Modern and Contemporary Art Australia: Primavera 2022 - Young Australian Artists

Primavera 2022 - Young Australian Artists showcased six works created by six emerging celebrities endorsed by Modern and Contemporary Art Australia. The works displayed in the exhibition are portraits of the artists. Through the artworks, viewers can get to know the stories of each artist and infer unaddressed narratives through visual cues. As the exhibition only shows a single work of each artist, viewers are encouraged to learn the complete story about each artist at the museum's website. The main purpose of the show is to introduce sponsors to the rising stars, so they can choose to financially support the artist of their choice. Remembering the artists who are featured in the show is highly recommended to readers who are interested in contemporary art, as they are currently in demand, and will eventually become big names in the art world in the next 5-10 years. Big names means showering with accolades and solo exhibitions at world-class art institutions.

Three Artists on Spotlight: Artwork and Profile

Julia Gutman

Julia Gutman, Isn’t it all just a long conversation?, 2022, Donated textiles, embroidery, chains

Assembled from fabrics donated by her friends and family, the patchwork is similar to her self-portrait. The artist compares herself to her artwork, stating that she is made from people who are close to her and who she engages with. She emphasizes the importance of keeping relationships by incorporating people who are close to her into her artistic practice. However, the artwork suggests that she has an abusive relationship with them, who refuse to interact with her sincerely and are even willing to impregnate her.
The artwork, the artist's largest tableau to date, features an appalling image of impregnated women as a subject of male desire. Though not explicitly stated, the woman is likely the artist herself. She values her honor and reputation more than herself. The three women on the left side of the pregnant women confirm that one of the main themes of the artwork is desire, as they are from canonical paintings of Western art history, in which women were depicted and manipulated by the desires of men.

Julia Gutman is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal land. She re-uses found textiles to produce ‘patchworks’ that merge personal and collective histories to explore themes of femininity, intimacy, and memory.

Amrita Hepi

Amrita Hepi, Open Poses (detail), 2022, Dataset for pose recognition, custom software, webcam, monitors, decal, lamps, painted wall, sound

Amrita Hepi, Open Poses, 2022, Images from dataset

In the interactive installation, the artist incorporates a green screen and motion capture technology to reveal the uncomfortable truth of modern society. The artwork enables viewers to perceive modern society as an iceberg. The top part that emerged above the water is the prevalent social phenomena of monitoring, which is simulated in the artwork, and submerged under the water is the order that maintains the unfair power structure of the social system.

Themes
1. premise: modern society is a panopticon
To understand the artwork, knowing the premise of modern society is a must. Modern society is similar to Panopticon, a circular-shaped prison where guards at the center monitor prisoners locked in rooms built around the edge of circumference. Prison guards, people of power, are eligible of monitoring and tracking prisoners, people of lesser power. Prison guards are the few authorities who are informed of common sense, have secure necessities of life, high social standing, and wealth. Prisoners are the majority and comparatively less in power than the guards. The power structure is set according to past behaviors that reflect ethical standards. Prisoners are encouraged to obey rules set by the authority to secure their rewards and avoid punishment.
In the artwork, the artist compares guards to the viewers and a prisoner to herself and emulates the process of reducing humans as leverages for capitalist means. In a mock green screen room, viewers are invited to intimate the artist's pose displayed on the left screen. Poses represent past behaviors of the artist, a prisoner. Viewers are guards, so they can monitor her poses through the screen. There are more than 2000 images of the artist in a strange posture. When viewers match the artist's posture on screen, a photograph of viewers is taken so they can compare their pose to the original image. The newly taken photo is saved onto the existing dataset of images.

2. helplessness of the human condition in modern society
Viewers can't check whether the artist would go through the newly captured images, but she emphasizes that monitored behaviors are returned to prisoners in her artwork description. Prisoners are reduced to a state of powerlessness, as they admit they are powerless compared to the mighty authority, who is in full grasp of prisoners' data and Achilles heel.
The artist reflects the helplessness of the human condition in society by selecting a green screen as the backdrop of her images. To be used in videos of various purposes, green screens are replaced with background videos. Just as green screens are easily replaced with a background video, people are easily removed from what they are and exploited as leverage for capitalist means regardless of their will. The authority is the ultimate judge and decision-maker, and people have no choice but to helplessly accept their vulnerable position.

3. First Nations body as a subject of humiliation
The artist is First Nations choreographer and dancer from Bundjalung country (Australia) and Ngāpuhi (Aotearoa New Zealand) territories. The choreographic practice of the artwork reflects the historical constructions of First Nations identity, which have also been subjected to fetishization, and dehumanization in the Western art canon. By taking and displaying images of herself in awkward postures, the artist reinterprets her First Nations bodies as a subject of humiliation.

