ART JOURNEY: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art

ART JOURNEY: 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
By Jorge Jefferds April 19, 2016

25 days or maybe less time is what you have to attend this magical event that takes place every two years in Adelaide, Australia. Magic is the main subject in this opportunity. Drawing inspiration from the ‘Wunderkammer’ those rooms or cabinets of wonder dedicated to the display of magical objects, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art champions the contemporary artist as conjuror.

Brookman Building, Freemasons Lodge

With attendant meanings and manifestations, including contemporary artists’ interests in the talismanic, in cultural rituals and material riddles, this exhibition offers the ‘Wunderkammer’ as a tool with which to view the world, and critique it as well. Since 1990, the Adelaide Biennial remains the country’s longest-standing survey of contemporary Australian Art. The 2016 iteration is the most ambitious yet, unfolding across an unprecedented number of venues in Adelaide, including the Art Gallery, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art at UniSA, JamFactory, Carrick Hill, and the Santos Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

Ranging in age from 28 to 105 years, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial includes the following artists:
Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Glenn Barkley, Chris Bond, Pepai Jangala Carroll, Tarryn Gill, Louise Haselton, Juz Kitson, Loongkoonan, Fiona McMonagle, Danie Mellor, Clare Milledge, Tom Moore, Nell, Ramesh Mario-Nithiyendran, Bluey Roberts, Kate Rohde, Gareth Sansom, Robyn Stacey, Garry Stewart and the Australian Dance Theatre, Jacqui Stockdale, Heather B. Swann, Hiromi Tango, Roy Wiggan, Tiger Yaltangki and Michael Zavros.

Magic Object is accompanied by a lively event program of tours, talks and workshops; a vernissage weekend as part of the opening program; activities for kids and families and an exhibition publication. In brief, here is some description of a few artists.

1) Abdul-Rahman Abdullah
A five meter long perahu carries an uncannily life-like effigy of the artist, guided by a hand carved polychrome rooster. Titled Merantau, 2015, a word that describes one who seeks fortune and adventure away from their homeland, this sculptural installation by Perth-based artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah was inspired by a research visit to South Sulawesi where Abdullah was able to trace up to eighteen generations of his Bugis heritage. Just as his ancestors sought new shores to ply their trade in the straits of South East Asia, Abdullah conjures his own journey, surrounded by totems of good fortune. Abdullah’s material magic has been honed through years of experience in the creation of sculptural dioramas and tableaux for tourist attractions. This desire to invent worlds, to push towards the dioramic, towards dream narratives and model worlds evokes the spirit of the ‘Wunderkammer’ as a microcosm of the universe. Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s work Merantau is on display in Gallery 23 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object.

Merantau

2) Fiona McMonagle 
Coupled with her soft and muted watercolor paintings, Melbourne-based Fiona McMonagle, with the assistance of her technician brother Declan, has included an animation created from her paintings for Magic Object. Given that humans have bodies composed largely of water; this seems a natural direction – to give life to the inanimate – for McMonagle. Her animation includes one thousand drawings of figures engaging in a natural setting. As these watercolors seamlessly move across the screen their aqueous images awaken. As anthropologist Loren Eiseley noted ‘If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water’, McMonagle’s works confirm this statement as they convey the wonder and diversity of the watercolor medium. Public parks, much like curiosity cabinets, emerged from the desire of pre-Renaissance royalty and aristocracy to proclaim wealth and status. In McMonagle’s animation, figures joyously engaging with their natural environment affirm how magic can occur in the liminal realm of the public park. Behaviors shift and attitudes change in the uncanny theatre of the park. Fiona McMonagle’s work will be on display in Galleries 9 and 10 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object.

Ginger Tom

3) Glenn Barkley 
With a long career as a curator, Sydney artist Glenn Barkley brings with him an extensive knowledge of art history and a specific interest in those outside and overlooked by the art historical canon. His choice of ceramics as his preferred medium speaks to this investment in the dismissed and downgraded. In his ambitious installation Temple of the Worm (2016) Barkley pays homage to the seventeenth-century Danish physician and collector Ole Worm, whose ‘Wunderkammer’, named Museum Wormianum, encompassed an extraordinary array of objects – from a puffer fish suspended from the ceiling to ethnic artillery. Barkley’s tribute to Worm can be found in his decision to craft his own space – his own room of wonders – populated by ceramics with worm-like or vermicular surfaces. In the words of catalogue essayist Ted Snell, ‘ordering information, linking ideas, arranging objects and images, creating new relationships, all these elements are at the core of the creative process, and all are used to impart a message or to engage the viewer in pondering our relationship to objects and their potential to shape our lives’. Glenn Barkley’s work will be on display in Gallery 22 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object.

Carbuncle pot with drooping polyp

4) Kate Rohde 
Kate Rohde’s large cast–resin sculptures and furniture are positioned against her pulsating psychedelic wall treatments in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s vestibule during Magic Object. This incandescently colored twenty-first century Wunderkammer recalls the baroque taste for ornamentation and dramatic decoration. Tables, chairs and vessels sprout animal parts and synthetic pelts adorn sculptural chimera. Selecting synthetic, rather than natural materials, Rohde questions the traditional practices of collecting natural history specimens and the power assigned to these items in traditional cabinets of curiosity. With their zoomorphic elements and wild and daring colors, Rohde’s contributions to Magic Object exude a theatricality that is both wild and hypnotic. Kate Rohde’s zoomorphic lair extends from the Art Gallery of South Australia’s vestibule into The Studio where the immersive experience continues.

Ornament Crimes

5) Pepai Jangala Carroll 
Although based for decades in Pukatja, in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northern South Australia, Pepai Jangala Carroll was born in Haast’s Bluff in his father’s country near Walungurru (Kintore) in the Northern Territory. While he has been painting for a number of years, it is only of late that he has begun to also create objects. Both his paintings and his ceramic offerings exude extraordinary powers. It is through his practice that Carroll conjures up Luritja/Pintupi country, merging his deep knowledge and custodial responsibilities of country into these wondrous works of art. Like a spell, the use of the recurring title, Walungurru, adds strength to this evocation, whether referring to his beautifully colored ceramic forms or his aesthetically minimalistic paintings. In his thrown ceramic form, Walungurru (2015) Carroll has incised intricate patterns and layered various tones of majestic blues to construct a highly individual and original interpretation of landscape and country. The vessel both commands with its profoundness, and enthralls with its wonder. Pepai Jangala Carroll’s work is on display in Gallery 23 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object.

Walungurru

6) Robyn Stacey
Using the camera obscura Sydney-based artist Robyn Stacey depicts the city of Adelaide as it has never been seen before. Translating from Latin to mean ‘dark room’ the camera obscura is an optical device of wonder, whereby the external world is trapped and inverted within the room. In this ongoing project, Stacey has selected many sites across the city, including Carrick Hill, the SAHMRI Building, The Cedars, Parliament House, Port Adelaide, the Brookman Building at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Institute Building, and has converted them into a temporary camera obscura. These seven locations have been transformed into a magical theatre where the world outside becomes a magic object. In the artist’s own words these bewildering photographs become ‘a mash up of inside and outside’. Comfort Inn Riviera – SAHMRI Building (2015) presents an unexpected view of the Woods Bagot award-winning building for medical research on North Terrace. As writer Craig Judd notes ‘In a seemingly generic hotel room a weird dirigible resides, coming to life for a brief time each day’. While our eyes first register the image upside down it is our brain that, in some mysterious way, finally turns the view around. Both our senses, and the photograph, allude that things are not always what they seem at first. Robyn Stacey’s camera obscura photographs will be on display in Gallery 7 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object. A live camera obscura can be experienced at Carrick Hill for the duration of the Adelaide Biennial.