15 January – 6 February 2010

FRONT GALLERY
HUSH
Tess E McKenzie

MIDDLE GALLERY
Moving Places
James Voller

SIDE GALLERY
Other v2.0
Baden Pailthorpe

Tess E McKenzie

HUSH is a large-scale text work, spanning floor to ceiling and painted directly onto two adjoining white walls with white semi-gloss acrylic paint.
HUSH is a command, as well as a transitory action. It is an onomatopoeic term that implies the action of beings falling silent. The straight glossy lines seem to be an abstract painting or design feature until the actual forms of the letters are discovered. The word is particularly aware of both the context of the gallery and the devices involved in viewing works, and merges them into becoming a ‘non-work’ – an element of the room. HUSH asks of the viewer to respect the conventions of gallery etiquette; it asks of the painter to restrain their mark upon the space, it stifles the architecture of the gallery cube.
HUSH booms through the room.

An excerpt from McKenzie’s paper on nothing/nothing on paper, 2009, can be found here.

Bio

Tess E. McKenzie has just completed her Honours year for a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. Recent shows include HATCHED 09 at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and We Are Hidden And We Can See You… at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.

James Voller

James Voller’s current practice is concerned with photographic interventions in urban sites.

Stemming from an interest in New Zealand social history, Voller aims to reference and re-examine the shifts in regards to what is perceived to constitute the homogenous expectations of New Zealanders’: the “quarter acre dream”.

Working with images of generic New Zealand housing the works utilise photography and photographic superimposition to generate shifts in the appearance and perception of selected urban sites to create an impression of a house where one does not actually exist. Consideration is given to site and the verisimilitude of the superimposition to generate a simultaneity between the illusionist and pictorial space of the chosen images and the actual site. The combination of the illusionary pictorial facades of New Zealand houses with a sense of displacement generated in locating them in overlooked and non suburban sites aims to reflect on the changes and rifts occurring to the realities about housing, housing affordability and how and where New Zealanders live.

Molly Samsell’s essay Recovering Sense Of Place, accompanies James Voller’s work and can be found here.

Bio

James Voller is a University of Canterbury Fine Arts graduate, and is currently studying extramurally towards a Master of Fine Arts through The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Baden Pailthorpe

IIn exploring representations of the “Other” in violent, on-line video games, Pailthorpe’s work grapples with notions of photographic reality and postcolonial discourse and applies them to the world of new media.

The work highlights the relationship between military and gaming technologies used in the ‘war on terror’, as they contemporaneously parallel popular online games in which enemy figures are reduced to pixels on a screen. Today the space between the referent and the game becomes increasingly opaque as real individuals are indistinguishably represented as video game characters in actual military combat, whilst US soldiers use Xbox controllers to direct drones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this context, Pailthorpe’s photographic portraits of dead video game characters aim to mobilise ethical questions surrounding the integration of gaming technology in current wars, and to readdress the limits of the real/virtual dialectic. For Pailthorpe, such immersive, mediated realities represent a sanitised version of actual conflict by constructing a convenient, omni-potent euphemism of immortality and inconsequence through the opaque cloud of a militarily, ideologically induced dreamland.

Read essays that look at Baden Pailthorpe’s work by Denise Thwaites and Wilfred Brant here.

Bio

Baden Pailthorpe recently completed his Masters of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. He has exhibited in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. Baden currently lives and works in Sydney.
www.badenpailthorpe.com