An award-winning artist. Hepi engages in practice concerned with dance as a social function performed within galleries, performance spaces, video art, and digital technologies. She engages in forms of historical fiction and hybrid —especially those that arise under empire— to investigate the body's relationship to personal histories and archives. Amrita is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Katie West

Katie West, I love you my baby, you are my first born (detail), 2020-22, Found driftwood and metal, 2-channel video projection

In the two-channel film, I love you my baby, you are my first born (2020–2021), the Yindjibarnd artist explores inter-generational trauma and the ongoing effects of the Stolen Generations. To associate the colonized land with her wounds of familiar history, the artist returned to Ngarluma Country, her ancestral land, to film this work. Taking place at a shoreline at sunset, the film shows the artist collecting driftwood, observing the shifting tide, and marking her footprint on the mudflats.
By documenting her actions, the artist undertakes a journey of self-realization. She informs viewers of the brutal policy of the Australian Government: removing Aboriginal infants from their parents at their birth. Then she discloses the artist's mother was forcibly taken away from her grandmother. While performing simple actions in her ancestral land, she imagines a time and place where the three generations might have all lived together. The film implies despair and intergenerational trauma of her and First Nations people, who are deprived of their culture. In this way, the artwork carries a social function — acknowledging that things are not as they should be; not as we imagine, and far from what we can hope for the experience of First Nations People in Australia.

Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman based in Noongar Ballardong Country, working in installation, textiles, and social practice. The process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric underpin her practice – the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water, and infusing materials with plant matter.

Modern and Contemporary Art Australia: Perspectives on Place

When appreciating artwork, knowing the qualities that make an artwork great is crucial. Amongst many qualities, one of the most important qualities is showing the social issue. An artwork with such quality grants viewers to contemplate and thus expands their perspective on the world. Perspectives on Place exhibited by Modern and Contemporary Art Australia showcased two types of contemporary artwork: the first type reveals the national history of colonization and the second type shows the current world governed by the western system. The exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to contemplate and reach a conclusion that the national condition is the global status quo. From the museum's permanent collection, the artworks on display were desolate works insufficient in craftsmanship and lacking in aesthetic value. Looking back at Australian modern art, I was expecting an evolved form of refined artwork depicting abundance. Exhibited artworks are similar to conceptual art, as their theme matters more than physical appearance.

Topics Covered

• Australia: Before Colonization, Violence, Settlement
• World: Individual, Population

Australia

Before Colonization

Comprised of two essential artworks, the image summarizes the theme of the exhibition.

 three close up paintings of Shirley Purdie, Goowoolem Gijam - Gija plants, 2013-16

Painted by an artist of Aboriginal descent, each of the 72 artworks contains images of plants native to Australia. Aware of the characteristics of each plant, the artist painted each plant affectionately. The artwork shows the artist's affection and knowledge of Australian flora. Originally an output of affection, the artwork changes its connotation when juxtaposed with the artwork on the floor.

 Megan Cope, Foundations III, 2020

The artwork has 400 separate components, and each component comprises a concrete pedestal embedded with a singular oyster shell. The selection of the material is directly related to the Australian history of colonization. Shells refer to Shell mounts formed by Aborigins. The mounts are the residues of cultural and communal life and indicate Aboriginals' occupation over a long period. After arrival, European settlers destroyed the shell mounts to mine limestones. Limestones were processed to create the raw material for mortar, which was then used in various colonial buildings. The embedded concrete pedestals of the artwork were also made from mined limestones.
Through the keen selection of the materials, the artist states that the purpose of destruction and mining was to lay out the basic foundation to establish the western system in the fertile land abundant in natural resources. The constant and calculated form of each component of the artwork graphically demonstrates the western system overridden onto the Australian landscape, connecting back to the artwork displayed on the wall.

Violence

 Tom Nicholson, Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, 2014

 Tom Nicholson, Cartoons for Joseph Selleny, 2014

The artwork is comprised of three parts:
1. a suite of large-scale charcoal drawings featuring soldiers shooting
2. a vast wall drawing: a myriad of tiny dots on an expansive paper
3. a takeaway artist's book

The component that addresses an evident narrative is 1. The subject relates to the story of the SMS Novara, an Austrian ship that docked in Sydney Cove in 1858 and departed with hundreds of handcrafts made by Aboriginal people destined for European collections. Joseph Selleny, as an official artist of the ship, produced numerous drawings of Australian flora, fauna, and even portraits of Aboriginal people. By depicting a graphic scene of violence, Nicholson points out Selleny omitted to depict colonial violence.

1, once had an apparent form, is smudged. The artist employed the cartoon technique to create the first two components of the artwork. The cartoon refers to the sketching technique for painting fresco (wall painting) invented by Renaissance artists. Once they finished sketching fresco subjects on a real scale with charcoal on paper, they punctured tiny holes in the outlines of the subjects. Then they pounced the paper with a small cushion against a wall to paint the fresco on. The process left dotted lines on the outlines of the subjects on the wall. 2 is the outcome of the repetition of the process, so the dots are in disarray.

