Julie Green

6 June - 4 July     Two drawings 2018/2019  

Julie Green is not big. If you were to meet her you would likely think of her as a petite woman. Who’s eyes begin to sparkle as she describes a life that is anything but small.

From high school in the eastern suburbs to art school with time off in New York to study tap dancing and textile design. The bands, the galleries, on to Europe back to Sydney, finish art school to find a job working for Ray Hughes in his art gallery that simultaneously celebrated artistic endeavor and defied categorization. She went on to work in a bookstore before travelling across Canada’s subarctic tundra with Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward researching Ward’s epic film Map of the Human Heart. Back in Sydney she opened her own gallery, which for her became a meditation on verbal and nonverbal expression. There was an M.A. in art therapy and then in 2000 study at Charlie Sheard’s studio school that “made the bottom fall out of my taste bucket”. Since then she has been working in community art and of course painting and drawing.

Standing in front of Julie’s two drawings, it’s their size and the scale of her marks that is arresting. It’s big and Julie explains, “after 20 years of sero-negative arthritis a new biological drug treatment Humira gave me back my body”. That was a couple of years ago when Trump was in power and Sydney gasped under a blanket of smoke. Julie’s “fucked-up American flag” and heroically defiant tree are swathed in a celebration of mark making that revels in her new found freedom. She explained that she lay on the paper sheets first stretching toe to finger to mark her scale on the drawing. It follows that the arc of her drawn line is the arc of her reach. In this way Julie observes the idea that expressionist art is the physical measure of the artist while a reading of it’s subject is a measure of the observer’s intellect.

It might be a long bow to draw but in an art work there is a marriage between the artist and the viewer. Each arriving at roughly the same spot from different directions. For a moment caught in a single image before departing on divergent paths, each carrying perhaps, for a while at least some echo of their shared meditation. And so it is with Julie’s drawings.

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

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