Dr. Rose Vickers is an art historian, writer, speaker and curator. Her PhD thesis, investigating Robert Smithson’s legacy and the Yucatán Peninsula, was completed in 2020 at the University of Sydney. Supervisors: Dr. Richard Smith (Department of Art History, USYD), Dr. Ann Elias (Department of Art History, USYD), and Dr. Alys Moody (Department of Literature, Bard College)
"It is September 10 at the tail end of summer, 6:50 PM, 20 degrees. Vienna’s stones are still war... more "It is September 10 at the tail end of summer, 6:50 PM, 20 degrees. Vienna’s stones are still warm from the day and André Hemer is scanning the sky. The scan will be one of many imprints to take place. . . . Hemer’s diverse media share a preoccupation with form that either goes beyond parentheses or takes them into account: his moving images, for instance, exist in a space between painting, photography, and video."
This new, hardcover book covers specific bodies of work made during the past two years and features a long form text by Rose Vickers and design by Anita Liu at Double Lux. Published by PAINTING DIARY [ISBN: 978-0-473-50138-9]
Australian and International Contemporary Photography, Jun 5, 2015
Of the twenty-seven artists brought together in the exhibition Australian and International Conte... more Of the twenty-seven artists brought together in the exhibition Australian and International Contemporary Photography, a logical starting point might be dead centre. Compiled according purely to a geographic criterion, certain thematics quite naturally arise from the viewing of these works in accordance. Terrains of nationhood play out as iconic and iconographic in works by Tanatos Banionis, Mary Anne Brophy, Tamara Dean, Tim Georgeson, Greg Nagel, Spencer Tunik and Michael Wolf – positioning Australian photographic forms in respective relation to Russia, France, Canada, French Polynesia, the United States and Japan. Disparate locations and a variety of visual forms converge to create, in the words of eighteenth century ruinenlust philosopher Georg Simmel, the effect of an ‘overriding harmony’ – frames between frames, works within worlds.
Using Robert Smithson’s 'Hotel Palenque' (1969/1972) as a fulcrum, this thesis investigates situa... more Using Robert Smithson’s 'Hotel Palenque' (1969/1972) as a fulcrum, this thesis investigates situatedness and the concept of "site". It does so by reconceptualising multiple sites, thereby tackling the disintegration of site and the ruin as a fixed form. Through 'Hotel Palenque' we encounter a site of new or classical ruin, and by looking at a wide range of artworks and the often-political environments of ruin they display, I consider how 'Hotel Palenque'—as a hybrid artwork, lecture, script, and photo series—seems to open up multifaceted elements of entropic site. By drawing a lineage between 'Hotel Palenque' and the writings of Denis Diderot and Georg Simmel—texts that may have informed Smithson—the subject of classical ruin can be located in the unlikely vehicle of new ruin.
Yet as the central work in this thesis, 'Hotel Palenque' also poses an exception: opening up a slew of revisory readings that reach back not only to Simmelian aesthetic theory, but into an urgent contemporary domain. A range of post-Smithson practices insist on 'Hotel Palenque' as an important and overlooked facet of Smithson’s practice, provide decoding insights, and raise questions of legacy. By scoping broadly backwards and forwards—and delving into artworks by Julius von Bismarck, Cyprien Gaillard, Harrell Fletcher, Renzo Martens, Anahita Razmi, and Melanie Smith—I establish a continuum of theory on the imaging of ruin from historical texts to the present. The purpose of this exercise is not to construct a timeline, but rather to explore a central idea—that of ruin as metaphor—tested at various temporal points. Where ruin now speaks to contentious social, political, economic, and cultural realities, the idea of ruin speaking to anything at all remains an unusual constant.
Art fair application essays for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles (Frieze, Art Basel; 2021) and Nathali... more Art fair application essays for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles (Frieze, Art Basel; 2021) and Nathalie Karg Gallery (ADAA, 2023). Draft materials.
Extract: Both artists delve into historical, autobiographical, and archetypal imagery, exploring their own and community histories to create artwork that plays with the subjective. These provide the viewer with certain options: to 'feel along' with, to identify, or to distance-to stand back. Rodriguez's paintings provoke a choice. From his Brooklyn studio, he works with traditional painterly media-oil on canvas-while the content of his ensuing images test out compositional logic. Characterized by an imposed geometry-the internal 'hard edge'-they reside at the periphery of abstraction and figuration. Their register in either direction is then a matter of personal preference: a conscious or unconscious proclivity toward shape or form.
I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer—the advisor Pa... more I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer—the advisor Paul Judelson—at dinner a while back. Over cheese, Judelson told me about this artist I “had to see” because, I was told, Burford is Australian, living over here, and making the kind of subversive visual images that compel writing (at the time “here” was the United States, pre-Covid, before Australia’s borders effectively closed). Now, perhaps wisely, Burford is home. We’re chatting between New York and Darwin, then Los Angeles and Darwin, as he settles into his practice on domestic soil for the first time in over two decades.
If art tends not to exist (well) in a vacuum, the same may be said of artists. This is particular... more If art tends not to exist (well) in a vacuum, the same may be said of artists. This is particularly true for the Australian sculptors Rosalie Gascoigne and Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who are the subject of an upcoming, carefully focussed survey at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV): Found and Gathered.
I use the term “survey” loosely, however, as the exhibition is staged far from chronology. Instead, it centres on a series of sets: the diametric themes, subjects, and visual devices employed by both artists in their biographically discrete careers.
Already a well-known Australian artist, this year is set to foster further recognition for Timoth... more Already a well-known Australian artist, this year is set to foster further recognition for Timothy Cook. From his studio on Melville Island, Cook’s paintings will appear in domestic and international arenas – and a spate of new prizes are on the horizon. With exhibitions planned in Australia, Europe and the United States at the time of writing, Cook has been selected as a finalist in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ renowned Wynne Prize, as well as the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s ‘National Works on Paper’, and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary First Nations Art Award.
