Negotiations between young contemporary artists from Gippsland & Melbourne.

| Brodie Ellis |
| Maria-Luisa Marino|
| Simon Pericich|
| Reghan De Mather|
| Kylie Ligertwood|
| Karen Heath|

Hockey Plot displays a breadth of multi-disciplinary engagement between two geographical areas: Melbourne and Gippsland. The artists featured were paired together from these respective regions and asked to embrace the challenges of negotiating toward new collaborative work. Joining forces, the artists devised projects that drew from their existing practices and melded their shared interests.

For artists Brodie Ellis and Maria-Luisa Marino, the arena for exchange surfaced through their combined interest in Australia’s socio-cultural history and the incorporation of found objects into their practice. In Home Altar, the artists have upturned a shower unit creating an intimate environment for the surveying of figurative and symbolic referents of the past. Perforations of the shower wall are illuminated to depict migrants arriving on a ship at Station Pier, Melbourne, in the mid 1900’s. A site that is bound historically to the multicultural diversity of Australia, Station Pier has seen the arrival of thousands of migrants – all who carried with them a hopeful vision for a new life. This sentiment is illustrated through the plaster cast eggs on to which Gippsland based artist Marino has transferred identification portraits. Each portrait presents an individual dream of a new life but the characteristic detachment of such portraits prevents a true connection to their innermost aspirations. Numbering over 70, they form clusters resembling mini-societies.

The eggs are contextualised within the material-driven influence of Melbourne based artist Ellis who is renowned for her creations of large-scale installations. There is an otherworldly or futuristic quality to this construction. Stripped of colour, the work has a lunar atmosphere but also harbours a doleful undertone. Despite its title this isn’t a celebration of cultural preservation. It is a receptacle for housing a significant milestone – a time of transition – perhaps it expresses nostalgia for a previously experienced but now unattainable feeling of hope. Marino has drawn from her own experience of watching the durability of her cultural ancestry diminish. Does this work seek to capture a perception of Anglo Saxon white – wash? The inversion of the shower unit could be read as a symbolic expression for the reorganisation of the cultural and domestic lives of the migrants. In removing the functionality of the shower, Ellis and Marino have subverted domestic comfort and our ability to make sense of the world. Through such conceptual devices, a narrative is invoked yet unsettling questions are raised, not answered.

Melbourne-based artist Simon Pericich and Rehgan De Mather from Gippsland developed a project entitled Punk’d. Each artist stretched several T-Shirts over canvas frames then embellished the surface with paint and various accoutrements. The two artists present these undertakings beside each other – as one work, but the schisms within their practices are evident. De Mather treats his frames through playful and instinctual processes governed largely by the use of bright splashings of paint and avidity for text. In contrast, Pericich treats the surface with his signature wit, irony and sarcasm. On first glance we see thick globules of paint dripping down from the various corporate logos he has selected, but at closer inspection we see googly eyes cemented into the drips of paint. They stare back at us in sardonic mockery of our investigation.

De Mather’s interests lie in the painting process itself and traces of the previous works can be found on the T-Shirts he has developed. In fact, it is evident he has worn the apparel whilst painting other works. The viewer is invited to ponder the incidental markings of creativity. Screen-printings of text are overlaid and include statements such as “Don’t ask, the first rule is do not talk about.” The T’Shirts speak to the viewer with an authority that is unnerving. Both artists respond to the fast-moving and transitional nature of trends in the world of fashion. Consumerism dominates fashion and perhaps, as their interrogation suggests, art as well. Visual culture and capitalism have merged. The work assaults the viewer with its commodity appeal; semiotics abound.

The teleology of words is the point of departure for Kylie Ligertwood and Karen Heath; intangible possibilities are expressed through the overlapping of sound and visual representations. Meditating on the inadequacy of language, its elusive qualities, we are drawn to the incidental, the peripheral. Although words may describe and prescribe, it is largely through the assimilation of text served from the mechanisations of the media that we form a relationship. Ligertwood, a multi-media artist from Melbourne (originally based in Perth), and Heath a musician and sound artist originally from Gippsland (now based in Melbourne), explore the implicit and contextual resonances of language in Gravity calls through a horn cast from the inner ear. Language contributes to the contextual perceptions of our reality. Through a participatory space with listening stations, the subtle transmutations of sound can be heard. There is discordant voice work punctuated by familiar corporeal sounds; the piercing female voice meets the visual chatter enlivening the gallery walls.

“The exhibition is an interstice, defined in relation to the alienation reigning everywhere else.” ¹

The poetry of Ligertwood speaks to this:

two casts

seek to match

meet as two balls

bounce together in a unit of time

called hope.

Claire Anna Watson
Curator

Published by: Next Wave Festival

Tour Itinerary 2008:

West Space, Melbourne, 23 May to 14 June

Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale: 5 July to 3 August

Cowwarr Art Space, Cowwarr: 9 August to 9 September