Sandra Winkworth

24 November - 28 December      I Give To You The Palaces of Montezuma

Link to artist's website

Sandra Winkworth’s piece is made from detritus. But more correctly it is made from litter and imagination. 

Her day begins “with morning walks spotting birds, inspecting home garden fronts and what remains after busy days and nights in the city.” And every Sunday since April those walks have been through Redfern. There was “no planed journey” instead, a “turn from laneway to road side to crossing” into memories that “revisited the streets” of  “skatey/mod/rocknroll days…the 80’s”, ”the gentrified to the old school” collecting “mementos with hawk-eyed intent”. Sandra Winkworth picked up quotations from our streets then glued them into an essay with her imagination that speaks of now, memory and art.

The gems assembled into her opal like offering are grazed by speed. Flattened to perfection by the uncaring pragmatism of progress that surges along our streets. And forsaken, the once essential no longer required, abandoned beside an urgent road carelessly heading towards tomorrows dim recollection. These things are held for a moment in Sandra’s imagination, turned this way or that
then cross-referenced somehow into something with a pang of emotion that feels like places I like a lot, here and art.

So delicately and thoughtfully crafted is this piece that we need to be reminded of the time it spent on the road, as a kind of refugee from our material existence. Now with a revised citizenship of the art world it’s collective emotive power far exceeds the feeling previously accorded to any single item. Is that down to the artist’s hand - her orchestration or is she simply the conductor of an emotive coir?

This is the voice of voices, it's the Palace of Montezuma, Aztec Emperor, “he who is angry in a noble way”, it is a cloud but it is far from a miasma, it is our hope.

- Tony Twigg

Pamela Leung

20 October - 23 November      Blossom Everywhere
Link to artist's website

Pamela Leung is a Hong Kong born Australian, who came here about 40 years ago. Like most people who live some distance in kilometers and years from their birthplace there is a sentiment reserved for the homeland that isn’t reasoned and never forsaken. This is the filter through which Pamela has watched the demands of students in Hong Kong for democracy with in the Chinese Republic.  Demands that stretch into the future, beyond the 2047 horizon of the one country two system regime that replaced Hong Kong’s British colonial rule.

The outlawed black facemask, the essential uniform of the Hong Kong protestor has become Pamela’s motif. Transformed into a flower and repeated, like the Hong Kong student civil disobedience, across the available space with fragile insistence. And while we might wonder what the outcome of the protest movement will eventually be Pamela has taken the dismal view that it will be squashed under the weight of China’s central government.

Symbolism, politics and sentiment collide as art in Pamela’s piece, Blossom everywhere posing the futile question of the artist’s intent. However it is not that the artist is saying anything particular about the political situation in Hong Kong, it is that she is living with a meditation on a confrontation that is reconfiguring her idea of home.

- Tony Twigg

Tony Twigg

15th September - 19th October     The Idea of Subject
Link to website with artist information

Usually a picture is of something. It might be a picture of a person, or a building or a landscape. Early on the idea of a picture’s subject was complicated by religious art. For example the subject might be a person, Christ who is not a particular man but a symbol of people’s humanity, or a building, the Kaaba, which is not a building shrouded in black cloth but the essence of Islam. And in Sydney we have our own wrapped thing, the landscape at Little Bay packaged by Christo as an altar to our cult of contemporary art. We keep these images in our memories where they cease to be pictures of particular things and become symbols that stand for all we know about a particular thing.

The picture then is not of something, but is a something that has been invented. Often fashioned along strict guidelines set down by culture permitting our pictures to be read by others as language. For some a stick is a stick is a stick while for others a stick is a tree is a magic wand. However in either case the subject is made and then remade each time it is read, eventually becoming, a sort of mirror reflecting our understanding or lack of it, of the self, the enduring subject of all art.

I have come to think of this as the method of making or inventing art. It is the experience through time of making and remaking a single thing that automatically changes each time it is made. For example, the constructed work here was made in 1989, remade in 1997 and remade again in 2016. The process was articulated metaphorically, codified as language and identified as myth. Evolving in this manner it could eventually be reduced to pattern. There are precedents in art making of legible matters, for example the crosshatching or rarrking in Aboriginal bark painting and the geometrical arabesque arrangements of polygons in Islamic art and architecture. My drawings are of similar patterns. And if this constructed work could be seen as a figure, each drawing would be seen as a portrait or more correctly a visage, an expressions caught in ripples of time connecting the past with the future that are stretched, teased out and exposed across a present that is our now.

