Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
The recent works I’ve made, or the shift that has occurred, say from working on canvas to perspex and other materials, has allowed a new dimension in the works, both spatially and conceptually. I feel as though the new paintings are much more intimate as opposed to purely reflecting what the viewer sees or projects. Of course the artist is complicit in the work, the audience does not merely create the work, nor activate it but in a sense the work is completed when it is being experienced - the paintings are extremely difficult to document, so, like performative works, they must be experienced in person.
I’ve worked with perspex and acrylic sheets since the early 1980s—by melting, adding pigments, painting directly on the surface and using various chemicals to manipulate the materials. The paintings have developed the sense of the viewer in the work, to the point where they are a crucial element to each work. These works don’t exist unless someone’s looking at them. All you have to do is try and take a photograph of one without trying to appear in it and it’s impossible. What the viewer sees on first glance is not a flat image, but a surface first manipulated by time and space (intentional distortion) prior to concentrated chemical conceptual manipulation that then traps , if you like, the viewer not only in the gaze, but in the work itself ... If my work is a kind of “mindscape”, or Hubble image, it is not because they are depictions, that is, because they are paintings of an image of ideas, the places we live, or deep space, but because they harness the same entropy—the same chemical reactions—across the surfaces that play out across the universes.
To convey a element of luxury at an art fair could be seen as theatre! Another earlier work from the Neon Parc exhibition also used furs. Some paintings have employed shattered glass sprayed or in piles across the paintings surface instilling in the viewer a sense of diamonds or stars glistening in a void. But luxury itself, as an aim or concept is not anything I have intentionally worked to achieve. It is only of interest to me in the sense of perhaps the view from the painting ... laying in the gutter looking up at the stars …
Artist Profile Dale Frank Controversial and uncompromising in his penchant for offbeat and confrontational gestures, Australian contemporary artist Dale Frank has divided critics and public alike over the past three decades. His practice is wide-ranging—from documentary films to eccentric performances—but today Frank is best known for his large-scale biomorphic abstract paintings and reflective resin paintings that challenge traditional notions of the medium.
Beginning to attract attention while still in his teens in the late 1970s, Frank spent ten years in Europe and the United States, returning to Australia in 1988. The beginning of his career was dominated by performance-based work; a notable early example took place in the late 1970s in Italy, where gallery-goers were presented with the then-teenage artist's legs and leather shoes dangling through a hatch in the ceiling.
Later in his career, Frank began exploring sculpture and installation and, eventually, painting. His current painting method involves pouring and brushing on several layers of thick varnish and colour pigments or clear resin, which sometimes embed colour glitter and studio detritus. These distinctive paintings do not depict anything identifiable, but rather are an exploration of different materials, movements and colours. Occasionally, he also includes readymade and industrial elements, such as construction foam, automotive paint, brightly coloured artificial hair (Dale dug another hole [2017]) or silver foil air-ducts (She was a collector of the best Art even though she relied on Emirates points to maintain her lifestyle [2018]). Given their unusual materials, Frank's paintings are not static objects; the materials can settle, react and produce structural changes even once they have left his studio. In recent years, the artist has replaced his usual canvas surface with Perspex, its reflective nature adding another layer to the work.
Provocative titles are often important to Frank's paintings, for example: Roslyn is the difference between Qantas gold and platinum or He always bought funeral insurance for all his boyfriends (both 2018). Sometimes the titles themselves are lengthy, self-contained narratives, with no apparent connection to the works to which they are attached. These lengthy interludes disrupt attempts to read specific meanings into the paintings themselves.
Interactive performance and installation remains an important part of Frank's career. In 1995, in lieu of showing paintings, the artist staged a disco—including fog machines and a mirror ball—at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, and titled the exhibition Dale, I'm only dancing. For his 2018 installation Ghost Story at the same gallery, Frank covered the walls and ceilings in reflective Mylar fabric lit with LED lights and presented petri dishes containing his personal bacteria, which grew into a dangerous state in agar.
Dale Frank was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, in 2002. He was selected for the Biennale of Sydney in 1990 and 2010, and in 1984 he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. His works are held in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Kunsthaus, Zürich; and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2005, Frank was awarded the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize from Bendigo Art Gallery.
Art Fair Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016 Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the International Contemporary Art Fair of the West Coast, returns for its seventh edition on January 28 to 31, 2016, at The Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, California. ALAC anchors Los Angeles's pivotal weekend in the contemporary art calendar.
The fair brings together over 70 established and emerging galleries, and a roster of independent publishers, hailing from over ten countries. The list of exhibitors includes a cross-section of Los Angeles galleries, reflecting the fair's long-term presence in its home city.
Gallery Pearl Lam Galleries 
Gallery Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Since 1982, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has been committed to the advancement of the most serious and innovative forms of contemporary art. Through its exhibition program the gallery has supported work that is challenging and at the forefront of contemporary art practice. The gallery has always featured new work in a range of media, from painting and sculpture to photography, performance, installation, video and other electronic media arts.
The gallery has always followed a policy of nurturing artists through their careers, acting as a primary dealer for their work. Opening with a group of largely unknown artists, the gallery has consistently seen its stable develop into some of Australia’s most renowned practitioners. The gallery currently represents over thirty highly esteemed artists, who have had significant shows and whose works are held in major collections nationally and internationally.
Ocula Insight Wim Delvoye on his art, censorship and the future 7 February 2019 At 53, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye continues to employ the shock factor with abandon. Moving between the sacred and the profane, inflections of gothic drama and high technology imbue the artist's drawings, sculptures, and installations. He frequently swings from fine art to the decorative, applying Belgian ornamental elements such as coats of arms...
Ocula Insight Field Meeting Take 6: Thinking Collections 1 February 2019 Asia Contemporary Art Week's annual forum, Field Meeting, was staged outside of New York for the first time in 2019, with Take 6: Thinking Collections hosted by Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, concurrent to Quoz Arts Fest (25–26 January 2019). The two-day forum unfolded inside Concrete, Alserkal's impressive OMA-designed space, with pop-up exhibitions...
Ocula Insight What to Let Go?, the sixth annual Para Site International Conference (22–24 November 2018) organised by Hong Kong non-profit art organisation Para Site, took as its theme the tangled issue of heritage. Fittingly, the conference was held in the JC Cube Auditorium in the recently opened Tai Kwun – Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong's new public...
Ocula Insight The second day of What to Let Go?—Para Site's international conference at Tai Kwun – Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong—was largely focused on the subjects of artefacts and repatriation.The day began with a local focus as Tina Pang—M+ curator of Hong Kong visual culture—presented an overview of the institution's...
