3 March - 25 March
Fabrication: Five Contemporary Artists who work with Pattern. John Aslanidis, Christopher Dean, Judith Duquemin,Kate Mackay, Justin Trendall.

Extreme Pattern

Fabrication: Five Contemporary Artists Who Work With Pattern is an exhibition of pattern making in the extreme, by a group of established artists who have developed vastly different approaches to visual art practice 1. The works by Christopher Dean, Judith Duquemin, Kate Mackay, Justin Trendall and John Aslanidis are linked by each artist's intention to fabricate autonomous worlds for their own interests and beliefs through a making and breaking of the conventions of pattern making.

In the world of cultural custom and tradition, Dean likes to make public statements as an independent cultural commentator. He expresses this through an exploration of the relationship between abstraction and text. For the exhibition he has produced a series of drawings titled: Conversations with Robert Lake #1- #8" based upon his many telephone conversations with the Sydney gallerist. Each framed drawing is a short sentence of hand drawn letters constructed out of a patchwork of soft, vibrant multi-coloured lines.

Dean says: "The beauty of both abstraction and text involves the expansive or interpretative concept of ambiguity. For some viewers/readers a particular piece of text may leave them unmoved while for others it might send them into a euphoric or rapturous state" 2 . In this way he says all of his works have the potential to be simultaneously 'poetical and political'. He reflects the sentiments of the group by saying: "For me the commercial side of painting is of little importance. What keeps me interested in art is not commerce but the ecstatic possibilities of communication. In this way painting is nothing more than a physical and institutional platform to express ideas...over the years I have restlessly attempted to clarify and refine this position. The current series of drawings brings the medium closer to the message by making a direct link between the use of drawing and text in art".

In 2004 Dean curated Conceptual Crochet at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross Sydney, featuring eleven artists including the five artists in this exhibition. The exhibition brought together a small selection of contemporary practitioners 'who have in a multitude of ways conducted visual experiments that aim to connect the tradition of Conceptual Art to the craft of weaving' 3.Dean's solo exhibitions include Tony McGillick was a Capricorn , Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney (2004); See you at Central Street , Front Room, Sydney (2003); The D'oyley Show , Raw Nerve Gallery, Sydney (1997). Group exhibitions include Home Sweet Home , National Gallery of Australia (2003), Juice , Art Gallery of New South Wales; Spirit and Place , Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1996).

Duquemin incorporates hard-edge painting, geometric abstraction, 20 th century design and feminine narrative to express relationships between art and life. For the Integrity paintings she has created figure/ground separations using an innovative approach to create what she describes as 'a feeling of integrity or completeness about art and life' 4. She connects with significant events through an appreciation for geometric patterns contained within 20 th century textile designs. The formulas for creating patterns are complex; in which distorted triangular shapes, made up of three tertiary colours of sentimental palette, are created using a-perpendicular, curvilinear grids that are intersected by a formula of alternating diagonal lines.

Duquemin's new paintings represent a culmination of eighteen months studio research into relationships between Painting Abstraction and 20 th Textile Design throughout France, Holland, Belgium, Austria, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her research project was funded collectively by the 2004 Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artist Travel Scholarship; a 2005 Travel Grant from the National Europe Centre -The Australian Universities Europe Network - Australian National University; and the 2005 Moya Dyring Studio from the Art Gallery of NSW at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Recent exhibitions along the same theme include Bleu sur Bleu , Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2005), Conceptual Crochet , The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2004), Grappling (with John Aslanidis) Peloton Gallery, Sydney (2004), Paralipsis (with Justin Trendall and Kate Mackay), MOP Projects, Sydney (2003), I'd Rather Be Blonde , SCA Galleries, Sydney (2003).

Mackay contemplates relationships between painting and craft to decide about the meaningfulness or otherwise of painting. Through the meaningless manipulation of pattern found in the art of crochet, she sustains her interest for Painting. She says, "I used to worry about the reason for my art practice. The old angst of what is it all about?...until I realised that it is the very uselessness of it that is so appealing to me, the random meaningless manipulation of order, pattern and colour - the actual unreasonableness of it" 5. All of this angst has manifested in this exhibition in the form of a hand crocheted freestanding Large Cube , other hand-crocheted Wall Pieces and a large-scale red monochrome Oil Painting . She adds: "there is nothing actually useful and practical about craft, it has to be an anachronism in the modern western world...there is nothing 'practical' about spending weeks crocheting a rug or knitting a jumper, when you can buy one so easily and cheaply in any shopping centre.   That's what makes it such rich fodder for art - it is every bit as impractical and useless as making a painting" 6.

