A group exhibition curated by Bronwyn Rennex and Josephine Skinner at Stills Gallery, The Big Picture confronts the pictorial plague of the digital age by interrogating the status and agency of the recorded image and questioning the way it mediates our experience of the world at large. Blinded by a surplus of visual stimulus, we often overlook what is right in front of us. Arresting the viewer’s gaze through playful acts of repetition and fragmentation, the photomedia, video and installation works on display in the gallery re-direct our attention to scenes that either pass by unnoticed or drown in overexposure. They teach us how to look.

Taking over an entire gallery wall, Penelope Umbrico’s ongoing project Suns from Sunsets from Flickr is a tessellating mural of photographic prints that appears at first glance as a vibrant — almost phosphorescent — latticed abstraction totally divorced from the real. And yet on closer inspection we realize that this grid is made up of small snapshots of the sunset, that faithful photographic cliché and the crown jewel of the picture postcard. Over-photographed, the setting sun is less a subject than a decorative motif. Umbrico knowingly exploits its ubiquity, creating an archive of repeated and interchangeable images sourced from the photo-sharing website Flickr. While each individual sun is a different colour and a different size (with some reduced to a pixelated haze), they collectively describe a single gesture and a shared photographic impulse.

But this collection of borrowed sunsets does more than just reveal staid pictorial conventions and the rampant compulsion to recreate images that already exist. It unearths a fragile temporality. All of these setting suns are on the edge of disappearance, about to dip below the horizon line. They linger in the ‘magic hour’. Yet however magical this moment may seem, it is a standardized interval of metric time that appears without fail every day (well, one would hope). The setting sun is a metronome. It keeps time.
Umbrico’s ever expanding grid of setting suns is a temporal index. It is a pictorial calendar and stock photography’s answer to On Kawara’s Today series.

Daniel Connell, Lightless, 2012, CRT TVs, multiple 4:3 videos, looped. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist

Daniel Connell’s video installation Lightless projects a similar metaphoric subtext. Looped footage of flickering lights appears on the CRT televisions scattered around the gallery’s mezzanine level. Filmed in underground car parks, tunnels, back alleys and lifeless interiors, these videos document the slow death of fading light bulbs. But the bulbs never really die. The videos loop, the lights continue to flicker. This is a pulse not a death knell.

These blinking lights follow their own rhythmic patterns and frequencies. As we walk amongst the jumbled arrangement of screens we move through a symphony of flashing light. We can almost hear the dissonant rhythms of these pulsating bulbs. It is noise written in light, a prolonged swansong caught on repeat. These looped intervals – hesitating on the edge between on and off, much like the setting sun — are the constituent parts of a temporal collage. Like Umbrico’s photographic mosaic, Connell’s installation constructs an image of time (the protracted moment, the interval) in spite of its immateriality.
The same idea animates Drew Flaherty’s video work, Loading Cycle. Flaherty uses the configuration and incessant spinning of the computer loading icon to re-enact the lunar cycle. The waxing and waning of the moon is synchronized with the mechanisms of the digital world. This deceptively simple visual pun conflates a digital time-keeper (though perhaps time waster is the more accurate description) with a natural one. In this way it participates in the ‘taxonomy of the temporal’ that unravels in the work of both Umbrico and Connell.

Tim Webster, Flow, 2012, Digital video, duration: 8:04 minute loop. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist.

Tim Webster’s Flow, a video projection made of vertically composited footage of rushing waterfalls, provides the (silent) accompaniment to Connell’s symphony of flickering lights. These slithers of running water resist perspectival reasoning. Each segmented waterfall moves in a different direction and with a different intensity. This is a fragmented and discordant panorama where the flight paths of the birds that pass in front of the falling water are reduced to a sequence of jump cuts. There is no horizon to orient the viewer, just the hard edges of collision and the competing force of abutting cascades.

