the materiality of emptiness

if i mention Einstein will you stop reading this? will it put you off? well, frankly, it's too late for that because there he is, sitting fourth in line of the first sentence. and what's more, here he comes again.

Einstein had this theory that 'empty space' can possess its own energy. those great big expanses of 'nothingness' filling up the gaps between the stars, or the gaps between and inside atoms - maybe they're not empty spaces at all.

for all we know about the universe, the things we observe on earth and in space, we think that we probably have a very rough awareness (not even an understanding) of about 5% of it. by our best, most contemporary estimates, we think that maybe there's about 70% of the universe made up of this mysterious force we call, for want of a better term, 'dark energy', and 25% of a mysterious material we call 'dark matter'.

for me, there's a parallel here with art. we make art to explore and express the great mysteries of the unknown. artists are out there, in the big open expanses of 'the universal void', scrambling about in the dark, piecing things together out of materials and non-materials to try and shed some light on our reality.

Hubble telescope's 3D model map of dark matter

dark matter_dark energy is a constellation of artists who reflect this way of thinking about art practice. each, in their own unique way, with their own unique approaches, grapple with the unknowable void and the forces and materials that make it up. and the reason for bringing their work together into a curated group show format is to play further on that idea of 'empty space possessing energy'. because in a group show situation, sitting between each work in the gallery, is a vast openness of space. the actual paintings, sculptures and screens take up about 5% of the gallery. it's the in-between space where the audience walks around, where the lights cast their illuminating glow and the ideas about the works bounce off each other, combine, repel and play, that constitutes the 95% of 'empty' space made up of something not unlike dark matter, dark energy.

in quantum theory (now if Einstein didn't put you off, i hope quantum physics won't either) there's a thought that maybe dark energy is actually a big mess of particles that continually form and then disappear. imagine that, trillions upon trillions of particles popping into existence, only to instantly disappear again. constantly. like ideas.

another thought is that maybe it's a type of liquid that we haven't figured out how to measure. or maybe a field, like magnetism.

dark matter, on the other hand, seems more likely to be some sort of actual material, just not detectable to our instruments. one of the theories is that it's particles called ... i love this ... 'weakly interacting massive particles' (WIMPs).

anyway - let's get back to art here. this isn't a science blog for crying out loud.
(in space, no one can hear you scream).

here's my take on the works of each individual artist, and why i see a relationship to the ideas above. each artist has their own ideas, of course, and their own expectations about what they're doing. like distant galaxies working their own orbital fields of planetary combinations. i'm just one observation point, trying to decipher the patterns in the void.

Michael Needham

Michael Needham, intra limen

what volume of space is death? what empty hole is left by a life dissolved? Michael has taken a casting of the depression left in the ground when a grave site sinks into the earth. his sculpture is an absence made present. this is a void made material. he's presented it like a relic, a museum piece, as if it's a casting from the print of a dinosaur or the inside of a sarcophagus. it's a monument, and it's monumental. and yet, the grave from which it was taken, is unmarked. an unknown death. an unremarked absence.

Michael's use of dental plaster reinforces thoughts of the human body. while the sculpture is a material translation of a hole in the ground, a sort of landscape art, it's also a sort of portrait. and in death, it's not uncommon to turn to dental evidence when in need of attributing an identity.

the plaster itself, with its bubbling, rippling and also eroded feel to it, evokes the landscape. not unlike sandstone or limestone it's like rock formations you see at beaches and along coastlines. and this tension between landscape and portraiture spins off ideas about belonging to the land, of being part of the land - dust to dust, we are all made of stars.


Nicholas Ives

Nicholas Ives, The Slow Story of the Felling

the darkly psychological portraits that Nicholas produces speak of the inner depths of the human mind. in the same way that some philosophers claim our grappling for knowledge about the universe is simply a grappling of knowledge about ourselves, these portraits reflect the unfathomable recesses of the psyche. the subjects in the paintings emerge from shadowy backgrounds, their outlines obscured by the darkly rich layering of oils. their facial features blend into their surroundings, and their surroundings become palpable. the shadows, the backgrounds, they become material. heavy, soupy atmospheres.

staring into portraits is always in some sense staring into reflections of ourselves. we're hardwired to look for signals in the human face, for recognisable familial traits and for symbols of communication. having sat with the portraits for a little while now, i've been noticing their changing characters. from different angles they seem either sad, haunting, frightening or melancholy. the way in which they're painted means they're almost alive as you move about the gallery space. and with three together on the wall there's a whole assortment of relationships or communications between the group that you can't help but wonder about. what are they whispering to each other when i'm not in the room?


Sally Blenheim

Sally Blenheim, Fire

Sally uses light as if it’s a material entity. and then there’s gravity. oh, we mustn’t forget there’s also electrical energy. the precariously teetering form is an exercise in balancing force.

there’s a precarious and tense balance between tangible and intangible materials - a cone of fluorescent tubes and the weight of light that cone produces around itself, electrical cabling that supplies both physical support and pulses of energy, gravity that pulls it all together while all the while trying to pull the whole thing down.

light changes the atmosphere of the space, blurring the hard boundary of the gallery walls and emitting a glow that dyes the air with energy. and you’ll have to enter the rest of the show through this luminous fog and be bathed by it on the way out.


