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:
what: withdrawal to the forest
01.04.21 - 22.05.21
Installation images, what; Withdrawal to the forest. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Mark Ashkanasy
An exhibition of paintings by what.
what
it’s a simple story
I met him in Katoomba
he told me
he’d left Sydney
for the blue mountains because
it was too expensive
he wanted to paint in peace
i got it
he mentioned
Velázquez casually
i got it
like a writer mentioning
jane austen
like a songwriter mentioning
guy clark
i sensed serious intentions
mixed
with humility
no big man shit
no art theory blizzard
took him at his word
somewhere there
i saw his work
and dug it
then
on another trip to Katoomba
he painted me
red tones
i am in black pants
against a wall
it makes archibald prize
finalists
a good painting
should mention what what
looks like
it was a vital clue
he looks the way
you want an artist
to look - slightly terrifying
wild hair
beard
gentle manner
very inquisitive
in art and the stuff
around art that we will call
life
then
i see self-portrait
screams breakthrough
some tricks
routes
gifted painters
had not followed
what’s face
painted ever so fine
bleeding in and out
and in and out
of field of spectacular
colour
geometric/figurative mix
done
in
master style
then
i get to know
what better
ride in his SAAB
(another sign of genius)
and
play his classical guitar
knowing
he’d devoted years
to mastering guitar styles
to turn
again to
painting
sisters and brothers
this aint no
routine art career
monk-like
immersion
in what he loves
then he hands me the coat
telling me
his girlfriend is
Benedict Cumberbatch
fan from Sherlock
my favourite
tv show/actor of last
years
i
put on coat
what says
‘didn’t think i’d
have to tell you
how to wear it’
'no'
the coat
bought in blue
mountain op shop
lives on me
i pose
and pose
and pose and pose and pose
then
what sends me
finished portrait
on computer
i see
comparison
to self-portrait
also see
fantastic starlit
explosion
into new
territory (time + space)
that we shall call
outer stratosphere
or
modern psychedelic
I’m free in space
looking
ecstatic in space
i
am
beyond
comprehension
of my self
in painting.
witnessing
one
of the great
Australian pieces
of art
since…...
what tells me
he will enter
it
in Doug Moran Prize
and win
i am not so sure
painting a masterpiece
art prizes a gamble
it wins
so
what next?
don’t know
more immersion/ blue mountains
SAAB
guitar
coffee fetish
Velázquez
supreme application
pure intent
i’m watching
Robert Forster (Written on March 7/8 2020)
Robert Forster is an Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist and music critic and co-founded of an indie rock group, The Go-Betweens.
ARTWORKS:
enquire.
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:
David Thomas: Moving Times
03.03.21 - 03.04.21
Installation images, David Thomas; Moving Times. Blockprojects, 2021. Photography: Christo Crocker.
An exhibition of paintings and photopaintings by David Thomas
This exhibition includes large paintings, primarily monochromatic in nature, large scale photopaintings from the ongoing Impermanences Series; and smaller photo paintings from the Water/Wash Series.”
Please see the accompanying publication “David Thomas: Moving Times”, available for purchase from the gallery.
BOOK YOUR APPOINTMENT to visit the gallery.
ARTWORKS:
enquire.
Neil Keith Baker: A Coarse Correspondence.
03.02.21 - 27.02.21
Installation images, Neil Keith Baker; A Course Correspondence. Blockprojects, 2021.
Neil Keith Baker was born in Luton, England. He gained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Norwich School of Art and Design, in 1999. After a period of independent practice he returned to study at The Slade School of Art, London where he completed an MA in Fine Art in 2007.
BOOK YOUR APPOINTMENT to visit the gallery.
ARTWORKS:
enquire.
Ross A. Waterman: Nick Cave Shot live 1983 - 2007
Re-OPENs 13.01.21 - 23.01.21
Installation images, Ross A. Waterman; Nick Cave Shot Live 1983 - 2007. Blockprojects, 2020.
Blockprojects is proud to present, a series of photographs by Ross A. Waterman, documenting singer, songwriter, screenwriter and composer Nick Cave. Nick Cave is best known as the lead singer for Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
BOOK YOUR APPOINTMENT to visit the gallery.
ARTWORKS:
enquire.
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
enquire.
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:
DOBLE & STRONG: THE INEVITABLE
11.02.20 - 07.03.2020
Blockprojects Gallery is pleased to present Doble & Strong, The Inevitable.
An exhibition celebration 10 years of artistic collaboration.
DARREN MUNCE: TIMING & LIGHTING
12.11.2019 - 07.12.2019
“…..it could just pass me by, you miss that song, you miss the timing, timing is everything - timing and lighting.”
Lyric from the song Timing & Lighting James Place, from the album Still Waves To A Whisper, 2019
GEORGIA BIGGS: RIGHT UP UNTIL. JARRYD COOPER: SIGHTSEEING IN THE WHOLE SHEBANG
16.10.2019 - 12.11.2019
Blockprojects Gallery is pleased to present a duo exhibition of works by Georgia Biggs and Jarryd Cooper.
STEVEN ASQUITH: ETHEREAL VARIATIONS: 2 RIPS & PUNCTURE MARKS
17.09.2019 - 12.10.2019
Steven Asquith’s new exhibition Ethereal Variations: 2 Rips & Puncture Marks continues his investigation of minimal abstraction that began in the 2017 Ethereal Puncture Marks series. Asquith’s new sequence of works are stripped back, uniform compositions of urban decay and the landscape.
Using stencils and acrylic spray paint, each composition is defined by two vertical slashes and an arrangement of puncture marks that appear to pierce the surface of the canvas. The interplay between the marks produce distinctive configurations through the repetition of materials and form. A luminous white haze spreads across the canvas creating an illusion of space, revealing an otherness behind the flatness of the painting.
The surface appears torn or distressed in parts—like it has been run over by a truck leaving tyre marks imprinted. Perhaps more contemporarily, the viewer is conditioned to the artifice of gazing at a digital screen while images render in and out of focus in front of their eyes. Where does the glare emerge from? Is it a tear in the fabric of our perception of reality or a reckoning of something else beyond
Other means of repetition and materiality emerge. Asquith samples the techniques of graffiti that he distinctively combines with elements of painterly abstraction. Like graffiti and hip-hop culture which sampled and echoed society, Asquith alludes to not only its history, and that of painting and abstraction, but also the current geo-political climate and the 24-hour news cycle.
The tonal variances of pink, purple, violet, orange and blue evoke skyscapes that transition in a twilight haze from dawn to dusk. The ominous skyscapes of toxins, gases, and exhaust fumes are a nod to fossil fuel-based economies and their effect on global warming. These paintings pose questions and suggest a dystopian vision of a scorched earth a few hundred years (or perhaps sooner?) into the future.
Aneta Trajkoski
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
enquire.
MERRIC BRETTLE: HYPNAGOGIC BLINK
23.07.2019 - 17.08.2019
In this new body of works titled, Hypnagogic Blink, Merric explores the relationship between hand-painted and digitally-created mark-making. In order to do this, he employs various visual art computer programs, spray paint and a variety of material and conceptual digital image-making techniques.
Employing these materials and methods Merric explores his mark making as he translates found and constructed digital images into material objects. This kind of practice allows him to explore the qualities of the ‘screen’ yet still insert ‘himself’ into the art object.
When looking at these works, Merric would like the viewer to consider two aspects in particular. Firstly he would like them to consider his ‘marks’ in for example the care of his construction, the layering of paint, and the small mistakes or human ‘glitches’ in the fabrication process. Secondly he would like them to contemplate the patterns he created in these abstract images and the way that they may have meaning in themselves. The reason behind these requests he explains,
“…is because it is behind these marks you will find me and behind these patterns you will find the way that I see the world.”
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.