Review PERTH

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It has been a while since I saw an exhibition by Jacobus Capone, but he never seems to disappoint. Memories of his 2007 art school grad work 'to love' flooded back. A five month durational project where he walked across Australia by foot, carrying a sample of water from the Indian Ocean in a suitcase. He released the water into the Pacific Ocean upon reaching Wollongong, NSW. It was a powerful display of the artist's dedication to his craft, and his connection to nature.

Capone’s exhibition, Falling from Earth, only goes further to embed him as an important figure in Australia’s contemporary art landscape. This work features a suite of seven paintings, photography, and a one-off live-streamed durational performance. The works explore the transformative properties that physical landscapes, the sea, and stars can have upon an individual's body and psyche. Capone's Devotional Paintings (7 Mountains & The Sea) were created through a process of reverence, devotion, and physical endurance. While on residency in Bergen, Norway, Capone would make daily ascents up one of seven mountains surrounding the city, gathering small samples of earth to be mixed with freshly retrieved seawater and applied as a wash onto canvas. (“Projects | MOORE CONTEMPORARY”) This ritual was repeated over hundreds of iterations to produce final works that act "as a conduit or medium between the sea and mountains to reveal something not seen or felt, but in existence."

Capone’s exhibition begins with a single photograph, Untitled (body as a constellation), imaginatively and metaphorically linking the image of a monochrome bodily surface with the idea of terrain or akin to a view of a constellation. It serves to bridge the exhibition of paintings with the physicality of the live stream performance tracing a darkness-to-dawn run, commencing at sundown on the 20th of February. (“Projects | MOORE CONTEMPORARY”) The live stream performance is a meditation on how landscapes, the sea, and stars all have an effect upon the body and psyche of the artist. The performance, which lasted until the following morning, took place on the south mole in Walyalup and involved the artist running overnight towards Sigma Octantis, the closest star to the south celestial pole.

Capone’s work is deeply rooted in process, meditation, and self-reflection, referencing Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome theory. The Devotional Paintings are a testament to Capone’s dedication to process, repetition, and ritual. The act of ascending a mountain daily, gathering earth, and applying it as a wash onto canvas is a process that required immense physical and mental endurance. The resulting paintings carry gentle traces of the poetic engagement that transpired between the artist and the environment.

Capone’s live stream performance, a journey towards Sigma Octantis, the closest star to the south celestial pole, is a metaphorical representation of the artist’s journey towards self-discovery and transformation. The performance is rooted in phenomenology, as the artist seeks to explore the subjective experience of these transformative properties.

Capone’s use of rhizome theory is evident in the way the Devotional Paintings are a manifestation of the artist’s engagement with the environment. The paintings act as a conduit or medium between the sea and mountains, revealing something that is not seen or felt, but in existence. The rhizome theory posits that knowledge is not hierarchical but is instead a network of connections and multiplicities. Capone’s paintings, in this sense, are a testament to the interconnectedness of all things and the infinite potential for transformation and growth.

Capone’s exhibition is a deeply introspective and transformative exploration, the artist’s use of process, meditation, self-reflection, and rhizome theory creates a deeply personal and immersive experience for the viewer. The Devotional Paintings are a testament to Capone’s dedication to process, repetition, and ritual, while the live stream performance is a meditation on the subjective experience of transformation and growth, drawing one deeper into the self and into a relationship with the world.

The performance begins with Capone's invitation to the viewer to connect with their own pulse, before taking them on a journey that is at once personal and universal. As he runs through the darkness, the viewer can see the abstract line of his route slowly growing on the screen, dividing it in two and metaphorically hinting at a self being separated from all earthly ties and turning towards the celestial. The line becomes expansive enough on the page, a powerful metaphor for the journey we all take towards self-discovery, a journey that is sometimes difficult to see but which ultimately leads us towards our true selves.

Through his performance, Capone proposes that the world is a non-hierarchical network of interconnected processes and ideas, rather than a structured system of order and control. Capone's journey is a rhizomatic one, with no predetermined destination or endpoint, but rather a constant process of becoming and transformation. His journey through the physical landscape is a way of exploring how the body and the psyche respond to the environment, and how our perceptions and experiences are shaped by our physical surroundings.

Falling from Earth is a powerful and evocative experience, Capone takes us on a journey that is at once personal and universal, a journey that explores the relationship between the self and the world, and the transformative power of the physical environment. Capone's work is a powerful testament to the importance of process, ritual, meditation, and self-reflexivity in the pursuit of self-discovery and creative expression. It is a work that resonates deeply with the viewer, inviting them to connect with their own experiences of the world and to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. So do yourself a favour and don't fail to see this exhibition its sure to leave a lasting impression on you.

http://moorecontemporary.com/projects/

https://fallingfromearth.net/words

Studio Photograph: courtesy of the artist

I roll over. Eyes wide open, I fumble for my mobile and check the time. It’s 1:23am again, I must have woken up at this time over one hundred times in my life. There’s something about this sequential thing that freaks me out a little. At this time of night it seems mystical or some s**t. Anyway, I can’t sleep, so despite everything I have read about blue light syndrome and as conscious as I am of the effect of my social media usage I quickly open up Facebook. “Nothing like a machine to make a man feel insignificant” I think to myself as I’m doing it and as I’m browsing apolitical posts by apathetic art students. I think to myself, we are rather simple, aren’t we? I switch over to chat and I see Holly, she was Active 23m ago.

