5 Sydney Gallery Shows to See This Winter
Natasha Walsh, The Marriage of Nicol and Ford (2023). Oil on copper. 38 x 50 cm. Courtesy the artist and N.Smith Gallery, Sydney.
Dale Frank's opulent paintings, Daniel Crooks' machine-generated drawings, and Natasha Walsh's reimagined portraits are among the works featured in Sydney's must-see gallery shows this winter.
Natasha Walsh: Hysteria
12 June–6 July 2024
N.Smith Gallery, 15 Foster Street, Surry Hills
Expect: a new view of the female muse in art inspired by the gendered pathology of hysteria.
Archibald Prize finalist Natasha Walsh continues her exploration of portraiture in Hysteria, engaging with the historic depiction of women in art as the male artist's muse and vessel.
In a poster-sized text, the artist writes of finding her impetus for these works in the 'curious illness' of hysteria, which has historically encompassed 'a wonderfully wide range of irritating or disquieting female behaviours and maladies'. She describes reflecting 'with intense frustration, on the dominance of the male gaze in the canon of art history, where women have largely been relegated to the restrictive position of muse.'
In Hysteria, Walsh turns her gaze on contemporary creative women. In rich oil paints on copper she depicts various artists, writers, and musicians including Louise Zhang, Brenda L. Croft, Prue Hazelgrove, Montaine, and Atong Atem in portraits that reimagine their original incarnations by James Whistler, Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, and Henri Matisse, among others. Presented alongside are Walsh's preparatory sketches, references, and images of the original portraits, linked together with pink thread in a timeline of sorts.
Daniel Crooks: Machine Drawing
13 June–6 July 2024
Sullivan+Strumpf, 799 Elizabeth Street, Zetland
Expect: algorithmic drawings that confound expectations of machine-made art.
Crooks uses a self-built drawing machine to execute several series of ink drawings. Body Drawing #1–6 maps the three-dimensional body in space and time, the result of scanning simple movements and gestures, while the Fibonacci #1–3 and Path #2–4 works (all 2024) manifest Crooks' interest in mathematical theory and its relevance to art and nature.
For Fibonacci, the artist has devised an algorithm to produce a figurative representation of the Fibonacci sequence in images of circles and trees, while the Path drawings extend the graph theory concept of the Hamiltonian path, where lines never cross each other or double back. Aided by a mathematician, Crooks created an algorithm to express the path. Despite the presumption that the outcome of machine-made art is predetermined, each of Crooks' Path drawings is unique with the machine taking different routes each time.
In the video work Static No.25 (George St, March 1) (2020–24) Crooks digitally manipulates imagery of pedestrians in a city street, slowing down the footage to reveal snapshots of what are normally imperceptible movements of the body, morphing to resemble swirling chains of DNA.
Francis Upritchard, Hany Armanious, Fiona Connor, Ricky Swallow
13 June–3 August 2024
Fine Arts, Sydney, 23 Hampden Street, Paddington
Expect: an uncanny suite of cast and constructed objects that playfully present as readymades.
Four established artists each present lifelike representations of their subjects to differing intent in this show of recent sculpture. Fiona Connor's Closed Down Clubs, Full O' Life (2020) is part of a series on closed-down gathering spaces, from social welfare services to clubs and restaurants. Bespoke plexiglass and aluminium-framed doors replicate the front doors of a closed business, complete with accumulated dust, dirt, and 'closed' signage—including A4 pieces of 'paper' stuck to the glass (which Connor has made from metal) and a silkscreened notice of gas disconnection—fooling the viewer into thinking the doors have been directly lifted from the defunct business premises.
The bemusement caused by seeing this orphaned object from 'real life' in a gallery space is mirrored in Tapestry (2024) by Hany Armanious. What appears to be a partial Styrofoam box threaded with orange rope is entirely cast polyurethane resin, leaning casually against a wall as though left behind by an installer.
Ricky Swallow's Spirit 3 and Spirit 4 (both 2024) comprise meticulous cast-bronze spirit levels, each level harbouring several bronze conch shells. While both are objects of this world, in their odd pairing they resemble an austere still-life.
The diminutive hippie-like figure of Francis Upritchard's Earth, Extinction, Monitoring, Adaptations (2021), with distinctive blue feet and hands, is categorically not of this world. Sporting the words from the work's title on a patch on the back of their jacket, the figure's painted harlequin-patterned face disguises their identity and lends them a theatrical, somewhat prophetic air.
MEMORY/MYTH
14 June–13 July 2024
Ames Yavuz, 114 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills
Expect: an ambitious spread of moving-image works—many on show in Australia for the first time—that find common ground in colonial displacement.
Curated by Ames Yavuz director Ananya Mukhopadhyay, MEMORY/MYTH exhibits film and video installations by 27 internationally renowned artists at the gallery's new space in Surry Hills.
Highlights include Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai's Die Mütter (2022), a two-channel video showing a group of people shuffling together in a tight circle while singing lullabies and dirges in various languages in the open shell of a church. The movement of bodies in space articulates opposing ideas of frailty and strength, will and compromise, belonging and loneliness.
Works by Richard Bell, Martha Atienza and Fikret Atay focus on the exhibition's themes of social justice and dispossession. Richard Bell's No Tin Shack (2022) is a restaging of the artist's home being bulldozed by the local government's health department, which has deemed it unliveable, rendering the family homeless.
Atienza spotlights the loss of fishing rights of locals on Mambacayao Daku, a small island in the Philippines, as the government seeks to remove them from the island. A video by Atay, who is of Kurdish descent, shows a young man's earnest attempts to professionally drum on a series of old tin cans before kicking them down the hillside in frustration.
Dale Frank: Alicia's thirteen puppies in an old Adidas bag
13 June–6 July 2024
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 8 Soudan Lane, Paddington
Expect: seductive paintings that melt the zone between viewer and picture plane, while others reflect and repel.
Dale Frank's suite of 18 new paintings possess the stickiness of candy, the luminescence of peacock feathers, and the reflective quality of a newly spray-painted car, filling the gallery space with a queasy, rich excess.
Frank starts with a layer of coloured perspex, before mixing pigment with resin—some areas of which are centimetres thick—and then splodges of ink, which bleed into the layers below, resulting in a finish that is by turns reflective, jewel-like, and feathered.
Each work, with its long, disconnected narrative title (seemingly poking fun at art audiences' desire to attribute meaning), offers another narrative: one which is almost exclusively about looking, process, and colour. The deep blues and seductive purples of Emma ... (2024) suck the viewer into their realm, while works with mirrored or paler perspex foundations reflect and repel.
The two works There is no such thing as good press 1 and 2 (2024), made of translucent dye and epoxy glass on perspex, cleverly appear flat when viewed from directly in front, but from the side we can see the media is bursting forth from the picture plane in colourful columns up to 45 centimetres in length. It's a sleight of hand from an artist whose work—despite the misdirection—offers its audiences a meaningful encounter. —[O]
