Rambler Collective Presents Ryan McGennisken’s debut solo exhibition “if it’s between death and magic”.
As a child, Ryan was dragged by his parents, all over the country on camping trips, spending weeks at a time on the beach, living from fire cooked meals, fishing and building huts out of sticks; Ryan uses these experiences as a basis for his drawing ideas.
Ryan uses ink and watercolor to create worlds based on portions of nostalgia, dreams and current realities.
“If it’s between death and magic” tells a story of survival, intrepidness and the journey of lost souls, on the quest to find a new liveable environment away from a deconstructed, over used planet.

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 6:00pm until Friday, February 24, 2012 at 4:00pm
Opening night: 6-9 Sat Feb 11

Latrobe Contemporary Gallery
209 Commercial Rd, Morwell, VIC
0403 341 664
lcontemporary@gmail.com
wed-Fri: 10am-4pm
Sat-Sun: 10am-2pm

Everybody is invited to join the artist for a free night of refreshments in a comfortable welcoming environment.

www.ramblercollective.com
checkin@ramblercollective.com

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Getting there:

By car - http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

By train (from Melbourne) – V-line tickets can be purchased from Flinders St or Southern Cross. The train generally runs hourly to Morwell and takes approx. 1.5 hours to arrive.

The gallery is on the opposite side of the train station on Commercial Rd.

Accommodation in the town is sufficient and will take a measly google search to find something cheap.

Train also run late into the night to return back to Melbourne. You could see yourself back in Melbourne by 11pm with the night still young.

I really hope to see you all here for a great night!

III
At the age of 82, he has seen much world. From Jalandhar to Lahore, London, Karachi, Tassaduq Sohail has travelled and worked through the most humble vocations. His days as a footpath artist are recalled with reverence. His first show in London occurred in 1978. Almost three decades later, in 2007, Sohail’s art arrived at Bonham’s. His last show was held at ArtChowk in 2010. He continues to work at his studio — preparing the next body of work for Full Circle this year. His hands tremble when not in use. He considers himself the last of a generation of libertine painters in Pakistan.
IV
A satirist before he came to art, he speaks of his “heated” fictions. There are too the rude pictures. He draws in jest, paints on commission, proliferates the same, the same. He despises forgery. At the heart of the matter lies the sobriety of Sohail’s gaze. His fabled creatures may be addressed once again. One may begin to outline erotics of his art. With this unusual figure, one may begin to pry a necessary history of erotic art in Pakistan. As Garcia Marquez writes in his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores: “Morality too is a matter of time.”
V
The construction of the work remains constant. Here too, the framing landscape is foreshortened. It is inhibited, lifted, flattened out. Only the rendered characters possess narrative depth. On the extreme right of this small painting, a female centaur stands in awkward liaison with an inanimate phallic form. Clarity is hindered by rapidly applied colour. We view, instead, knife smear, frottage, in earth browns, blues, hints of green, as though at once a psychic emergence and a segregation were being described.
The scene of sequestered sexuality is shared by master witness, a slightly bloodied pigeon. Its steady gaze commands the painting. This, whilst loosely coloured flowers adorn the soft distance between. The rest of the image works at disarray — and it resists “interpretation”. Sensual dis-order may perhaps only be felt, even as the painting’s strange Edenic beauty covets the viewer’s attention. For no one is permitted speech, in this or any of Sohail’s canvases. His universe is marked by implicit inner presence. It is always a communal space, enclosed and unutterable, and occasionally humoured.
VI
Sourced in daastans and western myth, Sohail’s canvases queerly proclaim erogenous polemic. The best of his work is either imbued with a feminine quality or is complexly engaged with it. Relief seems to occur in the naivete of his rendering and, counter-intuitively, in the retention of opaque interior life. One may read into this gesture a visible and located cultural history. In the moment however, through his pictorial energies we may return to an older art historic sentiment. Erotic form remains, to date, one of the most powerful ways in which art communicates with its audience.

There are 17 surviving copies of Magna Carta. Fifteen are in Britain, and one is displayed at Australia’s parliament. The U.S. copy was one of four reissued in the year 1297. It still carries the wax seal of King Edward I of England, which is attached by a ribbon under the document. The 1297 document became the law of the land in England. It’s central to the founding of the United States because the colonists argued they were entitled to the rights under Magna Carta as Englishmen, Rubenstein said. But King George disagreed, so the colonists chose to break away.

