David Thomas: the passing of days and nights
DAVID THOMAS
09.07.24 - 10.08.24
david thomas: the passing of days and nights
Simply put the exhibition is diverse/complex and requires slow viewing. I see it as a journey through various aspects of life, celebrating the intimate and the grand.
THE PASSING OF DAYS AND NIGHTS has a contemplative function.
THE PASSING OF DAYS AND NIGHTS is a COMPOSITE exhibition of abstract paintings, photopaintings, titles, photography, and structures.
THE PASSING OF DAYS AND NIGHTS presents new works that explore the perception of time, space, complexity, impermanence, memory, and feeling.
My PAINTINGS are mainly from the ongoing “Gently Painted Series”.
They are complex in a simple sort of way. They manifest the factual reality of the painting’s materiality, temporality and form. Colour evokes a sense of boundless time/space/ energy. They reveal the sensibility /sensation of human touch in time via surface/facture and celebrate the INTERIOR non-material world of feeling/spirit / thought.
My PHOTOGRAPHY reveals its own material realities (physical, digital, mechanistic). It records the specific, the details of the EXTERNAL everyday world. it activates memory, sentiment, at times reflecting the absurd, the sometimes beautiful, and the sometimes bitter-sweet world of PAST EVENTS.
My use of TITLES is POETIC creating entry points into the work. The titles can be literal, conceptual, humorous, ironic, paradoxical, deeply felt. They act as triggers for recovering content.
The JUXTAPOSITION of the various elements/durations in the exhibition creates COMPOSITE RELATIONSHIPS (at times surprising) between language, form, media, and content… at times simple, at times complex like the world itself.
David Thomas
David Thomas Biography:
David Thomas was born in Belfast N. Ireland. He studied at Melbourne, Monash, and RMIT Universities. He lives and works in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. His work explores the contemplative function painting, photopainting, and installation, in particular, how new iterations of the monochrome tradition and the composite can explore the perception of time, space, complexity and impermanence. He holds a PhD from RMIT University where he is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Art. He occasionally curates and writes on contemporary Eastern and Western art.
His work is held in numerous private and public collections in Australia and overseas including: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Australia. Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Melbourne, Australia. RMIT University, Melbourne. Australia. Cripp’s Collection, Australia and UK., Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia. Ballarat Art Gallery Victoria, Australia. Chartwell Collection, NZ Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand/Aotearoa. Lowenstein Collection, Melbourne, Australia. Canterbury University, Christchurch, NZ /Aotearoa. Lim Lip Museum, Gong Ju, South Korea.Theodor F. Leifeld Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Ahlen, Germany. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, The Frederick Collection, Germany, Justin Art House Museum, Melbourne.
He is represented by: Block Projects Melbourne, Australia, Minus Space, New York, USA and raum 2810, Bonn, Germany.
ARTWORKS:
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dorcas tinamayi bennett: mother’s story
Dorcas Tinamayi Bennett
12.03.24 - 06.04.24
Dorcas Tinamayi Biography:
“I was born in the bush at Wurturu rock hole near Kaltukatjarra (Docker River)”. After her birth, her mother and father walked with her to Warburton Mission where she was given her English name by the missionary Mr. Will Wade.
Her parents returned, walking with Dorcas to the Warakurna - Tjukurla area. Although soon after they had to leave due to the radiation exposure from the atomic testing in Maralinga “the funny smell made a lot of people sick”. Her family met Mr. Bob McAuley and traveled with him in the renowned yellow Native Patrol Officer’s truck to the Amata settlement. They then travelled by camel to Areyonga where Dorcas began to attend school.
Dorcas and her family returned to the Warakurna homeland when it was established in the mid-1970s. “In 2005 we started painting on paper then on canvas, the old shop turned into an art centre, that’s where we all started doing painting” Dorcas is the current Chairperson for Warakurna Artists. Dorcas Bennett is the daughter of Nyurupayia Nampitjinpa (Mrs Bennett) a senior artist for Papunya Tula Artists. Dorcas’s paintings are prefigured by her mother’s Tjukurrpa (dream time), encompassing the country between Tjukurla and Warakurna.
As the final heir to these ancestral stories, it is crucial for Dorcas to reenergizes them. She does so with a lot of gusto, creating vibrant connections between the dotted Tali (sand hills), the circler Kapi Warnanpa (water holes), and various designs linked to the journey of a group of women to the rockhole site of Yumarra.