The slight schism between the speed and intensity of each waterfall fragment produces a mess of aberrant yet synchronized rhythms. Again, there is a silent symphony. The surging crash of the water vibrates out of the projection. In this work, as with Connell’s installation, we find the sonic buried in the visual.
This is another image of immateriality, another instance of the invisible made visible. We discover the same impulse — the same drive to visualize the immaterial — in Gemma Messih’s sculptural installations. She plays with the limits of the photographic image through rupture and superimposition. In I’ve only just realized how important you are (to me) a photograph of a mountain is propped up against a pile of rocks. The two layered objects — the photograph and the miniature man-made mountain — share a mimetic bond. Each echoes the form of the other in a quiet pantomime of Baudrillardian simulacra.

A different logic permeates Messih’s other work. In Untitled (way out) and Someone else’s horizon the photographed landscape has been punctured, in the first instance by a rock (that now lies dormant on the gallery floor) and in the second by the artist herself. Here, the image becomes a threshold — a screen to be passed through. What we are left with is the trace of a performance and the memory of a gesture. We look on as absence enters into the (big) picture.

Patrick Pound, Portrait of the Wind (detail), 2012, Giclee print on rag paper, 127 x 230 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist

It is in Patrick Pound’s work that this line of thought reaches its apotheosis. His thematic arrangements of found photographs play out the poetics of absence. In Same place different people a row of photographs with the same background are arranged in a line. Each image frames a person mid-conversation as they occupy the same seat as their neighbour in the adjacent image. This row of photographs is disquieting. The backgrounds are the same but there are subtle compositional discrepancies in each. I found myself looking past the figure and into the edge of the image, trying to detect the differences. The figures become transparent, an absent presence that the viewer looks through.

In Pound’s Picture of the wind the pull of the absent and the immaterial is stronger still. Again, the figures in the photographs dissolve. Pound is not interested in these people, but in the space that surrounds them. He has composed an elegy to the wind that once rustled their skirts and ties and tussled their hair. Caught in the act, the wind inhabits a temporal threshold like that of the setting sun or the flickering light bulb. We see it briefly, on the edge of its disappearance, as it caresses and envelops these anonymous figures. They frame and mediate this composite portrait of an invisible force. Through them, we see the wind as form: as trace and imprint.

As the wind commands the gaze, the intangible and invisible takes centre stage. And with one fell swoop the exhibition asserts its thesis. For in the midst of a world overflowing with visual stimulus, an image still has the power to show us something we didn’t realize we could see.

Until May 18
The Big Picture, Stills Gallery

One of the country’s leading art awards is back for its 2013 outing. Known to all as “The Landa” its full title is now The Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013: The Space Between Us. This name change from the far simpler Anne Landa Award signals a course correction for the curated prize, now explicitly acknowledging the shifts in art practice and the difficulties of defining what is “video art”. So what does the Landa offer?

Curated by Charlotte Day, director of the Monash University Museum of Art, The Space Between Us takes in video documentation of Lauren Brincat’s endurance performance High Horse, Laresa Kosloff's video of people milling around in the Art Gallery of NSW’s grand courts, Angelica Mesiti’s four-screen video work of musicians from distant lands performing in Paris, Kate Mitchell’s video installation of the artist running through glass sheets and James Newitt’s video documentation of a staged protest rally. Alicia Frankovich will stage a performance with joggers in the AGNSW foyer while Christian Thompson's work is an immersive and meditative soundscape based on the sound of the djuldibha [bullroarer]. Is any of this work really new media? Not to worry, an iPad app will soon be available so punters can enjoy documentation of the show from the comfort of their homes.

The winner of the The Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013 will be announced on June 20.

Until July 28
Art Gallery of NSW, The Domain.
Pic: Lauren Brincat, High Horse, 2012. Documentation of an action, Single-channel High Definition video, 16:9, colour, sound, 26 seconds; looped. Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery.

