Recent, Current and Upcoming
Paul Bai - Pestorius Sweeney House
Dan Graham - ROCK MY RELIGION - Other Locations
Normana Wight - Minimal Painting - Pestorius Sweeney House
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Paul Bai
31 July - 28 August 2010
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane
David Pestorius is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Brisbane artist Paul Bai. It is Bai’s fifth one-person show at the Pestorius Sweeney House since 2001 and will focus on the artist’s video production.
The centrepiece of the show is a new work conceived especially for the house: a looping video of a partly cloudy sky projected onto the abundant glazing of the exhibition space with diagonal strips left clear so the viewer can see through. Only visible at night to passers-by in the street, projected space and real space co-exist in a work that playfully engages the blurring of inside and outside, which is perhaps the quintessential feature of the architecture.
The exhibition also includes two other recent video works incorporating table and shelf-like elements. Like the space-related work, they reflect Bai’s interest in spatial opposites and extremes. Often involving a sly humour, these ostensibly simple works have the capacity to activate complex meditations on questions of private and public, site and non-site, here and there, present and future, reality and illusion, art and life. They are themes evident in Bai’s earliest videos, which were first exhibited at the 2003 edition of the Art Forum Berlin and are again presented here. A group of four vignettes, they are, in fact, typical of Bai’s work generally in its tendency to confound expectation and first appearances.
Paul Bai was born in Tianjin, China in 1968. He migrated to Australia in 1988 and graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 1995. Since 1996 Bai has had several one-person exhibitions in Australia and internationally, including at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art in 2002 and at the Ausstellungsraum Ursula Werz, Tübingen in 2004 and 2006. Over the years, the artist's work has also featured in a number of group shows, including 1+1+1 at Yuill/Crowley (2004), TURRBAL-JAGERA at the UQ Art Museum (2006), and Primary Views at the Monash University Museum of Art (2008).
The assistance of MAAP Media Bank in the realisation of this exhibition is gratefully acknowledged.
Dan Graham - ROCK MY RELIGION (1982-84)
video, 55 minutes, black and white & colour, stereo sound
Thursday, 29 April, 6-8pm
Cinema A, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Screening + Dan Graham in conversation with David Pestorius
"Basically I would just go up to Dan's apartment and we would talk about music every day" (Thurston Moore)
"One of the most important texts on the theory of rock music" (Diedrich Diedrichsen)
"Rock My Religion marks this point where he really went beyond the white page and the beautiful type-set design of conceptual art." (Tony Oursler)
"... it was magic, and there is a point at which magic goes away, and then it just became music again" (Glenn Branca)
"I always thought it was about architecture" (Kim Gordon)
"A work of anthropology" (Dan Graham)
Dan Graham's visit to Australia was initiated by David Pestorius Projects and made possible with the assistance of The Australia Council for the Arts, Queensland University of Tehnology, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, OtherFilm and The Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art.
Normana Wight - Minimal Painting
10 April - 8 May 2010
Pestorius Sweeney House
39 Eblin Drive, Hamilton, Brisbane
The Field has seminal status in the history of Australian art. It was the first exhibition to be held in the new Roy Grounds’ designed National Gallery of Victoria, and was the first time a major art museum in Australia hosted a large national survey of contemporary art. Opening in August 1968, this groundbreaking show, which featured the latest developments in abstract art, included the work of 40 mostly young artists (the average age was 30).
The Field included a diverse range of abstract tendencies, from Post-painterly abstraction to Pop and Minimal-Conceptual work, although the dominant critical paradigm, as reflected by the catalogue essays, was the formalist rhetoric of New York critic Clement Greenberg. Espousing an approach that underscored the flatness of the canvas and shape of the support, Greenberg and his followers promoted an optical art that sought to overcome illusion and reference, and, above all, shunned duration. For them, “presentness” was grace, whereas the active experience of time was more properly the domain of theatre, and not art.
The Brisbane artist Normana Wight (b. 1936), was one of only three women included in The Field. Both embracing and defying the Greenbergian line, Wight’s severely vertical shaped canvas was amongst the most theatrical works in the exhibition: it demanded that the viewer take action, either through tilting their head or self-consciously adjusting their vision, up and down, in order to take it all in. At the same time, the shape and composition of the painting was the embodiment of the formalist critics' idea of deductive structure. Yet for all this, Wight has been consistently overlooked in the institutional reappraisals of The Field, including such important exhibitions as The Field Now (MoMA at Heide, Melbourne, 1984), and Fieldworks (NGV, Melbourne, 2004).
This small exhibition is designed to begin the process of overcoming this art historical blight, and to reassert the importance of Wight’s early minimalist achievement. Comprising a single multi-panel canvas, which was originally shown at Melbourne’s Crossley Gallery in 1970, its shape and composition of vibrating colour bands recall Wight’s painting from The Field. However, rather than being vertical, the orientation of Wight’s painting is emphatically horizontal. The flat screen-printed surface of the painting also reflects the Minimalist withdrawal traditional painterly subjectivity and embrace of mechanical procedures. It also points to Wight’s move into print making, the field in which the artist is today best known, both as a practitioner and as a teacher.
This exhibition is held in association with grahame galleries + editions. For further information, contact David Pestorius on (07) 3262 4870.