ARTWORKS:
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JAMES CLAYDEN : THOUGHT / MEMORY PAINTINGS
James Clayden
30.01.23 - 02.03.24
Jame clayden: artist statement
Early in 2023 after rewatching Peter Weir’s fantastic film The Last Wave I found myself once again disappointed with the way the film ended and thought to try and paint an ending for myself. The thought kept going around in my head and began merging with the memory of being in the Lisbon Aqueducts that were built on ancient Roman structures during the 18th century; this seemed together with the feeling left by the ending of the film, of being underground beneath the city but at the same time in some deep space far beyond, where past and present pulsed like some atavistic memory of longing amidst water and sky like spheres as one. Out of this, I remembered Michael Snow’s haunting 1967 short experimental film Wavelength and after watching it again it seemed something worthwhile was going on around me, without me, and this together with the mystery of painting itself is more or less how and why I began work on this series of Thought/Memory Paintings.
ARTWORKS:
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Merric brettle: Physcopomp: In The Eye of The Beholder
Merric Brettle
29.03.23 - 06.05.23
Merric Brettle: Physcopomp: In The Eye of The Beholder
As an artist, I make work about our relationship with the world in which we live, and what is fundamental to me is exploring and expressing this aim in the work’s production.
Central to my methodology is an exploration and use of the ephemeral as this would be the sociocultural associations of various aspects of things in the world such as material, text and context etc.
This description of what I do ‘gets under the hood’ of my practice, and directly relates the methodology I use to the construction of meaning. I have been using an experimental arts practice to make work for the last twenty years. This methodology explores creativity as the product of a clash between the artist and their subject/reality. Making work in this way, I try and capture the presences of both my subject and myself, as these would be my sense for example of the socio-cultural associations of my subject and also the sense of ‘me’ generated by my expressiowithin fabrication. I then explore a resonance or reverberating relationship of cause and effect, between these presences, and personally reflect on its nature as I make work and construct meaning.
This reveals the way that I use an understanding of the presences of my subject and myself, as exploring them helps me make work. When reading my work however, the viewer considers this use a little differently. That is, as they explore this resonance as it would support what I say. It is in this way that understanding the presences and resonance between them that guided my construction, that the viewer considers an emotional/conceptual framework within which understand nuance and complexity within what the work refers to. In this way this resonance functions much in the same way as a painter’s brushstroke, as it puts emotional inflection on a piece.
To illustrate I first used this methodology in a series of works that explore our relationship to a constructed urban landscape. In these works, I captured the presence of my subject by employing the materials and methods of its construction like concrete, plastic and vacuum forming etc. not only because the allowed me to fabricate something but also for their socio-cultural associations.
My presence was then captured in the forms I created and the idiosyncratic way in which I explored the expressive possibilities of these ‘found’ materials and methods. When constructing meaning in the work I explored the resonance between these two presences as I made work about the way that we construct this landscape, but are never able to produce exactly what we want.
This reveals the way that I use the ephemeral as it would guide what I make the work about. When the viewer considers it however, they do so a little differently. That is, as it would give the work emotional inflection. To illustrate, I hoped for the viewer to read these presences and their resonance between them as they would reveal a landscape that is banal toxic and distorting, yet somehow beautiful, alluring and an expression of hope. It was in this way that I hoped for this resonance to give my work emotional depth much in the same way that a brush stroke or texture would. Making work in this way I hoped for the viewers to consider the nature of our relationship to this constructed reality as it would not only reflect our hopes and human abilities to realise them, but also our limits, failings and inability to avoid them.
Employing this methodology, I do not illustrate an idea but create contemplative pieces in which I hope for the viewer to explore sense, presence and resonance as they would express a more nuanced understanding of what the work refers to.
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This kind of methodology can be simply ‘aimed’ at other subjects and it was with this in mind that I decided to explore our relationship with a now digitised social reality. That is as a social reality is a mixture of the ‘forms’ of our social relations that we interact with and the collective codification of reality that we use as a lens through which to see the world. Because this new subject has no physicality in itself, I started to explore text and text construction methods as my materials and methods. In particular, I explored this text as images and image construction techniques. I did not think that making this shift would be a difficult task, because if there is anything that expresses the ‘presence’ or sense of a social reality, then it is this form of text. I soon discovered however, that this change in subject would create fundamental problems for my methodology. The situation was that because images have no physicality in themselves, I couldn’t capture the presence or sense of my subject in the works materially as I had previously done. The effect of this was that I had an either/or choice between capturing the presence of my subject or my own in the forms I made.
