Kiribati – Putting a Face To Climate Change

Jon Lewis

Sydney Theatre Company Foyer

May 2010

Participating in HEAD ON Photo Festival

Temaiku-Tarawa

I have just been standing face to face with people from the small Republic of Kiribati. Kiribati is an island in the Equatorial Pacific which is predicted to be underwater in 30 to 40 years. I feel as if I have met each one of these people in person. The medium that facilitates this sense of meeting is the remarkably vivid portraiture of photographer Jon Lewis.

They are black and white, which can often suggest a removal in time, yet in this case does not. The quality of the images is sharp and the exposures superb. In characteristic Lewis style the subjects of the portraits are often placed centrally in the frame. This directness is potentially confronting and could even be read as a device of advertising images, yet that is not the intention here. The artist wants us to truly meet these people, to take us there.

I am seduced by this totally honest directness in the images. They make me ponder the reasons for the impact of this photographer’s work upon me. I know him and his work well. I am surprised by the degree I am affected by this work.

These faces of people from a culture far from my own tell me that this is a simple culture and that their life is a good one. There are people of all ages but Lewis is particularly drawn to children and young people.

The environment that encourages this healthy lifestyle is portrayed in equal degree to the people themselves. These are environmental portraits. Daily life takes place against a backdrop of the sea, white sand and a bright wide sky. People are seen fishing, dressed in costumes for dancing, playing with each other, expressing affection with companions and in groups, and then, in Lewis trademark, as solo portraits gazing directly into the photographer’s lens.

It is the remarkable nature of this gaze that I think makes Jon Lewis’ portraits so memorable. A significant photographer jumps to mind who invites an equivalent gaze and that is Diane Arbus. The people from Kiribati appear to have an innocence that cannot be compared to Diane Arbus’ offbeat subject matter, however the moment of complete collaboration, of giving over to the camera’s lens, is strikingly the same.

Another surprise for me on viewing these images is the realization of how fully Jon Lewis has evolved to being an ethnographic photographer. Perhaps I did not accept this trajectory despite all evidence as I am sure Lewis would exclaim he has been photographing cultures other than his own since the early days of his practice. A look at the Gallery section on his website lists places and titles including his well known Bondi series, Bali and Lombok, Outback, The Bush, Timor, Bouganville, Being Muslim, and now Kiribati.

It is time to look at the full body of work by this fine photographer who has suffered from the double peril of being seen as a documentary portraitist in an era when documentary was not welcomed onto the walls of galleries and portraiture has suffered from being hard to sell. This is a great shame as he is one of many very fine portraitists amongst Australian photographers right now.

If we look at Lewis’ output over the years we see a large body of work committed to honoring and highlighting cultural difference and social concerns. This is done through individual portraits which when seen cumulatively as a record of a culture, as in this wonderful tribute to the people and endangered lifestyle of Kiribati, present a passionate plea for an awareness and concern for others and for the wellbeing of our planet.

Sandy Edwards  June 2010

Japan Foundation Gallery

Level 1, Chifley Plaza,

2 Chifley Square, Sydney

Continues until 14 May

Mayu Kanamori is an unsung treasure in the Australian artworld. Her work bridges multiple disciplines and thereby falls between mainstream contexts. They include photography, installation, performance, dance, music and theatre. The closest comparison I can make is with the work of William Yang. They are both non Europeans within the Australian community. Yang was born in Queensland and says in his show Sadness that he did not know he was Chinese until the kids at school called him a ‘ching chong Chinaman’. Kanamori is a migrant in that she married an Australian.  The consequence of this commitment means that her final resting place will be Australia.

In Repose, which is both exhibition and performance, explores this relationship to adopted country that Kanamori has experienced as a migrant. She researched the history of Japanese migrants who lived, worked and died in Australia from as early as the late 1800’s. Their presence on Australian soil is portrayed through the cemeteries they are found in, in places such as Townsville, Thursday Island and Broome.

Kanamori does more than simply travel to, and document, these places. Working with sound designer Vic McKewan, koto player Satsuki Odamura and choreographer and dancer Wakako Asano, she stages performances in the cemeteries. These kuyo, as the Japanese call them, are offered as a ceremony to ‘respect, honour and calm the spirits of the deceased’.

Walking into the Japan Foundation Gallery there is a sense of entering a hallowed place. The lights are low and the sound of Tibetan gongs and koto are heard. Photographs show details from the cemeteries visited, in kanji (Japanese script) – the names of the deceased, the textures of tombstones, Australian soil, and native plants. Colors range from deep reds and oranges, to blue grey. Textures are drawn from marble and stone, grasses and earth.

Hanging from ceiling to floor are three scrolls printed with photographs of tombstones. The rich fibers of Japanese handmade paper (washi) made from mulberries add richness to the images. On the floor are resin tiles with images and words mounted onto them. At the opening and the performances tea light candles light the images on the floor.

A large screen fills one wall with a slideshow of photographs treated to present movement, poetically documenting the places visited and the performances that took place in them. A poignancy of mood is created in these images through the choice of light, A sense of journeying is portrayed. The places visited are ones which most Australians would not know existed within their own country. With the exception of Cowra, these histories are not a commonly known part of Australian history.

One of Kanamori’s intentions is to make visible the history of Japan’s relationship to Australia while at the same time coming to terms with her own place within her adopted country. She has chosen an ambitious method of interdisciplinary collaboration that makes her artwork rich with poetic resonance.

The work reflects Kanamori’s Japanese heritage in its unusual focus on the importance of death in life. Her belief in spiritual practice and its relationship to art is also apparent as is the idea that beauty and death are closely connected. Her commitment to performance is integral. She believes dance, live music and performance are metaphors for the ephemeral nature of the present moment in life. Photography is also integral in its recording of the moment of time which has passed forever. The desire to document ‘that which will disappear’ drives her art. She sees beauty and poignancy in that moment and seeks to represent it.

In Repose is a highly complex and rewarding experience. Kanamori uses the gallery space in a way I have not yet seen. It operates as both conventional gallery and as theatre set. The performance completely enlivens the space. The combination of photographs, moving image, dance, koto playing and storytelling  conspire to leave the audience simultaneously moved, informed and entertained. We have been invited to share a journey, a ritual and a transformation. Those who saw this beautiful piece of theatre, performance and visual art are fortunate indeed.

Contributors to In Repose are Vic McEwan (Sound Designer/Storyteller), Satsuki Odamura (koto player), Wakako Asano (dance), Mark Isaacs (Composer), Rosalind Page (Composer), Michael Whiticker (Composer) and Shigeaki Iwai (Video).

Congratulations to the Japan Foundation for their commitment to this project.

Stills Gallery

36 Gosbell Street, Paddington

Continues until April 17, 2010

www.stillsgallery.com.au

Pat Brassington: Postmark

Pat Brassington: Camouflage

Welcome to the world of Pat Brassington. In writing this review I must declare that in my roles as Codirector and Curator of Stills Gallery I have represented the work of Pat Brassington since 1997.  I still have a part time relationship with Stills Gallery whereby I curate a number of exhibitions throughout the year. This exhibition by Pat Brassington was curated by Bronwyn Rennex.

Pat’s work generates love and dislike in equal measure. It might be more accurate to say discomfort than dislike. People have confessed to me after an opening that they have found it difficult to stay in the room without declaring their unease. It is not just a response of ‘not interested’, ‘doesn’t do it for me’. It is  ‘I don’t like it’.

Yet Pat Brassington is one of the most collected artists in Australia and those who like her work are passionate about it. I think it is interesting to tease these facts out.

Anne Marsh writes in Pat Brassington (A Tasmanian Monograph, Publ. by Quintus 2006) that ‘Pat Brassington enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Tasmania in 1983, as a mature age student. She was forty one years old. Her work quickly evolved a conceptual and theoretical momentum informed by a compulsion for reading – fiction and theory, and viewing films’.

One of the reason’s Brassington’s work is confronting to viewers expecting photography is that the works do not bear the hallmarks of photography as most know it. Her prints have more similarity to printmaking (which she studied) than to a photographic print. Brassington embraced digital printmaking processes very early in their history, choosing the archivally sound giclee print method in which archival inks are sprayed onto a wide range of art paper surfaces through a very fine nozzle.

She also rejects standard photographic processes that privilege the negative as a ‘truthful’ method of recording ‘reality’. Rather she takes old black and white negatives created at an earlier stage of her art practice and scans them on a flat bed scanner, imports them into the computer and colourises and manipulates them with techniques like photoshop. The computer is her easle and computer tools are her paintbrushes.

Her influences are many however the surrealists would rate highly in the list. Her images present a conundrum, almost a riddle, yet by scrutinising her work the terrain becomes familiar. Femininity and female sexuality is a central subject. Particular erogenous zones in the female anatomy are revisited again and again.

In this exhibition the mouth is featured in two very different images, The Secret, in which a girl child has blue tape across her mouth and Camouflage in which a swollen protruding tongue is covered by a small white doily. In previous work the mouth, often a child’s mouth, has featured regularly. In Ocean Child we see the face of a child with a starfish extending down and out of the mouth in a playful and illustrative way.

It is rare to see the full figure depicted as it is in By the Way where a woman wearing a long red skirt and a paper bag of the same colour on her head, is seen walking away from us along a road. We sometimes see dolls but more often we see parts of bodies and usually they are female or an undeclared gender.

Childhood and memory are always present as subject matters alongside feminine sexuality. There is often a sense of mystery, of something undeclared. I suspect the undeclared is actually our own subconscious, not Brassington’s, which is perhaps why she is so reluctant to explain her work in any direct way. The subconscious, the theories of Freud and psychoanalysis are always hovering around a Pat Brassington image.

In A Perfect Day, a new series within the rich body of work made in 2009 and 2010 on display at Stills, there are an array of suggestive details such as, a grassy field, a horizon, knotted cords of fabric, an armless doll wearing stockings and a gumnut shaped hat, a bunched petticoat or tablecloth, a doll with motor cycling goggles over her eyes and a young girl (or boy) lying on the back in the field, her crossed arms covering her eyes. Where colour is introduced to the basic black and white it is a strangely putrid greeny yellow. This is a change of palette from the predominant pinks of recent work and the deep reds you see in this show.

The central image for A Perfect Day is a kind of summary or overview image in which a girl lies face down on a grassy knoll that features repetitively. Titled Rub Your Eyes, the girl is lying up the incline and is covered with the same petticoat or tablecloth which appears in another image. Her legs and shoes protrude towards us. It is an illustrative image and could be read as the coda for the series narrative.

Apparently the inspiration for this series is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I can entirely understand this novel as a source of inspiration however I think the reminiscences it has provoked in Brassington’s memories and dreams are entirely idiosyncratic. There is another, very red, image in the show (Going), which would seem to suit the title The Road.

This exhibition makes the point that Brassington is a true postmodernist. She acknowledges the inheritance of the viewer and does not prescribe their response in any way. Projection and psychoanalysis are the keys to reading a Pat Brassington image. So beware of saying you don’t like Pat Brassington’s work at an opening. It may say more about your predilections than you think!

As a woman I find Brassington’s work delightfully liberating. It is exciting to see an older woman freely creating images of women that are so diametrically opposed and free from social stereotyping in our culture, particularly by the media. I do not think this is her entire content, it is rather a function of her stage of life. I find the work conjures a chuckle from my solar plexus. It is a gasp of recognition, of a joke that you may catch, or miss entirely. Perhaps this is why she irritates viewers who do not understand where the joke is coming from. I think this crosses genders, is not a simplistic feminist position. It is to do with life experience. Her images are many things to many people. They are lewd, wry, hilarious, tongue in cheek, befuddling, beguiling and irritating in different measures depending on who you are.  Regardless of these responses Pat Brassington has clearly established herself as one of Australia’s most important artists.

Sandy Edwards

April 2010

Sara Roney Gallery

Foyer 19a Boundary St

Paddington

March 2010

Exhibition continues until April 21

www.sararoneygallery.com.au

A timely comparison with Pat Brassington’s exhibition at Stills Gallery (see separate review) is work by Zorica Purlija at Foyer 19A, Boundary Street Paddington. Sara Roney whose previous gallery was in Glenmore Road has re-homed her gallery in the stylish building at 19 Boundary Street. Which houses many fabric and furniture design shops. Adopting a new model of exhibition and representation she places art throughout the corridors of this large and gracious building with photography on the fifth floor.

Purlija was an Arthere artist at Xhibit 9 in Danks Street in 2008. I have great faith in her talent. This is the first serious body of work she has exhibited since then, and it is well worth waiting for. Look carefully in Café Luc and in the hallways adjacent to it to discover the ten artworks.

The pallet of the images is white with touches of soft colour.  The medium of the subject is fabric, a child’s christening gown in fact. The photographic medium is digital photography. These works could be called abstractions, yet they provoke the imagination alive and invite an active projection. In explanation Purlija says ‘I was interested in the idea the gown represents. It was not so much the colour or the fabric. It was the meaning of it.’

Zorica Purlija 'fervor'

These subtle photographs suggest a complexity of meaning. Firstly, the mystery and beauty of childhood suggested by the gown,. A central theme is the milestones of a woman’s life. This includes female sexuality, the union of the couple, which goes full circle, producing the child.

It is this subject matter and treatment that leads me to compare Purlija’s work to Pat Brassington whose exhibition is showing concurrently across the road at Stills Gallery until April 17. I find the comparison between these two women intriguing. They are both working in the surreal mode at very different life stages. As a mature woman Brassington is exploring female sexuality in a very free and challenging way whereas Purlija is approaching it with the perspective of a young woman. I see strong Brassington influences in Purlija’s work.

In Fervour, one of the most memorable images, a couple appears to be kissing. In Passage, the shapes suggest female genitalia. In Phosphorescence I could not have guessed until Purlija told me that the central white shape is a glowing fish in the bath. The hands reaching for it are the hands of her daughter Yumi, (who appears in many of Purlija’s photographs). There is subtle movement in the water which could be read as birth fluid, a symbol drawn from Christian beliefs. This is a magic image.

In Flutter the beauty and innocence of a child squatting with white fabric floating around her is depicted. Slowly Purlija’s themes emerge. She is divining the mysteries of life, drawing from her perspective as a young mother enchanted by the innocence of childhood yet drawn to the adult delights of sensual pursuits. These pleasures merge and become indistinguishable.

The material subject of Purlija’s photographs, the christening gown, is twisted and moved in the making of the image, transformed by Purlija’s hands, seen by the camera’s ‘eye’ and moulded by light itself. In Angels the gown is transformed into something dynamic, a kind if rushing energy. She has moved the camera and the christening gown while holding the shutter open. The shutter becomes a metaphor for time, for eternity. By leaving the shutter open she is searching for the unknown in photography and likes to work in that unknown moment, to create images that are ‘in between’ time. In this sense her photographs are about eternity.

Sandy Edwards

March 2010

Storm Gallery

2/65 – 67 Foveaux Street, Surry Hills

March – April 2010

www.giclee.com.au

Cam Neville: The Conclusion

In Coasting photographer Cam Neville has taken a unique path. He is exhibiting eloquent and mysterious photographs, which were taken when he was only 19 years old. This raises important questions about the role of photography as memory and as the repository for significant emotions. Having studied Psychology at university and with a fascination for how people tick, this territory immediately appealed to me.