Wintermute looks into Yoshida’s personal interiors, spaces in which to engage, offering a patina of her life. There is a certain estrangement we have to these paintings; they are glimpses of very familiar locations, corners of ceilings, lights and walls. It is a psychological tension, empowering and intimate that perhaps reflect our own struggle between the individual and our surroundings.

Through the engagement with the activity of painting, Yoshida activates these psychological spaces. Incredibly flat, built up layers of dry brushed oil paint with little to no glazing using a monochromatic palette framed in such a way that obviously has come from images from a phone screen. There is a detachment to this painting, it being almost scientific painting. What she sees, what she doesn’t know. These works are punctuated by intimate didactics, text messages or chats with friends, colleagues, lovers, which give clue to their origins.

It is this space she is interested in, giving us an uncensored look into intimacy and vulnerability. Yoshida states “the correspondence acts as an exteriorization to the interior settings of the paintings. I wanted to create a familiar frame around the paintings that could provide an access point for the viewers to bring themselves to the work.”
But it is a kind of faceless intimacy. The works leave us with a sense of hopelessness, simply titled “Active 23m ago.”

It is difficult to tell if Yoshida is acting as scenographer, creating new fictions using social media platforms and personal text messages as a framework for the paintings; or perhaps these are real afterthoughts, a Carveresque moment of stillness, her own collection of nature mortes, where she omits nothing. Either way, her practice is introspective, as it is considered.

image: Holly Yoshida, Active 1m ago (detail), 2016, oil on board, 24 x 33 cm, photo by Ben Waters

But No Metaphors
Kristen Brownfield: Teeter
Gallery Central 2016

But no metaphors. Nothing is like anything else. Things are themselves entirely and do not need interpretation, only a minimal respect for their precise integrity. The mark on the wall is two feet three inches wide and four feet eight and a fraction inches high. Already I have failed to be completely accurate. I must write "fraction" because I can't read the little numbers on the ruler without my glasses which I never wear. Gore Vidal- Myra Breckinridge

Brownfields praxis embodies this ‘integrity’, it is as considered as it is laboured.
Ephemeral in nature there is an ongoing contingency to Brownfields work, it is ever changing whether an intimate stack to room staged installation. Each component may seem individually insignificant, domestic in scale, trash. It is however accumulatively when these pieces come together in various configurations which she has worked and re-worked that they reach a clarity of form, More like paintings, layered through the her reconfiguration with there strength being in there multiplicity. You can tell Brownfields understanding of aesthetics and where it sits inside the language of abstraction is a learnt experience, this isn’t an exercise in design placement, there is a discipline and inventiveness to her work that comes only through an ongoing engagement with failure.

There are several ideas that are consistent across Brownfields work, she works with a reductive palette both in terms of its colour and structural value. The colours are mis- tints, other peoples discards that she reclaims from local hardware’s. Her palette/ the work is made up from the left overs of our contemporary culture, it is important to emphasis there is no monetary value to the pieces Brownfield uses, they don’t look like anything, neither is she trying to make them “look like anything” they are what they are and celebrated for that.

These work(s) operate as a proposition a kind of open source set of configurations that are labored to work with or mimic their architectural foundation. It is mutable and changeable and always self referential, with each installation referencing a patina of something before it. Relying on this additive and subtractive process to activate the work. Materials are divorced from their original purpose and become a part of the process of the work like a expanded contemporary merz, where tension is derived from the connection between objects and their foundations. As arrangements she creates intimate moments, she works with tension and suspense, utilizing almost theatre type trickery they form part of a time line of events where there is seemingly no beginning or end however they definitely find their origins in the studio where she constructs and re assembles the various components that come to form Teeter.

"Leading from a residency at ECU, Teeter employs up-cycled materials to investigate relations between painting, object & space. Responding directly to the space, this exhibition reveals an ongoing interest in material language and the potential to examine architectural surroundings"

https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Kristen-Brownfield--Teeter/C2DE21F9336AF6F4

Photo by Jayde Willis

Kimberley Pace OOZE

Kimberley Pace’s work is never easy to look at, sitting on that fine line between being incredibly beautiful and repulsive at the same time. Her work elicits a response that plays on the abject. “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 9). This joy is linked to jouissance and affect. “One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not it’s submissive and willing ones“ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 9).