This created a crisis in my methodology, which made not only making work difficult, but also, I realised, reading the work. Consequently, I became determined to find a way to capture these two presences in a piece. I managed to do this via collecting and remaking samples of images and image construction techniques from the Internet. These samples captured the socio-cultural associations/presence of my subject in themselves as they referred to something, while their transliteration from screen images to painted object using spray paint and sign writing vinyl captured mine. My presence was thus no longer in the forms of the work, but in its physicality, and so existed in for example the overlapping of paints between forms, the use of glazes to capture the effect of backlighting and an exploration of the logic of pixilation. This resolved my issue because the works were able to perform something like a cognitive ‘gestalt flip’. That is that like the classic optical illusion in which an image can be seen to ‘flip’ between being a depiction of a rabbit and duck, that these works could also ‘flip’ between being seen as either a sample/found image or an abstract minimalist painting.
This resolution however, created other problems because in locating the presence of my subject in the forms I create and myself in its physicality, I no longer had access to these forms as they could refer to anything. The implications of this was that I couldn’t make the works ‘about’ the relationship between the individual and my subject. I found this incredibly frustrating because this is in essence the ‘point’ of my methodology as an exploration. Consequently, I now had to find some way in which to allow for the works to refer to something, without displacing or destroying the presence of myself or my subject. The resolution I came up with was to explore different physical separations in the work that allowed for me to put either presences or references within them and thus allowing for all to be read in resonance.
To illustrate, I explored the use of different materials to make collage like works in which these images could be seen as separate or together thus preserving the presence in them of my subject while allowing for the relationship between images to refer to something else. I also started to join different panels that would allow for the use of one as a sample and the other as a vehicle for referring to my ideas. I then started to use the sides of the panels and their relationship with a wall as other places where I could locate a presence or a reference to something. It was with these separations therefore, that I felt I now had a whole lot of compartments or what to me seemed to be conceptual planes within which to locate presences and references and explore resonance between them.
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There is still much that needs to be considered and explained about this expansion of my methodology, but what I can do now is explain the relationship between production and meaning as I both make work and hope for it to be read.
Exploring the nature of my subject with my methodology, I have come to the belief that while a social reality exists, that it is constituted by our projections. Within this framework, I have also come to believe that while we are objective to it as it would be constructed by others projections, we are not objective to it as it would also be constructed by our own. Consequently, I feel that before we can describe this construct and our relationship to it, that we must first understand how we can ‘see’ it as it would be other to us yet not.
The works in this exhibition express/explore this belief and so when considering the references within them, they all relate to the way that our projections are part of what we see even when we are perceiving the projections of others. When contemplating the physicalities of the work by contrast, I would like the viewer to think about the way that I explored my presence in relationship to the samples I use as it would create a reverberating relationship with the works, and in doing this see this relationship as a metaphor for that which we have with a social reality as we can ‘see’ it. It is thus for example, that I would first like the viewer to explore my ‘marks’ as they would be evidence of me ‘within the image/samples’ as there is ‘stuff’ in the glazes, ‘under the image’ as it would relate to the textures that exists, ‘on top of the image’ in the vinyl on top of the paint, and ‘other than the image’ as I would explore ‘around’ the panel or behind it. I would then like them to think about the way that the sense of a reverberating shifting surface that tracing of marks would suggest, would be a metaphor for the kind of vibrating immediacy that I think we need to understand that we have with a social reality before we see it.
When thinking about my personal perspective on a social reality, I do not attempt to describe the perspective I think we should construct, but only the perspective that I explored on the way that we may see that reality as it would be partly our projection. To express this, I would hope for the viewer to explore my ‘marks’ in the work as they would provide them with a metaphor for the experience I had. Consequently, I would like for them to explore the way that they are formally pulled into the works by some of these marks, pushed out by others, and made to go around them etc by yet others as they would in essence ‘step into my shoes’. It is in this way that I would hope they then think about what it means to be ‘in the eye of the beholder’.
Artist Statement, 2023
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james clayden: flights of fancy
David Thomas
12.11.22-30.11.22
James Clayden : Flight of Fancy Installation Images
‘‘To me, great abstraction has always represented mystery. The literal or the realist painting grapples and passes with a moment. It merely records a single grain of sand on the eternal beach. Great abstract paintings deepen the mystery of our existence but also emote the feeling of the eternal. I feel that Clayden has always been in this zone of deep questioning but has an insightful understanding of what we have to get done in our nominated period as human beings. The mantra.