- Tony Twigg

Mollie Rice

11 August - 14 September      Worlds Above, Worlds Below

Link to artist's website

Mollie Rice was born in remote Australia. She spoke of Katherine - Lightening Ridge where her Dad was an opal miner, the unstable Australian bush and small towns where she got good at listening.  By the time she had a drivers’ license she was gone. First to Bathurst for study then to Sydney where she taught, next London, travel, husband, 2 children and then back to Australia, WHY? And with out a thought she replied, “the big sky”.

She wondered how a sense of location affected an individual?  For her Sydney delivered another child and a life threatening illness that left her grinning, “I’m still here!” then a chance to study textiles at CoFA. It was a foundational language that became drawing and the observation, “drawing permitted things to be, without being a statement or an answer”. For Mollie Rice drawing seemed to be the business of listening to a location.

The works here were made in response to the walk across the Domain from the Art Gallery of New South Wales towards the city that for Mollie is the walk into a wall of silence. She watched it through her sketches made on the spot. Drawn blind as she said tracing the cities contours on to her page without lifting her eyes from her subject. And she listened, making a drawn record of the silent cities sounds, blind again, with out lifting her ears from her subject.

Her paintings access those field recordings in a shallow slippery space where foreground and background merge into blurs that could be either.  Here it's tempting to think of her subject, our city rendered as an unidentified place, enveloped by "the big sky" where only the sounds of place remain to give us a sense of location.

Tony Twigg

Bryan Fitzgerald

03 July - 10 August      Last Train to Banksia

Link to artist's website

Bryan is a neighbour. He is the Fitzgerald of Chee Soon and Fitzgerald, a shop along Regent St. He’s the guy who sweeps the street in a wide arc around the shop, delivering the same aura of calmness to our street that his shop exudes. And he’s a photographer who observed Raam, a friend making his way to Redfern Station for the Last train to Banksia. And among these various endeavours the idea that threads them together is patina – Bryan’s alertness to patina.

Patina is the surface texture of things that visually conveys mood. It’s the shine on an old car’s chrome-work that labels it a classic, the faint echo of wall paint that encapsulates a past rather than indicating the need for modernization. It’s the beauty born of time and the passage of hands. And it’s the romanticism of walking down a street alive to every sensation where the visual charge is of life lived. This is the mood that Bryan Fitzgerald captures for us in his photographs of our streets.

Bryan offers us the gift of pause. It is the moment of stillness, listening, watching some perfect moment of light and shade across a surface that is gone in the moment it takes to perceive it. Then again that might simply be a friend rushing to catch the last train home.

He was born in New Zealand and living there in timber houses he says that he learnt about patina from his great aunts. With a single sweep of their hands they cleaned, making no distinction between inside and out. Timber was scrubbed, the weatherboards painted, lino was no doubt mopped, week in week out imbuing each surface with life. Small changes, incremental differences building across the passage of time and recorded as surface patina are savoured here in photographs of Raam making his journey, short and local that we might understand as cinema. We watch transfixed as time passes

Bryan offers us the gift of pause. It is the moment of stillness, listening, watching some perfect moment of light and shade across a surface that is gone in the moment it takes to perceive it.  Then again that might simply be a friend rushing to catch the last train home.

-Tony Twigg

All works are for sale in editions of 5 at $350 each
Enquiries – contact@cheesoonfitzgerald.com    83991305

Ho Bo Jo

2 June - 3 July      Vision River

It isn’t his real name.

More correctly, it wasn’t his name when I first came across him. But when real is divided into: what was, what is and what will be, it’s the present we pay attention to. Change is accommodated, necessitated even expected, but rarely questioned when a question could be read as impolite, ill informed and possibly reactionary.

Art has pummeled the idea of real. Words like, illusion and reality, origin and reproduction, concept and object, facsimile and symbol - have been thrown together often enough for people to realize that everything is real; however, some things are more precisely named than some other things. Reality has become a question of nomenclature.

Ho Bo Jo is exhibiting jpegs, objects from cyber space that effortlessly ship pictures around as numbers. For an artist digital imagery opens pictures to seemingly endless sequences of change that can be tracked. What might begin as a single idea can expand into a graphic record of its evolution. In time the narrative of evolution becomes more consequential than any single image suggesting that the narrative has morphed into an embryonic language, a Vision River perhaps. Look at one of Ho Bo Jo’s images and you will see a jpeg, look at a 100 and you will see a language.

I can see two of these language-like sequencers of images playing here. One that looks like a set of painterly abstractions while the other represents a reality that often includes pictures hanging on gallery walls. Of course the two sets of images mingle. We observe as an art-like image that evolved as a manipulation of pixels ends up on a gallery wall where it is observed as a manipulation of images.

