Two exhibitions
dal 12/10/2012 al 9/11/2012
Segnalato da
12/10/2012
Two exhibitions
Stills Gallery, Sydney
In 'Moving Out' Justine Varga pays elegant homage to her art studio, a site that gave rise to many of her works and also to one of her first exhibitions. With 'Syzygy', Harry Nankin reflects upon time, space and our increasingly troubled relationship with the non-human world.
JUSTINE VARGA
Moving Out
Justine Varga creates imagery that is minimal and sublime. Although she uses analogue techniques and works with great control of the craft, the results seem liberated from their medium to become more akin to abstract paintings. The delicate and balanced compositions evidence Varga’s obvious delight in the idiosyncrasies of light and film.
Varga often depicts anonymous and simple spaces, inner sanctums that give pause for reflection. In Moving Out, she pays elegant homage to her art studio, a site that gave rise to many of her works and also to one of her first exhibitions. As with earlier images from the series Empty Studios (2009), the emptiness of her work space is transformed with the addition of a few bits of string, a scrap of board or a shimmer of light into a somewhat magical and invested place.
Varga has achieved significant recognition since graduating with Honours from the National Art School, Sydney in 2007. In 2012 she has been selected for the prestigious Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, and will feature in Flatlands, Art Gallery of NSW and in The Lookout: Persuasion/Formation, National Art School. She was a finalist in the 2011 Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship, and has work in the collection of Art Gallery of NSW.
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HARRY NANKIN
SYZYGY
A syzygy is a conjunction or coming together of things. It can refer astronomically to when the sun, moon and earth align during an eclipse but also has the broader connotation of a pairing or union. It is an apt title for Harry Nankin’s artwork, where through a coming together of remarkable glass–mounted photographs of scrambling insects and twinkling galaxies he reflects upon time, space and our increasingly troubled relationship with the non-human world.
Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee, where Syzygy was created, once served as an indigenous celestial observatory. The heavens reflected in its shallow waters informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country, a reciprocity long ago ruptured by colonization. Today the heavens remain essentially unchanged but the lake and its environs cleared of most native vegetation is an ecologically impoverished zone. Syzygy ‘photo-poetically’ reconsiders this lost cosmology by turning the dry lakebed into a focal plane upon which raw starlight is used to imprint photographicfilms with the shadows of live native invertebrates gathered from the lakeshore and rarer astronomical photographs on glass brought to the location. Nankin literally uses the ‘light of the universe’ to render enigmatic images on film of the heavens and earth. His elegiac index of shadows is a syzygy of the timeless and fleeting, the infinite and miniscule.
Syzygy was a collaboration with scholar/artist Paul Carter, astrophysicist Maurizio Toscano and many volunteers. For Paul Carter this “meditation on the heavens” is an example of how the “recovery of stories, alternate histories, and their creative retelling, is a vital means through which artists…can contribute to the re-enchantment of environments currently under stress”
Image: Harry Nankin, Telescope 2, 2011. Eight gelatin silver shadowgram films created by exposure to starlight mounted on starfire glass panes with screen-printed mask on opposing face. Glass/film objects 33.5 x 35.5 x .5cm. Wooden support 18 x 39 x 5cm.
Opening Sat 13 October 3-5pm
Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street - Paddington NSW 2021
Gallery Hours
Wed to Sat 11am to 5pm or by appointment