bet you’ve never seen anything quite like this. This is #4. Glitter Canyon 2009. (Synthetic polymers, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 825 x 1015)  and #5. Untitled, 2009, (Synthetic polymers, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 375 x 375).
Rachel Jessie-Rae O’Connor is on show from 11.00am to 5.00 pm from Saturday and Sunday, May 9th and 10th, and on Saturday and Sunday, May 16th and 17th, at 18 Morphett Street, O’Connor.

And we admire works which recognise their antecedents in a way that enhances both sets of experience: see #9 Untitled after Tony Woods, 2009 (Synthetic polymers, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 505 x 505).

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for all the snaps in all their glory you’ll have to cross to megan’s blog at glasscentralcanberra

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Yuri Wiedenhofer, the inspired/inspiring ceramic artist who lives on a mountain behind Tanja, the man who milks death adders for a living, ran into some more mundane challenges when he tried to build his fire sculpture on the beach at Bermagui. This was to be the culmination of Sculpture on the Edge, but the censorious local intelligentsia got in the way. It was planned to be a much more ambitious affair, with bottles, sea grass, and offal, but the locals had apparently had enough of high culture for one week, and so his materials were edited during the night. Even so, the show went on, and thanks to Chris Polglase for the pics…

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Rose Montebello: The Feeding Tree, colour photocopies on card, 2009.

Rose’s work will be on show at ArtWranglers from 11.00am to 5.00pm on Saturday and Sunday, 21st/22nd and 28/29th March. Visits in between by appointment please.

Her latest series of works focus on images of predator and prey. If these seem to be strangely bleak representations of the natural world, it’s a consequence of their unnatural origins as in the pages of 1950s and 60s National Geographic and Reader’s Digest natural history books. In The Readers’ Digest Family Guide to Nature and Encyclopedia of Animals you will find surprisingly optimistic descriptions of “the natural world”, the wonders of which are depicted in glowing colour photography. In these pages, published in the years before the environmental crisis, and before the first Silent Spring, Rose finds Nature described as an uncomplicated and magical world, where its denizens are hyper-represented in the artificially enhanced colour print technology of the time.

From what now seems like a kind of exaggerated naturalism Rose Montebello finds images which now seem strangely unsettling, and she works at making them even more so. “The Feeding Tree” is the accidental title of this group of works, derived from the original page title of the photograph of an Osprey eating a fish which is now transformed into a Rose Montebello.  The theme of predator and prey suggests all is not well in our natural world…

For years she has made use of various optical and perspectival devices to create images of her subjects which re-compose the three-dimensional presence of the thing, enhanced beyond its photographic original. While a hologram does something similar, the holographic illusion has no tangible physical object. Similarly, stereoscopic illusionism occurs in the brain, even though the visual illusion seems to float somewhere in front of you, in your visual field. Digital technology now allows something similar, and as you move towards IMax the scale of the technology and its special effects increases exponentially.

Rose works at the other end of technology, with printed images on paper, using poor materials, at domestic scale, creating image-objects which are laboriously assembled, layer by layer. Her works look back towards the wellspring of 20th century modernism, the invention of collage, where the artist’s fascination with the phenomenology of vision is put to the test by dissection, reassembly and the reinvention of appearances. At its best, works of art such as these are “questioning machines” (to paraphrase William Rubin’s term), which engages the viewer in a play of appearances, materials, and processes. These open windows into the artist’s thought processes and motivations. The “questioning machine” enables us to question the artist’s own questioning process. This is as it should be. Enjoy the opportunity Rose provides for us…

Rose Montebello is at ArtWranglers for the next two weeks…

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When a journalist asks you to explain why sculpture festivals like Sculpture on the Edge are worthwhile, you’re put on the spot. Sculpture, like any of the three dimensional media, are harder to appreciate than the pictorial arts. They’re lumpy, and big, and heavy, and you need plinths or hidden bases to put them on. So you need to make special efforts to organise for them to be seen. Otherwise you would never get an idea what’s going on, because you only ever see them one at a time, like bits of jewelery, as decor in our social spaces. Think of the uproar when a sculpture gets plonked beside a freeway…