It is a simple story but it is a complex consideration of the mysterious romance of art. It’s not a movie; there is no beginning, no end, no running time. Look at it for 20 seconds or look at it for an hour, you will see much the same thing. But with an hour's viewing the more nuanced this meditation on the romantic ideal of art becomes.

At the end of a parting email, Ho Bo Jo informed me that his name is a “3 word poem”, a kind of onomatopoeia perhaps, a name that describes as much as it identifies, unlike his images that identify rather than describe.

Tony Twigg

 

Anie Nheu

28 April - 01 June      Paean

Link to artist's website

Like many artists, Anie Nheu sees her life reflected in her art. She feels that because her life went one way rather than another her art has permission to go that way as well. As this idea of representation grows it becomes an exercise in mapping that can chart life across generations. It can stretch to accommodate ancestors and locate the artist with in a pantheon of concerns that artists will often describe as their way of making sense of the world.

Anie was born on the road, as she said “moving from place to place with my parents since the civil war in East Timor”. To live a life, as she sees it, in 3 parts, now drawn into a “harmonious whole”. This is the map she has given us. Sketched out on 3 hessian bags stitched together with twine and Anie’s painting that has settled across the surface in a way that does not obscure the origin of her bags - bags, metaphorically that she has lumped since her days in East Timor as an infant.

Of course the work is a painting, symbolic of nothing more or less than itself. It gracefully observes the conventions of abstraction and achieves a beauty that is new to the hessian sacks. But Anie has included some jarring elements. The work is improbably placed on the wall, as if she were to continue working on it rather than display it for our consideration. There is a chair, arbitrarily placed that seems to contradict our preconceptions of scale. And far off to the side is a golden oval that might be something venerated.

The painting that is a map has been given it’s own space; it’s own set of preconditions that is different to ours. It is somewhere else.  Paean, the title, what does it mean? “A song of praise”, “a creative work expressing enthusiastic praise”. Could we think that from somewhere else we are hearing the voice of praise? That from some other time that could be the whole of life so far, comes a song of praise for the here and now? This moment of quiet pleasure, of walking down a street to encounter something that is a lot like an art work, if not the very thing that art is.

-Tony Twigg

Anca Frankenhaeuser

24 March - 27 April      The Wrapsody of the Daily Paper

Link to artist's website

Anca Frankenhaeuser is a dancer, a celebrated dancer and choreographer who traveled from Finland to London to dance with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. And in the dance of life she found Patrick there who danced her on to Australia, as David Bowie sang, “Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight, lets dance, lets dance, dance, dance, dance…………”


Among their many projects, Anca and Patrick dance with the group Australian Dance Artists that works with the Australian sculptor and performance artist Ken Unsworth to realize gloriously theatrical works that merge the various arts into a single expression. For Anca another unusual thing started happening when she reached Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald began arriving, tossed over the front fence skidding to a halt on the damp grass wrapped in glad wrap.

The silvery plastic sheet could only be saved - wound relentlessly around itself - growing more substantial day by day. As Anca said, this isn’t plastic wound around a form; it’s plastic all the way through. As she wound, in an elaborate calculation based on a time / weight ratio, her winding became 2,375 days worth that is 6 years and 6 months of winding. Or as Patrick put it, “I watch television and Anca does this at the same time.”

-Tony Twigg

Jualian Twigg, Tony Twigg, A Twigg

13 March - 24 March      TWIGG X 3
Link to artist's website

Julian Twigg. Sailing Rose Bay.

Decades ago there was an invitation to an art exhibition in my letter box, paintings of Sydney Harbor by Julian Twig at the James Harvey Galley, I think, somewhere near Bronte. It was a surprise, partly because I’d been thinking of myself, Tony Twigg as the only Twigg in Australian art.

Years went by, swapping invitations to exhibitions with Julian until I emailed him with the unlikely news that I had found another Twigg in Australian art, a marine artist whose picture of Sydney Harbor had turned up at Davidsons Auction House in Annandale.

Almost nothing is known of A. Twigg beyond a small collection of pictures that over lay his sailing boats on Sydney Harbour with a startling schematic understanding of reality. In this his work is not unlike Julian Twigg’s, but unlike Julian, A. Twigg painted portraits of boats. A profession described by an advertisement in the Business Cards column on page 1 of the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1876, “Balmain Regatta – Owners of racing boats wishing to have a PAINTING of their boat with a view of the regatta can have them done on application to A. Twigg, Marine Artist No. 10 Erskine St.”   The photocopies here are of the 2 works by A. Twigg sold through Davidsons Auction House. I found another sold by the Bridget McDonnell Gallery in Melbourne. There is a painting of the Ballina Ferry in the collection of the Mitchell Library and one other, The Cimba & pilot boat through Sydney Heads, 5 known paintings in total survive.

