Recent, Current and Upcoming
Janet Burchill/Jennifer McCamley - Pestorius Sweeney House
Louise Tahiraj - Pestorius Sweeney House
Some Recent New York Video - Pestorius Sweeney House
Mark Webb - Pestorius Sweeney House
Andreas Exner - Pestorius Sweeney House
Peter Bonde - Pestorius Sweeney House
A.D.S. Donaldson - Pestorius Sweeney House
Dave Hullfish Bailey / Lecture Performance - Other Locations
grave but not serious - Pestorius Sweeney House
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Janet Burchill/Jennifer McCamley
21 April — 2 June, 2012
Opening: Saturday April 21st, 6—8pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to present a new exhibition by Janet Burchill (*Melbourne, 1955) and Jennifer McCamley (*Brisbane, 1957).
Since 1992, the artists have been documenting the changing usage and urban status of a site in Kreuzberg, Berlin where the Berlin Wall had formerly run. At this site, a Turkish-German family had planted an outdoor vegetable and flower garden and constructed a number of sitting and garden structures. The artists were struck by the modernist art tropes (Bauhaus especially) and it’s beauty as a sculpture assemblage. Over the years Burchill and McCamley have made several works relating to this site and its documentation: photographic series, slide works, videos, sculptures and drawings. This exhibition will present, for the first time, Bethaniendamm 0, 2003, a specially framed limited edition portfolio of 6 offset prints from this work group.
Accompanying Bethaniendamm 0, 2003, will be a small selection of other photographic work including from the artists’ Feld und Funktion series: Feld und Funktion (Hook of Holland), 1995, which is a replay of Bas Jan Ader’s Pitfall On The Way To A New Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, 1971, and Feld und Funktion (Berlin), 1995, a staging in front of Mies Van der Rohe’s famous Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have been working both individually and collaboratively since the early 1980s. Their practice embraces a wide variety of media including photography, film, drawing, sculpture and painting. Throughout Burchill and McCamley’s combined career, they have critically engaged with the history and forms of modernist art and its relationship to everyday life, as reconsidered through feminist, psychoanalytic, filmic and spatial discourses. Collaboration has also been an important aspect of their practice. Recent exhibitions include Colombo Art Biennale, Sri Lanka (2012), A Different Temporality Aspects of Australian Feminist Art Practice 1975-1985, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2011), The Phantasm, Foxy Production, New York (2011), and Light From Light, MAAP, Brisbane (2010).
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Louise Tahiraj
9 March — 7 April, 2012
Opening: Friday March 9th, 6–9pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to present the first gallery show by Brisbane artist Louise Tahiraj (*1985).
Working predominantly in video performance, Tahiraj combines digital and hand-made processes to enact a playful tension between everyday experience and its representation. Adopting a lo-fi, do-it-yourself approach, the artist's videos, recorded on an iPhone, could almost be YouTube fodder. Yet there is always a twist to the scenarios she spins, always something that elevates the situation out of its apparent banality.
Tahiraj’s most recent video, Traces, takes on landscape, a genre that dominates art in Australia like no other. For artists to critically engage with landscape today they must address this dominance and the discourse surrounding it. Tahiraj does this, firstly by substituting new media processes for painting. She then confounds traditional perspective: there is no unobstructed wide view here, while the artist is very much inside the landscape rather than a detached observer of it. There is also nothing particularly spectacular about the view. Recorded at dusk, light is fading fast. Soon there will only be darkness, with the outlines of the topography all that remains to be sketched.
There is a simplicity and a lightness of touch in this video that is compelling. If Tahiraj is here playfully alluding to the redundancy of the landscape genre, she is also pointing to the value of lived experience and to an art that functions within the fabric of life rather than as an illustration of it.
All of this is lent emphasis through the screening of the video in a specially constructed black-box. Oriented so that its point of entry is not immediately apparent, it initially presents as an autonomous object, a bit like one of Tony Smith's Minimal sculptures. In the process, architectural space is activated and a hyper-awareness of the indoor/outdoor setting generated.
Louise Tahiraj attended the Queensland University of Technology where she studied with Mark Webb. In 2009 she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) and has since been a key participant in Brisbane’s lively ARI scene, exhibiting at and organising shows for spaces such as Accidentally Annie Street and Boxcopy, to name just two of the more well-known enterprises.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Some Recent New York Video
16 December - 18 December, 2011
Opening: Friday December 16th, 6-9pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
Curated by Robert McKenzie and in its title connected to the twin exhibitions of American and Australian art that toured this country in 1973, Some Recent New York Video presents the work of Ellen Cantor (Detroit, born 1965), Danny McDonald (Los Angeles, born 1971), and Ken Okiishi (Ames, Iowa, born 1978).
