This exhibition catalogue documents Mortal,
Immortal, an exhibition curated by DIAGRAM.
Mortal, Immortal featured works by Ali Bezer, Mitchell
Donlaldson, Emma Leslie, Jess Quinn, Genevieve
Reynolds and Jared Worthington.
The exhibition opened on 18 April 2013 and
continued until 27 April 2013.
Over page
Emma Leslie
This... (#14), 2013
Luke Kidd & Kylie Spear
0414 441 922
www.theholdartspace.com
[email protected]
Level 2, 274 Montague Road
West End Q 4101
DIAGRAM presents ‘Mortal, Immortal’, an exhibition of
contemporary reflections on mortality from the perspectives of
six visual artists. The manifestations of these reflections vary from
humble introspection, paranoia and explorations of destruction
to joyful celebrations of youth, potential and the sensorial;
colour, sound and light. The high drama of this classical theme is
tempered by the acknowledgement of everyday reality, the calm
of academic enquiry and the intimacy of personal gesture.
Jared Worthington
Albaboss (video still), 2013
The contemplation of
death is uncanny
By Simon Brigden and Cameron Hope
The relationship between mortality and immortality is strange one – it is an
uncanny relationship. For the living, death is impossibly foreign. A human can
imagine a death, or perhaps envision a fatal scenario with him or herself as its
victim, but to actually comprehend something beyond this living state is futile.
Uncannily, by having no access to what death is, the living only know life, and
thus live without mortality. They are seemingly immortal. If immortality is the
opposite of death, than who alive knows mortality?
The realm of art often claims the latter as one of its aims and ends. In each
painterly portrait, there is the making immortal of the sitter; in each family
snapshot, there is the preservation of the momentary. Yet to depict something
as true of mankind as its mortality is quite impossible. Art cannot claim that
sort of truth any more than science.
The theme of Mortal/Immortal is inherently unrepresentable. But, precisely
because it cannot be represented, it seems ever-present. Uncannily again,
expecting the work within the show to depict its theme is an impossible aim,
but engagement with the theme must be through the work alone.
The work must, and does, begin to represent these paradoxical experiences
of art and nature. As soon as the work focuses on death, becomes a memento
mori, it can no longer comprehend this grandiose fact. A tempering with
colloquial images, with playful form, forces the theme from the beholder’s
mind, but makes it ever present.
Jess Quinn
Self Portrait (Running Dog)
(video still), 2013
In I Cried, Mitchell Donaldson presents a triptych of sorts, with a photographic
and sculptural installation of materials surrounding the memory of an event
in the artist’s life. A photograph of a wrecked car is hung in a zip lock bag and
pinned to the gallery wall; an A5 sized exercise book is glued shut and mounted
on a wooden plinth; the third element is a framed photograph of a wailing
child, with bright red ribbon spilling out of the image’s eyes. Meanwhile, Never
mind is a work of black paper, with the titular word in bold, block letters. Nailed
low to the wall as if slouching on the floor, the texture of the work exhibits tears
and crumples in the joins of the letters.
I Cried sets out to confuse the viewer’s sense of memory and language as our
means of relating to the world, suggesting, but refusing to narrate, its objects’
biography. Without the artist’s narration, the revelation that he was the wailing
child and that it was his grandfather involved in this car crash, the starting-point
for their interpretations seems to exist perpetually beyond our grasp. We are
forced to pick an arbitrary starting-point for our engagement with the work.
The objects exist as documents of a past without a present; relics from another
life; items from the 21st century equivalent to the kunstkammer, with trauma
bagged up, books slammed shut, and memory made laughable.
Never mind, on the other hand, is formally and thematically more inclusive.
Indeed, there is a certain inevitability to the word. Its power to bring lines of
discussion and revelation succinctly to a close is mirrored by the disposable
formal qualities of the work. To what extent this correlation follows is
negotiable: is the crumpled and torn letters a sign of overuse or because “never
mind” makes conversation itself disposable? Never mind appears as both as a
challenge of to the audience’s use of the word, and an offer to use it however
they like, without excuse. First setting out with I Cried to confuse the beholder’s
sense of narrative, Never mind then creates the narrative of confusion, as
the desire to crack open the histories of the triptych are threatened by the
possibility that our questions will be answered with a dismissive “never mind”.
Right: Mitchell Donaldson
I Cried (detail), 2013
Over page: Mitchell Donaldson
Never mind, 2013
Jared Worthington draws the audience towards his looping video projection,
Albaboss, through a melodic, echoing soundtrack. Over four minutes he
scrambles and repeats small recordings of separate motifs: a rotating spiral,
the opening and closing of an eye, and a field of kinetic stones. Between
these images are singularities, including a body of water hypnotically lapping
against a rocky shore, a totally blue shot of a lamp, and the improvisational
choreography of a human hand.
Experientially, the work becomes immediately familiar. While this myriad
of moving images is disparate in content, its form unites it. Simultaneously,
Worthington’s soundtrack is not a sonically random accompaniment. The
music allows the beholder to legibly arrange a narrative from the video. Even
if this does not result in an explicit story, a moral parable or allegory, there is
the same effect, one of time passing and concluding (before then repeating
itself). The opening and closing of the eye bookends and joins the work’s
poles’, delimiting the narrative’s beginning and end. Within the classical
theme of the exhibition, this “blind recording” is actually quite playful, and
not exclusively through music. When creating this work, the artist would
watch the reality he thought his mobile phone was capturing, rather than the
representational screen itself. The jerky, hand held lens is not sure what it
sees, and the beholder is similarly content with their own uncertainty when
facing the video.