Indifference is no counterpoint to difference, at least in common parlance. While the term “diffe... more Indifference is no counterpoint to difference, at least in common parlance. While the term “difference” suggests a divergence of any two things, be they objects, thoughts, cultures, or landscapes, “indifference” invokes something entirely else. It is a peculiar emotion to associate with art practice and grates against many of our ingrained ideas about artists. Following the Romantic tradition, and depending on whom you are talking to, “indifference” manifests only in art: as received from a god; as bound deeply to an artist’s personal identity; as removed from the market; and/or as an expression of cynicism, perhaps to denote a psychological or political attitude. Though debate over questions of representational difference are quite frequent in the art world, an attitude of artistic indifference is elusive, and therefore intriguing.
The artwork entitled Hotel Palenque (1969/1972) involves 31 chromogenic-development slide transpa... more The artwork entitled Hotel Palenque (1969/1972) involves 31 chromogenic-development slide transparencies and an audiotaped lecture by artist Robert Smithson, originally presented to University of Utah architecture students. The Guggenheim (New York) “holds” Hotel Palenque, but MUMA is currently presenting a recreation in a dark Melbourne gallery, a minimalist space with a projector, a curtain, and three simple leather viewing benches. It forms part of Time Crystals: Robert Smithson, a collective exhibition co-curators Amelia Barikin (University of Queensland) and Chris McAuliffe (Australian National University) have put together at the museum as a follow-up a UQ (Queensland) show that garnered notable critical acclaim. Hotel Palenque shares space with better-known Smithson artworks such as Spiral Jetty (1970) and Rocks and Mirror Square (1971), well known, catalogue-friendly works by an officially recognized American talent.
There’s a quite-famous scene in the now-cult film American Beauty (1999) in which a man watches a... more There’s a quite-famous scene in the now-cult film American Beauty (1999) in which a man watches a plastic bag blowing around a parking lot. “Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I ever filmed?… Sometimes there ’s so much beauty in the world… I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is just going to cave in.” It’s a regular white supermarket bag set against a generic red folding door surrounded by autumn leaves, also in flight. Air to ground. Ground to air. The man is transfixed. One might argue that the man is both inside and outside the scene at the same time. It’s meant to communicate something about the possibility of art in everyday life, or the ultimate banality of the American dream, or both. That these two things can coexist suggests the manifestation of a very particular variety of indifference, and it’s this contradictory indifference I’m concerned with.
In studies on the relationship between voice and perceptions of feminine authority and helpfulnes... more In studies on the relationship between voice and perceptions of feminine authority and helpfulness, there is a strong consensus ascribing the widespread programming of “default” technological voices as female to deeply ingrained societal attitudes about gender. Foundational ideas of what gendered speech “is,” and represents, are paralleled in the (largely unrelated) fields of accent recalibration and speech training. As a gendered construct, we might say that in both areas, the speech act is perceived as something somehow cosmetic, as for instance in the widespread tendency to interpret any particular way of speaking as a superficial indicator of education or intelligence. The programming of an accent is, in technological industries, largely commercial; in speech therapy, respectively, the aim skews more personal. Though other connections and differentiations may be made between fields using or manipulating voice, the overriding point of this comparison is to posit that, when viewed critically, the symbolic idea of defaulting to a chosen accent is shaped by certain contemporary cultural tropes and characteristics.
Charwei Tsai’s exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) includes an ephemeral... more Charwei Tsai’s exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) includes an ephemeral artwork, Tofu Mantra (2009), which is screened on video loop. Tsai's practice hints at a fluidity of thinking which comes from working across multiple disciplines, as well as multiple continents. Her deliberately unpredictable method – consistent with a the broader tradition of ephemeral artmaking – eschews the myth of the artist-creator in favour of experimentation, process and subjectivity, as her inquiry reaches far beyond the sphere of 'bacterial art'.
Hannah Presley and I discuss Indigenous Australian art. It’s a balance of infectious enthusiasm a... more Hannah Presley and I discuss Indigenous Australian art. It’s a balance of infectious enthusiasm and deep knowledge. Not far into the conversation I feel a part of something new, yet also along for the ride. Presley’s passion for her field is contagious; it’s a rapid-fire, dry-witted, bridging discussion that crosses expansive geographical and conceptual territory. We touch on the art market, histories of Indigenous dispossession and ceramic budgies.
Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, UWA, 2021
Themed Panel Presentation: Paper Presentation in a Themed Session. Sixteenth International Confer... more Themed Panel Presentation: Paper Presentation in a Themed Session. Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society (UWA, Western Australia). Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global.
This paper examines use of voice by the American land artist Robert Smithson. Voice is a component in three of Smithson’s 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt. The trip culminated in Hotel Palenque – an artwork which occupies an ambiguous place in Smithson’s canon and can be seen, through voice, to challenge extant conventions of ethnographic representation. Voices tend to mellow over time, becoming more atonal. Yet only three years were to transpire between Smithson’s artmaking in Mexico and the delivery of his Hotel Palenque lecture (in 1972), as relayed to a group of architecture students at the University of Utah. Smithson’s voice, which becomes increasingly flatter the further he moves away from the New York city art world, traverses a great deal of liminal space: from inner Manhattan to the suburbs of New Jersey, before finally coming to rest on the small Mexican town of Palenque. In my research I draw on technical analysis commissioned from voice expert Dr Brian Stasak (University of New South Wales). Graphs of Smithson’s voice pose questions around artistic intention, and set the stage to propose the occurrence of a ‘voice aesthetic’ – as an overlooked, yet theoretically significant component of Smithson’s historical practice.
Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, UWA, 2021
"Voice is a component in three of Smithson's 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel... more "Voice is a component in three of Smithson's 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt."
Digital media presentation for the 16th International Conference on the Arts in Society, held at the University of Western Australia, School of Design, Perth, Australia.