Each a participant in the New York art scene, these artists and film makers work in an experimental tradition, inheritors of a pedigreed history that stretches from Andy Warhol and Jack Smith through to No Wave cinema, Charles Atlas, and Laura Cottingham/Leslie Singer, to name just a few of their forbears. Their immediate social and geographic scenario is the art worlds of New York, London and Berlin, and this is used as a ground against which narratives are constructed. Necessarily improvising, they conflate real stories with an hallucinatory allegorical other world. The use of friends and associates as actors amplifies this confusion, which carries with it ghosts of a "scene".
For each of the artists that essential cinematic term "location" is key. Cantor, whose video takes as its subject the lives of five children growing up under the rule of Chilean dictator Pinochet, deliberately recasts her story by shooting it in London and New York. These other cities, we become aware (one of the film's recurring themes is,“is tragedy a choice?”), are standing in for Pinochet's Chile and are themselves imprinted with this history.
McDonald’s video was filmed in the space of the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery in Berlin. The premise, a fictitious one, was that McDonald was unable to travel to Berlin to produce the exhibition. Sent in his place is the elderly drag acid casualty Mindy Vale. From another time and head-space, Vale must try in vain to get together a satisfactory exhibition for the Berlin audience. Failure, in its conventional sense, is brought into sharp relief and the concept of a 'frame of reference' is elegantly relativised.
In Okiishi’s video, location is also paramount. Riffing on the reciprocal fascination between the art worlds of New York and Berlin, he uses his friends, his own biographical engagement with the cities (he is often described as living and working in both places), and famous representations of these places (in the form of Woody Allen's Manhattan) to understand and experience how it is; as he has said, that “Manhattan is translated through Berlin and back again.”
The exhibition will take place at the Pestorius Sweeney House over the weekend of 16 December.
Friday 16 December, 6–9pm, Opening
Saturday 17 December, 11am—5pm, Gallery hours extended
Sunday 18 December, 11am—5pm, Gallery hours extended
Sunday, 18 December, 5—7pm, Robert McKenzie, Catherine Chevalier, and A.D.S. Donaldson in conversation. As an adjunct to this exhibition, curator Robert McKenzie will be joined by Catherine Chevalier, founding editor of the Paris-based May Revue, to discuss some of the themes that emerge from the exhibition. As well, the Sydney artist A.D.S. Donaldson who will present 'The Provincialism Solution', a paper co-authored with Brisbane art historian Rex Butler. Attendance is free, however booking is essential.
Robert McKenzie is an artist, writer and curator who has lived in New York since 2008. As well as producing exhibitions, McKenzie has published the art fanzines Slave and Sandwich, while in 2009, with Paul Foss, Rex Butler and others, he co-authored The Ampersand Files: Art & Text 1981–2002. McKenzie's last curated project in Brisbane was the Slave exhibition Freedom for Prosperity at the Pestorius Sweeney House in 2005.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Mark Webb
28 October - 19 November, 2011
Opening: Friday October 28th, 6-9pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to present a new exhibition by Brisbane artist Mark Webb (*1957).
The exhibition follows on the heels of the artist's 25 year survey at the same venue last year. Where that show presented diverse works and foregrounded Webb's role as teacher and mentor to the post-Bjelke-Petersen generation of Brisbane artists, his new exhibition is more situational in nature.
Critically responding to Heimo Zobernig's painted green carpet, a semi-permanent architectural intervention realised in the immediate aftermath of Webb’s survey show, the artist will paint red the windows of the predominantly glazed space to effectively create a two-colour painting that envelops the viewer and adds a new dimension to the painterly tradition of hinterglasmalerei. Webb's deployment of red and green, a combination traditionally associated with colour blindness, will turn that affliction on its head and, in the process, render reflexive the context and its history, including artists and artworks recently exhibited there.
Webb's artistic concerns have always revolved around ideas of play and recontextualisation. With his latest exhibition he will extend further these strategies, opening up, often in unexpected ways, the symbolic range of associations that the colour red can have, but also demonstrating how those associations are shaped by a particular context and moment in time.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Andreas Exner
17 September - 8 October, 2011
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to announce the return to Brisbane of Frankfurt artist Andreas Exner (*1962).
Much of Exner's material production falls to be considered within 'the extended field' of painting, which is to say that it exceeds the conventions of painting, but is still somehow recognisable as evolving the tradition in a critical way after the schism of Conceptual Art. Exner's clothing pieces, which brought the artist to prominence in the early 1990s, are a prime example. These works, with their subtle colour combinations, have a strange and compelling presence, however, this is not so much attributable to Duchamp's readymades, but to Russian Constructivism and its quest for a kind of quasi-functionality. And like the artist's more recent paintings for car windows, they continue the literalisation of Ellsworth Kelly's shaped canvas, bringing it into a more productive engagement with our everyday existence.
