from one side of the wall to the other opens Friday 6 April 6-8pm

Open 11am - 5pm Friday - Saturday 7 - 15 April 2018

From one side of the wall to the other shows works by three of the artists with studios behind the ArticulateUpstairs walls, who are each moving some of their works from one side of the wall to the other. 

Photo: Peter Murphy

Tim Bass is moving a selection from his recent paintings. Sue Callanan is re-locating her cork bricks to reflect the form and orientation of the building. Margaret Roberts is re-arranging her Richard Artschwager blps to re-signal the world around us.  

Tim Bass ‘Untitled’, 2012, Oil on canvas

Sue Callanan  . . Beside the Architecture We Know, (2018), sculptural installation. Cork bricks and architectural elements.

I’ve used cork bricks to displace familiar readings of the present architectural form of the building. The ‘bricks’ align in a pattern that is mirrored on both vertical and horizontal planes, signalling the orientation of the building and referencing various ‘discrete’ architectural elements—the apex of the ceiling, the stepped brick corbels, open louvre windows. The unlikely material form of the ‘bricks’ is located in such a way as to also draw attention to the particular surface textures—existing bricks and timber and, by extrapolation, other architectural forma and materials within the building.

Margaret Roberts blp 2018 wood, paint, boot polish, location. Ph Peter Murphy

I have installed two blps as part of my regard for artists who make physical space a key subject of their work. Why did that suddenly become so popular among artists last century? Was it in the hope that people would mimic the work and start noticing the world around them as well? Did they think the abuse of the environment might stop if enough people started also valuing the physical places in which they lived? Did they dare to hope that enough people might start caring for the physical places in which we live to stop fossil fuel burning, coal mining and csg fracking, to close nuclear power stations before they leaked into the oceans, to stop using plastic, to prevent global warming, to plant trees everywhere, and so on?  Imagine the future we would be facing now if that had actually happened in the twentieth century?

Those twentieth century artists are not to blame for that failure any more than the many others who contribute to the world-wide environmental movement that keeps battling in the hope that the worst can be avoided.  Richard Artschwager was one of those many twentieth century artists. He made blps  (among other things) from the mid 1960s onwards: curator Jennifer Gross described a blp as something that ‘had no merits unto itself, but you would notice the context, the world around it, . . . it is a signal for you to see other things’ (1). While the name blp is unique to Artschwager, the shape itself is everywhere—look for it on footpaths, in your kitchen and pill packets, in building decorations left from ancient Rome, the Baroque and probably other periods. margaretroberts.org
(1) youtube.com/watch?v=ELIo2zY2AQw

Margaret Roberts

Trial of Sophie's Circles 2017

Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 January
Opening Saturday 28 January 3-5pm

Trial of Sophie's Circles treats Sophie Taeuber's 1934 gouache painting, Moving Circles, as a long distance performance in which its 24 circles are in pause-mode (for 83 years so far), waiting, like the Agave 'century plants', to begin to actually move. I think of it as a long performance rather than as cross-dimensional travel, because Sophie was one of the early twentieth century artists who regarded the shapes they painted as occupying the same space as the material they used to paint them with, rather than using them to create other, illusory or representational spaces.

This project is like my recent work with Katarzyna Kobro's sculptures, in which I make a first stage of one of her works, and then wait for people to come along and move it towards the stage at which Katarzyna left it. In Trial of Sophies' Circles, Sophie has already made that first stage in 1934, and has been waiting all these years for us to give them the spatial energy to move (as she seems to ask for in the title). Many people may have 'moved 'the circles in their imagination since 1934, but Trial of Sophie's Circles will let them move in the actual space she intended her painted circles to occupy.

Trial of Sophie's Circles does this by providing 24 circles for people to physically move around inside an oblong of ground of the same proportion as the painting itself. The painted circles themselves will stay on the paper where Sophie put them, however, and enlarged circles will be provided, as circle-avatars, to better match the scale of the human bodies providing the energy needed for the circles to move. It is a trial for Sophie's Circles, a work planned for The Correspondence of Imaginary Places, a project organised by Sarah Breen Lovett for Cementa17. The plan is that Sophie's Circles will be made by Brooklyn artist Melissa Staiger and its documentation will be shown in Cuchifritos Gallery in New York in May-June 2017 and at ArticulateUpstairs at the same time.

www.margaretroberts.org/Move.html

Margaret Roberts

#8 2016

Opening Friday 19 February

Saturday 20 February to Sunday 6 March
Artist talk with Margaret Roberts Sunday 6 March, 1-2pm

Image: Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition 2, 1928,
black, white and grey-painted steel, 50cm x 50cm x 50cm, Muzeum Sztuki, Lódz, Poland.
Image source: http://www.wikiart.org

#8 is the latest of Margaret Roberts' reconstructions of Katarzyna Kobro's Spatial Composition 2 of 1928, made as an enlarged wall drawing. Her seven earlier reconstructions made in 2015 are shown here. She is remaking this work partly because Katarzyna was one of the early constructivist artists who, well before the consequences of the devaluation of place became so apparent in climate change, worked towards its revaluation by giving place an important role in their work. Katarzyna explained her approach to space in 1929 as:

Sculpture is a part of the space in which it is located. [...] Sculpture enters space and space enters the sculpture. The spatiality of its construction, the connection between sculpture and space, force sculpture to reveal the sincere truth of its existence. That is why there should be no random shapes in sculpture. There should be only those shapes that position it towards space by connecting with it. 

The 8th reconstruction of Spatial Composition 2 will be made in ash on the existing wall of ArticulateUpstairs. The ash is in part a memorial for the recent loss of the World Heritage-listed ancient Gondwana ecosystem in Tasmania. Much of this area was burned to ash following unusually dry weather and electrical storms in January 2016, each of which scientists attribute to climate change, as you can read here.

Room sheet link.

margaretroberts.org