Combined-space projects

During the exhibition periods up to April 2018, ArticulateUpstairs's mezzanine space  will be part of the projects that are also in the downstairs project space: Suzanne Bartos' Be Very Afraid, Articulate's birthday project, Articulate Turns Seven, Tolmie MacRae's Transimmanence,Articulate's progressive FERRET, the National Art School's PROXIMITY and WeiZen Ho's The Subtle Beings. 

Combined-space projects

During the exhibition periods up to April 2018, ArticulateUpstairs's mezzanine space will be part of the projects that are also in the downstairs project space: Suzanne Bartos' Be Very Afraid, Articulate's birthday project, Articulate Turns Seven, Tolmie MacRae's Transimmanence,Articulate's progressive FERRET, the National Art School's PROXIMITY and WeiZen Ho's The Subtle Beings. 

Hidden - opens Friday 27 October 6-8pm

Kirsten Drewes and Elizabeth Rankin 

28 October – 12 November 2017

Kirsten Drewes   Babyface wool felt,plastic  35x 30cm,2017

The exhibition Hidden reveals secrets, both the familiar and unfamiliar; the return of the half remembered into the present. It negotiates with the ambiguity of perception and presents experience as haunted, curious and ironic. Kirsten Drewes and Elizabeth Rankin present works which explore disturbing worlds. Kirsten’s soft sculptures describe abject bodily forms with humour. Elizabeth’s darkly romantic paintings, drawings and animations narrate stories of Australian noir. This is an integrated exhibition. It engages the space by hanging small and large drawings in space as collage and projecting animations onto a surface. There are soft sculptures crouching on the floor and suspended from the ceiling. The intention is for a dialogue between the works of each artist within the space that will extend the perceptions of the viewer. This collaboration between the artists enriches the experience of the exhibition as one of varied visual forms that create new conversations about the vulnerability of being human.

Elizabeth Rankin Mortality  oil/marble dust/wax on wood,2017

NOTEBOOKS 1969-2017 opened last night

Open 11am - 5pm Friday - Sunday till 23 October

Artist's talk Sunday 15 October 2pm 

Photos: Sue Callanan

WENDY HOWARD, NOTEBOOKS 1969-2017 opens Friday 6 October 6-8pm

Open Friday - Sunday 7 - 22 October 2017 

Artist's talk: Sunday 15 October 2pm

Wendy Howard Second Blue Satin 2017

Late in 2014, a notebook was returned to me out of the past – my first notebook, begun in 1969 in senior high school. As an artist, I have always used a notebook to organize, think, remember, and the return of this genesis of the books made me view them differently, objectively. I remembered the reason for the first notebook’s creation. We were required as senior students to keep separate files for each subject and I found breaking experience up into isolated chunks to be counterproductive. So I began the notebooks and started mixing study, life and ideas all together as they occurred. The visual/design aspect of each page helped thought and memory.

After a hiatus, I returned to the use of notebooks when I began study at art school and have maintained one ever since. The books contain everything – ideas, sketches, shopping lists, money (lack of usually). They have become a part of my brain, and a way to assess each day how steady my hand and mind are.

 These notebooks are not part of my art production, but as a collection they have become (one visual identity/an object in itself), one that I very much wanted to see together. Nearly 50 years of creative life, with a few gaps, are represented here.

Logically this leads me to think of the end of the series. I would want to destroy them rather than leaving them behind after my death to be dealt with by my relatives, but to choose the time of their completion is akin to choosing the time of my own death.

As only one double page of each book will be displayed at any one time, the pages will be turned each week so that 3 different viewings are possible.

Wendy Howard Concertina

Wendy Howard gli alieni

Wendy Howard Gondola

Wendy Howard Indian Drum

Wendy Howard Seagulls

Wendy Howard babar & alligator

Artists' talks by Sally Clarke & Annelies Jahn on Sunday 1 October at 3pm

Artists' talks begin on Sunday 1 October at 2pm with John Gillies speaking in the downstairs project space, followed by Sally Clarke and Annelies Jahn at 3pm upstairs.