When the intention of the cartoon and its process combined with the narrative of the artwork induces a wealth of connotations. Cartoon is a foundation for building up a fresco painting. Fresco is a large wall painting meant to be seen by mass, so publicity is one of the main characteristics of a fresco. By selecting shooting soldiers as a subject, the artist intended to publicize the violence of colonization that Selleny missed. Despite that he created a cartoon for his fresco, he didn't even start the base layer of the painting. Moreover, he repeatedly pounced the charcoal sketch to make the subject hard to identify. Through his process of cartooning, the artist compares shooting with pouncing, in which charcoal dots are 'shot' onto paper instead of bullets. In the artwork, the cartoon is a metaphor for colonial violence. Just as a sketch is ready for building up paint layers, colonial violence lays a foundation for building up a new governing system.

Settlement

Rosemary Laing, brumby mound #6, 2003, Photography

The image is from one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape, a photography series by Rosemary Laing. The image features red domestic objects arranged in the red soil plains near Tanami Desert, the land of the Wirrimanu Aboriginal community. Originally from a conventional household, the objects sit on the setting awkwardly. The objects represent modern western life settled uneasily on the Australian landscape, invoking histories of colonization, migration, and displacement.

World

Individual

 Christian Thompson AO, Dead Tongue, 2015

In the looped video, the artist is silenced by the Union Jack flags held between his teeth. The video is similar to photography in that the artist doesn't move throughout playtime, but the video has a soundtrack. A song in Bidjara, one of the Aboriginal clans' languages, plays along with the video, offering viewers an immersive experience.

The artist, who is of Bidjara descent, is aware that Bidjara is an endangered language, but he insists that it continues to be a living language if one word of the language is spoken. His work demonstrates the resilience of his Bidjara language and Aboriginal culture in the wake of Australia's colonization.

While showing Australian social issues, his image also reflects the conditions of non-westerners living in a modernized society. The traditional governing system of non-western countries was overridden by the western system directly or indirectly, as western ideas and systems established the foundation of modern society. Though traditional cultures are still tightly knitted to people's lives, the world is run by western ideas, especially capitalism, and productivity. Without any questions, modernized non-westerners follow the path set by past generations and instructions proposed by authority: they study at schools, then goes to work to afford their living.

Population

Louisa Bufardeci, Ground Plan, 2003-2009

In the large print that occupies an entire wall, the world map is reimagined as an architectural plan. Each country is resized according to the relative size of its population instead of its landmass. Borders of each country are configured as rooms in a metaphorical shared house. Open doors suggest the flow of people, capital, resources, and information between countries. The containment of countries within a Western design suggests the world is governed by a western system.
The most intriguing part about this work is that the size of each country is resized according to its population. The population is comprised of modernized westerners and non-westerners. The conditions of both groups of people are depicted by the previous artwork, Dead Tongue. Two artworks are purposefully displayed closely to communicate the idea of the world as a colony of modern civilization. 

Art Gallery NSW: Australian Modern Art — Part 3 Sensuality

Sensuality

Blessed with fertile land, Australians cultivated an abundant life of materialistic pleasure. Such prosperous life greatly influenced Australian modern artists and their works. Many artists regarded that the voluptuous and muscular forms of Australians reflected the rich country's power. Thus, they celebrated the physical beauty of Australians by preserving them in their paintings. In their works, they often related sensuality with procreation and nurture, linking back to the role of fecund Australian land to settlers. To capture the nourished beauty, they incorporated techniques from European classical art and avant-garde.

Charles Meere, Australian beach pattern, 1940, Oil on canvas

Charles Meere, Atalanta's eclipse, 1938, Oil on canvas

Charles Meere was one of a group of Sydney artists whose work depicted Australian life during the inter-war period and modernized classical artistic traditions. Yet, he painted works of neo-classical style, most notably Atalanta's Eclipse, which shows a running race scene between Atalanta and Melanion. Contrasting to other suitors who competed with the huntress to marry her, Melanion won the race by distracting her with three golden apples.
The artist contributed to cultivating Australian modern art by painting works inspired by the art nouveau of the European avant-garde. One of his art deco masterpieces is Australian Beach Pattern, which was painted during the interwar period. Though full of enigma, the masterpiece is interpreted as a celebration of a healthy young nation's beach culture and a glorification of heroic racial purity.

Jean Broome-Norton, Abundance, 1934, cast 1987, Bronze

In the exceptional art-deco relief 'Abundance', a wholesome and athletic Australian family is presented. By adding the child, the artist relates sensuality to procreation and fecundity of the bodies. Sheaves of wheat and a wreath are rich provisions from the fertile land of Australia. As the family's body is from the food, the artist expresses gratitude towards the bountiful nature. The work reinforces notions of Australian life as a golden age of physical and environmental harmony.

Arthur Murch, The idle hour, 1933,

Oil on canvas on hardboard

The nakedness of the mother suggests she just finished feeding her baby. The mother, along with her baby, radiates sensuality with glossy skin and precariously hanging clothes. Their porcelain-like skin combined with warm key light from the window imbues sublime energy to the setting. The exceptional rendering of light's effect on skin indicates the artist's deliberate study of lighting and masterpieces of the early Renaissance and classical periods.
The artist associates sensuality with the sublime by showing the role of a mother as a nurturer of a family. To create images of national culture, the artist depicts Australian modern life by employing classical traditions of European art.