When l have had the privilege of standing in front of some of the greatest abstract paintings ever made, from east to west, they have all had a commonality of making me feel that there is something strange and mysterious beyond the physical and material world. I have had this feeling on many occasions in front of Clayden paintings. It is as if he has an understanding of that mystery, an insight that has come from humility and a dense art practice that has never followed fashion trends. A true gift of new conditions and discoveries. A moment of insight that gives us a reason that it all meant something to exist on this mystical spinning ball in space.’
Jeremy Kibel
ARTWORKS:
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the colour & the shape
10.08.2022 – 03.09.2022
Installation images, The Colour & The Shape. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
Blockprojects is please to present The Colour & The Shape, a group exhibition exploring the visual language between shape, form, colour and line in abstraction.
ARTISTS:
Steven Asquith, James Clayden, David Freney-Mills, Jason Haufe, Kyle Jenkins, Paul Newcombe, Tom Vincent, David Wallage.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
now & then : 40 years of abstraction
08.04.2022 – 16.04.2022
Installation images, Now & Then : 40 Years of Abstraction . Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Simon Strong
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract works from the last 40 years.
ARTISTS:
Steven Asquith, Neil Keith Baker, Stephen Bram, Merric Brettle, James Clayden, Dan Dan Dai, Robert Jacks
Dale Frank, Marc Freeman, Denise Green, Kyle Jenkin, Michael Staniak, John Nixon, Julia Powles, David Thomas, Vivian Cooper Smith, Tom Vincent, Peter Westwood, what.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
THE DIRECTOR’S CHOICE 2021: important australian & international works of art.
17.04.2021 – 28.04.2021
Installation images, The Director’s Choice 2021: Important Australian and international Works of Art. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Angela McKinnon
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract and figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture by important Australian and International artists.
ARTISTS:
Tony Bevan,
James Clayden, Adam Cullen, Robert Jacks, John Olsen, David Thomas, Tony Tuckson, Ben Quilty, Brett Whiteley, Ken Whisson, Fred Williams.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
HOW SOON IS NOW
12.08.20 - 12.09.20
Installation images, How Soon is Now. Blockprojects, 2020.
Blockprojects is proud to present, HOW SOON IS NOW,
an exhibition featuring fifteen contemporary artists who explore the mystery of abstraction.
ARTISTS:
Darren Munce
Julia Powles
Eduardo Santos
David Thomas
Tom Vincent
David Wallage
Peter Westwood
Neil Keith Baker
Merric Brettle
James Clayden
Dandan Dai
Robert Doble
Marc Freeman
Kyle Jenkins
Jason Haufe
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THE DIRECTOR’S CHOICE 2020: LEADING AUSTRALIAN AND BRITISH ARTISTS
09.06.2020 – 11.07.2020
Installation images, The Director’s Choice 2020: Leading Australian and British Artists. Blockprojects, 2020.
This group exhibition features a selection of abstract and figurative works by important Australian and International artists.
ARTISTS:
Tony Bevan,
James Clayden,
John Colburn,
Adam Cullen,
Sydney Nolan,
Albert Tucker,
Gareth Sansom,
Peter Walsh,
what.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
JAMES CLAYDEN: PAINTINGS - DRAWINGS - GROUPINGS
10.03.20 - 11.04.2020
Complex Translation by Adrian Martin
Art, a wise person once said, is a matter of the “complex translation of the seen and the felt to a series of visual marks on a flat surface”. That’s a mystery you can contemplate forever. For such translation has nothing to do with verisimilitude, copying, faithful reproduction. Things change, transform along the line between the seeing & feeling, and those marks laid upon the flat, layered surface.
The original impetus – that landscape, object, face, moment, flicker or flare – can be lost altogether, beyond recognition in its eventual rendering. That doesn’t matter, in the end. It is what arises, what we – both artist and spectator arrive at, which counts.
James Clayden can sometimes seem like an abstract painter. But I never, personally, find his work (whatever media he uses) to be entirely abstract. There is always the trace – sometimes evident, at other times faint – of what, in the world, inspired him to begin his complex translation.
We sometimes see a line, a shape, a nose, a post, a fence railing. Maybe that’s what they are, maybe not. The nomination doesn’t matter. What matters are the visual marks, the marking, the intensity and process of that.
Edward Colless writes: “It is something else – that com- motion of vague and fleeting sensations … I loiter among vagrant, half-formed perceptions, bewitched”.
