MIX-ED: DIVERSE PRACTICE AND GEOGRAPHY

Presenting a disparate group of Australian and international practitioners working in photography, video and the found object, the connections apparent in MIX-ED have, perhaps, more to do with notions of the contemporary than with any structured thematic convergence. Nevertheless, further consideration of reason and emotion in art – the curatorial premise of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney – will not be without value. The artists, as diverse in their cultural backgrounds as in their practice, are either Australians resident in Australia (via Malaysia, New Zealand and Brazil) or from Japan, Korea, Argentina (via Guatamala) and China – a mixed bag indeed.

Several artists in MIX-ED use video as a central component of their practice; Sydney artist Shaun Gladwell, however, works across multifaceted media, creating artworks characterised by ironic street funk, skateboard cool and a wry apprehension of the cultural ‘moment’. Gladwell produces a continuing self-portrait, referencing and subverting a sophisticated take on art history. Both immediate and layered, the work exists comfortably (if sometimes cheekily) within the context of its own historical framework – the self-portrait and the sublime.

Essentially a video artist, Daniel Crooks (based in Melbourne) produces images that similarly reflect a keen interest in contemporary culture, particularly cinema. His work exploits technological and scientific developments in the medium, sometimes to surreal effect, sometimes achieving a lucid, haunting romanticism that relates to landscape and the representation of natural beauty. In this, like Gladwell, he borrows from nineteenth-century paintings of the sublime.

Malaysian-born artist Emil Goh works differently, exploring urban banalities in an effort to place the human and humane within a conflicted and ambiguous contemporary universe. His camera tracks people in shopping malls or on trains with a poignant and particular tenderness. Goh also has a passionate interest in cinema, not perhaps (like Crooks) in terms of technological development, but in a conceptual re-reading of significant cinema icons.

Daniel von Sturmer is a video artist from Melbourne (originally New Zealand) whose formalist compositions and detached, crafted images belie the handmade. Referencing a Duchampian sense of the everyday (paper cups, rolls of tape), he builds small worlds of intense movement within contained spaces, which nevertheless resonate with the universe of science and technology. Through filming and then projecting these images, his constructed worlds are rendered muffled and enigmatic.

The photographers in MIX-ED are equally diverse, but again connect at surprising junctures. Luis Gonzàlez Palma is a Guatamalan photographer of a dispossessed people. His photography, at first glance, might be confused with documentary work, borrowing as it does from this important tradition; yet, within a spare and personal idiom of loss and grief, Palma’s images achieve gentleness and an intensely realised sense of the aesthetic. His photographs never simply ‘record’; they are emotionally charged, elegiac, evoking a melancholic and heartfelt resonance within a fractured, post-colonial environment of dislocation and ambiguity.

Contemporary Chinese art has developed a new importance over the past several years; in particular, evidence of a new openness. Among the current group of significant practitioners is Xing Danwen, a young photographer whose documentary style in much of her past work evokes (like Palma’s) memories of place and people. Her recent work is more formalist, finding abstracted beauty in the discarded paraphernalia of consumerism (computer refuse, circuit boards, wires). In MIX-ED, works from her Duplication series, 2003, register the pathetic and macabre in piles of cast-off dolls’ heads.

Brazilian-born Australian photographer Vanila Netto is similarly interested in junk and its link to an almost overwhelming consumerism. She constructs images of people and objects that are at once elegant, humorous and critical takes on western culture. She looks again at the discarded and finds beauty in refuse, commenting on the fragility of a world of corporate neglect. She references and rescues objects from a dump of forgotten signifiers.

Jacky Redgate, a photographic artist living in Sydney, explores formalist issues relating to the nature of light and perception. Her staged photographs are pared back, modernist and witty, with subjects ranging from 1950s kitchen canisters to slide rules and rulers. Everyday objects are assigned roles in works of great graphic power, which, like von Sturmer’s, occupy a strange yet familiar space.

Plastic cartoon-like poodles are the signature works of Myeong-eun Shin, a Korean photographer who lives and works in Tokyo. Her photographs of toy dogs thrown in the air appear disoriented and bewildered against a relentless blue sky.

Myeong’s partner, Masato Nakamura, is a photographer and re-maker of signs (711, the McDonald’s ‘M’). His photographs are sometimes quiet reflections on daily life, including images of worn, utilitarian objects, such as chopsticks and bicycles, evoking lives lived. However, in MIX-ED, Masato is once again a sign-maker – pointing us to the nature of consumerist culture and current iconography, where the sign is art and art is a sign.

Each artist in MIX-ED is uniquely able to fashion an aesthetic response to the contemporary world, providing us with access to modes of seeing that inform and challenge.

Simeon Kronenberg