The public perception of Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, commonly known as ‘The Shire’, has been shaped by popular culture. First came the 1979 novel Puberty Blues. A decade later, the ground-breaking ABC TV series Sylvania Waters brought ‘reality TV’ to Australian homes and last year it was followed by a revamped TV ‘dramality’ named The Shire. The exhibition Home and Hosed, a show of new art by emerging and mid-career artists – all of whom have ties to the area – tells a very different cultural story of Sydney’s southern suburbs.

Ceramicist Lynda Draper sources ideas for her sculptures from junk shops and is interested in exploring the connections between domestic objects and memory. Home and Hosed examines that idea with particular relevance to the period of her adolescence in The Shire. The outlandish performance artist Anto Christ, co-founder of ‘The Colour Parade’ of fashion and wearables, displays examples of her psychedelic crochet sculptures, which viewers will be invited to look at as well as try. Christopher Dolman says his interests lie ‘in the obsolete, the outdated and the unpopular’. His video in this show explores the apparent split between sport and art and ideas of failure common to both. Other artists include John A. Douglas, Gemma Messih, Marc Etherington, Nicole Kelly and Sieglinde Karl-Spence.

During the same period, photographer Marian Drew will also exhibit her latest series of photographs entitled Ornamental (Royal National Park) at the Gallery.

Until June 30.
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Gymea.
Pic: Christopher Dolman, jumprint, 2012. Digital video. Courtesy the artist and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery.

In Paul Snell’s show Chromophobia the artist has taken on a complex task: questioning the image as a self-referential object. The works in the show are colourful and large, most are rectangular with two circular and two square pieces. Their titles offer few clues on how we’re meant to interpret their meaning - Lull, Trace and Drift – and with their densely arranged stripes there’s a suggestion that these patterns have been made with computers, or perhaps capture some kind of movement, like a time-lapse photograph or a vector diagram. Everything else is just guesswork.

The abstract image, like the abstract painting or sculpture, is a strange object. There’s the meaning we associate with them – decorative patterns or spiritually significant mandalas perhaps – and that meaning is associative. How much of the meaning of these works is inherent to the object itself? An educated guess might be none -we can simply enjoy these works for the optically dazzling fields they present. Or maybe they do have some inherent meaning, and it’s our job to work it out. Either way, Snell’s exhibition achieves what it sets out to do.

Until June 1
Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills.
Pic: Paul Snell, Pulse, 2013. Lambda metallic print, face mounted plexiglass, 120 x 120cm. Courtesy Rex-Livingston Art Dealer.

The Queensland Centre for Photography is currently on a mission to bring Queensland photomedia artists to the attention of new audiences. As part of the QCP program, selected works from four series by artist Michael Cook are currently on exhibition at Depot Gallery. Cook only held his first solo show in 2010 and is generally described as ‘emerging’ although the Through My Eyes, Undiscovered, Civilised and Broken Dreams suites each illustrate accomplished post-colonial themes and narratives.

In Undiscovered, the ironically named artist has centred his project on the discovery and settlement of Australia by Great Britain. Using inkjet print on paper an Aboriginal man is pictured on the ocean shore in various orchestrated situations involving sailing ships, Australian native animals and the Union Jack as props, while in Broken Dreams a stunning Aboriginal woman is the protagonist. Both imaginary sequences are suggestive of the discord between notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ and revisit the claims of terra nullius most famously resisted by Eddie Mabo. Civilised, the most recent, returns to the seashore with Cook’s models this time engaged in speculation on which of the four colonial powers might have just as easily have become the eventual rulers of this country. In addition to their enigmatic qualities it’s the seductive beauty of Cook’s images that results in their subtle, but powerful, claim.

Until May 25.
The Depot Gallery, Waterloo.
Pic: Michael Cook, Civilised #13, 2012. Inkjet print on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane.