Jared Worthington
Albaboss (video still), 2013
Jess Quinn’s three video works, Self-Portrait (Running Dog), Untitled, and
Lone Rider, use the familiarity of humour as an opening for a representation
of the strangeness to be found in the everyday. Self-portrait (Running Dog)
takes a short clip of the artist running on a beach, and loops it innumerably
over a soundtrack of the playing out of a game of Charades. In Lone Rider, a
figure dances to some bluesy pop music, while in Untitled a string orchestra
plays over footage of someone in a Panda costume parading near a shopping
centre.
Appealing to our sense of familiarity with the everyday, Quinn relays home
video and the conversation of her family in a purposely a-synchronic form so
as to illustrate the abstractedness and bizarreness that this familiarity allows
us to overlook. In Self-Portrait (Running Dog), the repetition of the video
creates the visual sense of running on the spot, contrasting the audio of the
Charades’ players searching through their imagination and vocabularies to
find the next word. Physically energetic yet immobile, Quinn’s work tempts us
into a game of Charades ourselves, teasing the stolidness of routine, playing
its picture out again and again as if the clue to some great riddle.
Jess Quinn
Lone Rider (video still), 2013
The moving image is not unique to video loops. Genevieve Reynolds’ Sunset,
Gems, and Napoleon as Red Canary are lenticular, tilt controlled images,
with layers of paint disfiguring the original scene. Through prior knowledge it
becomes apparent that each is a well-known masterpiece, with Napoleon as
Red Canary hiding Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the St. Bernard
Pass (1800-1). A separate sequence of five paintings on board undergoes a
similar layering and peeling back.
As each layer of paint is discernible on The Last of the White Paint, they
reveal through inference. The original wooden surface remains invisible,
but it is not hidden. Sight is unreliable as Reynolds creates an experiment
in connotation. In Red Canary, there is more than an art-historical in-joke.
With a lenticular image, this famous portrait of imperial and individual power
becomes kitsch and trivial, ignoring the painting’s history. Napoleon becomes
a wall decoration held up by blu-tack. But atop this irreverent poster are
broad strokes of abstract paint, hiding it almost entirely from view. Instead of
erecting a chromatic barrier between viewer and comprehension, Reynolds’
inhabits a formal laboratory. Like White Paint, which reveals and conceals
background, the lenticular undercoat establishes a moving, alternating depth,
and abstract paint is its static foreground. Not just a fruition of modernist
aesthetics, the subjective tilt image relies on the viewer to crane their neck
and discover its flicker between two forms, the depth in its foreshortening.
Genevieve Reynolds
Still Life with Rocks, 2013
Ali Bezer’s sculptures, Sound-Form 1 and Sound-Form 2, attempt to translate
the invisible sensation of sound into the mute sensation of sight. Minimalistic
in their aesthetic, these painted aluminium sheets are bent and undulated
into naturalistic, wavelike forms, each about 6 feet long. Suspended at head
height on the walls, the work seems to deny its physical conditions, seeming
steadfast and yet delicate.
Materially, the works have a strong aesthetic appeal to the mechanised
textile industries, and invite comparison to miniaturised Richard Serra steel
installations. Yet their overcoming of these comparisons is down to their
seeming immateriality. Despite the coldness of aluminium as a medium,
Bezer’s works are soft and ephemeral.
The folds and warps in the texture seem uncannily familiar; semiautonomous, as though it were sound itself, and not the artist, which
affected them. Yet in the same breath, we might say that the works become
strangely unfamiliar. Having taken something commercially mass-produced
and allowing it a new artistic freedom, we are forced to reconsider the
relative boundaries of material and structure. Bezer’s vision is one of the
weightlessness of the concrete, the sculptural rigidity of wind, and the
harmony in cacophonic modernity.
Right: Ali Bezer
Sound-Form 2, 2013
Over page: Ali Bezer
Sound-Form 1, 2013
Formalist preoccupation at first appears to shape Emma Leslie’s photogram
series This… (#13, #14,#15). Large sheets of light sensitive paper, the works are
almost exclusively a single colour, either red, orange, or black. Before exposing
them to light, Leslie manipulates these planes, crumpling, folding, and unfurling
them. Each has its own three-dimensional imprint. #13 has an ethereal streak
of light, #14 two folds which pull the work inwards, and #15 appears to
represent a solid point of impact between the surface and an unknown object.
These works are analogue photographs, despite their lack of mimesis. They
depict the capturing of light through exposure to darkroom chemicals. Leslie
is a social photographer, inferring the context this analogue medium now
inhabits. With digital photography’s ubiquity now an archaic fact, these
photograms point to the apparent purity which a hands-on process implies.
In turn, their creases and folds create a tangible, corporeal, three dimensional
space on the flat paper. But as they do not represent a traditionally mimetic
image, which tries to create a doorway for the viewer, these works are not
nostalgic for the medium’s past. Leslie’s work shows us the un-photographic
present of analogue photography. Yet this methodology also points towards an
unknowable future of similar images.
Emma Leslie
This... (#13), 2013
It is possible to write both from within and without the exhibition’s theme: to
be able to document, the author must write as though they were there, but
when they are there, they must act as though they are not. There was here an
attempt to document the show both as these authors saw it and as it appeared
to them, but they found the limit of the theme in the work, and of the work in
the theme, and so remain uncertain that they have found anything at all.
At some point, the curtains close. The inevitable end-point which defines
mortality arrives unannounced, and the endless looping of the immortal
concludes. But until then, so long as we have some youth and thus some
future, we are immortal. “When somebody comes up to you and asks ‘how’s
life?’” Julian Barratt once joked, “look at them and reply: ‘I don’t know, I’ve
got nothing else to compare it to”. Comparing these works in their dissonance,
juxtaposing different interpretational routes, is an act of immortality, the
human mortality.
Genevieve Reynolds
Four Trees, 2013