July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers
By Megan Backhouse
Enchanting and seductive as these forests with their furry animals and fiery blooms might be, there is nothing of the environmental campaign poster to be found here. These are bobcats with disco-silver lightening bolts gleaming from their coats, frolicking werewolves, flowers that only reveal themselves by night and wild beasts that could happily eat you alive.
This is a natural world that cries out not to be logged or cleared or hunted because of the mythical power embedded within the place – old-world folklore in which civilisation is very much at the mercy of the wilderness.
But it is our current-day concerns for the environment that Jazmina Cininas suspects is reawakening our interest in a time when animals and trees were thought to speak and when our forests were a place of magic – both charmed and cursed.
In that vein, Cininas, who has found a place for fantastically dressed werewolves in her work since 1995, has curated an exhibition in which any boundary between mankind and the forest is only ever-so vaguely defined. The artists represented in The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers invent their own flora and fauna and they place it in landscapes that are both familiar and uncanny, and inevitably come with danger attached.
Cininas, herself, is represented with her reduction lino-cuts, built up from as many as 30 layers, and all featuring female werewolves (derived from actual and fictional women throughout history) who are determinedly super, rather than sub-human.
"They are more powerful, live longer, look sexier. They have gone from being less than human to being more than human," Cininas says. "The natural world used to be considered below culture, culture was on a pedestal, but now that is being challenged."
The other artists challenging the premise in this show of more than 30 works are Deborah Klein, Milan Milojevic, James Morrison, Louise Weaver and Louiseann Zahra-King. Where Milojevic and Cininas are print makers, Klein and Morrison are exhibiting paintings and Weaver and Zahra-King are showing sculptural objects.
Deborah Klein, Chelepteryx collesi, 2007, from the series 'Moth masks,' synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Courtesy the artist.
Milan Milojevic, Terra frieze, (detail), 2005, digital print, woodcut. Courtesy the artist and James Makin Gallery (Melbourne)
Just as each of Cininas' prints take three to four months working 40 hours a week to make, all of the work here is labour-intensive and meticulously rafted. Whether it's Weaver crocheting her immaculately dressed menagerie of hybrid forms or Klein painting her coiffed women, here wearing moth masks or accompanied by flightless butterflies, there is a refined, jewel-like quality to the works and natural worlds) being shown here.
Zahra-King lies her bronze cast birds among a field of etched-glass flowers and mirrors for pools, while Milojevic concocts imaginary gardens full of impossible plants and beasts like something out of The Magic Faraway Tree.
Morrison, however, has taken nature into quite another realm, transporting his forest onto another planet entirely so that there is a sci-fi twist on the gothic in his five-panelled, two-and-a-half-metres-long panorama.
Cininas, who has spent three years putting together the show of both new and old works, says Morrison's painting serves to remind us that current environmental debates encompass not only the conservation of wilderness but also the biological manipulations occurring within our laboratories. But, like other works in the exhibition, his painting also touches on ideas about collecting (as with Klein's butterflies and moths) and death (Zahra-King's birds).
These are, Cininas says, narratives that go beyond the simple celebration of nature's delights. "These artists are working with the natural world but not in a purely illustrative way. They are seeing something else in it," she says. "They deal with the mythology surrounding the forest, the mythologies that link the human world with the natural world. There has been a revival in that kind of interest in nature now that we are at a crisis point. Where do we fit in with the natural world and how are we going to sort out our relation to it because, if we don't work out a way, nature will take care of itself in some form, and not necessarily in a way that suits us."
"There was a time when humans had less power over nature, they had to respect seasons, they couldn't go to certain areas because they might be eaten alive by animals. The mythologies from those times are coming back but mytholigies change all the time and these are contemporary mythologies."
Jazmina Cininas, Rima knows the curse of being born on Christmas Eve, 2006, reduction linocut. Courtesy the artist and Port Jackson Press Australia (Melbourne)
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers is at the Bendigo Art Gallery 19 July – 17 August 2008
Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.