"Mysterious sounds have been heard booming from the sky all around the world – in some cases they were so loud they set off car alarms. The unsettling noises were heard recently from Europe to Canada, sounding like groans and powerful horns. In Germany noises coming from the sky were recorded on a video camera and uploaded to YouTube, with car alarms clearly heard going off in the background. The internet has been buzzing with theories about what the sounds could be, with suggestions such as Jesus returning and the world ending put forward. But experts have said that there are rational explanations. University of Saskatchewan physics professor Jean-Pierre St. Maurice told CTV that it’s electromagnetic noise emitted from auroras and radiation belts.

"Geoscientist David Deming from the University of Oklahoma, meanwhile, has previously written about a phenomenon called The Hum – ‘a mysterious and untraceable sound that is heard in certain locations around the world by two to ten per cent of the population’. Writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, he said that sources of The Hum could include telephone transmissions and ‘aircraft operated by the U.S Navy for the purpose of submarine communications’. According to Nasa, the Earth has ‘natural radio emissions’.

"The Agency said: ‘If humans had radio antennas instead of ears, we would hear a remarkable symphony of strange noises coming from our own planet. Scientists call them "tweeks," "whistlers" and "sferics."
'They sound like background music from a flamboyant science fiction film, but this is not science fiction. Earth's natural radio emissions are real and, although we're mostly unaware of them, they are around us all the time.’ For instance lightning can produce eerie-sounding radio emissions, Nasa added.
Earthquakes can also produce sub-audible sounds, according to seismologist Brian W Stump from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas."

What's causing the mysterious sounds coming from the sky that are so loud they set off car alarms?

Sounding like Julianna Engberg has been drinking the same magical elixir as that favoured the Romantic poets and artists of yore, the Biennale of Sydney today announced a sneak preview of artists for next year's 19th BOS. You Imagine What You Desire will feature a number of artists, some you might have heard of, who will join together in a themeless mega-group show that reaches for the very heights of artistic endeavour, namely, the sublime! As Engberg explained in the press release:

‘You Imagine What You Desire seeks splendour and rapture in works that remain true to a greater, even sublime visuality. Today these things co-exist and overlap, and the tactics of theatricality cannot be separated from overtly social-situationist inspired works, just as they are central to works engaging with humanity at a grand scale. Extra energies are sought in works that unleash physical and psychic intensity. A happy anarchy is produced with works that activate the power of imagination through laughter and activity.’

In an effort to marry the magical with the everyday, artists include Yael Bartana, Ulla von Brandenberg, Mircea Cantor, David Claerbout, Yingmei Duan, Krisztina Erdei, Douglas Gordon, Henna-Riikka Halonen, Roni Horn, Mikhail Karikis, Laurent Montaron, Agnieszka Polska, Augustin Rebetez, Maxime Rossi, Wael Shawky, John Stezaker, Corin Sworn and Tori Wranes.

Binary opposites; despite the criticism, we still trust them. Material and spiritual, body and soul, love and hate, truth and fiction; these are the polarities that Western society still uses to make sense of life. Yet nothing is like this; there are no such clear distinctions; in reality everything contains something of the other. When it comes to art, abstraction and representation are the polarities we use for evaluation. But problems arise. Australian indigenous art, for example, is often still not recognised for what it really is. Those artists, untrained in Western conceptual modes, haven’t the slightest interest in binary opposites, abstract or representation, or indeed that entire way of thinking.

Likewise there are other contemporary artists who seem to disregard these rationalist modes of thought. One of these is Matlok Griffiths who is currently showing New Thoughts on Luxury at Blockprojects, Melbourne. Griffiths is relatively new to us and, as sometimes happens, he brings to the art scene something fresh, honest and energising. His paintings have a spare, layered translucency, clearly evincing a process of erasure and reassessment, and they sit uneasily on the abstraction/representational platform because they are neither of these.

Matlok Griffiths, Luxury’s Disappointment.

Rather, his works roam unselfconsciously across another plane altogether, engaging experiences and memories which are always in flux – like the paintings themselves. We sense that the works begin anywhere; something is plucked from the material world and under Griffith’s unmediated guidance, evolves in directions of its own. Painterly decisions seem to be influenced by small encounters with unknowable elements (as in life) which means that his working trajectory might easily turn left or right, reconcile or complicate further.

