calendario eventi  :: 

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30/3/2005

Four exhibitions

Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts PICA, Perth

From Space to Place
curated by Marco Marcon

Sixteen of Australia’s most exciting, early-career contemporary artists have created new work in the Western Australian rural communities of Kellerberrin and Ballidu for IASKA’s new national touring project.

From Space to Place features photography, installation, video, sculpture and performance created from the artist’s direct engagement with the spaces and places they inhabited in rural WA.

From Space to Place concentrates on the ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions that emerge in the zone of continual exchange between space and place, determined and undeterm-ined, actual and virtual, form and formlessness. The explorations of rural experience in this exhibition focus on the linguistic, aesthetic and emotional relationships between people and places/spaces, through the artists process of becoming displaced and re-situating themselves. This process also implicitly addresses the effects produced by globalisation and new communication technologies on the way in which we feel, understand and experience the space/place nexus.

Participating artists: Izabela Pluta (NSW), Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro (NSW), Anna Nazzari (WA), Hayden Fowler (NSW), James Lynch (VIC), nat & ali (VIC), Wilkins Hill (QLD), Matt Hunt (WA), Tom Nicholson (VIC), Bruce Slatter (WA), Raquel Ormella (NSW)

The relationship between space and place is a complex and ambiguous one. Space is a notion of the highest generality, but seen from the vantage point of concrete human experience, it connotes an abstract potentiality that has not yet been formed or determined. Place, on the other hand, represents a specific and concrete segment of the spatial continuum laden with meaning and history. Space becomes a place when its abstract and open-ended formlessness is seized upon by an agency - an individual, a community, a people - who gives it a form, a name and a history.

But the line separating space and place, determined and undetermined, actual and virtual, form and formlessness is often one based on exclusion. The identity of places – of homes, suburbs, towns, nations - is over and over again won by separating a familiar inside from an alien outside. Boundaries, borders and frontiers are created to preserve and perpetuate the original act of exclusion upon which the identity of place was gained, keeping at bay the constant threat of indeterminacy that presses from the outside. A sense of place is often a double-edged sword that entails both a positive affirmation of identity and a regressive closure to what lies beyond the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Place is a historically relative human creation that defines itself against an alien exterior space: nature, foreign culture or the unknown.

The dialectics between space and place manifests itself with particular intensity in small and remote rural towns. For example, the relationship between the places of human settlement and the unbounded space of nature is deeply troubled by the effects of environmental degradation (salination is a case in point). Agriculture culturalises nature, gives it a human form, but it also triggers destructive processes that affect the zone in-between nature and culture, space and place. Analogous degenerative phenomena can be observed at community level: with diminishing population, reduced economic and demographic imbalance threatening the future viability of long established rural settlements. These are examples of environmental and social entropy in which the usual path that leads from the indeterminacy of space to the specificity of place is actually reversed. Amorphous space reclaims areas that were previously colonised by form, meaning and history: homes and farmed lands are returned to silence and indeterminacy, memories blurred and blunted, sense of identity weakened.

In rural Australia traditional ideas of belonging and locality are also increasingly challenged by the economic and social consequences of globalisation and spread of new information technologies. The strong sense of local identity that characterises small country towns is diminished by the realisation that remote and faceless global forces increasingly shape the way we live. This is a situation that creates real difficulties but that also provides communities and individuals with an opportunity to rethink creatively the relationship between the local and the global. New models of cultural identity are required to bridge the cognitive and emotional distance between the immediacy of local experience and the new horizons opened up by progressive integration of cultural, economic and social forces across nations. And in this context art can play a positive role by questioning boundaries and rigid notions of identity and by offering more fluid, open and innovative ways of reinterpreting the relationship between the virtuality of space and the actuality of place. …

From Space to Place concentrate on the ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions that trouble the in-between zone separating space and place, determined and undetermined, actual and virtual, form and formlessness. The exhibition presents new works created by 11 early-career Australian artists during their residency at IASKA in 2004. Invited artists have resided for several weeks in the small town of Kellerberrin in the Western Australian Whealtbelt with a view to researching and developing works that engaged with the specificity of the place and community.