A. Twigg, Ballina Ferry [mid to late 1800s]

The oil painting here is of boats sailing past Rose Bay by Julian Twigg. Australian Galleries who represent Julian describes him as a “Painter, ceramicist and printmaker (who) completed a Diploma of Visual Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2000. His impasto paintings of maritime scenes are constructed from simplified forms and broad colour, emphasising the emotive aspects and changing temperaments of Port Philip Bay. Twigg’s works have been exhibited in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. He was awarded the ANL Maritime Prize in 2007 and the Mayor’s Prize Waverley Art Prize, in 2010. His work is held in several regional and tertiary collections.”

My own work, A Sail, by Tony Twigg is from a suite of works made in 1980 as I considered offering my life to the becoming of an artist. So long ago now that memories of how and why crumble when pause is taken to recall them. But if the poetry of a sail is given, it is also shared, coincidently through a name, blown however fleetingly through Australian Art by the unrelated artists, Twigg.

-Tony Twigg

Twigg X3: A Sail by Tony Twigg, photocopied images of paintings of ferry and paddle steamer by A. Twigg, Sailing Rose Bay by Julian Twigg.

Jayanto Tan

10 - 28 February      Warung Peranakan Waginem

Link to artist's website

Jayanto Tan makes exquisite installations from unlikely materials, memorably used tea bags and in this instance the spent packing cases of incense sticks. This “threw away” packaging is function first, inadvertently beautiful and when amassed by Jayanto, musical. It sings a song, exotic and familiar that is inescapably, the left overs of Chinese New Year.

Submerged within the surface clatter of his installations are meditations on being that reveal Jayanto’s unfolding autobiography. He wrote of this piece: 

"you visit my grave - my tomb will make you dance. 
- be sure to bring a tambourine.”

                                                                                                                                                          -Rumi

 

It [this work] focuses on themes of remembrance and narrative history that create points of connection between the past and the present, between Fujian Province the Straits of Malacca to the City of Sydney of Peranakan culture. Through discarded objects – emptied incense case Perankan cultures and personal experiences, I created hanging installations that purpose a memorial of connection to my late mother as a gift in Lunar New Year. This is a healing that creates a bridge from the past to a current living that embraces a diverse future in celebration of our contemporary world.

Fujian Province and the Straits of Malacca are exotic sounding places that gave rise to the equally exotic Peranakan culture of the Baba-Nonya, the descendants of Chinese traders who settled through the Malay archipelago before European colonization.  They prospered but more interestingly they assimilated with the Malay culture into an exotic life style expressed in architecture, clothing and food…..some of the most delicious food imaginable.

The Nonya are one of many distinct social groups that are a legacy of the migration to and colonisation of the Malay Archipelago. It is a stark contrast to the Australian experience where history is neatly split into two culture zones - before and after British colonisation. It isn’t like that of course, the Australian experience is constantly shifting but with this “shake of the tambourine” Jayanto seems to be inviting us to join his dance of assimilation.

-Tony Twigg

Jonathan Thomson

13 January - 09 February      Gilded Youth
Link to artist's website

Jonathan Thomson lives the expatriate life-style. A gentleman in Hong Kong whose history reaches back to Adelaide where he studied economics and even further back to the ship yards of Whyalla.

A trip to London landed him in art galleries and sent him back to uni where he studied art history. That lead to a job with the Australia Council and then an invitation to help Hong Kong set up their version of the Australia Council, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In cashed up Hong Kong Jonathan landed at the top end of town.

With the change from British to a Chinese administration in 1997 Jonathan moved on, became a freelance curator, an advisor and a journalist, writing for Ian Finlay-Brown’s magazines, Asian Art News and World Sculpture News, which is where I met him. Like Finlay-Brown he wrote about Asia and the art made there from the point of view of a privileged outsider, alertly discussing a culture that seems willing to meet the west, only halfway.

More travel and a CV too long to list left Jonathan with the time to make art. And this is the product. An example here drawn from a body of work that takes the shadows falling across the beauty of youth as it’s subject, that and the merchandising savvy that markets youthful beauty as the commodity, gilded youth.

This show has an air, somewhat Louis Vuitton- sleekly beautiful, effortlessly digestible that sets it apart from the here and now, rendering it unmistakably desirable. It promotes, at least for me a meditation on fashion, on “this year's model”- a critique offered by the insider who, like the expatriate adopts a view as skeptical as it is enthralling. He will meet his subject but only half way.

 - Tony Twigg