Magna Carta was far ahead of its time in opening the door to principles for government based on law and the role of the people, said American University law professor Stephen Vladeck.

“It’s really the first example, at least in Western history, of a monarch agreeing to abide by legal rules written by others,” Vladeck said. “So we really have the Magna Carta to thank for the legacy of what we could call in American law due process — the idea that the government should act fairly and should act at least rationally in all cases.”
Rubenstein’s gift is funding an exhibit that will open in 2013. There, Magna Carta will be shown as a forerunner to the freedoms envisioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights and will be paired with other documents declaring human rights for African Americans, women, immigrants and others.
Remarkably, this Magna Carta is in better condition than the much younger Declaration of Independence from 1776. The ink is dark and legible, though written in medieval Latin, while the handwritten words of the Declaration of Independence faded badly years ago. That’s because the Declaration of Independence was rolled up frequently for travels and for decades was exposed to sunlight while on public display near a window, according to National Archives records.

This Magna Carta was folded up for centuries, likely in a cool, dark place at a family home in England. It was also written on parchment — a specially prepared animal skin — rather than on paper. “It’s in remarkably good condition,” said Kitty Nicholson, the Magna Carta’s lead conservator at the National Archives.

Still, the document required repairs. Over the past year, conservators removed old patches and adhesive that had caused it to contract. They repaired small holes and tares with handmade long-fiber papers from Japan and Korea that were toned to match the parchment. Those patches were applied with a mixture of gelatin and wheat starch paste, Nicholson said.

Now the document is sealed in a 225-pound case filled with humidified argon gas to prevent degradation from oxygen and will be lit with filtered light, removing ultra-violet rays and some radiation. The document rests on cotton paper produced at the University of Iowa Center for the Book to give it a soft, acid-free surface.

“Once it’s sealed in this encasement, we want it to rest in a relaxed format and not contract or do anything to change,” Nicholson said.

A new interactive display will allow visitors to zoom in on an image of the parchment and see areas that were repaired. Some words had been hidden by water damage in the past. But an ultraviolet photograph taken during the conservation work reveals the words are still there, though invisible to the naked eye. Visitors can read an English translation of Magna Carta’s Latin words and compare it with language in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Rubenstein said he became interested in the ideas behind the Constitution while working for the Senate in his 20s, which led him to study the Magna Carta. He has purchased other historical documents, including a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation on loan to the Oval Office.

“Everybody in life has certain things that they like, and I guess one of the things I like is buying these documents and owning them,” Rubenstein said. But he said he has no interest in displaying the documents in his own home, adding he hopes Americans will learn more about history from such public displays.

Magna Carta will likely remain at the National Archives permanently, added Rubenstein, now 62.

“You can’t be buried with these documents as far as I know.”

The summary of the Magna Carta is as follows:

The Church – The Church was to be free from royal interference, especially in the election of bishops

Taxes – No taxes except the regular feudal dues were to be levied, except by the consent of the Great Council, or Parliament

The right to due process which led to Trial by Jury

Weights and Measures – All weights and measures to be kept uniform throughout the realm

Come along and help celebrate 1 year of business and wish the gallery a Happy Birthday! Espionage Gallery is lucky enough to showcase one of the best exhibitions thus far for this special occasion featuring 30 of Australia’s best artists!

Featuring

Joshua Smith, Gary Seaman, Sync, Fredrock, Tarns, Fletch, Fu, Emmaline Zanelli, Kate Gagliardi, Sean Thomann, Rebecca Murphy, James Dodd, James Dean, Kate Kowald, Jelena Vujnovic, Joshua Miels, Cameron Brideoake, Véra Ada, Fruzsi Kenez, Donovan Christie, Jayson Fox, Peter Fong, Lilian Choo, Luka Va, Lampin, Elita A’Vard,
Katherine Prue Eggelston, Jack Artini, Jake One, Daniel Purvis, Jennifer Allnutt,

Espionage Gallery

Suite 1, Level 2, 93 Rundle Mall, Adelaide, sa 5000

View Map · Get Directions

Gatherings
Mark Florian
February 9 – March , 2012
Skew Gallery101, 1615 10th ave SW, Calgary, AB T3C OJ7

View Map · Get Directions

In his unconventional photography, the emotional and spiritual experience of a place and its lineage of time are at the core of Mark Florian’s depicted subject matter. Through his signature technique of using multiple layered images that Florian began developing in 1981, over 2 decades before the invention of the digital camera, he employs composition, vivid color, light and shadow, creating what can be arguably described as photographic paintings.

Forgoing the traditional use of photography as a means to capture a moment in time, or to depict with visual accuracy an object or place, Florian utilizes many individual images and occasionally multiple exposures as a material for which he composes his emotional response of a particular place of congregation. Through his technique Florian utilizes the multiplicity of images as an opportunity to explore a new visual world that speaks of movement and the passing of time, which ultimately leads to a deeper philosophical interpretation of reality.

Born in 1960 in Moravia Czechoslovakia to a family of musicians, where by the age of ten he began playing the pipe organ, and devoted himself to choral singing with a particular interest in Renaissance Polyphony. Florian was introduced to the world of photography through the discovery of Josef Sudek’s work and promptly purchased his first camera at age 12. By age 15 he mounted his first solo exhibition in Jesnik, Czechoslovakia, a documentary series on the lives of Gypsies. He has continued to exhibit and make new work in response to his extensive travels to the Middle and Far East, Europe, Africa and most recent to Mexico and the Nevada Black Rock desert for Burning Man.

Mark Florian has been the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts visual arts project grant, and his work can be found in several corporate collections in Canada. The influence of his musical and spiritual upbringing are apparent in Florian’s art today, utilizing images like musical notes Florian is both the composer and conductor in presenting magnificent visual scenes that deliver a depth and complexity in the same way a piece of chamber music is written for two or more solo parts.

Ted Heibert

Werewolf Stories

February 9 – March , 2012

This exhibition features medium- and large-scale photographs that document the performative nature of Heibert’s artistic practice. Hiebert becomes the central subject of his photographs, by combining movement with a found wolf pelt, exploring the belief held by some cultures that if a photograph can steal one’s soul, can a photograph also imbue a soul?

Sydney, Australia.- SOHO Galleries are pleased to present “Graeme Balchin: The Immaculate Perception”, on view at the gallery from February 4th through February 24th. Describing the works in the show, Graeme states: “Art is something that lives inside me, a thing that is vital to my well-being. It is a huge part of my everyday life and to be without it is something I could not comprehend.

A full time artist working mainly in oils and graphite, I choose the term “Imaginative Realist” to describe my style. I am mostly self taught but have learnt and studied in a great many places, so I am influenced by many but determined to stay true to my own style.I have found that I am a solitary person, not quit fitting in with mainstream demographics and therefore I live alone and am happy to do so; I feel most artists are this way. I often feel perhaps we are just a touch crazy”.

“I constantly look for meaning in my work; a story that can hide inside the painting. I find it hard to paint just a portrait of someone. My endeavour in life is to create a masterpiece – which I hope I will never do as it would signal the end of my desire to paint. I am fascinated by the changes in young women that have come about due to their freedom and equality, which I find an endless inspiration. Most of my figure work has come from this; the dawning of their own sensuality and how they work with it. The paintings I have created for this exhibition, “Immaculate Perception” are the culmination of a decade of working with two particular models, my stepdaughter Amy and her friend Alexandra. I started painting Amy at the age of twelve. She loved to pose and I painted her for the local regional art prize each year. She introduced me to Alex, who was equally keen to pose, and they became my main stay muses each year, winning me People’s Choice in 2009. After some time I became aware that I was capturing the lives of these two young women as they grew into adults.

Theirs was such a different experience to mine when I was young and yet strangely the same. As they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. I started playing with their ‘modern-ness’ and my era, bringing the two together, painting in a style that would bring out the feeling of them and not just the image. After you have studied a subject so long in painting it, you fall in love with every little detail. I like to paint so as to give the desire to touch the painting, the feel of the skin, or the material -  kind of 3D effect. I want to give the viewer the same feeling that I get when painting it; everything becomes so immaculate and the shapes are so beautiful you can not stop looking at them. Having known Amy and Alex so long I feel I can paint their personalities as well as their image. The two girls are quite different; Amy a little reserved, Alex more extrovert. I feel this shows in the paintings, not just in their images but also in the whole story of the work. Their sensuality shows in different ways. It has been a great delight to watch them obtain and recognize the power their looks have given them, and observe how they use this to get their way – how they throw it at me when they pose and then giggle at the knowledge of their suggestiveness. It is an amazing journey for them, and to be able to paint it is even more amazing. I hope the viewer can feel this also.

The only way to capture this emotion is with a high degree of realism but I am always aware of not losing a painterly effect. It lets the viewer see that the artwork has been created and crafted with emotion and thought; about how to capture the moment with narrative and symbology; how to make their temporality eternal. Most of my paintings carry a metaphor or symbolism, a story of a part of the lives of these young ladies. “Papiliophobia” – the fear of butterflies – the desire to be free, but with it comes the fear of the responsibility; the desire to leave the nest, crossed with their need for security. They want to go in search of far away castles but are hearing the warnings of danger.
http://www.sohogalleries.net

As part of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary’s community outreach program, the MAC has teamed up with Mercantile Coffee House to extend its contemporary artistic vision and educational support to downtown Dallas. This partnership will promote and support emerging talent with monthly exhibitions throughout the year. Donations from Mercantile Coffee House will benefit artistic programming at the MAC.

The upcoming exhibition at Mercantile Coffee House features Liz London’s Seeking Infinity. With the use of mixed media, Liz London presents an allegorical representation of personal adventures. Process becomes an important factor in London’s art making. Curiosities discovered from travel coalesced with painting, drawing, rubbing and collaging formulates the works on display. While working on various pieces collectively, the act of producing takes on a philosophical ceremony for London where mistakes are created, boundaries are pushed, questions are asked and icons are made.

Dallas based artist Liz London’s creative aspirations began as a child and flourished as the daughter of interior designers. London possesses a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Relations from the University of Central Oklahoma and has studied under artists such as Dorothy Moses, B.J. White, Carolyn Barnes and Mark Briscoe. In 2006, London established the work shop Connecting through Collage, where she applies visual and meditative exercises to foster creativity. Her work has been commissioned by the new Omni Hotel and most recently exhibited in the Art Hash Group Show at Kettle Art.

The opening reception for Liz London: Seeking Infinity will be Thursday, January 26, 2012 from 6:00 -7:30pm. The exhibition will be on view through February 25, 2012.
Mercantile Coffee House will host monthly exhibitions of a variety of emerging artists and media, enhancing the setting and experience for visitors. Through the MAC’s innovative efforts and artistic advisement, visitors to The Mercantile Coffee House will have the opportunity to view and interact with contemporary art in a non-traditional setting. This initiative is congruent with the MAC mission of supporting experimentation and promoting a visual dialogue between the artist and the viewer.

WHEN AND WHERE
Monthly at The Mercantile Coffee House
1800 Main Street Dallas, TX 75201
ABOUT THE MAC

Established in 1994, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) is a nonprofit
organization that stands as a Dallas advocate for creative freedom offering the opportunity for experimentation and presentation of art in all disciplines. It supports the emerging and established artist role in society providing a forum for critical dialogue with their audiences. This relationship is cultivated through education and innovative programming. The MAC is a member of Dallas Art Dealers Association and The Uptown Association.

Call 214-953-1212 for information or visit www.the-mac.org. The MAC is open Wednesday – Saturday 11 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.

ABOUT MERCANTILE COFFEE HOUSE
Mercantile Coffee House is a business hip place to have a great cup of premium coffee, espresso or tea. Mercantile Coffee House features the best coffee beans of 2010, Intelligentsia. It serves world famous Yogen Fruz frozen Yogurt and Smoothies made to your liking. The Mercantile Coffee House is a comfortable environment to enjoy the first cup of coffee for the day, a convenient place to meet with your colleagues or hook up with friends. It is also technology friendly with ample laptop plug ins, free high speed Wi-Fi and a Free Conference Room use for your more serious meetings. For a limited time only Mercantile Coffee House is offering the finest bean to bar chocolate in the US, Amano Chocolate. Visit Mercantile Coffee House online at

www.mchdallas.com

Eckart’s paintings have articulated a dialogue with sculpture since he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s. Thirty years later, he isn’t so much a painter or a sculptor as a meta-artist whose material propositions make us think and feel. “I consider my work to be a kind of philosophy of art articulated through the creation and manufacture of objects that embody particular sets of concerns,” he wrote regarding his 2011 exhibition “The Absurd Vehicle and Other Propositions” at theMcClain Gallery in Houston. He continued, “I do not think of the things I make as artworks but, rather, as propositions for, or potential, artworks. Ultimately my feeling is that art is a verb and is something that occurs in the space between a percipient and any device that might be found occupying a space where things generally known as artworks tend to show up.”

The Toronto “perturbation” acknowledges the need to communicate with both groups and individual spectators in a busy area. The entire work relates sculpturally to its large, containing space while also connecting more intimately with the body through its individual triangular panels; the painting makes sweeping gestures by virtue of its scale and vibrancy, but can also readily address a solo viewer because its faceted surface offers small-scale details, shards of a larger work that act like individual canvasses for a more personal gaze. These individual panels are identical from both sides, but as the piece as a whole angles in from either end, the geometrical grid softens to embrace the space, and it can never appear flat like a traditional painting. Complex in its design and fabrication (manufactured to Eckart’s exacting standards by Toronto’s Soheil Mosun Limited), the work’s considerable presence nonetheless comes from its simplicity. Hive Brane reminds us that painting addresses viewers both visually and physically; this carefully machined yet somehow organic colour-generator has the ability to move people.

Art in publicly accessible places should be effective for a broad range of viewers. The beauty of Eckart’s installation—its reflective and translucent qualities, its vibrant yet finely tuned palette, its geometrical rhythms—can satisfy the casual passerby as well as the connoisseur of abstract painting and sculpture. If it remains the case that many people come to art expecting to see a demonstration of skill and authorship, his work again makes good. By examining an Eckart piece up-close, one can readily appreciate its distinctive details: for example, the unique design qualities of the aluminum armature that supports the glass panels in the St. Mike’s work. Translucent colours and hard support exist in delicate equilibrium. No two triangles are identical; there is no repeating pattern. It’s clear how this bodywork of complex angles and brackets holds the glass panels, yet, at the same time, the colour soars free.

Though calibrated to specific buildings, Eckart’s works also deliver the pleasures of connection with the international art world. For those familiar with the recent history of art, the pieces are replete with carefully considered affinities. Eckart has spelled out the associations. In 2003, he organized an exhibition called “Space Vehicles: Allusion Objectified” in Houston, bringing together eight artists who, in his words, “represent some of the more interesting, albeit disparate, markers in the terrain of post-abstract and post-pop or non-pop artistic production. They break down unrigorously into two groups—a ‘senior’ group including Donald Judd, John McCracken, Imi Knoebel and Marc Vauxand a ‘junior’ group comprised of Julia Mangold, Julian Opie, Gerwald Rockenschaub and myself.” On this external axis, too, his works are propositions, questions. As he reported in another text from 2002, “I am an artist who emerged, arguably, at the end of the history of painting and the end of the history of abstraction. My relationship to both is what I would call archeological and anthropological. My interest in the tropes of abstraction and the imperatives that drove both their development and reception is the way in which they can be used to describe the civilization from which they emerged and evolved.”

Middle spread for “Beyond the Wall” by Mark Cheetham, Canadian Art, Winter 2012, pp 116–20

Eckart’s installations are beautiful—no question—but what of their self-titled quality of “perturbation”? We might inquire about the implied unease, and question to what ends they aim to unsettle us. In some of Eckart’s earlier paintings—the dark and deep Power Chord Cycle(1989–90), now in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, or his exquisitely honed Curved Monochromes (1992–ongoing), whose polished surfaces seductively reflect the viewer’s presence—beauty is something of a Trojan Horse, a vehicle for the penetration of our consciousness. Following the lead of the Danish intellectual Tor Nørretranders in The User Illusion (1991), Eckart believes that “most of what goes on in a person’s brain doesn’t emerge in their consciousness.” To access this level of submerged awareness, Eckart effectively extends the selectivity of consciousness in his art, culling the customary fascination with superficial visual information to forge an aesthetic—but never aestheticized—distillate of our perceptions, emotions and fundamental nature. In an unfinished, unpublished text, Eckart comes close to Nørretranders’s thoughts; he suspects that “much of our response to an artwork…is not informational in nature, but rather poetic and/or exformational.” Similarly, Eckart muses, our reaction to works of art “seems to take place non-consciously, with only a small fraction of the impressions actually filtering through to conscious awareness.” His new works seek to engage us on this level.

The visual and technical refinements needed to achieve this quality of depth can seem less important once they have reminded us of our unconscious selves. For Eckart, “beauty” may be a necessary function in gaining access to a deeper property: the sublime, or what he often refers to as a “meta-sublime.” If these works deflect us from our usual unthinking aesthetic habits and give us access to new levels of sophistication or profundity, it is arguably because of what some scientists suggest are analogies—even homologies—between perceptual and neurological geometries and the worlds we perceive and build. Put simply, we may literally see through hexagons. In her 2007Echo Objects, the University of Chicago art historian Barbara Maria Stafford claims that “there appears to be an echoic relationship between the carpentered outer world of edges and our staked-out mind-brain.”

Do Eckart’s perturbations resonate with us because parts of the brain “echo” the structures of geometric abstraction and vice versa? Could this echoic stimulation produce and explain the effect of the sublime, that awe-inspiring sense of connection with and diminutiveness in the presence of the cosmic? These are momentous questions. Eckart’s works have not been as readily visible in Canada as those who appreciate his art might wish. While his pieces are found in several public and private collections in this country, and while he has shown periodically in Calgary and Toronto, his new installation allows us to engage with his ideas on a different plane. A permanent work has the advantage of soliciting interactions under varying circumstances and over time—interactions that include its evolving relationship to other large-scale urban art. If Hive Brane effectively develops the outside/inside, street/lobby interplay specifically for the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, the work could be placed in conversation with other ambitious, accessible artworks.

At the moment, such a conversation is eminently possible in downtown Toronto, thanks to James Turrell’s Straight Flush (2009), installed in the lobby of the Bay Adelaide Centre, a few blocks from St. Mike’s. The artists’ works share several qualities. Both pieces are prominent from the street and inside their respective architectural contexts. They are semi-public, space-defining sculptural works that depend on light for their effect. And both assert the transformative potency of art. Turrell’sStraight Flush consists of five large, vertical, rectangular fields of colour recessed into a massive marble wall and facing a glass curtain wall; changes in hue and intensity across the five elements are accomplished by artificial backlighting. Each recessed light field can be viewed as singular, or as in concert with the others. While Turrell says that the glowing panels “work in a sequence, together,” his work—however kinetic—feels very much like a series of paintings. Eckart’s nearby Hive Brane is more palpably sculptural.

Eckart’s personal, unpublished notes on his practice resonate with his Toronto work, located in a hospital research institute. He writes, “It has always been my belief that the most radical qualities of artworks, over the long term, are the perennial ones: beauty, grace, elegance, dignity, simplicity, depth, slowness and benevolence. If we consider the conceit of avant-garde practice in general, that certain gestures are somehow for the good of the community, what, then, is the nature of a healingartwork?” Glass Hexagonal Perturbation – “Hive Brane” is an answer. Its healing potential lies in its ability to reduce and reorganize excess visual and corporeal stimulation precisely through these perennial but all too rare qualities. It aims to harmonize with—and thus strengthen—the fundamental elements of our perceptual apparatus. It is an encouragement to take reorganized ways of seeing back into a communal space.

Closing page for “Beyond the Wall” by Mark Cheetham, Canadian Art, Winter 2012, pp 116–20

The Annual Acadia Art Exhibition celebrates visual creativity in our community. This non-juried art exhibition features the diverse work of gallery members.

Information on how to submit your work:

21st Annual Show – Information.pdf

Submission Form:

21st Annual Show – Submission.pdf

Submission Dates: January 8 & 9th: 10-4pm