Anie Nheu

27 November - 29 December      Passing Through

Link to artist's website

Anie Nheu’s piece Passing Through is both an appreciation of nature and a consideration of the appreciation of nature in art.

It began during a holiday on a farm at East Gresford beside Allyn River in the upper Hunter. Anie was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the trees she saw. So much so that she began drawing them, on this occasion a casuarina on the left and a eucalypt on the right. Back in her Sydney studio and faced with the proposition of making something out of her time away for SLOT, Anie focused on her drawing.

In a pile of some-one-else’s thrown-out junk she noticed an exquisite Art Nouveau frame, a style that celebrated organic form, in particular trees. It seems to have set the tone of Anie’s piece. Lovingly restored, it embellishes the rawness of the Australian bush with an orientalist elegance.

Like a giant piece of ikebana, a tree branch cut and re-assembled for the window space offers a counterpoint to the stylised representation of bamboo that frames Anie’s drawing of native trees - incidentally it is drawn in charcoal, the burnt fragments of trees, and is pointing out that the paper is pulped and processed timber taking the metaphor too far? Standing looking at the finished work I found myself thinking how many ways can you say tree in art? Anie commented that she saw it as commodification. She felt that the process of art is to make a commodity out of an experience. In this case the reverie found in nature. Sure, it’s not such a big thing, but in the hands of an artist it becomes that.

This then is a meditation on our function in nature as much as it is a meditation on a couple of trees in nature. We commodify as Anie points out, we transform, process, consume and combust. It is our art. Our agency is vast and sweeping. We approach it with such urgency that few have a moment for pause as Anie does, to think widely while gazing at a couple of trees in a paddock on a farm up the Hunter.

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

Anie Nheu

20 December - January 20    an elephant in the room

Anie Nheu’s art is about space. Most literally in this piece it is the space between 2 pictures. This place where something isn’t, as Anie describes it, the elephant in the room.  In this piece the gallery like space around the work has been artfully “sculptured” into a form of equal importance to the objects that make up the exhibit. And it is the art of a dance. A painted colour doesn’t cover an entire surface; it leaves a colour behind that pushes the form back while correspondingly the wall pushes forward. At another moment holes cut in the work offer lagoons of white wall while off shore two islands of colour seem to have been deposited, “Spratley like”.

an elephant in the room, 2015. Acrylic on plywood. Dimensions variable

This picture is not presented on a wall, it’s colonising the wall. Gently underlining the fact that it has taken ownership of the space. Gracefully wrapping around a corner in the wall and quietly stepping off the wall on to the floor this work has arrived in our space, subtly merging with our space as we observe its elegant form. 

In her notes on the piece Anie Nheu describes her work as “identity formation” a process where the obvious can go unsaid. Here among the morphing relationships of her forms she reads the emotive content of the work. It replicates her life as a migrant. Travelling with her parents from Taiwan through the 3rd worlds to Australia. What might have been a firm foundation for most of us was fluid for Anie. Things have never been just one thing for Anie. And if we think for a moment few things are ever just one thing.This elegantly restrained work approaches the edges of most art and fearlessly steps across them. Without hesitation it side steps the self-serving clatter or transactional enterprise, and in its place offers us poetry, reflection and silences that otherwise would remain unseen, the elephant in the room, perhaps.

For more information on Anie's work, visit http://anie-nheu.artabase.net/