The participating artists share a similar interest in areas of practice situated at the crossroads of art, social intervention, new media and architecture. Their works are often centred on the linguistic, aesthetic and social processes that intervene in the transition from space to place. The exhibition approaches the curatorial theme from two main interpretative angles. The first one concerns the interaction between personal and social space/place; the second examines the interface between social space/place and the natural environment. These works investigate notions of actual and virtual space, place and displacement, belonging and estrangement.

The works in this exhibition result from an encounter between young artists and the people and place of contemporary rural Australia. This project has provided artists with a rare opportunity to work for extended periods of time outside an urban environment. The resulting works testify to the excitement that stems from the discovery of new realities and from a dialogue between individuals who represent sections of society that often don’t have the opportunity to engage with each other.

Marco Marcon, 2005

The International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA)

IASKA is a groundbreaking art organisation based on a unique idea: to run a cutting-edge program of exhibitions and residencies by distinguished contemporary artists in a remote rural community. IASKA’s gallery and studio space are located in the small town of Kellerberrin, 210 kilometers east of Perth, in the heart of the Western Australian Wheatbelt. Participating artists live and work in the town for periods of up to three months, interacting with the community and developing original artworks based on their experience of the place and people.

IASKA is an initiative without precedent in Australia. Our vision is to foster a dialogue that brings together the views of a rural microcosm with those of leading artists from all over the world. We want to promote a synthesis of global and regional experiences in order to engender positive change and innovation at both artistic and social level.

Works and statements

Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy - Maintenance, 2004
Abandoned house, MDF, acrylic paint, dimensions variable

Maintenance is the result of our month-long residency at Milaby farm, Ballidu. The project is our architectural response to the natural forces of entropy that we witnessed on the property. The decision to use geometric shapes to describe a force of nature was a reaction against baroque interpretations of natural verdancy. We decided to create forms that were extrusions from the home’s portals, similar to the honeycomb of bees. This home was disused but still subject to the forces of nature; bringing about change in form. Our response was an attempt to capture the intensity of this force within the redundant shell.

Thanks to Pam Toster, Peter Phillips and Bev Hornibrook.
Work courtesy of the artist.

James Lynch, Earliest Memories, 2004
DVD, foam, cotton and polyester, dimensions variable
Work courtesy the artist, Uplands Gallery Melbourne, Mori Gallery Sydney and Galerie Frank Paris

Works in playing order:
"Jo’s Memory", 2004 (2:30 mins)
"Reynold’s Memory", 2004 (2:22 mins)
"Mick’s Memory", 2004 (1:26 mins)
"Kit’s Memory", 2004 (1:15 mins)

Over the weeks at Kellerberrin mainly through conversations I asked people about their earliest memories which were archived and added to my own personal collection. With suggestions from Pauline and Donna at IASKA, willing participants were encouraged to direct and re-enacted some of these scenarios with a camera. I spent most of my time including a few weeks back home in my studio in Melbourne drawing different aspects of these video tableaux. I also made a big soft foam log to accompany these animations, invoking the storytelling and campfires that I think I remember from my youth.

nat&ali - Honk 4 Art, 2004-05
DVD projection and acrylic painting on canvas

nat&ali - Feeling Groovy, 2004-05
DVD projection

Honk 4 Art comments on the largely 'just passing thru' nature of small and diminishing towns on major road systems throughout Australia. This draws attention to the unusual nature of an art project such as IASKA existing in such a town. The accompanying painting is a copy of Drysdale's 'Sofala',
with our 'honk 4 art' image added to the foreground.

Feeling Groovy commemorates the gestation period of Maxine - Coral (whose mum was pregnant during residency) in an absurdly surprising and some say slightly disturbing manner. This work is inspired by Ron Mueck's Pregnant woman, and various works of Leigh Bowery.

nat&ali wish to thank Marco Marcon and Felena Alach, Tom Howie, Amanda Marburg and Maxine Coral Starr, Thomas FayleWork courtesy of the artist.These are loosely performative works, which were filmed in Kellerberrin.