It celebrates the theatre of the body, seemingly transgressive in nature, it often enacts visceral responses from viewers, operating on many levels through seeing, touching, feeling, and hearing, much like the ultimate of human connection, s*x itself.

She works directly with the body through draping, folding, stitching and casting. She uses garment as an extension to the idea of body parameters where anything worn on the body becomes a part of the body, these are indefinable blurred spaces.

Pace states” The corporeal body (the material physical body) is not confined by the boundaries of skin. The surface of the body is not like a Tupperware container sealing off our insides, snapping everything hygienically shut inside. It is a marginal place.”

Acknowledging taboo she avoids the obvious literal bodily sites, as these are tropes for shock value, and are bound with suggestion. Instead opting for more erogenous zones, the lips, fingers, and feet. In fact she celebrates these as adornments or growths that replicate themselves and spread all over these incredibly laboured couture garments, poking, pushing, squeezing out of these hand stitched folded bodies of fabric. Accoutered with beads and fake pearls, she uses a visual language that would sit comfortably inside a adult shop, but she transforms these garments into a kind of bedecked epidermal growth.

Pace works as scenographer, not only directing the audience to areas or zones of the gallery, but she also utilizes the ultimate of narcissistic devices, the mirror, to direct your eyes to these erogenous places. They make you feel comfortable, they say ‘it’s ok to look ’, but is it? The subsequent gaze of the onlookers contributing to the thresholds of the body.

“Gaze beckons and simultaneously denies, invoking possession at the same time that it expands into an infinite, inaccessible dreamscape… a distance across which desire can be constructed as unsatisfiable, and so constructed, can work its magic as the unending drive to accumulate, appropriate, possess, acquire”

Pace’s use of such devices, both revealing and denying the body, almost forces fe**sh, albeit benignly upon the viewer. But ultimately she is in control. She is well aware of what she allows us to see and what she denies us.

The ambiguity of the body undermines our own perception of what is taboo and what is not, and with Pace you never know how she will confront you with another taboo, one you didn’t even know you’d be bringing to the opening.

OOZE - Photography by Emily Hornum

Ben Waters, 2016

A sordid caper, in paint.

Having the opportunity to preview Ryck Rudd’s Capriccio! series is an overwhelming experience. It gives an insight into not only this vast body of work, but also the man behind the painting. Rudd himself has a difficult politic to tie down. He is in his mid twenties, sports a manicured waxed moustache and has long flowing shoulder length hair, almost like one of his heroes from the depths of art history that he reveres so closely; or perhaps he is a caricature from the BBC television series the Desperate Romantics depicting the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. One is never quite sure. What I do know is that Rudd is not afraid of playing the philodox, always speaking his mind, fervently antagonistic, and yet constantly in a reflexive and mediating state when it comes to his own praxis.

Looking at the earliest work in the Capriccio! series 2013-2014, we see tortured pasty faced carny types. There is a frugality to this work, colour is used incredibly sparingly leaving everything rather insipid, atonal in fact, creating a flatness across the picture plain, with no distinguishing between figure and landscape. Everything is pallid. These early portraits offer us an insight into his growth as a painter and the work we now see before us in 2017. Much of that earlier work had sat disconsolate in his studio for years and is now beginning to fruit, showing signs of maturation. I respect this about Rudd’s practice. He is happy to show you through his dirty work, his sideshow of freaks, the unfinished business.

In contrast, looking at the latter paintings it is obvious from the outset that Rudd’s work is driven by drawing. This new focus is where he does much of his tinkering, hundreds upon hundreds of pages of finely drafted pencil drawings and watercolours, as if it is a way to getting it out from his unquiet mind. It is in paint though where he thinks, really thinks, working and re-working composition over composition, losing any idea of preciousness. As a colleague of mine says, ‘painting is not a legally binding contract’. Rudd has this clarity of mind when working. He is constantly visually editing the histories of his painting, forcing new ways of seeing upon his surface. Works live and works die and works are re-incarnated in Rudd’s practice. However, all the ideas, the notations, the drafting, is all there for easy reference if a Mark II is ever required.

"As a young boy I longed to see what lies beneath a Barbie doll's dress. This initial curiosity has developed into an interest in what motivates us as human beings. My latest paintings explore the psychology behind our s*xual obsessions."

Rudd has an undeniable authorial hand, his handle of the material of paint is charged with a macabre s*xuality which is reminiscent of Ensor. His marks are consistent and much like his newly developing subject matter, have a squirminess to them. As the work has developed Rudd has embraced a higher chroma palette. Reworking the muted and underdressed has revealed much more in the painting, a kind of psychological pentimenti, allowing the images to become less reliant on just their pictorial narrative and more on the quality of the mark and the hand of the artist, the act of painting itself, layer upon layer, opening up a spatiality in the work, which shows a certain nod to Vuillard.