Andreas Exner first visited Brisbane for an exhibition at the David Pestorius Gallery in 1996. The artist has since returned to Australia on several occasions for exhibitions and to see friends and family, often for extended periods. While Exner's career is mainly in Europe, with its vast exhibiting and other networks for art, over the last two decades he has developed very real ties to Australia. Following his Brisbane show, Exner will travel to Melbourne, where he will be artist-in-residence at the VCA and have an exhibition at its Margaret Lawrence Gallery.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Peter Bonde
20 August — 10 September, 2011
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to present a new exhibition by Copenhagen artist Peter Bonde (*1958), the artist’s first solo show in Brisbane since 1997.
For over three decades Bonde has challenged the conventions of painting in a truly critical way. Emerging in the immediate aftermath of Conceptual Art, his work bends unpredictably under the weight of art history and the contemporary media overload.
Bonde also continues something of a local tradition, one that acknowledges the important role of Danish artists in the Situationist International (Asger Jorn) and Fluxus (Henning Christiansen, Erik Anderson, etc). The anti-authoritarian provocations of these international art movements echo loudly in Bonde’s work. For him, the material forms of art, it’s appropriate subject matter and modes of display are always in question. Repeatedly defying notions of good taste and decorum, his work foregrounds highly personal aspects of daily life, often touching on subjects that tend to go unspoken. What shines through is a psycho-social dimension, which is utterly contemporary and generates empathy in the viewer.
There is one other important constant in Bonde’s work and that is the principle of collage. Perhaps the most salient development in art over the last century, Bonde has contributed to the evolution of collage, not just through his irreverent ‘in your face’ approach, but also for the way he has integrated new media processes and materials. For his latest exhibition, the artist will update, daily, a large multi-panel collage first shown at the UQ Art Museum in TURRBAL-JAGERA: The University of Queensland Art Projects 2006. And as with other recent exhibitions at the Pestorius Sweeney House, Bonde’s new show will engage with Heimo Zobernig’s painted floor, a semi-permanent architectural intervention that exerts a strong presence on the space.
In the late 1980s, Bonde was based in Cologne, then an important centre for contemporary art. There he and compatriot Claus Carstensen paved the way for a new generation of internationally ambitious Danish artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Superflex and Jens Haaning. Like them, Bonde has exhibited widely, including several times in Australia since 1990 when he participated in Rene Block’s memorable Biennale of Sydney. The artist is perhaps best known, however, for ‘The Snowball’, his 1999 collaboration with the Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) for the Danish pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale, while in 2002 his work was featured in Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting, an important international survey by Phaidon.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
A.D.S.Donaldson
8 June — 9 July, 2011
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Sydney artist A.D.S. Donaldson.
For over two decades, Donaldson has been one of the foremost exponents in Australia of a critical post-Conceptual abstraction. It is a practice that is historically self-conscious, experimental, multi-disciplinary, playful, straight-forward and open to chance. Importantly, it also encourages a kind of aesthetic receptivity to the mundane and almost overlooked aspects of everyday life. To this extent, Donaldson’s work has been seen as an extension of Fluxus and in 1993 he was included alongside Robert MacPherson, Peter Tyndall and others in the Queensland Art Gallery exhibition FLUXUS and after … Allied to all of this is an engagement with what we might call ‘Aboriginal Abstraction’.
Donaldson's new exhibition will be broken into four parts, with the opening installation (8—12 JUNE) exemplifying what Donaldson has described as the “continually evolving dynamic between the work of contemporary abstract painters and that of indigenous Australian artists.” This part, whose focus is on painting, also includes a fabric work created by Group Otto but, significantly, it also includes a small screenprint from Tim Johnson's ‘Radio Birdman’ series. Johnson was Donaldson's teacher in the early 1980s and the presence of his work here acknowledges his importance to Donaldson and indicates the very Sydney-specific lineage this work comes from.
For the second part (15–25 JUNE), Donaldson will present a small exhibition of the work of Mary Webb (1901-1958) . This will be the first time in more than 60 years since Webb's work has been seen in public in Australia. Little-known in this country, Webb was a Sydney trained artist who exhibited at the highest levels in Paris during the 1950s and was our most successful and accomplished mid-century avant-gardist and our pioneering collage artist. Webb was also the conduit to post-war Paris for Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder and it was through her that they all appeared in Michel Seuphor’s Dictionary of Abstract Painting (1957) and Balson was able to hold his only overseas exhibition (of his radical ‘Matter Paintings’) at Galerie Creuze in Paris in 1960. Raymond Creuze had been Webb’s last gallerist and the suggestive cloud-like abstract paintings in this exhibition were shown first by him in her final exhibition only weeks before her untimely death in December 1958. Over the last decade, Donaldson has conjured Webb in a range of ways, including by exhibition (most notably in 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art) but also by essay and more recently by dissertation. This, however, will be the first time that the artist has curated a small show of Webb’s informel or nuagist abstraction, an event which, more importantly, will be the first occasion since 1950 that the work which brought her to such prominence in Paris has been seen in the country where she first made her reputation.