Open 11am- 5pm Friday - Sunday until Sunday 1 October.

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Annelies Jahn 5 x 9 #2.1 / variation, 2017 string and pins 

Sally Clarke, Dismemberments: Some Stumps To Remember Our Great Artists By (drawing), 2017, modelling clay on wall

Two Wall Drawings: Annelies Jahn and Sally Clarke opens Friday 15 September 6-8pm

Open 11am - 5pm Saturday 16 September - Sunday 1 October 2017
Artist's talks: Sunday 1 October 3pm

An exhibition of two wall drawings—by Annelies Jahn and Sally Clarke.

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Annelies Jahn presents 5 X 9 #2.2 variation, 2017, part of an ongoing drawing project that can adapt to different spaces. Using systems and process, the work uses personal units of measure and an element of chance with similar intention to the works of Sol Le Witt. The continuous line drawing of string secured with pins, is made over a loose grid. The resulting drawing is subtle with line strength dependent on both the viewing point and changing light.

It is part of an art practice that investigates space, relationship and temporality. Exploring the agency and reception of ephemerality, contingency, everydayness and context within the processes of art making, Annelies works with a variety of media such as installation, intervention, drawing, assemblage, painting, photography and video. 

instagram.com/anneliesjahn

Annelies Jahn 5 x 9 #2.1 / variation, 2017 string and pins 230 x 325 cm The Drawing Exchange NAS August 2017

Sally Clarke creates linear wall works in pink modelling clay, her medium of choice since 2013. Through a process of slow and recycled drawing, Clarke genders the line in depictions of Australian ‘bush’ themes and other visual topics to critique masculine narratives and gendered constructions of ingenuity. 

At ArticulateUpstairs Clarke presents a drawn version of her 2004 painting Dismemberments: Some Stumps to Remember Our Great Artists By, a critique of Australian landscape painting.  It references Sigmund Freud’s castration theory and the anxiety experienced by white occupiers when confronted by the ‘she’ of the bush.

http://www.sallyclarke.com.au/

Sally Clarke, Dismemberments: Some Stumps To Remember Our Great Artists By (drawing), 2017, modelling clay on wall, 275 x 275cm. Image courtesy of the artist

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Jacquelene Drinkall - Unconscious Extraction

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Opening 25 August 6-8pm

Open 11-5pm Friday - Sunday,  26 August - 10 September 2017
Artist's Talk Sunday 10 September 2.30-3.30pm
Finessage Sunday 10 September 3.30-5pm

SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER

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In some EcoDome works I am exploring the sphere of the earth as it relates to the rounded skull and the brain, inspired by both late conceptual artist/architect Juan Downey’s exploration of telepathy of invisible architecture as well as the telepathy aesthetics of Buckminster Fuller’s utopian work with dome structures. I seek to generate poetics for examining the psychopathologies and telepathologies of human existence embedded within the utopian/dystopian energetic feedback loop generated between humans, cosmic (earth/sun/moon/fruit/ball-bearing) spheres, and the automation of both extraction machinery (e.g. of cement and coal; normcore-punk touristic spectacle; and surveillance information and data accumulation) and psychical processes.

Auto Bio Geography (the first five), collage on paper, with Skull for the Body, electrical cable, bathtub mounted on watermelons, installed at Spike Magazine Headquarters, Berlin, for 2017 Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art exhibition titled Onhe, Prickelnd, Sanft.