Tom Nicholson - Documents After a Marching Season, Kellerberrin, 2004-5
Digital prints on paper, plastic folder sleeves, three looped DVDs, dimensions variable. Work courtesy of the artist.

The work I produced in Kellerberrin is part of an ongoing project of banner marching, conceived as a kind of memorial process.

I organized two banner marches in Kellerberrin, one at dawn, one at dusk, followed by a meal shared by the banner bearers.

The work is also a response to a curious image I found in Kellerberrin: a gathering of Kellerberrin schoolchildren bearing English flags on the occasion of George V’s London coronation in 1911. The declaration of allegiance before the camera for an event on the other side of the world was a connection to the banner marches.

Raquel Ormella - Remnant, 2004
Acrylic paint, masonite, water bottles, dimensions variable.
Work courtesy of the artist and Mori Gallery, Sydney

Remnant is a work that tries to describe my experience of the physical landscape of Kellerberrin, of the distance between things as well as their fragility and inter-connectedness. Remnant is made up of objects you would find wandering around any urban area. These images are of objects from around Kellerberrin’s main street. Onto these are inscribed the names of birds that are dependant on remnant native vegetation in the surrounding area. They are classified as ‘priority’ birds or ’those that will be lost from the landscape if nothing is done to protect and enhance their habitat’ (1)

Urban encroachment, the effects of land clearing, salinity, and drought effect the social fabric of a town, not just its landscape. While these objects and bird species are specific to Kellerberrin it could be any country town where people are trying to remain connected to social and natural environment. I spent my time in Kellerberrin bird watching. I saw 51 species, 4 listed as rare in the area, 9 as ’priority’ birds. Most of these birds I had never seen before and it took me at least a week to adjust to the different sounds scape of their calls.

1. From Birds of the Central Wheatbelt, based on CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems as part of their Living Landscapes project. Research was conducted in South Tammin and Wallatin Creek as well as three other sites.

Flaps - Raquel Ormella and Regina Walter
Flaps no.8: What people are wearing in Kellerberrin/ Unwept, unhonoured, unsung. Japan, 2005
Hand coloured photocopies. Limited edition of 99 self published zine
Work courtesy of the artists

Flaps is an ongoing zine project I do with Regina Walter. Our zine is like a visual list of ideas or memories or a collection of things. It’s a way for us to mediate on everyday things we see when we are traveling and finding a way to share those small observations with each other and an audience. Past issues have been “Boys I’ve pashed”, “Floro Flaps” (eighties fashion come backs and memories) and “Ugly” (photos people sent us where they looked unprepared and unattractive). Our next is “I love me and don’t you forget” so if you have a photo of yourself where you are posing and feeling pretty special, perhaps posing near your new car, and you are prepared to laugh at your ego send it to:- raquelmonkey@ozemail.com.au

Izabela Pluta, Frontyards, 2004
Digital prints on vinyl, 230x230cm each

My interest in Kellerberrin became the domestic landscape – specifically the notion of the vacant or decorated Australian ‘front yard’. A regular tour of the streets by bike, after my visit to the Saturday cake stall, soon became an obsession for scoping the unique language and diversity of these private/public spaces. In these fragmented, life-size photographs the mundane is transposed and our attention to small details is heightened. The images ‘showcase’ these humble yards, as defined by climate and urban fashion. Three-dimensional forms are flattened, altering perspective, scale and context.

