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…

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…

Continue reading →

Yesterday ArtWranglers paid a lighting visit to Bermagui’s annual Sculpture on the Edge, and here’s the verdict of the drive-home jury: this furry “falling man” detail is from the work Pitch by Chloe Bussenschutt. While it may have been the least “sculptural” work in the show by traditional criteria, somehow its persuasive three dimensional illusionism and unlikely materials (carpet remnants, some branded “Tate Gallery”) has remained in our memory.

Elsewhere the good Burghers of Bermagui paid not the slightest attention to this flash (flesh) event by the installation artist Alice Fresco, who comandeers vacant plinths at events such as this. This work, Les Fillettes Mignons, is characteristic of Alice’s interventionist aesthetic.

In more relaxed mode, Suzie Bell and Berndt Weiss discovered this whimsical work Another famous cast for that Siren! by the photographer Wesley Stacey. If Wes was attempting to lure these water nymphs, clearly he was looking in the wrong direction! More tomorrow!

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

“When the empires fall — all that is left is the art.” So says Jose Mugrabi, who likes to corner the market in the high-flyers of the boom. How the top of the art market is going is chronicled by Eric Konigsberg in the NYT. Thanks to BP for the lead.

your work, your copyright, your intellectual property, anything to protect your lifestyle! Read this NYT article.

now you don’t. Understandably, the exhibition Voids, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, is free.

This makes us very nostalgic. Here’s a work by your blogwrangler from 1993 “Maquette for an Invisible Sculpture” in the exhibition Décor, curated by David Watt, with an essay titled Object Language by Gordon Bull. All of which was very close to the antecedent provided by Art & Language in “The Air Conditioning Show” in 1966-7, which is referenced in this CGP “retrospective”. They love Art & Language in Paris. It translates so well…

News from McNamara Gallery always pleases. You can always go to the link in our sidebar or subscribe to get their monthly emails. You’ll find things like this Ben Cauchi, “Untitled [Borderland]” in Lull [the Tylee Cottage Artist-in-Residence exhibition] at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, until March 8. He also has a show at McNamara, online images available from March 3…

Here’s a set of 64 mini-vids by the mobile politics collective. Work your way past the rather funereal and ungroovy front page, (black screens we don’t like) and on the right hand side you will find directional buttons which allow you to see sets of four tiny thumbnails of each video. Well worth the journey, and along the way you’ll find works by Lucien Leon, Ivo Lovric, Charlie Sofo, Dan Bell, Reuben Ingall, Liang Luscombe, and Trish Roan. Click on an image and you’re there! And there’s another button below if you wish to download. How you get it on your phone is another story…

Read and watch Turner Prizewinner and Tate Trustee Jeremy Deller‘s account of his project at the New Museum in New York. Read also Jonathon Jones commentary on Deller’s similar (previous) proposal for the Fourth Plinth. That was a another car damaged by a bomb. This particular car “was destroyed in an attack on the crowded book market at Al-Mutanabbi street in central Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Thirty eight people were killed and hundreds injured.”  Feel free to use the comments function on this post…