Theme: Special Focus—Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
June 16, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Rose Vickers PhD Graduate 2020, The University of Sydney
AICA Conference Proceedings, AICA Online International Conference, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis has posed a dramatic intervention in modern life, bringing with it an enormou... more The COVID-19 crisis has posed a dramatic intervention in modern life, bringing with it an enormous global experience of casualty and loss. At such scale, the experience of pandemic is unprecedented in recent times. Because it is so new, it is difficult to comprehend. In this presentation, I propose two texts as a starting point for thinking through collective loss: Denis Diderot's writing on ruin in the eighteenth-century essay "The Salon of 1767", and Georg Simmel's somewhat later treatise, "Die Ruine" (1911).
These discussions explore the theoretical foundations of a mortal sublime, and do so by invoking ruinous architecture; that is, the archeological or architectural ruin as metaphor. In recent art history, these themes have changed and been adapted. While keeping with the central concept of the sublime, a few artworks, including those by the American Land artist Robert Smithson, consider ruin to represent contemporary social, political, economic and cultural states of change. Together, such texts and artworks pose frameworks for thinking through, and coping with, collective upheaval and difficulty.
New Ruin, Gili Meno: Entropic Site as Metaphor, Nov 11, 2014
In this paper, theoretical examination of new ruin is complimented by epistemological findings ga... more In this paper, theoretical examination of new ruin is complimented by epistemological findings garnered from a qualitative, site-specific research methodology. Chapter One examines the question of how a physically ruinous landscape might be depicted as metaphorical of broader, non-physical erosive forces, whether social, cultural or political. This query engages with aesthetic conceptualisations of new ruin in the writings of Denis Diderot and Georg Simmel. I posit ruin as a point of aesthetic equilibrium between opposing forces of unity and disunity. Contemporary artists examined include Paris-born, United-States-based multimedia artist Cyprien Gaillard, and Singapore-born, Malay-Australian photomedia practitioner Simryn Gill, focusing in particular on the site-specific methodology employed by Gaillard in the artwork 'Cities of Gold and Mirrors' (2009).
Chapter Two investigates ethnographic and art-historical precedents for artists working as foreigners, and describes my attempt to formulate an ethical research methodology in a foreign region. This chapter examines social, political and economic frameworks on Gili Meno, noting the pervasive impact of tourism. Epistemological account provides some description of social and cultural mores, economic conditions, linguistic mutabilities and gestalt. Visual arts practice serves as a mode of inquiry potentiating the re-consideration of cross-cultural and intra-national understandings, as well as posing a visual counterpoint to mechanisms of 'photopromiscuity' in tourist regions.
At the time of my interview with Gary Carsley, events are unusually upended. Scheduled programs i... more At the time of my interview with Gary Carsley, events are unusually upended. Scheduled programs in the arts have been postponed, globally, with the outbreak of COVID-19. Carsley is adapting. His planned intervention into the historical collection held by New York’s ICAA (Institute of Classical Architecture and Art) will not take place – or rather, will occur online.
Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Conte... more Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room will be one inclusion: a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, memorial-poppy-fabric conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs, it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community: for instance, Apocalpse Later, which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter, comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents.
The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.
"It is September 10 at the tail end of summer, 6:50 PM, 20 degrees. Vienna’s stones are still war... more "It is September 10 at the tail end of summer, 6:50 PM, 20 degrees. Vienna’s stones are still warm from the day and André Hemer is scanning the sky. The scan will be one of many imprints to take place. . . . Hemer’s diverse media share a preoccupation with form that either goes beyond parentheses or takes them into account: his moving images, for instance, exist in a space between painting, photography, and video."
This new, hardcover book covers specific bodies of work made during the past two years and features a long form text by Rose Vickers and design by Anita Liu at Double Lux. Published by PAINTING DIARY [ISBN: 978-0-473-50138-9]
Australian and International Contemporary Photography, Jun 5, 2015
Of the twenty-seven artists brought together in the exhibition Australian and International Conte... more Of the twenty-seven artists brought together in the exhibition Australian and International Contemporary Photography, a logical starting point might be dead centre. Compiled according purely to a geographic criterion, certain thematics quite naturally arise from the viewing of these works in accordance. Terrains of nationhood play out as iconic and iconographic in works by Tanatos Banionis, Mary Anne Brophy, Tamara Dean, Tim Georgeson, Greg Nagel, Spencer Tunik and Michael Wolf – positioning Australian photographic forms in respective relation to Russia, France, Canada, French Polynesia, the United States and Japan. Disparate locations and a variety of visual forms converge to create, in the words of eighteenth century ruinenlust philosopher Georg Simmel, the effect of an ‘overriding harmony’ – frames between frames, works within worlds.
Using Robert Smithson’s 'Hotel Palenque' (1969/1972) as a fulcrum, this thesis investigates situa... more Using Robert Smithson’s 'Hotel Palenque' (1969/1972) as a fulcrum, this thesis investigates situatedness and the concept of "site". It does so by reconceptualising multiple sites, thereby tackling the disintegration of site and the ruin as a fixed form. Through 'Hotel Palenque' we encounter a site of new or classical ruin, and by looking at a wide range of artworks and the often-political environments of ruin they display, I consider how 'Hotel Palenque'—as a hybrid artwork, lecture, script, and photo series—seems to open up multifaceted elements of entropic site. By drawing a lineage between 'Hotel Palenque' and the writings of Denis Diderot and Georg Simmel—texts that may have informed Smithson—the subject of classical ruin can be located in the unlikely vehicle of new ruin.
Yet as the central work in this thesis, 'Hotel Palenque' also poses an exception: opening up a slew of revisory readings that reach back not only to Simmelian aesthetic theory, but into an urgent contemporary domain. A range of post-Smithson practices insist on 'Hotel Palenque' as an important and overlooked facet of Smithson’s practice, provide decoding insights, and raise questions of legacy. By scoping broadly backwards and forwards—and delving into artworks by Julius von Bismarck, Cyprien Gaillard, Harrell Fletcher, Renzo Martens, Anahita Razmi, and Melanie Smith—I establish a continuum of theory on the imaging of ruin from historical texts to the present. The purpose of this exercise is not to construct a timeline, but rather to explore a central idea—that of ruin as metaphor—tested at various temporal points. Where ruin now speaks to contentious social, political, economic, and cultural realities, the idea of ruin speaking to anything at all remains an unusual constant.