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Here’s a Rose Montebello work in progress for her ArtWranglers show opening on Friday 20th March. There’s a queue forming…

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Here’s a show for the summer! We want to see Bondi Jitterbug: George Caddy and his camera at the State Library of NSW until 22 February. Be sure to click the slideshow – and go to the Library Shop to see them all. This fabulously transgressive “beachobat”, (Roya Geale, Bondi Beach 1941) caught our eye in the press advertisements. If the date of this photograph really is 1941, it pushes back the history of the (illegal) two-piece a few more years… And, boy, this vernacular modernist makes Max Dupain look a bit sober…

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What a schemozzle! Read David Marr interpreting the Arts Law Centre and the Australia Council, and Joyce Morgan reporting Tamara Winnikoff on the same territory. Or Corrie Perkins in The Oz. Those who are required to follow the OzCo’s draft (or is that “daft”?) protocols may find that publishing almost any photograph of any child can now be construed as a problem… For example, what is a “partly nude” image? (Thanks to Breakfastpolitics for the leads…)

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Seems there’s a beat-up at the SMH in anticipation of the launch of David Marr’s new book: The Henson Case.  In this advertisement for next weekend’s Good Weekend the SMH pix editors parody their own self-censorship, brought on themselves by the Bill Henson controversy of a few months ago. David Marr’s account of the issues raised by the various reactions to Bill Henson’s work do not engage with the substantive questions of the weak nature of the defenses already mounted: the prior arguments based on context and intentionality (it’s erotica, not porn, so that’s OK) are about vested interests, and not the 21st century reality of the way images are now distributed and consumed. Henson and his dealers have sold and continue to sell individual works out of context, and to distribute such out-of-context works on the internet, so the stable door is wide open… Nobody appears to be willing to mount a defense of this aspect of the “case”.

On September 15 we posted a reference to a Bill Henson photograph of a different order to any of those that were in the spotlight back in May. This (trigger warning) image was put to auction last week by Menzies Art Brands, on their online catalogue, and it’s still there. (We wonder whether Henson gave copyright permission, but that’s another issue). We asked then whether such examples of his work could be defended in the same terms as the discourse which emerged in May, and subsequently.

Throughout this debate, ArtWranglers has always taken the position that the world of the internet has radically changed the context in which images such as these are (now) seen and interpreted. Defense of the work in its original context, or a defense based on the autonomy of its artistic intent, seems to us to be no longer sufficient once the work is “out there” circulating on the internet. There, it occupies a different contextual category, and is therefore subject to different values, criteria, and critiques. Surely it is no longer a matter of where each of us may draw the line between (say) erotica and pornography, or whether the artist’s intention supercedes its new context in the wider world of vernacular photography. Once it’s “out there” in cyberspace, there’s nowhere to draw a line, and just as individual works may challenge our assessment of the whole corpus of Henson’s work, so such works as the above now need to be assessed (and defended) in the expanded field of internet imagery. Perhaps. What do you have to say about that, David? And there are more questions for David to answer on The Art Life. Read also Jonathan Green’s comments on Crikey. Regrets? A few…

And a growing caution in interview with Leigh Sales: “The photographs are beautiful and nothing Henson has done in the last few months with all of these photographs breaks any law and none of them are remotely pornographic.” and “The Internet has changed the way we view photography. There is a sense in which no photograph can actually be corralled anymore. Everything is potentially available to anybody anywhere in the world, once it gets on the Internet. We still have to deal with that, that apprehension of the Internet, because it’s changing the way we consider art, photography, all sorts of things. Part of the purpose of my book is to look at the history of that fear of the Internet, and try to work out whether in fact we need to be so afraid. I don’t think we do.”

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As Peter Fay remarked, how fortunate are we to have two Howard Finsters available in Sydney for this show? This one When Jesus calls be ready… (1983) from Ray Hughes’ collection is one of Finster’s “sacred” works, is one of perhaps 46,000 such works produced between 1976 and 2001. Makes Emily look like a slowcoach! See them both at Without Borders: Outsider Art in an Antipodean Context (previously at MUMA), now at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Find details, links and bios on their site. Here’s Peter, Slim, Mary Anne Voyazis and Elizabeth (guests from the NGA) on the second last day…

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