer girl character. The board ties her to the domestic chore, to tradition because of its age and ultimately to the ground. She cannot float or fly, her fantasy is well and truly anchored.

Peter Gurry, Limited Intervention –
Quality of Material, 2005.

Atop a table that looks like a drawing support (complete with bull dog clips), sits everyday objects no doubt influenced by the artist’s surrounds. There are clumsy objects, chunky foam shapes occasionally painted in garish pink, blue and red. Then there is a foam paint tube oozing paint, an eroded milk carton, an apple, a real glass filled with foam ‘liquid’ and a grided wire jug. They form an interrelated series of experiments and investigations.

Peter Gurry’s table of assorted foam objects or ‘interventions’ is a brash display of process and materiality. The paint tube and apple are cushioned by rectangular pieces of foam as if to indicate the original format. Another piece has had the centre cut out of it, potentially forming one of the other objects on the table.

These objects are frozen in time in the tradition of a still life. The futility of a liquid that can never be drawn through a straw, and jug made of grided wire grapples with some of the dilemmas of the sculptural object. There is something devastatingly futile in these objects lack of functionality. They brazenly distinguish themselves from that which they replicate.

In fact, these objects behave like drawings. Each object is as if it has been plucked from a sketch. The milk carton is only complete if viewed from one angle, from the other perspective it caves in, completely eroded. The wire jug is like an exercise in volume and perspective, and so on. The green foam from which some of the objects are carved is porous, lightweight, and flexible. Throw it against the wall and it would bounce back, and yet there is something immensely fragile about the apple carving of the same material. It could be the scale, is it slightly smaller than it should be? Or the dexterity in the detail of its fine carving, you can almost see the leaf wobble if you get too close.

When considering the ‘Quality of Material’ it becomes apparent that there is an obvious absence in this collection of works. There is no fluid, no avenue for the foam to fulfil one of its best-known uses as a material that is extremely absorbent. The individual pieces tease us, think of the juiciness of an apple, the thickness of fresh paint, the missing part of the milk carton could be that which is stuffed into the glass. These sculptures mock the quality of fluid in their lightweight renderings.

The art object in Limited Intervention – Quality of Material is poised. Each experiment has the potential to elaborate and expand or remain dry.

John Gilmore, Painful Condition, 2005.

John Gilmore’s video has distinct surrealist tendencies as it marries the banality of the everyday with the marvellous of the act. An old floral carpet and the ordinary clothing attire of the protagonist heighten the extraordinariness of the action that ensues.

A barely visible hole is cut into carpet, the camera is angled down so that we view the unfolding scene as if standing within the frame looking on. A man kneels just within the frame of the camera, and after a pause, he bends down to the hole, and in one smooth action pushes his head through. The initial shock of this action turns to wonder as the man lies on the carpet (without his head) in a foetal position, his back to the camera. His left shoulder disappears also, he then wriggles partially submerged as if unsure whether to continue or withdraw. He continues, his upper body vanishes into the hole, his legs and finally his feet, leaving only the stretched hole.

The protagonist is male, the act is penetrative, an obvious reading follows. The man determinedly initiates the action; however there appear to be moments of doubt as the body struggles back and forth in the hole, at one point the carpet surface lifting as if greedily devouring him, confusing the animate and inanimate as he seems to be pulled through the hole more than diving in despite the initial penetration.

Without his head the body becomes mutant, animalistic – reminiscent of Patricia Piccinini’s silicon mutants. It moves in serpentine fashion through the hole. The magical quality of this action that would be commonly unachievable begins to merge dream and reality.1
Gilmore has literally set up the circumstances in which his character can disappear. He can literally shrink from our sight, escape into the architecture of a room, almost superhero style. There are no special effects or supernatural powers to aid this act, simply a predetermined path, and physical struggle. The circumstances have been constructed to play out this fantasy.

The repetition provided through the tight looping of the video turns the single action of the sequence into a compulsive repetition. The carpet remains there is no significant break in the sequence from its end to its beginning. Thus the repetition of this act becomes more important. Such repetition in relation to Freudian theory is considered a comforting impulse.2 Freud may also suggest that this sequence plays out the fantasy of returning to the womb of the mother. The determined action of the protagonist in Gilmore’s video is equally escaping as much if not more than journeying somewhere. The tight camera angle scrutinising this man develops a strong sense of claustrophobia that is released as the character finds his escape route. Perhaps it is this release that makes Painful Condition such a satisfying video to watch as the protagonist grapples with fantasy and reality.

Emelie Plunkett, John Doe, California, 1979, 2005.

Emelie Plunkett presents us with the angelic face of a boy from another era. The pink flush of the boy’s cheeks and the golden tones of his hair, combined with his expression are reminiscent of a school photo. Displayed in its hoop, the image is embroidered using cross-stitch – a common form of embroidery that builds an image with small 45 degree overlapping stitches to form tiny crosses.

There is something of the banal in this image. The subject’s face is neither joyous, nor sad. It is ordinarily blank. Perhaps it is this ordinariness that creates a nagging sense of familiarity. The very nature of portraiture invests its subject with a form of importance. Historically, the aristocracy or royalty were common subjects depicted in formal portraiture. Still prevalent with bureaucracy and celebrities, the portrait has many informal uses now with photographic portraits used for licences, school photos, passports and recreational ‘happy snaps’. Thus by this logic, the portrait fulfils two main purposes: one, for notoriety as a record of an important person, an important moment; and two, for identification purposes.