Matlok Griffiths, installation view. Photo: Simon Strong

The works on the walls seem still in transition; they are never quite resolved, never ‘finished off’ – which is the popular objective of so much other art. That ‘need to complete’ can create a kind of enslavement, but Griffiths sidesteps this completely. His logic seems to operate outside language and outside the object-based world, yet very much within his sensory and cultural experience. Perhaps it’s not form that interests him but phase; not definition but discourse. In a society that is deeply mired in the “Age of Reason”, uneasy about fuzzy boundaries – and still anticipating enlightenment – this work is refreshing indeed.

Until May 25 Blockprojects, Melbourne.

Mitzevich, director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, is taking the 13th Biennial in a new direction by highlighting what makes Adelaide so special - the dark underside of Australian society. Says Mitzevich in the press release:

“The Adelaide Biennial is highly regarded for its risk taking, expansive vision and desire to educate and inform the general public about contemporary Australian art. It has always successfully displayed the best contemporary work in the context of Australian artist’s engagement with the world in which we live. It is forward thinking, timely and perhaps uniquely capable of expressing the dominant concerns and position of the visual arts in our time,” Mr Mitzevich said. “In its 13th iteration the Biennial will tap into the hearts and minds of contemporary Australian society, to explore the political, the psychological and the personal. I am after an inherently emotional and immersive experience, one that is unafraid to ask difficult questions and expose the underbelly of society.”

The Biennial will feature "...photography, painting, sculpture, installation and the moving image. Satellite exhibition spaces are also being explored and it is anticipated that a total of 25 artists from all states and territories will contribute to the Biennial."

Grayson meanwhile, is best known to art world punters as an artist, dancer and director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney [The World May Be] Fantastic,one of the finest parenthetical BOS's of all time. Grayson was explained that he is excited:

"Returning to Adelaide to curate Adelaide International is an exciting prospect. I am keen to select a range of work that fits in to the whole festival experience. With both the Biennial and International running at the same time there is an exceptional opportunity for people to see a significant body of work during the Adelaide Festival and it’s great to be part of that experience.”

Full details of the both the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and Adelaide International 2014 including the artists involved will be revealed in the lead up to Adelaide Festival 2014.

Portraiture has been one of the enduring genres in Western art. Traditionally, portraits were commissioned by the church, the aristocracy and, later, the middle class, to promote their wealth and status. With the advent of photography in the 19th Century, however, the genre of portraiture became a popular cultural form available to the average person. Now the camera is in the hands of the subject. Digital media technology has provided the means for us to be more than consumers; we’re now producers and publishers of images of ourselves.

Artist Emma Thomson’s practice is about these shifts in the genre of portraiture and with each series of quirky, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing works, she sets out to interrogate what’s been termed ‘the troubling gaze of photography’ – the question of who is in control: the subject or the photographer.

In her latest series of images, Take Your Best Shot, undertaken as part of a residency program at Dubbo Regional Gallery, and in association with the Head On Photo Festival, she has chosen to turn her lens on female hunters. The motivation for choosing women and hunting came about from Thomson looking at hunting magazines and online photos of women and hunting, some of whom had sent in their photos to be displayed. In this context, these images are about emphasising the glamour of the woman rather than the fact they are hunters. Thomson’s images combine elements of glamour photography with more traditional portraiture to create pictures that complicate the relationship of women hunters to the gaze of the viewer. Each photo, to varying degrees, depict the agency of the female subject in a traditionally masculine landscape.

Emma Thomson will be in conversation with Kent Buchanan, Curator, Western Plains Cultural Centre, at the gallery on Friday 17 May, 2 - 3pm

Until June 8
Galerie Pompom, Chippendale.
Pic: Emma Thomson, Rachel, 2013. Lambda print, 88 x 72 cm, edition of 5 + 1 AP. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney.