SUBTERRAIN: The Organic Sublime within Contemporary PracticeAn official MELBOURNE ART WEEK 2018 event
FLG POP-UP @ COLLINS PLACE GALLERY Level 1, 45 Collins Street Melbourne
Opening Hours: Friday 3 August 12 - 7pm, -Art PArty from 5-7pm- free entry all welcome Saturday 4 August 12-5pm, Sunday 5 August 12-3pmART PARTY: FRIDAY 3 AUGUST 5 - 7PM GUEST SPEAKER: Mr Charles Justin Co-Director of Justin Art House Museum & 2018 Chairman of Melbourne Art Foundation
This exhibition aims to provide audiences with a highly tactile and intimately immersive arts experience, inspired broadly by ideas of organic forms and systems found beneath the earth’s surface. Referencing the beauty of nature’s patterns, textures and currents, the works presented will offer an alternative view of the world, inviting visitors to enter a nocturnal, interior space full of sense of wonder and curiosity. Using natural formations and geological structures as points of departure the artists selected to participate in Subterrain share a common interest in challenging the limits of their chosen practices, to achieve highly complex and utterly unique artworks. Free of any representational limitations, the abstract nature of their practices offer an experience of nature mediated through acts of repartition, duration and reimagining.
Liquid Portalz, 12.35minute 2 channel video by Jacob Leary for Subterrain in collaboration with Ariel Ruby, 2018.
CATALOGUE ESSAY by Phe Luxford 2018I gazed at these marvels in profound silence. Words were utterly wanting to indicate the sensations of wonder I experienced. I seemed, as I stood upon that mysterious shore, as if I were some wandering inhabitant of a distant planet, present for the first time at the spectacle of some terrestrial phenomena belonging to another existence. Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 1956
We find ourselves beginning with two encounters of the sublime. From Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, a passage that communicates a fantastical moment of possibility deep within the earth, when the world is seen anew. And then another from the Godmother of environmental science, Rachel Carson, with her prescient appeal for humanity to find moments of connection with the Earth and a sense of humble perspective within it.
The cultural interpretations of the term ‘subterranean’ – the dark mantle of this vast lump of soil and rock we call home, full of fossils and oil and volcanoes, worms, roots and caves – is loaded with both a profound sense of marvel and a terrifying state of trepidation. From the time of the Ancient Greeks to today's daily news of seismic activity effecting global populations, Earth’s potholed depths holds a grip over our psyche. It can represent the inevitability of death, the fear of loss or some suppressed primal memory. But it can also represent great optimism, goodness, sustenance and the well-spring of life itself.
As the creep of modernity, full of high rise apartments and online realities, draws us further away from earthly experiences, many of us are seeking new ways to find a path toward meaningful connection. Canberra based printmaker Annika Romeyn is one such individual. A keen hiker, Romeyn walks and kayaks with paper, pencil and camera in hand, gathering up geological annotations of rock fragments, cliff faces and root systems. Meticulous and painstaking in their observational detail her micro/macro sketches serve to inform her later monotypes and drawings. The multi-panelled Ghosts series, printed in a base of cool antiquarian blue, reveals complex black and white pencil layers which, slightly offset, produce a kind of solarised, meta-real visual quality. Combined with an intentionally tilted use of perspective at a larger-than-human scale, these impressive images envelope the viewer and give rise to a palpable, disorientating sensation of vertigo.
In joining together the fragments of a previously experienced landscape, Romeyn is imparting a deeper sense of encounter. Agneta Ekholm’s work takes the darkness and light of those earthly geological folds and pulls us, slipstream, into the chasm. Between each luminous veil of paint any reading of distance or space is. As our eyes follow the glowing edges of sensuous sweeps within inky blackness, we become orientated through thoughts of trickling subterranean rivers, icy rivulets or the falling curtain of a waterfall. Ekholm’s language of intuitive abstraction exudes the calm of an ethereal inner world. We behold the natural world and wonder at the surreal quality of it forms. Within the familiar and marvellous we try to make sense of our own one-way ticket through this wonderland. With his latest installation Tasmanian artist Jacob Leary has jumped head first down the rabbit hole. Like the bedazzled travellers in Jules Verne’s Journey, The Object Compendium presents us with a rich seam of riotous colour and scintillation. Little mountains of shiny paper and valleys of mossy plastic, each scattered with equally plastic springtime buds, offer up a kitsch treasure trove of sparkling, opalescent bling. These distorted, dreamt up landscapes replace nature’s fecundity with a ceaseless outpouring of tiny man-made objects. In his collaborative video work with fellow artist Ariel Ruby, Leary extends his enquiry into the darker depths and complexity of systems, questioning the state of flux and transmutation that occurs there.
Painter and printmaker Melinda Schawel also draws upon the endless mutations of the natural world with Descent I & II conjuring up complex new structures filtered through her own bodily experience. Each of her images offer a panoramic view of ecology in action. Inspired by the forms of spider egg sacs, the slow-motion reach of microbial fungi or the floating spore of coral, details once microscopic are rendered large and miraculous, teaming with sensitively rendered textures, colours and fluidity. Via pools of liquid pigment and torn surfaces, Schawel’s images invite us to get down on hands and knees, to peer under the leaf litter and witness the abundant microbial life that exists there.
The movement of the earth’s surface is the subject of Dan Lorrimer’s large metal monoliths. Akin to the geological forces that play out on tectonic plates, the artist feeds sheets of metal through a hydraulic press, allowing selective pressure to buckle and distort their planes. Recalling the strata in a cliff face or the crumpled surface of a cave wall, the resulting sculptures stand like monuments to geological time, baring the scars of a slow but determined power. With the ability to shift continents and raise up mountains, the same geological pressure is also responsible for the creation of diamonds. The layers of Zac Koukoravas’ cast acrylic paneled Descent to Hades reminds us of the glinting beauty of precious stones; crystalline clusters found within prehistoric geodes or glistening refractions in a finely cut gem. Using geometric shapes that scatter their points in multiple directions, catching the light and playfully casting shadows within the multiple sheets of acrylic panels, there is an energy in these works that speaks of the fabulous wealth extracted from the Earth’s layers.
Also seen shimmering in the darkness, like so many phosphorescent jewels are Hannah Quinlivan’s painstakingly woven LED lights. Bringing time and movement into the logic of her practice, Quinlivan’s actions liberate the drawn line off the page and give it the freedom to exist as its own entity. Within her Holding Pattern series the slow and deliberate weaving of industrial materials into something new and highly organic recalls the flows of ebbs & flows of underground systems or deep ocean currents.
In the most direct sense Subterrain is an exhibition concerned with the abstract representation of Nature. On a subtler level it is a meditation on the human need to connect with the systems that support us. Each of the selected artists share a common interest in exploring the limits of their chosen materials, to discover new visual languages that will allow them to scrutinise those ecological systems of interest to them. When experienced together, the final selection of works seeks to take the audience into a lived experience, to celebrate the wonder and beauty of a natural world increasingly at odds with our urban life.