Wilkins Hill - The Samboy International Challenge, 2004
Multimedia installation, dimensions: 6.3m x 3.5m or variable.
Work courtesy of the artist

Anna Nazzari - Untitled
DVD, balsa wood, model trains, gear box with pulley system, rail tracks, dimensions variable

The work portrays a short film of a handmade model hybrid train-tractor endlessly circuiting its environment. It details a vehicle whose journey has been manipulated by camera angles, lighting and track speed to reveal a repetitive, solitary, awkward, yet comforting passage through time. The creation itself, influenced by the Kellerberrin museum, modern day farming and the constant stream of trains within Kellerberrin, lingers surreptitiously between the old and new and the past and the present. Its odd appearance and continuous efforts absurdly highlight the repetitious aspects of farming and the significance of seemingly ceaseless trains within a small town.

Matthew Hunt - Heliport Kellerberrin, 2004
10 x digital prints: 16cm x 24cm image size each, 40cm x 46cm frame size each

Heliport Kellerberrin pulls into focus the pressures of rural communities, in particular the diasporic behaviour of the rural youth. Yet it also aims to widen the net to include the current worldwide phenomenon of the politically and economically disenfranchised seeking refuge in wealthier Western countries. In this sense Heliport Kellerberrin contains notions of arrival as well as departure, ideas of ideological and ethical defection, notions of rapid change and generational difference, of rescue and help, of disappearance and of loss.

Heliport Kellerberrin refuses didactic or singular readings. Ultimately it seeks to question what the economic and political reasons creating this human departure and arrival might be. The work therefore mimics the layers of history that occupy the township of Kellerberrin and its surrounding environs. Heliport Kellerberrin works to ensure that the ideas contained within can simultaneously be read using wider global frameworks, reminding us of the global pressure points that reinforce the notion that all spaces could eventually become transit zones.

Bruce Slatter

Youth Club, 2005
1300 mm (height) x 400 mm (width) x 400 mm (depth)
Plinth based freestanding sculptures, mixed media

Youth club is a scaled down version of a gazebo modeled from a life size structure situated in the playground and barbecue recreational space in Kellerberrin. The traditional gazebo, known for its connections to summer houses and the function of giving wide views, becomes ironic and inadequate in the context of this site.

This public structure is chosen by the youth in the area as place to meet and hang out, outside the organised and mainstream clubs of the country town. Their use of this place subverts the middle class utopian function perhaps intended in the design of the structure and finds a more realistic and necessary purpose for its public use.

Afternoon Tee, 2005
Plinth based freestanding sculptures, mixed media, 1300 mm (height) x 400 mm (width) x 400 mm (depth)

Afternoon Tee is a model of a bridge over a storm water drain and a golfing tee at the Kellerberrin golf course. The contradiction of a storm water drain, in a dry place on an impeccably tended grassless golf course reflects the difficulties and patience required for both farming and golfing.

The title of this work alludes to the colonial hangovers within the culture of Australian country towns that stretch from public structures to sporting pursuits.

Hayden Fowler - White Cock (2004-2005).
Video projection (11 minute loop), gold frame, screen, speakers.
157 x 125 x 25cm

White Cock features a pristine white rooster standing upon an ornate perch amongst a lavish gold and aqua set. He crows intermittently, flaps his wings and puffs out his chest in seeming self importance. Interestingly, although the rich setting signals privilege and prestige, in this context it also denotes a certain captivity. After all, it is a gold chain that secures the rooster to its perch, impeding his flight.

Ever-attentive to the sculptural properties of his work, Fowler has the work projected within an elaborate gold frame complete with florid gold speaker fittings. Recalling the rotating images of a pokie machine or mechanised billboard, the footage periodically slides in and out of the frame accompanied by the sound of electronic blips.

Fowler developed this work immediately after five months of travel through Latin America. As a response, White Cock operates on one level as an exquisite refrain on the relationship between ‘white’ culture and the third world. But it also produces an affective power which delivers it beyond this metaphorical dimension. The unique live presence of the bird ignites the work, as well as the apparent reverence that the artist bestows upon it.

Dominique Angelero

acknowledgements
Out of Site is presented by the International Art Space Australia Kellerberrin (IASKA).

National tour managed by ART ON THE MOVE.