This new work follows on from a recent mini-retrospective titled Cohesion: Constructions 1999 - 2005 (curated by Christopher Dean) and staged at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross Sydney 7. Significant exhibitions that have contributed to Mackay's current use of pattern include, Conceptual Crochet , The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2004); Ornamentalism , Museum of Modern Art, Brisbane (1997); Florescence , Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney (1996); Looking at Seeing and Dreaming (with artists including Christopher Dean), Sherman Galleries, Sydney (1996), and, Grammar of Ornament, First Draft Gallery, Sydney (1991).

Aslanidis considers himself to be a sound artist more than a painter. For the large sized painting titled: Sonic Network 2003 he captures 'a fragment of infinity' somewhere in an ambiguous zone between sound and vision using a method that Eltham recently described as 'a series of stunning interference patterns of considerable depth and optical ingenuity' 8 . He says "In the current phase of the Sonic Series I aim to create a body of work with an optimistic vision. Vibration created by the kinetic resonance of the paintings occupies an ambiguous Zone, which exists between sound and vision" 9 . His intention is to create imagery with a sonic resonance were there is no starting or ending point, capturing a fragment of infinity using a creative process that is simultaneously both structured and spontaneous.

Aslanidis is a prolific artist exhibiting nationally and internationally. At Tobey Fine Arts, in New York he has staged the solo exhibitions Sonic Fragments , 2005, Sonic , (2004), and participated in the group exhibitions: Dreams of the Abstract Paintings 1933 - 2005 , Pure Painting 2 , (2004) and Abstraktion 100 Years Later (2003) (also at Moscow Artists Union, Moscow). He exhibited in Good Vibrations The Legacy of Op Art in Australia , Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2002) and is currently showing along side Christopher Dean in The Colour of Music , Adelaide Central Gallery2 at the   Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts (2006) 10 .

Trendall, a designer at heart, has constructed in the centre of the gallery Childe Harold/Future Fall , a rectangular section of an imaginary building in the form of a suspended frieze made out of delicately screen-printed horizontal pieces of burgundy coloured textile (a frieze is a horizontal band forming part of the entablature of a classical building situated between the architrave and the cornice). Ornaments and figures once characteristic of the classical frieze are replaced in Trendall's version by what looks more like a semi-continuous arrangement of textile patterns', buildings and decorative diagrams... except on closer inspection one is confronted with a series of computer-generated ultra-weblike information maps containing names and other groupings of personally valued information. The disrupted surface of the hanging print contributes to the illusion of a three-dimensional section of a building.

This new work by Trendall carries on from a recent exhibition titled: The Phantasmagorical Grid Justin Trendall & The Influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, staged at the War Memorial Gallery, University of Sydney (2005). For the latter, Trendall was able to express an ongoing interest in cultural theory, modernist architecture, the designs of Venetian born architect and printmaker Battista Piranesi and the French architect Claude Nicholas Ledoux, all of which compliment his unique projection of the language of printmaking 11.

Other exhibitions to be noted about Trendall include: CCAS Contemporary Art Award , Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra (2005), Perth Art Award Exhibition , PICA, Perth (2005), ABN-AMRO Emerging Artist Award Exhibition , Sydney (2005), Sightseeing Sydney , SCA Gallery/CAFA Museum, Beijing (2004); Conceptual Crochet , (2005), Self Information , Scott Donovan Gallery, Sydney (2003).

Practical approaches to pattern making are a way of making sense of things, situations and events around us. Therefore the five artists do not adopt pattern for the purpose of being purely decorative. In this exhibition the patterns are greatly exaggerated through each artist's attempt to conceptualise a personal knowledge, a knowledge that cannot be articulated . The result is an exhibition of Extreme Pattern mostly expressed in this exhibition through strenuous applications of colour and line as Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Sculpture and Installation.

