SUMMER GROUP SHOW 09.03. – 04.04.18
PHILIP WOLFHAGEN
Philip Wolfhagen is Australia’s pre-eminent contemporary landscape painter, living in and inspired by the atmospheric terrain of northern Tasmanian. Wolfhagen has rendered these works in thickly applied oil and beeswax, drawing from the emotive and often mysterious qualities of natural light. His paintings are based on his direct observations of changing weather, resulting in personal impressions of a land that he knows intimately and frequently traverses.
GARY DEIRMENDJIAN
“... once a believer, I now rest my faith in uncertainty. there's been a lifelong personal struggle towards a firming appreciation of our oneness as a single species, and of our extreme smallness in the context of a vast, humming and indifferent universe. the understanding that ours is a momentary existence on a speck of dust adrift in boundless space, has gained considerable density. The tension between the felt sublime of this base truth and the many ways in which we are ushered away from knowing it fully, is somehow the surge underlying the expression.� Gary Deirmendjian
JANET LAURENCE
The work started to manifest when Janet was visiting the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Originally built for the Hindi god Vishnu in the mid 12th century, it became a Buddhist temple and was then neglected after the 16th century, succumbing to plant overgrowth and ground movements. Laurence was inspired by this instance of nature recapturing a space of human intervention, crafting five panels of different materials for the work, including burnt plywood, aluminium and acrylic. The photographic prints from her time at Angkor Wat have been pressed into the aluminium under high pressure and temperature, giving the material a metallic shine and the root system an almost ghostlike and outer worldly appearance.
JL Â detail
MARION BORGELT
Marion Borgelt has drawn inspiration from language, cosmology and phenomenology to create her mysertious and atavistic work. These highly-crafted wall sculptures suggest connections between culture and nature, between the constructed world and the organic world, between microcosm and macrocosm, and the duality of light and dark.
KYNAN TAN
Data Erasure is a computer-generated simulation of a conveyor belt, showing computer hard drives being slowly crushed. The work investigates the dual materiality and ephemerality of data; the feeling that around contemporary computation our data is at once fleeting and could be lost in an instant or permanently archived and maintained by corporations and governments. This simulation works within an aesthetic of in-betweeness, alternating between pseudo-photorealism and virtual hyper-reality.
HELEN PYNOR
Helen Pynor’s work reflects her ongoing fascination with the porosity between culture and biology. For this work, Pynor undertook an extended residency in the laboratory of Crick Institute scientist Dr Iris Salecker, whose lab studies nervous system development of the fly eye during metamorphosis. In response to this, Pynor’s video work captures the movements of Salecker’s hands as she explains how this system changes. This work explores the history and role of the scientist’s body in relation to the transformative nature of metamorphosis.
LUCAS DAVIDSON
Lucas Davidson uses a technique that dissolves photographic emulsion in water, allowing the portrait to become a transparent, flexible form that represents the fluidity between the conscious and unconscious. His work engages in a process of both forging and fracturing images of the self, exploring the intangible through highly involved material processes. ‘Second Life’ is a powerful self-portrait of the artist.
JOSHUA CHARADIA
Joshua Charadia is a contemporary Australian artist living and working in Sydney. He renders industrial scenes, photographed in passing, in traditional ‘slow’ media like oil paint and charcoal. By affording time to these images of shipping yards and container terminals, which are normally delegated to our peripheral vision, Charadia makes seen what is otherwise unseen. These objects are containers of capital, highly mobile chess pieces in an indifferent and ever-changing international market place. Charadia’s work asks the viewer to reconsider their passive perception of the world, for the anonymity of these objects reflects our inability to see what is really happening around us.
DANI MCKENZIE
Dani McKenzie’s painting practice stems from an interest in vernacular photography as a domestic ritual and the role photography plays in identity formation. Working from found and personal analogue photographs, McKenzie utilises painting as a tool for deconstructing the presumptions of veracity that give all photographs a kind of authority. Light-leaks, scratches, or even parts that are out-of-focus are easily ignored when looking at a photograph, mostly because we trust that photographs really are experience captured. In a painting, however, traces of mechanical production work to disrupt traditional bonds between subject and object. Identities blur; pasts converge; memory is not merely revealed, but produced and sustained by the image.