These black and white images have a touch of Bill Brandt in them. They depict scenes of the seaside town Worthing in West Sussex about 20 miles from Brighton, with more than one lonely image of crashing waves against sea walls, tangled fishing nets, sand rocks and sea, revealing a wet and wild sea town. They are all rendered in a satisfyingly contrasty black and white. There is not a lot of black and white photography of this nature being seen at the moment, and this show looks very good in the space.

Some images have evocative titles such as Peace at Last, Are you there? and forebodingly The Conclusion. Others have no titles at all.

There is loneliness and yearning permeating these photographs. Cam Neville says of his life at that age ‘I was lonely from seventeen. I always wanted a family of my own. I was looking at people to see if they were happy.’ ‘There is nothing like a bit of heartache to inspire an artist’, Neville quipped, making light of the difficulties he was experiencing at that time.

He had genuine reasons for his struggle to connect with life. His parents split when he was thirteen. After he was 19 his mother moved herself and her son to Australia. She soon returned to England leaving her son in the new ‘colony’. These events caused his experience of isolation. Looking at the photos we can directly feel his emotion.

I speak about these circumstances because they are very much the subject of the work. Dealing with major life experiences is one very valid reason for producing artwork. It has been proven as a therapeutic tool. Clearly the power of these emotions are still with Neville in order to make him want to recontact with them through this exhibition. It is a courageous action many would avoid. For those not daunted by emotional honesty it is a deeply rewarding experience to look at these photographs and contemplate the difficult passages of life. If this is ‘Coasting’ through life, as Neville has titled the show, then I foresee good things for Cam Neville in the future.

Sandy Edwards

March 2010

Performance Space

March 2010

Review by Sandy Edwards

William Yang’s generation was also my generation.  This is partly why I found William’s 10^th slideshow so delectably enjoyable. Of all his shows it is the closest to my personal experience of growing up, or should I say discovering what it meant to be an adult, in Sydney. The time period covered is from William’s arrival in Sydney from Brisbane in the late 1960’s, to the present. It chronicles William’s introduction to Sydney society and the circumstances which made him a photographer, and more than that, a superb and satisfying story teller.

William’s great charm is his calculated understatement. As he stands before you, a lone figure on the stage with his giant images projected in duplicate behind him, there is both intimacy and droll comment in his delivery. There is also generosity of spirit, light and sometimes wicked humour, and a sense of playing it for laughs. Much of the humour arises from gossip and wry revelations about the foibles of human behaviour.

My Generation tells the stories of some very high profile Sydney identities in the creative arts. William was well positioned. He was introduced to Patrick White by actor Kate Fitzpatrick. He lived at Wirian, Martin Sharp’s house in Double Bay, a home for many over the years, and was therefore able to photograph Martin’s wonderful collection of Mickey Mouse dolls and chronicle Martin’s obsession with Tiny Tim. Another central identity in William’s group was Brett Whitely who attracted a group of fellow artists around him in his Lavendar Bay home. He shared a house with film producer Margaret Fink and they developed a firm friendship.

These artists were the glitterati of Sydney. Even if one was not a close participant in this world, one was aware of it. It was Sydney’s equivalent of the New York art scene of Andy Warhol. The Yellow House was as influential in Sydney as Warhol’s Factory was in New York.  Some viewers of William’s show have said he is name-dropping. I personally don’t have problem with that. I existed on the fringes of this scene when I was working as a photographer in Sydney in the early stages of my career. It was a little daunting for a shy young photographer.    However William is being true to his personal experience. It is natural for a photographer to be attracted to celebrity.

Others have commented that they find William’s theatre show voyeuristic. My answer is, ‘Isnt all photography voyeuristic by nature?’ I think some people are not comfortable with personal revelation. William is a master of discrete revelation. One problem people familiar with the world William is portraying have, is their fear of non-inclusion within it.