Extreme Pattern , is a new term that I have introduced to describe a form of contemporary art expression based upon the works in the exhibition Fabrication: Five Contemporary Artists Who Work With Pattern . Extreme Pattern can be defined as exaggerated pattern resulting from the artist's attempt to elucidate a personal knowledge through practical applications of pattern making.

Personal knowledge was defined by the Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi as tacit knowledge. Polanyi stated that all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is silent knowledge, 'a knowledge we know but cannot tell' 12/13. The idea that our thoughts and behaviours are influenced by operations inaccessible to consciousness has been addressed in psychology and philosophy by thinkers such as Herman Helmholtz, Franz Brentano, Sigmund Freud, Gilbert Ryle and Charles Peirce 14 . In more recent times tacit knowing has come to be known as 'procedural memory' and refers to 'felt' qualities of bodily and emotional experience that cannot be analysed in single elements 15.

Many artists acknowledge the tacit realm in one form or another. One such artist is Gerhard Richter who said: "Painting is the making of an analogy for something non visual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that's why good paintings are incomprehensible. Creating the incomprehensible has absolutely nothing to do with turning out any old bunkum, because bunkum is always comprehensible. 'Not comprehensible' partly means an analogy for something that, by definition, transcends our understanding, by which our understanding allows us to postulate" 16.

Fabrication: Five Contemporary Artists Who Work With Pattern has been effective in highlighting other ways to view the significance of the use of pattern in contemporary Australian art. A further exhibition titled Extreme Pattern is being planned for the future by members of the group welcoming new opportunities for dialogue around this interesting topic.

© Judith Duquemin 2006

1. Fabrication, is a replica or duplicate of something, a repeat event, a process of doing, saying or writing something again - an assemblage, construction, organization, invention, creation or design; a concoction, myth, fable, tale, yarn or falsehood; a fake or fiction; and an improvisation, putting and piecing together, making, moulding, refining, shaping or synthesizing. Such terms refer to two groups of definitions. The first: 'that which has been fabricated; a falsehood; as the story is doubtless a fabrication'...' a deliberate act of deviating from the truth...lying, prevarication'. The second group refers to 'the act of making something (a product) from raw materials...'the act of fabricating, framing, or constructing - construction; manufacture; as with the fabrication of a bridge, a church, or a government...'

Fabrication Wiktionary 2006 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fabrication

2. Dean, C., Artist Statement , Sydney, 2006

3.Dean, C. Conceptual Crochet , The Cross Art Projects A Space for Independent Art & Curatorial Studies, Kings Cross, Sydney, 2004, p 3

4.Duquemin, J., Artist Statement , Sydney, 2006

5.Mackay, K., Artist Statement , Sydney, 2006

6. Op Cit., 2006

7. The exhibition formed part the Kings Cross Street Festival for 2005

8. Eltham, B., Dislocation exhibition, Review, Metro Arts, Brisbane, The Courier Mail, November, 2002

9. Aslanidis, J., Artist Statement , 2006

10.Aslanidis's expression of the visual properties of sound is reinforced by an early interest in 'extreme metal'. He was a member of Clan analogue, a collective of electronic sound and visual artists in Melbourne (1995 - 1998). He is a talented saxophonist and has produced visual work for the Zonar label

11. Garside, S., Phantasmagorical Grid Justin Trendall & The Influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, 2004  

12. Polanyi, M., The Tacit Dimension , Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1966, p.4

13. Tacit is a term first coined by Noam Chomsky and refers to a language of tacit or silent knowledge underlying linguistic rules Polanyi, M., The Tacit Dimension , Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1966, p.4

14. They adopted the terms 'unconscious inference' (Helmhotlz), 'Unconscious Ideas' (Brentano), 'the Unconscious' (Freud), 'knowing how' (Ryle) and 'Theory of Abduction' (Pierce).Pierce, C., in Mullins, P., Peirce's Abduction and Polanyi's Tacit Knowing in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 16.3 (2002)

15. Fuchs, T., The Tacit Dimension, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology , 2001.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v008/8.4fuchs.html.

16. Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting Writings 1962 - 1993 , Obrist Hans-Ulrich (Ed.) Britt, D., (Trans), Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 99

 

By Judith Duquemin. 2006