He is also now becoming more confident with his story telling. These new paintings are like a licentious romp from the set of Gore Vidals 1979 film Caligula cast with a group of gender bending intemperate rubenesque cherubs, riding the fine and ever closing line of obscenity, which is not surprising considering he cites the likes of Georges Bataille, Ken Russell and Balthus as some of his most venerated artists.

Rudd’s work The goods 2016 shows three Romanesque puttis, ivy wreath intact, naked and crawling over a table of loose, nondescript meat, perhaps eating it? One putto has his hand extended as if to welcome his new guests. One is facing towards this gastronomic feast and the other is leaning forward, crutching his stomach and dry retching, all of them with their eyes shut as if in disgust at what that have just done, or are about to do.

Yet these Capriccio! paintings aren’t shocking. Like many contemporaries that have come before him Rudd actively mediates his world by separating figuration from any sense of reality. They might leave us with a sense of unease depicting s*xual acts between these distorted and disfigured young putti and cherubs, questioning our own ideas of decadence, s*xual identity, discovery and desire. Make no mistake, these works are autobiographical for Rudd, translated by him in his first language, paint.

Ben Waters, 2017

Assuming the role
2014
Oil on wood
60.5 cm x 75.5 cm

An unconscious everyday of the city
Ben Waters and Paige Luff

‘One thing is certain: although historical moments in the life of a city can be isolated, the urban process never stops. Unlike works of art—or even certain buildings, which have a more determinate existence—streets are as mutable as life itself and are subject to constant alterations through design or use that foil the historian’s desire to give them categorical finitude’ (Çelik, Favro, & Ingersoll, 1994, p. 1).

In Be on time 2011 at spectrum project space ECU Galleries, Andrée pays homage to these often forgotten arterials of everyday life and to the people that walk these surfaces. The works offer a kind of reverence that can only be understood through making and doing. In this process of moving from place to place, a linear, normative and historical way of thinking about the city can be evidenced. For Andrée though, it is the slippages in this journey that are imbued with meaning. This linear trajectory is unfolded and allows us insight into Andrée’s reverie, hypnotically, step after step in the piece ‘Twenty-five degrees two hundred and fifty-two minutes and twenty-four seconds’ (2011-2012). This trajectory is not simply linear, but ventures into a metonymic exploration of the city, with the frames of individual pedestrians allowing for the gaps of what is desired/being sought to appear.

Andrée actively takes control of this process of being a city pedestrian through building the loom on which she weaves this inquiry into the urban everyday, in a physical sense through the creation of fabrics, and in a conceptual sense through the process of labour. One could be reminded of Penelope in The Odyssey who weaves and unweaves the fabric she creates on her loom each day, this process being an act of deferral whilst also creating meaning and signification. Rather than simply interlacing and combining details into a whole in ‘6000 steps’ (2012), the meditative process of weaving also creates gaps and slippages through which points de capiton are created. Paving is made from silver foam sponges in ‘Clearing’ (2012) which absorb pedestrians steps like memory, and woollen handknitted and felted plywood pavers are laid on the ground in ‘A plied away’ (2011-2012). It is as if the scale of the weaving spills out and through this one loom of ‘6000 steps’ to the space and works around it.

These pieces create textuality through the physical form and process of fabrication and weaving, provide playful ways of making meaning and signification rather than non-meaning, and create a sense of place in the urban everyday by drawing attention to stable, fixed meanings. In ‘Streets and the Urban Process: A Tribute to Spiro Kostof’, criticism of fixed, historical meanings are explored. “By shifting the subject of inquiry from architecture or buildings to urban fabric, he made a relatively safe field dangerous: no longer limited to privileged protagonists, fixed chronologies, established technologies, and finite artifacts, the discipline was forced to comprehend the multitude of users, their cultures, and the conflicting interests of any urban situation” (Çelik et al., 1994, p. 1). This ahistorical approach, rather than eroding a sense of memory and place, absorbs it, amplifies it, and offers both the artist and viewer a reflexive unconscious language in which to explore the city.

Çelik, Z., Favro, D. & Ingersoll, R. (1994). Streets and the Urban Process: A Tribute to Sprio Kostoff. In Z. Çelik, D. Favro & R. Ingersoll (Eds.), Streets: Critical perspectives on public space (pp. 1-7). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ben Waters is an Artist and arts writer from Perth Western Australia
Paige Luff is an Arts writer and Librarian from Perth Western Australia

Welcome to ReviewPERTH, a brand new forum for myself and friends to share reviews and musings on the art scene of Perth. So if anyone has anything they’d like to share, please DM me.

As an amateur art critic/ writer, I have been keeping a private collection of my earlier writings that have never been published online. These unpublished reviews and musings will be the starting point of ReviewPERTH.