Art fair application essays for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles (Frieze, Art Basel; 2021) and Nathali... more Art fair application essays for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles (Frieze, Art Basel; 2021) and Nathalie Karg Gallery (ADAA, 2023). Draft materials.
Extract: Both artists delve into historical, autobiographical, and archetypal imagery, exploring their own and community histories to create artwork that plays with the subjective. These provide the viewer with certain options: to 'feel along' with, to identify, or to distance-to stand back. Rodriguez's paintings provoke a choice. From his Brooklyn studio, he works with traditional painterly media-oil on canvas-while the content of his ensuing images test out compositional logic. Characterized by an imposed geometry-the internal 'hard edge'-they reside at the periphery of abstraction and figuration. Their register in either direction is then a matter of personal preference: a conscious or unconscious proclivity toward shape or form.
I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer—the advisor Pa... more I found out about Burford’s practice through a mutual friend and former art dealer—the advisor Paul Judelson—at dinner a while back. Over cheese, Judelson told me about this artist I “had to see” because, I was told, Burford is Australian, living over here, and making the kind of subversive visual images that compel writing (at the time “here” was the United States, pre-Covid, before Australia’s borders effectively closed). Now, perhaps wisely, Burford is home. We’re chatting between New York and Darwin, then Los Angeles and Darwin, as he settles into his practice on domestic soil for the first time in over two decades.
If art tends not to exist (well) in a vacuum, the same may be said of artists. This is particular... more If art tends not to exist (well) in a vacuum, the same may be said of artists. This is particularly true for the Australian sculptors Rosalie Gascoigne and Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who are the subject of an upcoming, carefully focussed survey at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV): Found and Gathered.
I use the term “survey” loosely, however, as the exhibition is staged far from chronology. Instead, it centres on a series of sets: the diametric themes, subjects, and visual devices employed by both artists in their biographically discrete careers.
Already a well-known Australian artist, this year is set to foster further recognition for Timoth... more Already a well-known Australian artist, this year is set to foster further recognition for Timothy Cook. From his studio on Melville Island, Cook’s paintings will appear in domestic and international arenas – and a spate of new prizes are on the horizon. With exhibitions planned in Australia, Europe and the United States at the time of writing, Cook has been selected as a finalist in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ renowned Wynne Prize, as well as the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s ‘National Works on Paper’, and the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary First Nations Art Award.
Indifference is no counterpoint to difference, at least in common parlance. While the term “diffe... more Indifference is no counterpoint to difference, at least in common parlance. While the term “difference” suggests a divergence of any two things, be they objects, thoughts, cultures, or landscapes, “indifference” invokes something entirely else. It is a peculiar emotion to associate with art practice and grates against many of our ingrained ideas about artists. Following the Romantic tradition, and depending on whom you are talking to, “indifference” manifests only in art: as received from a god; as bound deeply to an artist’s personal identity; as removed from the market; and/or as an expression of cynicism, perhaps to denote a psychological or political attitude. Though debate over questions of representational difference are quite frequent in the art world, an attitude of artistic indifference is elusive, and therefore intriguing.
The artwork entitled Hotel Palenque (1969/1972) involves 31 chromogenic-development slide transpa... more The artwork entitled Hotel Palenque (1969/1972) involves 31 chromogenic-development slide transparencies and an audiotaped lecture by artist Robert Smithson, originally presented to University of Utah architecture students. The Guggenheim (New York) “holds” Hotel Palenque, but MUMA is currently presenting a recreation in a dark Melbourne gallery, a minimalist space with a projector, a curtain, and three simple leather viewing benches. It forms part of Time Crystals: Robert Smithson, a collective exhibition co-curators Amelia Barikin (University of Queensland) and Chris McAuliffe (Australian National University) have put together at the museum as a follow-up a UQ (Queensland) show that garnered notable critical acclaim. Hotel Palenque shares space with better-known Smithson artworks such as Spiral Jetty (1970) and Rocks and Mirror Square (1971), well known, catalogue-friendly works by an officially recognized American talent.
There’s a quite-famous scene in the now-cult film American Beauty (1999) in which a man watches a... more There’s a quite-famous scene in the now-cult film American Beauty (1999) in which a man watches a plastic bag blowing around a parking lot. “Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I ever filmed?… Sometimes there ’s so much beauty in the world… I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is just going to cave in.” It’s a regular white supermarket bag set against a generic red folding door surrounded by autumn leaves, also in flight. Air to ground. Ground to air. The man is transfixed. One might argue that the man is both inside and outside the scene at the same time. It’s meant to communicate something about the possibility of art in everyday life, or the ultimate banality of the American dream, or both. That these two things can coexist suggests the manifestation of a very particular variety of indifference, and it’s this contradictory indifference I’m concerned with.
In studies on the relationship between voice and perceptions of feminine authority and helpfulnes... more In studies on the relationship between voice and perceptions of feminine authority and helpfulness, there is a strong consensus ascribing the widespread programming of “default” technological voices as female to deeply ingrained societal attitudes about gender. Foundational ideas of what gendered speech “is,” and represents, are paralleled in the (largely unrelated) fields of accent recalibration and speech training. As a gendered construct, we might say that in both areas, the speech act is perceived as something somehow cosmetic, as for instance in the widespread tendency to interpret any particular way of speaking as a superficial indicator of education or intelligence. The programming of an accent is, in technological industries, largely commercial; in speech therapy, respectively, the aim skews more personal. Though other connections and differentiations may be made between fields using or manipulating voice, the overriding point of this comparison is to posit that, when viewed critically, the symbolic idea of defaulting to a chosen accent is shaped by certain contemporary cultural tropes and characteristics.