The development and tour of this exhibition was assisted by Visions of Australia a Commonwealth Government Program providing funding support to tour exhibitions of cultural material across Australia. Visions of Australia aims to provide all Australians, wherever they live, with better access to the nation’s cultural heritage; historic, scientific and visual arts material; and Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander culture.

This exhibition has been supported by the National Exhibitions Touring Structure for Western Australia Inc. through the State Exhibition Development and Touring Funds.

The State of Western Australia has made an investment through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission in ART ON THE MOVE the National Exhibitions Touring Structure for Western Australia Inc. ART ON THE MOVE is assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Special Exhibitions Events sponsored by Healthway for Asthma WA to promote the message Smarter than Smoking.

ART ON THE MOVE
GPO Box M937 PERTH WA 6843
T: (08) 9227 7505 F: (08) 9227 5304
E: artmoves@highway1.com.au

International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA)
PO Box 8087, PERTH BC WA 6849
T/F: (08) 9228 2444
E: iaska@iinet.net.au

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2nd Ave - Mike Gray

Perth photographer Mike Gray’s new series of images applies the surreal and uncanny to a suburban landscape that on one hand is familiar but takes on different qualities when walking alone at night. All photographs in the series are taken in darkness with a flash, revealing bright and strange arrangements of flowers and plants in front of dimly-lit houses and indigo skylines. Moodily atmospheric, Gray creates a tension between the projected beauty of each dwelling (the flowers on display, the manicured lawn etc.) and the inhabitants he has never met.

The things that are closest to the general public are examined closely with the flash of a camera. These floral frameworks contrast against the underexposed houses where public scrutiny is not invited. 2nd Ave retains an element of innocence and voyeurism as if its subjects are viewed from a child's perspective.

Mike Gray - biography

Mike Gray is a photographic artist from Perth, Western Australia. Through a variety of photographic styles he produces bodies of work primarily concerned with his immediate environment. It is said that charity begins at home, and this is where Gray applies a critical examination to himself and his surrounds, physical or otherwise.

Mike Gray has exhibited work in a number of galleries across Australia, most recently Surface Tension (Australian Centre of Photography), and Ladies and Gentlemen (Queensland Centre of Photography). He also appeared on the cover of Photofile, issue 72: “Satire – laugh ‘til it hurts”. Gray is employed at Edith Cowan University in the School of Communications and Multimedia.

The term ‘topographical’ refers to the making of a detailed study and analysis of a small area, and it’s also a term applied to a style of American landscape photography practiced during the 1970s. These 1970s topographical, landscape photographers didn’t refer to the epic and heroic 1930s landscapes that made Ansel Adams famous, preferring instead pictures of mundane and everyday suburban and rural America. There is, nevertheless, something ambivalent about their pictures; almost a feeling that you’re looking at a crime scene or the location for a David Lynch movie. Curiously this 1970s style of photography is back and with Mike Gray’s 2nd Ave, my suspicions are again aroused; something seems wrong.

The subject matter of 2nd Ave is benign enough, being mainly pictures of common garden plantings in front of suburban homes. 2nd Ave’s floral studies were created with a borrowed digital camera and a flash as Gray walked to his local deli in the evenings. Gray’s nocturnal specimens appear almost surprised to be photographed. Their extraordinary beauty and uncanny otherness belie the ordinariness of their surroundings. Through the failing light, glimpses of the homes that provide the back drops for these garden plants speak to Australian or Californian suburbia circa1950 / 1960. These houses were constructed and their gardens planted during the first decades of the cold war: Khrushchev, Castro, Elvis and the Kennedy’s. There are no visible signs of life coming from the homes of 2nd Ave; only the garden plants that appear as if seen for the very first time.

Kevin Ballantine, 2005
Kevin Ballantine is a practising photographic artist and lectures in Photomedia at Edith Cowan University, School of Communications and Multimedia.

To take a walk down Mike Gray’s 2nd Ave is to stroll through an eerie and almost alien space. In what may be thought of as an X-File-ish moment the boulevard has become, through Gray’s lens, a Bahktinian space of inversion and excessiveness. Here is a perversion of the Australian dream of the home and quarter-acre block. Depicted is the antithesis of the safe and smug enclave estates of suburbia. As the dark clouds gather and the light fades to a sinister shade the manicured lawns, immaculate flowerbeds and perfect plants, Cicero’s 2nd nature, a ‘nature’ crafted and controlled by human hands, gives way to another nature – a nature which is sensual and surreal, impressive but intimidating, fragile but foreboding.

As the suburbanites and their houses retreat into the darkness behind the walls and fences this other nature struggles to breach these barriers and assert itself in the public spaces of the promenades. Silently, as this intruder ensnares the darkness, certain qualities are revealed: the lush colours of the leaves and flowers present a humbling beauty; the juxtaposition of crumbling brick and sturdy branch describe a veiled but awesome power; the explosion of the plants from the gardens to the pathways suggests an irrepressible peril; the silhouettes of the distant trees against the threatening skies insinuates a furtive foe.

The images of 2nd Avenue rehearse a ‘third’ space embedded in the master planned communities. If the two spaces of suburbia – the perceived space of the house and garden and the conceived space of the notion of the home and family – rehearse a space of security and self-satisfaction then the third space of 2nd Avenue describes a vagrant space of uncertainty or apathy or, as the images suggest, a mysterious menace.

Meanwhile, suburbia sleeps.

Dennis Wood, 2005
Dr Denis Wood lectures at Edith Cowan University, School of Communications and Multimedia.

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Prolepsis
Toni Wilkinson

Young subjects in their school uniforms are set against the WA landscape in the most recent work of Perth based photographer Toni Wilkinson. The work looks at the correlation between the school motto, the young Australian and the landscape that surrounds them. Wilkinson explores the nature of identity and external forces that go into shaping young people.

Wilkinson’s new body of photographs attempts to raise questions and reveal as problematic the shared core values that “underpin the curriculum framework and education” (VES report 2003). The work highlights the complex and contradictory notions that exist between these values by photographing children and adolescents wearing school uniforms bearing a school motto, in large, natural yet cultivated spaces like the pine plantation. Each image takes its title from the school motto worn on the uniform of the children photographed. The young people, juxtaposed in these landscapes appear tense and uncertain; they seem to anticipate the weight of the values that underpin their motto. Their expressions suggest the enormity of imagined futures and an awareness of an expected model of behaviour that seems fixed - cut off from translation and interpretation.

Toni Wilkinson - biography

Toni Wilkinson had her first solo exhibition Tough Pleasures at Fremantle Arts Centre in November 2003. In February 2004 she took part in Spin at the Western Australian Museum followed by a second solo show in July 2004 at Linden, St. Kilda Centre for Contemporary Arts. In August 2004 she was a participant in Ladies and Gentlemen at the Queensland Centre for Photography. Wilkinson was included in the City of Joondalup Invitation Art Award and The Josephine Ulrick National Photography Prize In September 2004. Works from Prolepsis were curated into a group exhibition Changeling at the Australian Centre of Photography in November/December 2004, alongside other Australian and international contemporary artists. Toni Wilkinson was featured in Photofile, issue 70: “Money and Power” and has had photographs published in numerous editorial publications in both Australia and overseas. She is a lecturer at Curtin University.

Toni Wilkinson - Prolepsis

Toni Wilkinson has found an apt title for her latest exhibition of photographic work; Prolepsis is “the representation of something happening before it actually does, as in, he was a dead man when he entered”. (OED)

‘Prolepsis’ is a rhetorical device in which an expected future event or characteristic is presented as though it was an already accomplished fact. School mottos, as Wilkinson suggests in her latest series of photographs, are an example of ‘prolepsis’ in every day life. Those high-minded slogans, usually matched with a crest and emblazoned on the hats, bags, chests and ideally, the hearts of dutifully dressed school children, are designed to portray the ideals and values that these students will aspire to live by.