NATASHA WALSH
Walsh’s practice wistfully explores the bittersweet inevitability of a present that is both lost and found. A human perception of time only made possible through the processes of memory. Her practice shifts between the living and the dying, the enduring and the fleeting. In her work, this has manifested as an investigation into the relationship between the illusion of a seemingly timeless space within a painting, and its decaying material body. As such, her application of oils onto a copper surface is informed by an understanding of painting in terms of the alchemical transformation of matter.
MENG-YU YAN
Meng-Yu Yan is a photomedia artist based in Sydney, best known for their creation of mystical dreamscapes and haunting self-portraits. The artist’s practice is characterised by an obsession with mirrors and the superstitions that surround them. As a result, Yan’s work is animated by reflections, doppelgangers, and parallel realities. Playing with natural light, self-reflections, and layering of the photographic image, their work represents a highly personal expression of the artist’s Chinese-Australian queer identity.
DANI MARTI
Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, Dani Marti’s work is hinged to a representational paradox. For on the one hand it presupposes belief in the act of portrayal, and on the other hand it tacitly admits portraiture’s inevitable failure to accurately capture. His relation to his subject is consistently fixed: an obsessive, laborious, and often desire-driven attempt to represent something of his subject that is beyond appearances, in other words, beyond surface. But it is surface—quite literally—that we as viewers are left with in Marti’s work, nothing objectively closer to ‘the real’ other than what one chooses to see and read into it.
NIKE SAVVAS
Much of Savvas’ work has consisted of large-scale installations that ‘translate’ painting into three dimensions and popular culture into high art. Blurring the boundaries between disciplines, genres and materials she has created her own unique iconography. Savvas states that “It is important as an art maker to dissolve the boundaries that create and reinforce convention. I work from the inside to break down and erode the boundaries that create distinction, to create a unique animal of sorts, one that is free of the shackles of the arbiters of power. it’s all about liberty and a new world. It’s a kind of personal and public revolution.”
EMMA FIELDEN
Emma Fielden’s repetitive, reductive and monochromatic sensibility is coupled with a sensitive approach to materials that are both studied and spontaneous. Fielden began her art practice making contemporary jewellery with a focus on engraving and mark-making, and she has an earlier background in music. This has come through in her recent practice in her dense graphite drawings, video work, and installations.
JEREMY EATON
Jeremy Eaton explores lineages of social-space and materiality through sculpture, print-making and installation. The works presented at Dominik Mersch Gallery centre on window displays created by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (under the pseudonym Matson Jones custom display) whilst they were a couple. Archival images of these works have been sourced to form the basis of a series of UV exposure prints entitled Permissibility. The two-part bronze sculptural work, The Sleepers, reimagines bronze bamboo designs by Jean Michel-Frank as slight, reclining bodies in a state of respite.
SHANE NICHOLAS
Shane Nicholas explores the mechanisms inherent in current smart technologies to investigate how the human subject could be viewed and represented by systems of online surveillance. The systems of artmaking that Nicholas employs reproduce the human form based on the mishandling of data. The resulting forms appear organic and flawed, echoing the fundamental contradictions and limitations of this technology. By decontextualizing, filtering, fragmenting and reconstructing data to create distorted versions of the original, the resulting sculptures present a vision of how systems alter our reality.
LOTTIE CONSALVO
Lottie Consalvo works across painting, performance, video and photography in order to explore intensely personal moments of quiet strength and reflection. Her bold strokes in dark and ochre hues have a unique and balanced gravitas. The performative element of her practice comes through in her gestural application of paint, allowing the viewer to trace the movement of her body. These powerful and relentless marks also give physical form to imagination, memory and psychological transition.
Philip Wolfhagen, ‘Mound Excerpt IV’ 2001, oil and wax on linen, 90 x 122 cm
Philip Wolfhagen, ‘Mound Study’, 2001, oil and beeswax on linen, 62 x 79 cm
Philip Wolfhagen, ‘Little World No. 14’, 2016, oil and beeswax on linen, 96 x 103 cm
Janet Laurence, ‘Empire Roots, Angkor Wat’, 2016, dye sublimation print, oil glaze on acrylic, burnt plywood, 100 x 216 cm
Marion Borgelt, ‘Bloodlight Stack: 40 Leaves Fig. G, Perspex Box’, 2014, handmade paper, acrylic, timber, Perspex box, 47 x 41 x 11 cm framed
Marion Borgelt, ‘Liquid Light: 78 Degrees’, 2016, canvas, acrylic, timber, pins, 120 x 120 cm
Gary Deirmendjian, “the empire is tired” spoke the weathered head of Nero’, 2017, ceramic, 25 x 25 x 30 cm
Gary Deirmendjian, ‘fat head – yolk’, 2016, mixed media, 15 x 15 x 6 cm
Gary Deirmendjian, ‘robbie’, 2016, bronze, 8 x 6 x 9 cm
Kynan Tan, ‘Data Erasure (Object NA4M9N4N)’, 2018, hard disk drive, 15 x 10 x 3 cm
Kynan Tan, ‘Data Erasure’, 2017, computer-generated simulation, sound and video, continuous loop, edition of 5 + 1 AP
Joshua Charadia, ‘Untitled (No. 1)’, 2018, oil and acrylic on linen, 31 x 31 cm
Joshua Charadia, ‘Untitled (No. 2)’, 2018, oil on board, 30 x 30cm
Joshua Charadia, ‘Untitled (No. 3)’, 2018, oil and acrylic on linen, 31 x 31 cm
Lucas Davidson, ‘Second Life’, 2018, pigment print, 75 x 60 cm framed, edition of 2 + 2 AP
Helen Pynor, ‘Development of the Visual Circuit of Drosophila melanogaster in 3 Acts: Larva; Pupa I; Pupa II’, 2017, video, 22 minutes 24 seconds, edition of 3 + 1 AP Commissioned by The Francis Crick Institute, London for the Deconstructing Patterns exhibition
Joshua Charadia, ‘Untitled (No. 4)’, 2018, oil and acrylic on linen, 31 x 31 cm
Dani McKenzie, ‘Girls Weekend Away’, 2018, oil on linen, 31 x 31 cm
Dani McKenzie, ‘Sleeping Child’, 2018, oil on linen, 31 x 31 cm
Dani Marti, ‘Pointless (Silver)’, 2017, customised corner cube reflectors and glass beads on aluminium frame, 90 x 90 x 28 cm
Natasha Walsh, ‘The Gorgons (selfportrait)’, 2018, oil on copper, 23 x 25 cm framed
Nike Savvas, ‘Living on a Promise (A5)’, 2017, carbon fibre, acrylic paint, aluminum, 53 x 42 x 42 cm, edition of 5 + 1 AP
Meng-Yu Yan, ‘new moon cleanse’, 2018, framed digital print on Ilford gold mono, edition of 7 + 1 AP, 12 x 12 cm unframed, 35 x 45 cm framed
Emma Fielden, ‘Gravity and Lightness II’, 2018, drawing, archival ink on Arches paper, 76 x 56cm unframed
Emma Fielden, ‘Gravity and Lightness I’, 2018, drawing, archival ink on Arches paper, 76 x 56cm unframed
Jeremy Eaton, ‘Permissibility (Flowers)’, 2017, UV exposure dye on canvas, pine and luan mount, 59 x 77 x 4 cm
Jeremy Eaton, ‘The Sleepers’, 2017 two-part cast bronze sculpture, each piece 195 x 3 cm
Shane Nicholas, ‘Variations of the Artists’ Skull’, 2017, Polylactide and acrylic sheet, 74 x 110 x 40 cm
Jeremy Eaton, ‘Permissibility (Apricot)’, 2017, UV exposure dye on canvas, pine and luan mount, 89 x 75 x 4 cm
Shane Nicholas, ‘Three different scans of the same figure’, 2017, Polylactide and pigmented polyurethane, 85 x 120 x 33 cm
Lottie Consalvo, ‘Until End’, 2018, acrylic on board, 122 x 100 cm
Lottie Consalvo, ‘And Then’, 2018, acrylic on board, 60 x 60 cm
Lottie Consalvo,‘Passing Ends’, 2018, acrylic on board, 122 x 100 cm
Lottie Consalvo, ‘Into and From’, 2018 acrylic on board, 90 x 80 cm
www.dominikmerschgallery.com