For the third part (29 JUNE – 2 JULY), Donaldson will continue his series of minimalist floor constructions known as the ‘Greens’. Made from grass-green painted sheets of glass supported by timber beams, these low-slung floor works function at the overlap of painting and sculpture. Like mirrors, the surfaces of the glass reflect the architecture of the space around them, casting the world all green. This will be Donaldson’s fifth Green, the latest in a series that commenced in Sydney in 1995, was followed by a second Green in Sydney in 1998, a third in Copenhagen in 2000, and a fourth in Brisbane in 2002.
For the fourth and final part (6–9 JULY), Donaldson will show a group of recent memorial paintings based on the work of the Brisbane painter Gerald Ryan. All but invisible today, Ryan exhibited with the Queensland Art Society before moving to Sydney during the years of the Second World War where he befriended Sydney’s leading artists and joined the Contemporary Art Society in whose exhibitions he showed. Crucially, he participated with Balson, Crowley and Frank Hinder in the seminal 1944 exhibition Constructive Paintings at the Macquarie Galleries, an exhibition that placed him at the forefront of art in Australia at this time. Ryan, however, is today almost entirely absent from our local, let alone national, art historical accounts. In raising the figure of Ryan, Donaldson, in effect, both asks questions as to who is missing, or might also be missing, from our standard accounts but as well answers who might be included were another narrative to be written, one that could see our art made up through the inter-connections between our cities. Donaldson hopes through this work to bring Ryan to life, to bring him back as it were, and perhaps in this way the exhibition might lead to us being able to see a ‘real’ Gerald Ryan. In the meantime we will have only Donaldson’s Ryans.
For further information, please contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.
Rex Butler and Sam Watson
7 May, 2011, 1pm
Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane
As part of the exhibition 'grave but not serious', the art historian Rex Butler and Brisbane Indigenous activist and playwright Sam Watson will discuss the idea of Aboriginal humour and its deployment in a range of cultural forms and contexts going back to the early 1970s. Bookings essential.
Gary Foley and Bob Maza, Basically Black, ABC TV, 1973
grave but not serious
1 April—7 May, 2011
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane
Opening on Friday 1 April, David Pestorius will present a thematic exhibition dedicated to the idea of Aboriginal humour and its manifestation in contemporary art and culture.
In his famous Boyer Lectures ‘After the Dreaming’ (1968) W.E.H. Stanner recalled an exchange with an elderly Aboriginal man whose tribe was facing extinction. Reflecting upon his predicament, the old man said “When all the black fellows are dead all the white fellows will get lost in the bush, and there’ll be no one to find them and bring them home.” The observation was related dispassionately — there were no “tears, reproaches or dramatics” — and the old man went off laughing. According to Stanner, this was exemplary of Aboriginal humour, “a wonderful gift, one they did not get from us, of taking us gravely but not seriously.” Today we see something of this gift in the works of Richard Bell (Brisbane), Destiny Deacon + Michael Riley (Melbourne/Sydney), Tracey Moffatt (Brisbane), and Archie Moore (Brisbane), presented here. At once both frightening and funny, this disarming humour is generally understood as the product of a continuing effort to come to terms with white Australia. The exhibition also features Indigenous playwrights John Harding (Melbourne) and Sam Watson (Brisbane), whose works reflect a similar sensibility, while a new piece from Watson’s ongoing collaboration with Dave Hullfish Bailey (Los Angeles) is presented alongside the ABC television spoofs ‘Basically Black’ (1973) and ‘Babakiueria’ (1986). In the process, a long and proud tradition of Aboriginal activism that embraces the agency of satirical culture is alluded to.
In scheduling the exhibition opening for April Fools Day — a day when practical jokes are tolerated — the present moment is reflexively activated in a ploy first utilised locally by another great humorist, the Melbourne artist Peter Tyndall. In 1980 Tyndall set his exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in motion in this way, yet the show itself was a savage indictment of the repressive socio-political and cultural situation in Brisbane at the time. In a similar inversion, the artist’s mock newspaper daybills (‘SCREAMING TEENS MOB PAINTINGS’) from this important exhibition, one of which is included here, pit the solitude of the art gallery experience against the intense communal response that popular music can generate. It is a sensibility perhaps not so very different from the one that Stanner was trying to describe.
This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Ablatio Quarry and MAAP Media Bank.