Art Guide

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March/April 2010

A good ARI isn’t hard to find > NSW
Artist Run Initiative (ARI) Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 1: Paddington/Woollahra > NSW
The first week of Art Month Sydney kicks off across Paddington and Woollahra, collectively crowned ‘Precinct 1’ Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 2: Surry Hills/Darlinghurst > NSW
In reality Sydney’s gallery scene is a broad and vibrant kaleidoscope. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 3: Waterloo > NSW
Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Read More

Art Month Sydney > Precinct 4: Redfern/Chippendale/CBD > NSW
Serendipitously there are two galleries in Precinct 4 that showcase Asian art, Read More

Discipline ain’t what it used to be
Donald Judd, one of the more influential founding fathers of minimalism couldn’t hack New York’s claustrophobia. Read More

The legacy of two great artists > NSW
Two significant Indigenous exhibitions, staged as part of Art Month Sydney, are East Kimberley Painting Revisited at Michael Reid at Elizabeth Bay and Museum III at Utopia Art. Read More

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Art Month Sydney Precinct 3: Waterloo

By Gina Fairley

Precinct 3 takes in the suburb of Waterloo, home to the Danks Street Complex which includes ten of Sydney’s commercial galleries. Just around the corner you will find Gallery Barry Keldoulis (GBK) which is staging two exhibitions as part of Art Month Sydney, both posing an
interesting and somewhat loaded question – at what point is a work of art complete? When it is conceptually resolved; when it comes off the studio wall, is exhibited in a gallery or perhaps, only when an audience engages with it? It is an extremely layered encounter and one that is explored by two artists - Debra Dawes and Jonathan Jones - albeit from totally different perspectives.

The artist’s studio is sacrosanct. For Dawes its systems and experiments have long been the foundation to her art making, demonstrated by exercises such as paint being squeezed from a tube corresponding with the length of an exhaled breath, or the metered stripes of an abstract canvas charting days and time spent in the studio, as recorded in her clock wise series (2004). Dawes pushes that performative foundation of her work a step further in her current project, Open Studio – Untitled, where Dawes herself becomes the exhibit, embedded for the month at Gallery Barry Keldoulis. The gallery visitor literally becomes witness to the studio’s artistic alchemy. Made homely with furniture, books and ephemera transposed from her studio on the New South Wales South Coast, the viewer’s chance encounter becomes part of Dawes’ recording of time – serendipitous everyday beginnings, outcomes and afterthoughts manifest as abstractions. It is a deeply personal yet public space.

For Jonathan Jones, however, the studio is merely a latent menagerie of incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and electrical paraphernalia awaiting transformation. That alchemy from everyday to art object is a succinct moment only realized through its material engagement with the gallery – its installation. Jones’ abstractions, like Dawes, are simple in their materiality and equally complex in meaning. This new installation for GBK takes the ubiquitous domestic ‘fluro’ and turns our understanding of it literally upside down, presented as constructions that sit flotilla-like across the gallery floor, their cumulative glow consuming visitors.

Debra Dawes, Light fantastic 08, 2008, oil on canvas, 168 x 107cm, photo: Paul Green.
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.

It was a device Jones used in his last solo exhibition at Artspace Sydney, untitled [heads or tails], (2009), where clustered cog-like bars of white light filled the gallery. It is a configuration that speaks explicitly about our contemporary reading of communities both rural and urban, their support networks and spiny frictions.

Essentially, GBK gives us two projects for Art Month Sydney that are about the experience of looking and engaging. They challenge our perceptions of the gallery environment and role in ‘completing’ these individual projects – how we interact with them and contribute to their dialogue. It is an extremely literal translation Dawes opts for, inviting gallery visitors to stay a while, to read a poem or comment on a work in progress, meanwhile documenting the process. From that discreet, contained works will emerge bearing witness to this vigilance, both analytical and ethereal. It is the anatomy of an artist revealed.

Colour, direction, repetition, linear definition – one could easily be describing both these projects. While it is easy to draw sympathy between the rigorous abstractions of Dawes and Jones, first read as coolly minimal and conceptual, there is a sense of humanity and electric energy in their art works that is far from clinical or ambiguous. The textures, uneven repetitions and off-register patterns of Dawes’ paintings and paperworks lack the crispness of hard-edge abstraction,
despite being extremely considered and refined in their execution. They hold an honesty within.

Interestingly, Jones’ installations have similarly been described as connecting humanity with light, where bars of light wash visitors and the walls alike, casting ‘light’ on the darkness of cultural ignorance. Jones’ installations are never far from his Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri heritage and the

influence of his grandfather and avid ‘maker’ of things. There is a truth in the way he presents the everyday unadorned, the cords and fittings of his constructions blatantly exposed. Jones’ abstractions, however, are far from simple or unfinished.

Urging the gallery visitor to move through and around his installations - which are often subtle configurations of permissions and exclusions - Jones corrals his audience into new considerations, both material and metaphorical. This spatial encounter was most eloquently played out 11am Utopia Art Sydney - Appreciating and collecting: Indigenous Australian art through Jones’ 2008 installation at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, untitled (the tyranny of distance), where stacked corridors of internally light blue tarpaulin ushered and wowed audiences. Jones enjoys that element of surprise both sensual and cerebral, and we see it again with this new installation at GBK.

While these projects may be renditions of everyday experiences, for Dawes and Jones the everyday is a measured consideration arriving at cumulative understanding. Whether that is played out in the ‘studio
space’, pictorial space or the sculptural space of an installation, the result is an energy that emanates from the work and is transferred to the audience. Both installations promise to be a highlight of the Art Month Sydney program.

Debra Dawes, Breath Green, (2004-08), oil on primed linen, 110 x 55cm.
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis.

Art Month Sydney

Gina Fairly