Charwei Tsai’s exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) includes an ephemeral... more Charwei Tsai’s exhibition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) includes an ephemeral artwork, Tofu Mantra (2009), which is screened on video loop. Tsai's practice hints at a fluidity of thinking which comes from working across multiple disciplines, as well as multiple continents. Her deliberately unpredictable method – consistent with a the broader tradition of ephemeral artmaking – eschews the myth of the artist-creator in favour of experimentation, process and subjectivity, as her inquiry reaches far beyond the sphere of 'bacterial art'.
Hannah Presley and I discuss Indigenous Australian art. It’s a balance of infectious enthusiasm a... more Hannah Presley and I discuss Indigenous Australian art. It’s a balance of infectious enthusiasm and deep knowledge. Not far into the conversation I feel a part of something new, yet also along for the ride. Presley’s passion for her field is contagious; it’s a rapid-fire, dry-witted, bridging discussion that crosses expansive geographical and conceptual territory. We touch on the art market, histories of Indigenous dispossession and ceramic budgies.
Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, UWA, 2021
Themed Panel Presentation: Paper Presentation in a Themed Session. Sixteenth International Confer... more Themed Panel Presentation: Paper Presentation in a Themed Session. Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society (UWA, Western Australia). Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global.
This paper examines use of voice by the American land artist Robert Smithson. Voice is a component in three of Smithson’s 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt. The trip culminated in Hotel Palenque – an artwork which occupies an ambiguous place in Smithson’s canon and can be seen, through voice, to challenge extant conventions of ethnographic representation. Voices tend to mellow over time, becoming more atonal. Yet only three years were to transpire between Smithson’s artmaking in Mexico and the delivery of his Hotel Palenque lecture (in 1972), as relayed to a group of architecture students at the University of Utah. Smithson’s voice, which becomes increasingly flatter the further he moves away from the New York city art world, traverses a great deal of liminal space: from inner Manhattan to the suburbs of New Jersey, before finally coming to rest on the small Mexican town of Palenque. In my research I draw on technical analysis commissioned from voice expert Dr Brian Stasak (University of New South Wales). Graphs of Smithson’s voice pose questions around artistic intention, and set the stage to propose the occurrence of a ‘voice aesthetic’ – as an overlooked, yet theoretically significant component of Smithson’s historical practice.
Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, UWA, 2021
"Voice is a component in three of Smithson's 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel... more "Voice is a component in three of Smithson's 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt."
Digital media presentation for the 16th International Conference on the Arts in Society, held at the University of Western Australia, School of Design, Perth, Australia.
Theme: Special Focus—Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
June 16, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Rose Vickers PhD Graduate 2020, The University of Sydney
AICA Conference Proceedings, AICA Online International Conference, 2020
The COVID-19 crisis has posed a dramatic intervention in modern life, bringing with it an enormou... more The COVID-19 crisis has posed a dramatic intervention in modern life, bringing with it an enormous global experience of casualty and loss. At such scale, the experience of pandemic is unprecedented in recent times. Because it is so new, it is difficult to comprehend. In this presentation, I propose two texts as a starting point for thinking through collective loss: Denis Diderot's writing on ruin in the eighteenth-century essay "The Salon of 1767", and Georg Simmel's somewhat later treatise, "Die Ruine" (1911).
These discussions explore the theoretical foundations of a mortal sublime, and do so by invoking ruinous architecture; that is, the archeological or architectural ruin as metaphor. In recent art history, these themes have changed and been adapted. While keeping with the central concept of the sublime, a few artworks, including those by the American Land artist Robert Smithson, consider ruin to represent contemporary social, political, economic and cultural states of change. Together, such texts and artworks pose frameworks for thinking through, and coping with, collective upheaval and difficulty.
New Ruin, Gili Meno: Entropic Site as Metaphor, Nov 11, 2014
In this paper, theoretical examination of new ruin is complimented by epistemological findings ga... more In this paper, theoretical examination of new ruin is complimented by epistemological findings garnered from a qualitative, site-specific research methodology. Chapter One examines the question of how a physically ruinous landscape might be depicted as metaphorical of broader, non-physical erosive forces, whether social, cultural or political. This query engages with aesthetic conceptualisations of new ruin in the writings of Denis Diderot and Georg Simmel. I posit ruin as a point of aesthetic equilibrium between opposing forces of unity and disunity. Contemporary artists examined include Paris-born, United-States-based multimedia artist Cyprien Gaillard, and Singapore-born, Malay-Australian photomedia practitioner Simryn Gill, focusing in particular on the site-specific methodology employed by Gaillard in the artwork 'Cities of Gold and Mirrors' (2009).
Chapter Two investigates ethnographic and art-historical precedents for artists working as foreigners, and describes my attempt to formulate an ethical research methodology in a foreign region. This chapter examines social, political and economic frameworks on Gili Meno, noting the pervasive impact of tourism. Epistemological account provides some description of social and cultural mores, economic conditions, linguistic mutabilities and gestalt. Visual arts practice serves as a mode of inquiry potentiating the re-consideration of cross-cultural and intra-national understandings, as well as posing a visual counterpoint to mechanisms of 'photopromiscuity' in tourist regions.
At the time of my interview with Gary Carsley, events are unusually upended. Scheduled programs i... more At the time of my interview with Gary Carsley, events are unusually upended. Scheduled programs in the arts have been postponed, globally, with the outbreak of COVID-19. Carsley is adapting. His planned intervention into the historical collection held by New York’s ICAA (Institute of Classical Architecture and Art) will not take place – or rather, will occur online.
Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Conte... more Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room will be one inclusion: a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, memorial-poppy-fabric conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs, it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community: for instance, Apocalpse Later, which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter, comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents.
The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.
The exhibition ‘Destiny’ – set to open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) later this year ... more The exhibition ‘Destiny’ – set to open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) later this year – surveys an impactful body of work by Australian artist and activist Destiny Deacon. Included in the show are multimedia works made with Erin Hefferon, Michael Riley, Lisa Bellear and Virginia Fraser. Rose Vickers talks with Deacon and Fraser about the boundaries and definitional challenges of their ongoing collaborative practice.