It seems to me that James begins from something at once very concrete (a sight, a sense-impression), and some- thing cloudier: a feeling, an association, some obscure reminiscence that has been sparked within him. It is all those things at once that he seeks to translate. Not to disentangle them, necessarily, but certainly to convey them to the canvas, page or screen. Maybe he himself is not always completely sure what this process is all about. But it drives him.
Sometimes, I feel, with a sharp pang, that I grasp some- thing very specific in his pictures. Maybe a person I know (who we both know), a film scene that I too have seen, a precise location where I have stood and viewed something from that very same angle. There are place names indicated in the titles: Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill. Have I ever been there, or are these pictures just making me imagine it was so?
I never attempt to verify any of this with James, because I may be entirely dreaming it. But what’s important is that his art can incite this game of fleeting projection and recognition.
The fleetingness is what matters. The dissolution and rebirth of the trace. The loss of a stable, consensus referent; but also the finding of a personal point. Just for a moment, before it vanishes again. The complex translation that takes the artist down one path, and the spectator along another, around the same work.
There is truly a hallucinatory aspect to immersing your- self in James’ work; that’s certainly my experience of it, at any rate. Dark patches, shadow, pools of night. Outlines are blurred, and are plunged into amorphous masses. The tops of trees shimmer and dissolve into each other. Square objects – they could be anything – rise out of the ground, but also disappear into it. Faces are creased, folded, their features unaligned.
The eternal mystery of the horizon: is it a thing, existing in itself, or just the interval between other things, land and sky, earth and clouds? The horizon is the line that is not a line; yet what work it can do inside an image.
The hallucination can be three-dimensional, 3D. Layers and smudges on that surface. “The skin of another”– where skin is translated by folds and swathes of coloured paint. Depths emerge but then find themselves, once again, brutally flattened, cancelled. James is always fighting with the flatness, resigning himself to it, then making it “pop”, somehow, in and for our eye.
The incessant movement in his film and video work is never far away from his paintings, drawings, and other as- semblages. Yet his films and videos, too, wage war, stage a dance, between the flatness & stasis of abstraction and the fullness of actors in space – a space of theatre, of mise en scène, another medium in which he works and plays.
James is often involved with the telling of stories in his work. But the stories are cryptic. Suggested, elusive, allusive. Memories crossed out, but still visible, struggling to be seen and heard. Ghost paintings. A vertigo of the visible; an inaudible, murmuring soundtrack.
I experience a kind of synaesthesia from James’ art. While I stare, I am hearing the sway and rustle of those trees; and also the scratch and bustle of his own painting- drawing tools. Things are returning to me – even if they are not the same things that James himself began from. Voices speak, whispering poetic fragments in my head.
Ruins of texts, of the sensations and feelings they gave me, once upon a time. Shakespeare, Cassavetes, Sondheim: I know they are all, somewhere, in James’ neural memory banks, and sometimes also in mine. But convergence and divergence are the same, ultimately, in this game. He can start from a mountain and end at a movie; I can go in the opposite direction. The translation shuttle is two-way, and eternal.
Art, the reception of art, is the crowded, suddenly fro- zen, eternal moment in the middle, in medias res. We are caught between things and feelings, objects and their metaphors, memories and their stories. Stranded between the host language and a newer language to come. A series of visual marks on a flat surface returns us to the seen and felt not the original thing seen and felt, but something else, something that is coming into being.
Something stirring in the darkness and in the light; something flitting between the lines and the outlines. The marks made on our bodies, and our hearts.
James Clayden’s art, in all its forms and manifestations, is the art of infinite suggestiveness.
Adrian Martin is an associate professor at Monash University, and a film and arts critic.
SELECTED ARTWORKS:
CANTO
31.08.19 - 14.09.19
Installation images, Canto. Blockprojects, 2019.
Blockprojects is proud to present, HOW SOON IS NOW,
an exhibition featuring fifteen contemporary artists who explore the mystery of abstraction.
ARTISTS:
Justin Andrews
Neil Keith Baker
James Clayden
Will Cooke
Jordan Grant
Denise Green
Melinda Harper
Julia Powles
Tom Vincent
David Wallage
what
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ROBERT JACKS & JAMES CLAYDEN: WHAT IN THE WORLD
28.05.2019 - 22.06.2019
Blockprojects is pleased to present, What in The World, an exhibition of paintings by two of Australia’s most pre-eminent painters of our time, Robert Jacks and James Clayden. The exhibition features paintings from the late 1960s to mid-2000.