Plunkett’s portraits traverse these categories. In selecting the subject Plunkett has given him a sense of importance. The title (John Doe, California, 1979) strips the subject of a unique identity or ‘story’. Common knowledge prescribes John Doe as the name for unidentified bodies. Her work clearly points to missing person files, to innocent victims stripped of their dignity to finish life as only a body, not someone’s child, brother, or friend. The details of this boy’s life float, disassociated from his physical being and possibly his gruesome end. The two pieces are installed as if each piece acknowledges the other.

Although domestically inclined, these delicate renderings of an unknown subject have qualities of the headline exposé of a serial killer. A Google search of the title produced a file on a serial killer targeting males aged from their early teens to mid twenties. Mutilated bodies were found in California in the nominated year. This is just one possible scenario. For Plunkett’s cryptic technique pushes us to come up with answers, links, and make associations. Ultimately she drives us to look at what is not there.

The digital image of the reverse side of the embroidery is not to scale, it is larger than its source. It manifests the mess of threads behind the neat façade of the embroidery. The pixels, as with the cross-stitch, reveal a physical fragmentation, the subject is literally broken down to small squares of colour. Stitch-by-stitch Plunkett carefully renders the fine details of the subject, making a personal memorial to this unidentified victim, but also to the many missing persons and John and Jane Does. In doing so she creates a work about identity, memory and violence portrayed through the civilised art of embroidery and documented through digital reproduction.

Francis Jerome Russo, Sound Mirror, 2005.

Resting against the wall, the recycled timber frame of Francis Jerome Russo’s Sound Mirror supports a reflective piece of acrylic. Its highly polished mirrored surface and human scale emulates a dressing mirror. Behind the rectangular frame is a wooden box that encases a stereo speaker. Glued to the back of the mirror is a small rubber toy ball that reacts to the sounds emitted from the speaker, making the flexible mirror quake at various intervals in response to the soundtrack.

The hum of the pre-recorded track builds in activity until the mirror reverberates more fiercely and then quietens, slows and stops before the track begins again. The effect the sound has on the reflective acrylic is to bounce light and our reflections, so that our perception of the reflected objects is visually disrupted. Solid objects appear flattened and flimsy whilst the intangible: sound, takes on a physical presence, the weight of it looms in the gallery, literally occupying space.

Russo’s clever device for altering the presence of objects and sound demonstrates metaphysical enquiry. However, his experiment in sound frequencies, perception and atmospheric conditions should not exclude consideration of the work as a sculptural object. Using a combination of recycled and industrial materials and common domestic objects, the work also functions as a personal history or portrait. Childhood remnants, musical importance, and its human scale could be referenced biographically. The artist also allows the object itself to span time through the use of materials with previous different functions, new materials, and a reflective surface that will respond to its environment.

The duration of the soundtrack could be another way of framing this work however it carefully reaches a climax and slows again so that it becomes more of a rhythm than a piece with a beginning and end. Russo’s Sound Mirror is an investigation into time, sound and space. He plays with our perception with the portal like mirror offering ever-changing variations.

Don Tassone, The Stone is a Stone Series, 2005.

Don Tassone’s work is hesitant and unassuming. Its scale requires you to be very close to the work to appreciate its personality. The ‘plaques’ look like merely a piece of plaster or marble from a distance. It is only within close quarters that their inscriptions can be read. Their self-effacing texts read “pathetic”, “it’s a confidence thing” and “this is not working.”

Each of the three pieces has their own specific material qualities. Cast in plaster and black pigment the colouration is relatively random. However, the surfaces are somewhat determined by that in which it is cast. Some of the plaques have beautifully smooth facades that are pock marked; others have cracks running through their length. The artist assesses and potentially damns each piece, inscribing them with his verdict. At this point the artist can regain control over the material. Once they are on the wall of the gallery their reception is out of control again. These plaques may not be such a far cry from workplace motivational propaganda. Rather than urging the reader on to success and exuding bravado, these small quotes allow the display of a frank vulnerability. They also demonstrate a struggle with the material at hand and the ability to materialise a preconceived idea.
For slabs of plaster they are also quite animate only revealing their dilemmas once closely observed. Even the way in which they are hung on the wall allows them to shirk away from the direct gaze of the gallery visitor. They stand apart from each other demanding separate attention. These small humane gestures capture moments of hesitation, doubt and insecurity to which most people can relate. Perhaps other artists most of all, with the constant need for self-critique and evaluation necessary for any good art practice.

The strength in Don Tassone’s work is his willingness to acknowledge a struggle. Rather than keeping it behind the scenes, he allows his work to deal with failures and disappointments and to acknowledge the difficulties of creating work. Working with the idea of a plaque Tassone commemorates a moment of despair, disappointment of unfavourable judgment rather than an achievement or poignant memory.

Johanna Eustice
2006

Notes
1 A key definition of Andre Breton’s surreal. (Breton,A. Manifestoes of Surrealism, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, USA. 1969. p.14.)
2 Foster, H. Compulsive Beauty, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1993. p.9.