A Wiradjuri woman living in regional New South Wales, Karla Dickens is known for her often provoc... more A Wiradjuri woman living in regional New South Wales, Karla Dickens is known for her often provocative reflections on Australian culture, past and present. Combining and repurposing material elements in unexpected ways, she takes on a three-tiered politic of marginalised identity, frequently tackling issues of race, gender and sexuality. Interview pp. 68 — 75.
Coming to prominence on the cover of the landmark 2014 book, "100 Painters of Tomorrow", New-Zeal... more Coming to prominence on the cover of the landmark 2014 book, "100 Painters of Tomorrow", New-Zealander André Hemer’s pigment-loaded canvases are instantly recognisable. In this interview for Artist Profile, Hemer speaks about maintaining a studio practice, the death of Instagram, and his experience as an antipodean artist living mostly in Europe.
It’s been a significant year for Indigenous art in Australia. This year’s 17th Biennale of Sydney... more It’s been a significant year for Indigenous art in Australia. This year’s 17th Biennale of Sydney, 'The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age' was devised by curator David Elliott with a special focus on first people and the post-colonial: Brook Andrew constructed a jumping castle with a violent twist; Canadian artist Kent Monkman queered the frontier with his uniquely camp brand of romanticism; and the Museum of Contemporary Art dedicated a prominent space to a significant collection of poles by the Larrakitj Yolngu people. More recently, The National Gallery of Australia unveiled the world’s largest collection of Indigenous art in a $92.9 million renovation, and ABC1 teamed up the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Hetti Perkins with award-winning director Warwick Thornton to produce the documentary Art+Soul. On the other hand, the failure of Sotheby’s Aboriginal Fine Art Auction has prompted widespread speculation about the future of Indigenous art.
Four contemporary arts writers critically engage with the 17th Biennale of Sydney in a shrewd and... more Four contemporary arts writers critically engage with the 17th Biennale of Sydney in a shrewd and sharp roundtable discussion [facilitated by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris].
Sculpture is only one aspect of the contained yet fictitious universe created by Fox in his lates... more Sculpture is only one aspect of the contained yet fictitious universe created by Fox in his latest project, Salon Jetpack. A carefully constructed body of supplementary material – of maps, commentary, and even a kind of game plan for city transport - lends an uncanny credibility to Fox’s arrangement of industrial machinery.
Kate Just is an American-born, Melbourne-based artist whose "sculptural knitting" explores ideas ... more Kate Just is an American-born, Melbourne-based artist whose "sculptural knitting" explores ideas of metamorphosis and transformation, often drawing upon emotional points of reference from her own life. Her work is at once autobiographical and historically orientated, as she draws upon her research into Greek and other mythologies; the Persephone and Daphne myths, and art historical interpretations. In her upcoming exhibition at Nellie Castan Gallery, Just continues her project of 'world-making' with a large-scale installation that will incorporate a number of sculptural elements and will also feature an atmospheric sound component. Interview pp. 136.
[interview by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris]
Rose Vickers is a Sydneysider artisan whose new solo sh... more [interview by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris]
Rose Vickers is a Sydneysider artisan whose new solo show focuses on aesthetics, beauty and mortality. I caught up with her recently on a chilly winter night to hear about bones and get an insight into this dedicated artists practice. Interview pp. 16 — 20.
Julia Burns is a new-media artist. Her work to date has been concerned with issues of privacy in ... more Julia Burns is a new-media artist. Her work to date has been concerned with issues of privacy in the digital sphere, employing video and live performance to communicate in from the streets to national galleries. She has exhibited variously in Sydney, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. Recently she has aimed her signature analytic approach to issues of gender in media culture. This interview took place high above Hyde Park, on the 25th floor of the Boulevard Hotel, which plays nightly host to an ascending phalanx of vampire bats.
Published biographies for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles, 2021.
Artists: Candida Alvarez, Jose Alva... more Published biographies for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles, 2021.
Artists: Candida Alvarez, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), April Bey.
Extract: Puerto Rican-American and Brooklyn raised, Chicago-based painter and visual artist Candida Alvarez explores both interior and exterior landscapes in her bright, abstract work. Her mature practice explores temporal and geographical facets of an increasingly sophisticated visual and textual modality. Alvarez’s works have included sculptures, collages, abstraction, and figuration, with materials as diverse as fabric, acrylic paint, enamel, galkyd, on various supports from canvas to cotton napkins to vellum.
Unpublished biographies for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles, 2021.
Artists: Alex Anderson, Lisa Anne... more Unpublished biographies for GAVLAK gallery, Los Angeles, 2021.
Artists: Alex Anderson, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Kim Dacres.
Extract: Alex Anderson uses the delicate medium of ceramics as his main vehicle to explore the intersections of the sublime experiences that make up both the man-made and natural worlds, as well as deeper, more complicated issues of race and cultural representation. His artworks combine a dexterity in the medium with a confluence of baroque imagery and compositions, Japanese pop art references, and current contemporary fashion and design trends in order to probe the depths of reality, illusion and identity. At the core of Anderson's practice is a philosophical, existential examination of identity politics relative to his respective backgrounds. By channeling methodologies surrounding artistic production in ceramic arts, Anderson creates fantastic, multifaceted sculptures; synchronously subversive and whimsical. He uses the classical aesthetics of a Western art canon-one ironically sharing space with queer and camp aestheticsto translate the structures governing his lived experience in society, along with social perceptions of non-Western identity and form. Anderson's work engages with Western ceramic histories, yet operates, too, at the core of Post-Blackness. This method of production directly corresponds with current aesthetic and artistic practices and ideologies surrounding theories of Post-Black art. Working at the intersection of identity politics and aesthetic empowerment, Anderson's ceramic creations appear charming and playful-yet their frivolity is only glazedeep. They contain layered conceptions about blackness, masculinity, and perception, folded and fused together, reciprocating the merging of the artist's lived experience, historical inheritance, and conscious selfawareness. Criticality, political derision, and gender politics are all relevant schemas for Anderson's sculptural oeuvre. Each of his identities has a history of marginalization, received violence, and fetishization. His work gives form to the realities, stereotypes, and cultural perceptions of divergent cultural identities, and, as a group, give rise to complex aporic spaces. Anderson seeks to create a metaphorical world of objects-those that distill his understanding of what it means, and how it feels, to live through intersectional identities, and his resultative place in the contemporary social world.