In Auto Bio Geography a German book titled ‘Humanbiology’ found on the street near the Berlin gallery Eigen+Art has been cannibalized and combined with the terrain of maps of the world to create a series of fifteen abstracted humanoid figures.  This work continues my interest in geography, geology and the way humans extract resources from the earth. A roboticised Franksteinian Body-Without-Organs (BWO) figure emerges from reconfigured rectangular, data-abstracted, documentary and illustrative images cut from this Humanbiology book, with the spine of the figure aligned to the equator switched to a vertical axis. Most images are reproduced in a rectilinear format, providing readymade pixilated units from which to construct basic head, limbs and torso. Placing a foot or a limb on the map with a diagonal inflection helps animate the emerging roboticised form. Each robot reconfigured from human body parts has an uncanny unique personality, pointing to futuristic subjectivities. The extended cognition of humans creates automated robots that are literally taking over the earth. Extraction technology is dependent on maps, ability to bring together diverse resources from diverse and far away locations through means of modern machinic automation and transportation. Bruno Latour refers to the extraction methods as a telekinetic modulation and control of resources at-a-distance in his text Science in Action and Action At a Distance.[1]

My works involving weaving with telecommunications wire also reflect upon the automation and a transcended yet materially woven/bound/knotted engagement with the alienation of telecommunications, where connectivity is privileged over collectivity. I have documented the Solstice performance of a conjoined headpiece on the Bow River (Banff), performed by my two friends whom are themselves bound by friendship. Another work combines a head form woven in red telecommunications wires, with the wires resembling veins, with a machinic encephalitic brain with splitting the grey right and left brain hemispheres from which a red length of twisting forms suggest spinal nerve tissues.  Matteo Pasquinellini, an Italian Autonomist/workerist theorist, has a recent text on the machinic encephalitic brain and he also works constantly with Janus headed problems accompanying technology, empathy and autonomised artificial intelligence.[2]

My works exploring dome structures are a metaphor for exploring the extended and social brain and cognitive architecture. The human skull replicates itself upon the spheroid earth, facilitating further automatised methods for extracting, accumulating and processing materials, energies and information. The Exshaw Lafarge EcoDome on the edge of Banff National Park is a shelter for the accumulation of processed rock materials to be used in the production of cement. The geodesic domes of Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain, within Grunewald Forrest of Berlin are now shelters for capitalist hippies and normcore tourists keen to view and shoot (on their cameras) an accumulation of ‘street art’ and graffiti away from the street. The original purpose of the Teufelsberg domes was to house top secret and very expensive USA CIA intelligence gathering equipment such as satellite dishes. The dome as a social brain for automatised accumulation of data and surveillance information is now replaced with a social brain for automatised touristic spectacle. My own recent fascination with spheroid forms met its match at Teufelberg, where disco balls, bathtubs (an elongated half-sphere that I had come to think of as a skull for the body in a work I developed for Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) and a range of dilapidated round woks and round saucepans, as well as tourist tours punning with soccer ball play. Round things popped out everywhere at Devil’s Mountain. Nature has long valued spheres for containing concentration of energy resources, world building material and information resources. Oranges and watermelons contain an abundance of fructose, fibre and seeds full of code for biological/botanical information sharing.

How are the solarised images a contributor to my long established interest as an artist in telepathy, going back some twenty-five years? As the title of the show indicates, I am also very much interested in unconscious processes and extraction processes and how they occur together. As humans we use tools to assist our hardwired and automatised need for natural and processed resources. Humans consume and capitalise with and without a conscious thought, and thus this consumption is highly unconscious at times. Telepathy is stretched within a material landscape that is both utopian/dystopian industrial scape and a spectacular almost extraterrestrial mountain. In these black and white photographic images I again focus on the EcoDome, full of Buckminster Fuller energy, radio and telepathy aesthetics, as well as technologies and devices of eco-sensing and surveillance of pollution and particle presences in the air. Are we ‘telepathically urban’ even on the edge of the wilderness at Banff National Park, to borrow Jennifer Gabrys phrase?[3] Maybe we are telepathically industrial, or telepathically capitalist, with technologically mediated telepathy projecting into all the most remote areas of Canada’s vast expanse and more abstractly into Anthropocene consciousness itself.

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[1] Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers in Society (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

[2] Matteo Pasquinelli, Abornal Enchaphalitization in the Age of Machine Learning, Journal #75 – September 2016, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67133/abnormal-encephalization-in-the-age-of-machine-learning/, cited August 2017.