These mottos, statements or proclamations of hope, duty, service, achievement and godliness are literally pinned onto our children. Talisman-like, they appear to desperately, presumptuously and pre-emptively announce both individual and ‘shared’ core values as a means of ensuring bright, successful futures.

Wilkinson’s subjects, young children and adolescents in school uniform, are photographed alone yet each of them appears somewhat overawed, whether by circumstance, environment or the burden of expectation. Photographed in unidentified, partially cultivated surroundings, perhaps on the walk to and from school, they appear overwhelmed and bewildered by the expectations of parents, institutions, governments and churches; expectations succinctly expressed through their everyday, worn-to-school mottos. Wilkinson’s photographs suggest they have every reason to be.

The young subjects in Wilkinson’s photographs sport a range of mottos from ‘Truth’, ‘Courtesy’, ‘Caring and Sharing’, ‘Go Forward’, ‘Aim High’ and ‘Strive for the Highest’ and including ‘Loyalty and Service’ to ‘With God for a Leader’ and ‘Serve God Serve One Another’. Her subjects are positioned within landscapes that seem to act as a kind of metaphor for the educational institutions, their charges and the enormity of imagined futures. Like the young people themselves, these ‘natural’ environments, have been shaped, pruned and cultivated to varying degrees, in the belief that it is for the betterment of society itself.

“Serve God Serve One Another”, stands amidst a pine plantation, a forest of tall trees, a symbol of the unknown and long used in childhood narratives as a fearful place, a site of loss and isolation. “Truth”, on the other hand, stands beside a swamp, her golden hair almost at one with the dried, sun-drenched, reedy grasses. With closed eyes and teary gesture she bravely beats off the confusion of the swamplands; there is a sense of feeling ‘stuck’ and overwhelmed by the unclean, murky darkness below.

“Loyalty and Service” and “Go Forward” appear to be in paddocks or fields, vast, open spaces in which, paradoxically, the fertile and the barren coexist. One is thin and uncertain in his oversized motto’ed t-shirt whilst the other, grimly clenching his hat, seems to be wondering what it means to “Go Forward”.

The most poignant of Wilkinson’s works are the images of the little boys in “Aim High” and “Through Shadows and Images to Truth”. “Aim High” is lying, in an almost foetal position on gravelly ground. A child’s pain is often unknowable, incomprehensible. Has he fallen off his bike or been taunted by bullies? Some days it’s hard to aim high. “Through Shadows and Images to Truth” emerges chin quivering from a grouping of trees dappled with light and shade, nervously twiddling his fingers.

While engaged in research for this new body of work, Wilkinson came across the following statement from The Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training:

Australian society has a shared sense of values that unite people and are important for accepting and celebrating diversity. Values such as tolerance, trustworthiness, mutual respect, courage compassion, honesty, courtesy and doing ones best are a part of our democratic way of life and shape our children’s understanding of themselves and the world. 1

These “shared values” apply to government run schools, while independent or religiously-based education, as Wilkinson notes (2), offers additional core values generally based on church rulings as seen in mottos such as ‘Service to God’, ‘Trust in Christ’ and ‘With God as a Leader’. These “shared values”, particularly the secular ones, may seem at first quite worthy of promotion, however, as Wilkinson has said, “It is, I believe, difficult to easily apply these values as mottos because they are reliant upon translation and their meaning is entirely dependent on context.” 3

Whose god exactly is it that we ‘Serve and Follow’? And should we blindly offer ‘Loyalty and Service’, especially when this motto, matched with the antiquated crest representing an early colonial ship upon the Swan River, alludes to a dark, colonial past not often kind to the area’s first inhabitants, descendants of whom, attend the school that has chosen to brand itself in this way.