There is some wisdom in recognizing similarities where they occur. And–at risk of sounding like a... more There is some wisdom in recognizing similarities where they occur. And–at risk of sounding like a bad pub joke–in his latest show at The Address gallery in Brescia, Italy, Édouard Nardon is asking about the layline between a prison cell and the artist’s studio. This, and other environments. Consider places which may be seen to depend upon a sense of the insular and the insulated: childhood, educational institutions (secondary school, academia), the military, politics, Saint Barthes, old age (sort of), small towns and alchemy. They are worlds of internal logic, and sometimes, but not always, self-correcting economies.
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This new, hardcover book covers specific bodies of work made during the past two years and features a long form text by Rose Vickers and design by Anita Liu at Double Lux. Published by PAINTING DIARY [ISBN: 978-0-473-50138-9]
Yet as the central work in this thesis, 'Hotel Palenque' also poses an exception: opening up a slew of revisory readings that reach back not only to Simmelian aesthetic theory, but into an urgent contemporary domain. A range of post-Smithson practices insist on 'Hotel Palenque' as an important and overlooked facet of Smithson’s practice, provide decoding insights, and raise questions of legacy. By scoping broadly backwards and forwards—and delving into artworks by Julius von Bismarck, Cyprien Gaillard, Harrell Fletcher, Renzo Martens, Anahita Razmi, and Melanie Smith—I establish a continuum of theory on the imaging of ruin from historical texts to the present. The purpose of this exercise is not to construct a timeline, but rather to explore a central idea—that of ruin as metaphor—tested at various temporal points. Where ruin now speaks to contentious social, political, economic, and cultural realities, the idea of ruin speaking to anything at all remains an unusual constant.
Extract: Both artists delve into historical, autobiographical, and archetypal imagery, exploring their own and community histories to create artwork that plays with the subjective. These provide the viewer with certain options: to 'feel along' with, to identify, or to distance-to stand back. Rodriguez's paintings provoke a choice. From his Brooklyn studio, he works with traditional painterly media-oil on canvas-while the content of his ensuing images test out compositional logic. Characterized by an imposed geometry-the internal 'hard edge'-they reside at the periphery of abstraction and figuration. Their register in either direction is then a matter of personal preference: a conscious or unconscious proclivity toward shape or form.
I use the term “survey” loosely, however, as the exhibition is staged far from chronology. Instead, it centres on a series of sets: the diametric themes, subjects, and visual devices employed by both artists in their biographically discrete careers.
This paper examines use of voice by the American land artist Robert Smithson. Voice is a component in three of Smithson’s 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt. The trip culminated in Hotel Palenque – an artwork which occupies an ambiguous place in Smithson’s canon and can be seen, through voice, to challenge extant conventions of ethnographic representation. Voices tend to mellow over time, becoming more atonal. Yet only three years were to transpire between Smithson’s artmaking in Mexico and the delivery of his Hotel Palenque lecture (in 1972), as relayed to a group of architecture students at the University of Utah. Smithson’s voice, which becomes increasingly flatter the further he moves away from the New York city art world, traverses a great deal of liminal space: from inner Manhattan to the suburbs of New Jersey, before finally coming to rest on the small Mexican town of Palenque. In my research I draw on technical analysis commissioned from voice expert Dr Brian Stasak (University of New South Wales). Graphs of Smithson’s voice pose questions around artistic intention, and set the stage to propose the occurrence of a ‘voice aesthetic’ – as an overlooked, yet theoretically significant component of Smithson’s historical practice.
Digital media presentation for the 16th International Conference on the Arts in Society, held at the University of Western Australia, School of Design, Perth, Australia.
Theme: Special Focus—Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
June 16, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Rose Vickers
PhD Graduate 2020, The University of Sydney
These discussions explore the theoretical foundations of a mortal sublime, and do so by invoking ruinous architecture; that is, the archeological or architectural ruin as metaphor. In recent art history, these themes have changed and been adapted. While keeping with the central concept of the sublime, a few artworks, including those by the American Land artist Robert Smithson, consider ruin to represent contemporary social, political, economic and cultural states of change. Together, such texts and artworks pose frameworks for thinking through, and coping with, collective upheaval and difficulty.
Chapter Two investigates ethnographic and art-historical precedents for artists working as foreigners, and describes my attempt to formulate an ethical research methodology in a foreign region. This chapter examines social, political and economic frameworks on Gili Meno, noting the pervasive impact of tourism. Epistemological account provides some description of social and cultural mores, economic conditions, linguistic mutabilities and gestalt. Visual arts practice serves as a mode of inquiry potentiating the re-consideration of cross-cultural and intra-national understandings, as well as posing a visual counterpoint to mechanisms of 'photopromiscuity' in tourist regions.
The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.
This new, hardcover book covers specific bodies of work made during the past two years and features a long form text by Rose Vickers and design by Anita Liu at Double Lux. Published by PAINTING DIARY [ISBN: 978-0-473-50138-9]
Yet as the central work in this thesis, 'Hotel Palenque' also poses an exception: opening up a slew of revisory readings that reach back not only to Simmelian aesthetic theory, but into an urgent contemporary domain. A range of post-Smithson practices insist on 'Hotel Palenque' as an important and overlooked facet of Smithson’s practice, provide decoding insights, and raise questions of legacy. By scoping broadly backwards and forwards—and delving into artworks by Julius von Bismarck, Cyprien Gaillard, Harrell Fletcher, Renzo Martens, Anahita Razmi, and Melanie Smith—I establish a continuum of theory on the imaging of ruin from historical texts to the present. The purpose of this exercise is not to construct a timeline, but rather to explore a central idea—that of ruin as metaphor—tested at various temporal points. Where ruin now speaks to contentious social, political, economic, and cultural realities, the idea of ruin speaking to anything at all remains an unusual constant.