[3] Jennifer Gabrys, “Telepathically Urban,” in Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, eds. Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 48-63. Available online: http://research.gold.ac.uk/4544/1/Gabrys_Telepathically_Urban.pdf

Many thanks

Many thanks to my Banff Research in Culture ‘On Energy’ crowdfunding supporters as well as extra-Pozible donors (Natasha Steele, Gianni Wise, Bec Dean, Warren Armstrong, Ian Milliss, Grace Kingston, Daniel Kotja, Martyn Jolly, Jim Richardson, Peter Nelson, Joshua Lobb, Yiorgos Zafiriou, Peter Drinkall, Vanessa Robins, Susie Schwaiger, Clare Cooper, Lena Obergfell, Jacqui O’Reilly, Jenny Tubby, Laura Fisher, Sarah Smutrs-Kennedy, Rachel Neill, Gilbert Grace, Connie Anthes as well as Julie Shea, Carolyn McKenzie, Shivaun Weybury, Miriam Williamson, Dorothea Melbourne, Ge Haillun), Louis Muhlstock Endownment (The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity), Banff Mid-Summer Artist Ball Award (The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity), Paul Greenaway and Phasmid Studios, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art Full-Tuition Scholarship - This project to study at 2017 Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (where I made some of this work) is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW. Special thanks to Margaret Roberts and Dot and Pete Drinkall.

  

KENDAL HEYES - To the Borderline

Opening Friday 4 August 6-8pm

Open Saturday 5 August to Sunday 20 August 2017

Artist Talk - Sunday 20 August 3pm

Kendal Heyes To The Borderline, pyrography on paper, 2010-2017 (ArticulateUpstairs Sydney 2017)

Kendal Heyes, To the Borderline, pyrography on paper, 2010-2017 (William Milbank Whanganui 2017)

Jan Taylor, Toni Warburton, Anna Ingham

BOAT: Friday - Sunday 22-30 July, 11-5pm

Opening Friday 21 July 6-8pm
Artists' anecdotes Sunday 23 July 3pm
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Invitation

BOAT continues  a conversation between three Sydney artists  about our intrigue with things maritime, being afloat and the perspectives that the mobility and buoyancy of boating can  bring to being ashore. We met on the Owen John,  the cray fishing boat that Jan Taylor motored up the east coast  from Tasmania to Sydney so she could live on the bays of  Middle Harbour and Pittwater. Water colour and drawing are  her medium, images of boats her message, metaphors for her peripatetic lifestyle.  Anna Ingham has  now taken up the anchor and lives between the Owen John and the Blue Mountains.  Boat tackle in all its forms and the charismatic movement of light on water inspire Anna's sculpture and photography. Not a boat dweller, Toni Warburton takes a row boat or a  kayak  along shorelines to observe the  habitats of  molluscs,  oysters, limpets, tidally adaptive life forms  that she conjures  into ceramic cups for the not quite every day. 

Anna Ingham gunwale (photograph)

Anna Ingham July 2017

Living on a timber boat draws a sculptural element into the everyday. There is a sense of being held as in two cupped hands in a separate, simpler but more infinite sphere. Even the words that surround are beautiful - aft -gunwale- cleat - bow. My work is an exploration of this. 

Jan Taylor  untitled (work on paper) 

Jan Taylor July 2017  

Most of my childhood Christmas holidays were spent staying onboard Dad's boat. Sailing around Sydney harbour and Pittwater left me with a distant urge to live on a boat. Four decades later I couldn't resist buying a well loved 64 year old Tasmanian Cray fishing boat. A whole level of complexity was opened up from an elementary knowledge of diesel driven boats. The preoccupation of managing life onboard became a freedom that was a discipline, and a discipline that became a freedom. 

Toni Warburton study for oyster catcher cups (watercolour)

Toni Warburton July 2017 

A row boat glides where  littoral life, tides, sand, rocks merge in shoreline shallows. One thing leads to another: a reef of varied hanging cups to sway in a friend's galley kitchen.