The Australian Federal Government has, with increasing vigour over the past few years, aired its concerns about the values taught in schools. In 2002 Federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, said that, “What needs encouragement and formalisation in our schools is the teaching of values and building of character”, adding “...it is also time to reinvigorate school mottos”. 4

Despite the wealth of publicity around increased funding for well-resourced, non-government schools, John Howard, in January of this year, made the controversial statement that parents were moving their children out of government schools because the state system is “values-neutral”. This statement, which seems to go against the findings of a recently commissioned Federal Government study, inevitably sparked bitter debate.

One of the Federal Government’s key answers to the so-called “values-neutral” problem was to re-instate the flying of the Australian flag in schools. In fact Government has committed significant funds to this program and has made the flying of the Australian flag a condition of receiving federal education funding. In a recent statement issued by the Federal Education Minister, it was claimed that,

By taking pride in the flag and its presentation, schools can help support parents’ expectations that our schools will foster values such as tolerance, trustworthiness, mutual respect, courage, compassion, courtesy and doing one’s best. 5

If only the above-mentioned qualities and values, as expressed in mottos worn by Wilkinson’s school children, were so readily visible in the politicians that issue these statements. Our Government has spectacularly and regularly let us down with shameful incidents like the Tampa and children overboard affairs, the indefinite and cruel detainment of asylum seekers and the support of a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.

The Federal Government view that private, church based schools are more successfully instilling these “shared” core values in their pupils is similarly worrying at a time distinguished by the continuing refusal of many church leaders to endorse birth control, women clergy and gay marriage.

Wilkinson’s photographs implicitly suggest that we ask our children to live by a moral code that many of our political, corporate and church leaders consistently fail to live up to. One might go so far as to say that far from seeing our Church, Business and State leaders as role models they are viewed by many with cynicism and distrust.

Subtle and suggestive, these photographs are both timely and disturbing in their evocation of the hypocrisy underlying something as fundamental to a country’s well being as its education system. The uneasiness they elicit, implicitly questions the current processes and thinking that inform curriculum, values-based education and perpetuate our unequal two-tiered public/private system. Wilkinson’s young subjects stand bewildered, confused and torn between a world that purports to follow one set of values whilst living out their opposite; a world that uses a ‘values’ based argument to justify its own, often selfish and value-less ends.

Amy Barrett-Lennard, Melbourne 2005
Director, Linden St. Kilda Centre for Contemporary Art

1. Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training website, www.dest.gov.au
2. In conversation with the artist
3. Op.Cit.
4. Quoted in The Age, 23 September 2002
5. From Media Release issued by Brendan Nelson, 25 January 2005

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Blue Budgie on Pink
Martin Wilson

Martin Wilson works primarily in painting, with projects incorporating mixed media and wool. Wilson’s portraits are a way of re-inventing people and situations, inspired by his interests in history and popular culture. In these works he creates simple contrasts between the respectful and irreverent. The iconic and ironic often become intertwined in a serious representation.

The use of wool as a medium combines vivid colours and the kitsch technique of latch-hook making the works desirable to touch. Wool is something ‘natural’ and ‘good’, and has an instant connection with people.

The Australian Budgie is uniquely ordinary and sentimentally Australian - the doily of the animal world, but friend to all.

Wilson’s Fuzzy Prime Ministers (2000), a series of 25 latch-hook rugs were one of features of the 2001 Sydney Festival at Object Galleries, before commencing a regional gallery tour until 2004. “Blue Budgie on Pink” (2003) was a work developed for the Contemporary Project Space at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery. In 2004 Wilson has held solo exhibitions at Soapbox Gallery (Brisbane), Westspace (Melbourne), Rocketart (Newcastle), and was selected to exhibit in The City of Hobart Art Prize. He is a co-Founder and co-Director of artist-run space Rocketart in Newcastle, where he is based.

opening: Wednesday March 30, 6pm
exhibiting: March 31 - May 8, 2005

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Image: Healy & Cordeiro, "Maintenance", Milaby Farm, Ballidu, 2004, site specific installation, photo: Acorn Photography

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Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA)
51 James St, Perth Cultural Centre
Free Admission - Tuesday - Sunday 11am-6pm

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