In 1977 William had an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography. It was his first, his coming out as a paparazzi. I attended this exhibition and can vouch that after it, nothing was the same for William or his community of peers. Shortly after that exhibition I turned my back on William at openings, not wanting to be photographed, feeling it was an invasion of my privacy. Over the years my attitude changed and I wanted William to photograph me because if he didn’t I would not be seen as significant in the shared history of my artistic community.

William’s achievement is his generous acknowledgement of the creative artistic talents in Sydney in the 70’s and 80’s. As a gay man he has been able to infiltrate this scene in a unique way. In an excellent piece in the Spectrum section of the SMH Valerie Lawson ‘got’ William with great accuracy. She says his multiple achievements include historically documenting the Sydney artistic elite and the mood of the time, and that he honors the key creative talents of its members. Included in My Generation are stories about actor Kate Fitzpatrick, film producer Margaret Fink, clothes designers Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson and Fran Moore of Flamingo Park, painter Brett  Whiteley, his partner Wendy Whiteley and their daughter Arkie, photographer Jon Lewis, artist Martin Sharp, Mardi Gras giants Peter Tully and David McDiarmid, and most centrally the huge talent and personality of writer Patrick White and his partner Manoly.

White provides the creative and personal core of My Generation. William acknowledges him as the giant talent that he was in Australia in the world of literature and in a fascinating way shows how the other artists and actors revolved around the flame of his talent. And yet he shows the vulnerabilities of Patrick White to be equivalent to those of any other human being. White provides William with the opportunity for his greatest photographic portraits.

William says that the reason he stayed ‘in’ with Patrick was that he yielded to his (and by implication others) needs. My feeling has always been that William operates as a conduit for others, and for life in general. He is a keen observer of life and of human nature. He wants to be at the centre of it and yet does not wish to change or influence its flow. There must be a spiritual belief in influence here. In My Generation William tells how he met Yen Soon at Wirian through Martin Sharp. They adopted each other and due to her influence William changed his name from Willie Young to William Yang. If you dared make a mistake and call him Willie (as I did once at Fletchers Photographic shop) he said very firmly “Its William!” Yen Soon helped him become aware of his Chinese heritage, which as he has chronicled in other slideshows, he had no knowledge of as a child in Queensland.

As Valerie Lawson said in her article in Spectrum, no other artist of William’s generation has recorded their own generations’ history in such a way. He simultaneously tells his history and that of his peers. There is a remarkable generosity and openness in this action. People have said to me, ‘Where is William in this? I want to know more about him’. I remind them that William’s presence, standing formally in front of his audience and telling us stories, is an outstanding act of charity and inclusion. Why should he ‘spill the beans’ in front of us. Would we want to do that? And why do we want him to? Significantly, why do those people in his slideshows appear so humble in his presence, so grateful almost, to be included. It is because William gives them the ultimate compliment. Through his inclusion and attention he acts like a wise Buddhist sage. In recording our histories he reminds us of our mortality and at the same time of the importance of our time on earth.

William Yang is a national treasure.

Museum of Sydney

Exhibition 20 Feb – 8 August

In the so-called ‘summer of love’, Kings Cross was as much a magnet for long-haired hippies as it was for US servicemen on leave from Vietnam.

Photographers Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey spent six months in 1970–71 capturing the sights, sounds and pulsating rhythms of Sydney’s infamous red-light district: from drag queens to avant-garde artists, celebrities and local characters. This exhibition is a fascinating portrait of life ‘up the Cross’ at a unique moment in time.

For more info visit: www.hht.net.au
Exhibition on until 8 August 2010
Museum of Sydney
Corner Bridge and Phillip Streets, Sydney

Rennie Ellis: 'US Servicemen and Girls, Kings Cross' 1970-71 (detail) © Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive