Newcastle
Art Space is alive and vibrating with raw energy, quite literally I mean. The space is filled with colour, sexual references,
phallic symbols, menstruating knickers, painted B-Grade movie stills where the
bad girls take centre stage, masked faces, sculpted body parts, pin-up girls
and nocturnal dreaming and memory.
Gallery
1
Pop
Tart
Jack
Barnes, Lauren Horwood, Cecily Lomax, Ellie Kaufmann, Patrick Mavety and
Katelyn Slyer
In
Gallery 1 six artists explore pop art, cultural Americanism displaced within the Australian domestic landscape, our day and night suburbia and
identity with humour, fun but always carrying subversive undercurrents.
Ellie
Kaufmann won the Newcastle Emerging Artist Prize for painting in 2015. She has a Diploma Fine Art from Newcastle
TAFE. She has brought Lauren Horwood,
Katelyn Slyer, and Cecily Lomax together after their recent exhibition in Project
Contemporary Artspace Wollongong, Vicious,
Delicious and Ambitious. The current
exhibition highlights work from this show and underpins the new work. Vicious,
Delicious and Ambitious is now set to become an annual event on the
Wollongong art scene. Emily paints her
friends into the frame depicting them as the bad girls, naughty provocateurs
and heroic figures, showing a seedy, lude side to portraiture.
Local domestic suburban streets set the
backdrop for playing with the un-popular image while at the same time,
re-inventing the un-popular, into the popular right before our eyes. They
cannot be avoided. Emily talked about her subjects being themselves and her belief in not taking oneself too
seriously. Some of her influences are
American painters Eric Fischl and Eric White.
Contact
Ellie: Elliekaufmannart.com
Facebook.com/elliekaufmann
Instagram:
Elliekauf
Katelyn
Slyer describes herself as a photographer and has an Advanced Diploma in Fine
Art and studies in Design through Wollongong institutions. In this exhibition she invites us into her
travel diary which is interspersed with individual portraits of people she knows
in the underground punk scene.
Katelyn
has been documenting the punk scene for more than ten years and talked about
the underground punk subculture with music at its centre along with fashion,
visual art, performance, film and ideologies originally linked to
anti-establishment views and support of individual freedom.
Find Katelyn on Instagram: slyer83
Lauren
Horwood describes herself as a self-taught photographer inspired by the films
of James Bond particularly the glamorous style of the Bond women. She also
inhabits the world of punk and is searching for her own new way of depicting
the images of the 1950s and 1960s Playboy bunnies within a contemporary
context.
Her work is informed by her
tongue-in-cheek attitude of not taking it too serious, although she is working
quite seriously to achieve some ambitious goals. Lauren has been in the U.S photographing the
American pin-up scene and plans on returning soon to network and make further
photographic works in this same style. Another of her projects is an Australian
magazine based on the 1960s Playboy format, filmed and produced by Lauren using
Australian models.
Cecily is interested in examining how far we can push a human body before it loses its human-ness. Influenced by 1960s sci-fi movies, comics and art of that era, Cecily counts performance artist Stelarc and Patricia Piccinini amongst her influences.
Find
Cecily on Instragram hellcatlomax
The
works of the female group members in the centre of the room do carry strength
due both to the subject matter but also through the volume of the work that
sits in the space. However, there are
two male artists whose work sits around the edges and do more than hold their own in the space.
Patrick
Mavety is a painter now undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Art at the University
of Newcastle. A former Central Coast
resident he has been in Newcastle for the past five years or so. In 2014 he won the much coveted Reg Russom
Drawing Prize at TAFE, always a great achievement amongst a talented competitive
group.
In this exhibition he paints
mostly nocturnal suburbia, stepping out with his camera at sundown and dusk to
find that quiet alone space chasing euphoria.
He then returns to the studio to recall this alone-ness and the dark
tones of evening through direct photographic reference, memory and dreaming the
streetscape back up into conscious thought and actions. Patrick is influenced by the German
Expressionists and Kandinsky.
Contact
Patrick via email: patrickmavety@gmail.com
Jack
Barnes is studying at the University of Newcastle to be an art teacher. He talked of the masks that we all wear and
the pretending that occurs within contemporary social-media culture. Two figures in Love is Love are depicted wearing masks. Jack does however do something that other
works do not do, or did not appear to do when I viewed them at the opening, and
that is to show himself to us by removing his rabbit costume head and standing
before us with cigarette in hand, face front on to the viewer.
Jack tries hard to not take selfies but has
taken the longer road and painted one out for the audience with his
self-portrait. I neglected to ask him
about his costume and whether he was Alice in Wonderland’s White rabbit and
late, very late for a very important date.
He did seem to have a strong group of fellow students waiting to embrace
and catch up with him on the night. Always a richer conversation when talking face to face with
an artist and not through a disconnected social-media platform.
Find Jack on Instagram: _barnz
Gallery 2
Reframing
our Flaws
Emily
Amaryllis
In
Gallery 2 Emily Amaryllis is showing us overtly political work that focuses on
the female body, consent, sexual assault and Queer studies. Emily is
undertaking studies in Fine Art, Honours at the University of Newcastle and
referred to herself as a feminist and Queer activist. Her medium is textiles and she also works in
interactive performance. Some of the issues Emily tackles may still be
confronting for some audience members.
Even today some subjects are still considered taboo and not to be openly
discussed, but I hope we have come a long way in recognising our differences as
something uniting and something to be embraced, rather than hidden.
Her
bedroom quilt carries the words from shared stories gathered from the audience,
as part of an interactive performance. These same words about sexual experience
and consent are now stitched onto the surface of the quilt. Emily’s work references the boundaries of
‘the normal’ and the flawed or ‘not normal’, however, it is difficult to find a
workable contemporary definition of what is normal and what is just human, at least for me at this time. Emily mentioned the influence of the work of textile
artist, Magdalena Abakonowicz.
Contact
Emily: facebook.com/emilyamaryllisart
Overall
I should not have liked some elements in the combined NAS show particularly from my experience of being an older female, and having gone through early teen years just prior to the women's liberation movement, but I loved it all, innuendo
and hidden messages (real or
imagined). The most significant experience
though was meeting the seven artists whose own collective intelligence, talent, initiative, beauty and zest for
art and life, actually superseded the beauty and wonder of the art itself. That is saying something because as I said, I
loved the work and their confidence and courage to put it all out on the line
for art.
When
you come along to visit, and you will, allow time to see the full range of
works in this space. It is a rewarding experience. If you have time to talk to the artists in the gallery, this is also guaranteed to be interesting.
Chris Byrnes
NAS Blogger
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