Artists' BOAT anecdotes, Sunday 23 July 3pm

join us for BOAT anecdotes at ARTICULATEUPSTAIRS  on Sunday 23rd July  at 3 pm to hear the artists share some stories about being afloat, possibly  tell your own, discuss work in the show... a couple of tales are posted below:

AFLOAT

1

Fast forward, take it away boys. Or signal fires, the beginning of true modernity. Kant alone with his evening books. Now he changes channel as prone to the soap as anyone else. Categorize that dear friend. Regensburg in winter is a dear and friendly place but not in the league of, not. Not in the league of Kaliningrad where the gravel pits are. The port is dearer than springtime. Air-cushion ships resume production. Sources of nitrogen please note. Charlie Parker plays a keynote address.

2

How we got there no idea. Tin Can Bay. Where my grandmother’s ketch, Tassie-made but no forbidden apples. How young I was then. Very. Her true love was washed overboard. That settled things, like a concrete wall of meaning. Off Fraser Island, they said, in a cyclone, they said. The Norwegian sea captain swept away and true love fixed forever, tighter, more implacable, than a ball and chain. The ‘Crescent’, my brother has the watercolour. ‘Because he’s in the navy’ – or was. I got the sad papers of this dire love, in a school port. She had a repertoire of three topics: ghost stories, the politicians and other celebrities she knew, and her paramour. Not that we heard of the latter, she just kept his name. Sponge cakes during the week and lamingtons on the weekend. Strawberries and turkey. The tide is out, someone has arranged tiny little fish in the round residual puddles. They’re bright silver with a bright black band down the side. The hooks are bent pins. We ‘catch’ the fish. They’re arranged then on big dinner plates. Our sister dearest recovered a giant baler shell. The snail was still inside. No one in the family wanted to take up the boating life. Not even my sailor uncle who gave up finger after finger to the cabinet-maker trade and then became a federal government officer in the diplomatic corps with a posting in Athens. What he did for language I have no idea for he never spoke

3

At Torquay that’s where she told her endless tedious ghost tales. The house was still there when I was last in that neck of the woods. A hop and a spit and you were on the beach. A large shark appeared in the murky breaking surf. Before that it was Lota. If you got up early you could float on the tide all the way to Wynnum and back again. When the tide was out we set to work with the yabby pump. Not that we ever got anything. My birthday treat was a trip on the Hayles ferry from North Quay. A terrible wind had sprung up by the time we reached Moreton Bay. As the cargo – mostly sawn timber – was washed overboard and the galley was flooded with the crew spewing their guts out, my grandmother thrilled with delight. I had good sea-legs but I didn’t screech; I inspected. By the time we reached Amity Point things had settled. I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed.

4

How she got her love of the sea I don’t know. After that decisive moment when she quit her landlubber life and became a solitary spirit, there she was with her boats and her sea planes - and the taxis she used to hunt real estate. And always two spits from the shoreline: Victoria Point, Cleveland Point, Thorneside, Redcliffe, Maroochydore, Noosa. You could never quite believe her. She claimed to be the first woman to have a commercial fishing license. Maybe so. She claimed to have donated various marine oddities to the Queensland Museum. Maybe so. She let my brother eat tomato sauce sandwiches – which was a good thing. There are photos of the 'Crescent' at TI; and more photos in Townsville with a huge catch of Spanish mackerel on the deck. I never found out if she could swim. She was brought up round horses, a Snowy River girl. These days she might be a jockey

John von Sturmer   11.7.2017

BOAT Anecdotes 2

not really my story

Boats…my mother once jumped off a row boat to save a small child who had fallen off a pier while my elder sisters yelled for someone to “get mummy’s hat!” , which had floated off to sea (but this is not really my story because I wasn’t born yet)

AND I once sailed after midnight from Balmain pier to Darling Harbour with three intoxicated others in a row boat, which was probably a bad idea as I can’t swim (lucky I lived to tell you the tale!)

Jan Guy July 2017