Extract: Both artists delve into historical, autobiographical, and archetypal imagery, exploring their own and community histories to create artwork that plays with the subjective. These provide the viewer with certain options: to 'feel along' with, to identify, or to distance-to stand back. Rodriguez's paintings provoke a choice. From his Brooklyn studio, he works with traditional painterly media-oil on canvas-while the content of his ensuing images test out compositional logic. Characterized by an imposed geometry-the internal 'hard edge'-they reside at the periphery of abstraction and figuration. Their register in either direction is then a matter of personal preference: a conscious or unconscious proclivity toward shape or form.
I use the term “survey” loosely, however, as the exhibition is staged far from chronology. Instead, it centres on a series of sets: the diametric themes, subjects, and visual devices employed by both artists in their biographically discrete careers.
This paper examines use of voice by the American land artist Robert Smithson. Voice is a component in three of Smithson’s 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt. The trip culminated in Hotel Palenque – an artwork which occupies an ambiguous place in Smithson’s canon and can be seen, through voice, to challenge extant conventions of ethnographic representation. Voices tend to mellow over time, becoming more atonal. Yet only three years were to transpire between Smithson’s artmaking in Mexico and the delivery of his Hotel Palenque lecture (in 1972), as relayed to a group of architecture students at the University of Utah. Smithson’s voice, which becomes increasingly flatter the further he moves away from the New York city art world, traverses a great deal of liminal space: from inner Manhattan to the suburbs of New Jersey, before finally coming to rest on the small Mexican town of Palenque. In my research I draw on technical analysis commissioned from voice expert Dr Brian Stasak (University of New South Wales). Graphs of Smithson’s voice pose questions around artistic intention, and set the stage to propose the occurrence of a ‘voice aesthetic’ – as an overlooked, yet theoretically significant component of Smithson’s historical practice.
Digital media presentation for the 16th International Conference on the Arts in Society, held at the University of Western Australia, School of Design, Perth, Australia.
Theme: Special Focus—Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
June 16, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Rose Vickers
PhD Graduate 2020, The University of Sydney
These discussions explore the theoretical foundations of a mortal sublime, and do so by invoking ruinous architecture; that is, the archeological or architectural ruin as metaphor. In recent art history, these themes have changed and been adapted. While keeping with the central concept of the sublime, a few artworks, including those by the American Land artist Robert Smithson, consider ruin to represent contemporary social, political, economic and cultural states of change. Together, such texts and artworks pose frameworks for thinking through, and coping with, collective upheaval and difficulty.
Chapter Two investigates ethnographic and art-historical precedents for artists working as foreigners, and describes my attempt to formulate an ethical research methodology in a foreign region. This chapter examines social, political and economic frameworks on Gili Meno, noting the pervasive impact of tourism. Epistemological account provides some description of social and cultural mores, economic conditions, linguistic mutabilities and gestalt. Visual arts practice serves as a mode of inquiry potentiating the re-consideration of cross-cultural and intra-national understandings, as well as posing a visual counterpoint to mechanisms of 'photopromiscuity' in tourist regions.
The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.
Rose Vickers is a Sydneysider artisan whose new solo show focuses on aesthetics, beauty and mortality. I caught up with her recently on a chilly winter night to hear about bones and get an insight into this dedicated artists practice. Interview pp. 16 — 20.
Interview pp. 23-26
Artists: Candida Alvarez, Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), April Bey.
Extract: Puerto Rican-American and Brooklyn raised, Chicago-based painter and visual artist Candida Alvarez explores both interior and exterior landscapes in her bright, abstract work. Her mature practice explores temporal and geographical facets of an increasingly sophisticated visual and textual modality. Alvarez’s works have included sculptures, collages, abstraction, and figuration, with materials as diverse as fabric, acrylic paint, enamel, galkyd, on various supports from canvas to cotton napkins to vellum.
Artists: Alex Anderson, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Kim Dacres.
Extract: Alex Anderson uses the delicate medium of ceramics as his main vehicle to explore the intersections of the sublime experiences that make up both the man-made and natural worlds, as well as deeper, more complicated issues of race and cultural representation. His artworks combine a dexterity in the medium with a confluence of baroque imagery and compositions, Japanese pop art references, and current contemporary fashion and design trends in order to probe the depths of reality, illusion and identity. At the core of Anderson's practice is a philosophical, existential examination of identity politics relative to his respective backgrounds. By channeling methodologies surrounding artistic production in ceramic arts, Anderson creates fantastic, multifaceted sculptures; synchronously subversive and whimsical. He uses the classical aesthetics of a Western art canon-one ironically sharing space with queer and camp aestheticsto translate the structures governing his lived experience in society, along with social perceptions of non-Western identity and form. Anderson's work engages with Western ceramic histories, yet operates, too, at the core of Post-Blackness. This method of production directly corresponds with current aesthetic and artistic practices and ideologies surrounding theories of Post-Black art. Working at the intersection of identity politics and aesthetic empowerment, Anderson's ceramic creations appear charming and playful-yet their frivolity is only glazedeep. They contain layered conceptions about blackness, masculinity, and perception, folded and fused together, reciprocating the merging of the artist's lived experience, historical inheritance, and conscious selfawareness. Criticality, political derision, and gender politics are all relevant schemas for Anderson's sculptural oeuvre. Each of his identities has a history of marginalization, received violence, and fetishization. His work gives form to the realities, stereotypes, and cultural perceptions of divergent cultural identities, and, as a group, give rise to complex aporic spaces. Anderson seeks to create a metaphorical world of objects-those that distill his understanding of what it means, and how it feels, to live through intersectional identities, and his resultative place in the contemporary social world.