Tristan Jalleh

 

Tristan Jalleh, Verge 2 (video still)

the cyclical nature of universal forces, of destruction and creation, are poetically expressed in the throbbing plumes of smoke of Verge 2. floating in an expanse of endless white, looping infinitely like a breathing galaxy, the beauty of this video work is in its simplicity. a simplicity of complex relations.

a stadium is destroyed. a circular platform for viewing. In the centre of any given stadium is where the action traditionally takes place. the field of play. some 20-odd human bodies, jostling about, like a molecule of different atoms. Following rules, behaving collectively, behaving competitively. and yet around that open field, sits thousands of spectators. observers whose very act of observing influences the outcome of play. oh look, it's our old friend, quantum mechanics again.

and here we are, watching it all on a screen. spectators observing the destruction of a spectator structure. on a spectator structure. A destruction now rendered as a creation.


Jacques Soddell

The visible patterns of sound waves, Bell Laboratories

nothing quite fills an empty void like sound. rippling waves of air pulsating across the room, tickling the hairs inside your ears. when you think about it, sound doesn't exist in the air. only little waves in the air exist. that noise we hear - that's only inside our brains. that's our brain translating vibration into tone. the 'sound' is only inside our heads.

Jacques knows how to manipulate vibration, how to make sound a spatial material. stand in different parts of the gallery and you'll get a different physical feeling caused by his sounds. he is technically minded and the thoughts behind his work are compelling:
In 1916 Einstein suggested that there is no such a thing as empty space. Similarly John Cage’s 4’33” (1951) was about lack of silence. Even black holes emit a sound - the sound of B flat, 57 octaves lower than middle-C, is rumbling away from a supermassive black hole in the Perseus cluster. So this piece is also about lack of emptiness. When discussing the “empty” universe (Dark Matter & Dark Energy), astro scientists talk about MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), but I have uncovered LAMBS (lucid aggregates of mobile baryonic sounds), and these form the basis of my piece. Granular synthesis of white noise is the main source producing both particulate and continuous sounds, but is interrupted by the throbbing of B flat, the note detected in black holes (although here it is 54 octaves higher (29.135Hz) to make it audible, and is modulated by a couple of other sine waves). A Higgs-like glissando makes a brief appearance on the Bose-on sound system.

WARNING: low frequencies occur.


Adam John Cullen

Adam John Cullen's cluster of sculptures (foreground)

Adam’s cluster of sculptures on the floor reads like a constellation of phrases arranged in a chemical molecule. if you move any one of the component parts the force that binds them as a unit is disrupted and realigns with a new feeling that fine-tunes an effect in your stomach.

balance is temporally important, temporarily. always undercut by a force that appears as both an archive of its
action and the tension of its reappearance. the cluster sits as a mini-reflection of the whole show. centred in the space, an arrangement carefully placed, it is a pattern of a pattern. an echo of the placement of 6 artists' work in the gallery. a fractal of a pattern of a resonance.

the hand of the individual artist is also ever present. these are objects that have been conspicuously acted on. the hovering ghost of the hands laid upon these forms is in the room. and the probability of more clumsy hands about to get at them lurks in the shadows.


 - - - - - - - - - - - -

the exhibition runs until 5 August.


(Michael Needham appears courtesy of Daine Singer Gallery)

mid winter art

this is the second time i've called on damon albarn to provide a soundtrack to an art opening video piece. i wonder what that means. i do know he collects art. i like him for that. i would have put jacques soddell's sound piece on here, but really, it just wouldn't do it justice because you have to immerse yourself in that sound.

anyway - here's a snippet of an opening night launch. if you haven't been to one, you should totally change that.

art warms the air

in the dead middle of winter, with rain and wind and chill biting at your bones, there's few things as heart warming as dozens and dozens of people turning up to look closely at the creative work of talented people. artists who, more often than not, work at multiple jobs, pour funds into projects that offer limited hope of financial return but plug away obsessively producing beautiful and captivating sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs and sounds just for us to engage with.

i know i have vested interests in this, but it still always amazes me. sitting in studios, sitting in bedrooms, standing at easels, investing time into creating work. making art is not working for a wage. you can't clock in and claim $25 an hour for your time. and then, to add more tension to the process, putting themselves and the public opinion of their work on the line, for anyone to come and stand in front of and say, 'my kid could do that'. but .... hopefully... you'll get the occasional 'wow, that's amazing' or 'shit, i never thought of that' or watch someone stand in front of your work mesmerised, saying 'what? you made that video of an exploding stadium out of still photos? and the plumes of smoke are pyroclastic gas from volcanoes? holy fuck that's cool'.

so, last night, with freezing central highlands air driving all and sundry for the comfort of their doonas, a happy, warm and excited crowd milled about the spaces of the galleries, talking about the artists and their work, and noone even noticed it was cold anymore. it's so accurate that in our language we use the term 'warmth' to describe relationships between people.

we warmly invite you. that warms my soul. you warm my heart.

anyway - last night was great fun. i managed to get some snaps of the event, in between chatting about the work and catching up with people. and while i'm here, again with confessed vested interest, if you want to put some warmth into your life, put a little warmth into the life of others too, i can show you some seriously amazing creative work, by some amazingly creative people, that would look amazing in your house or workspace. seriously. some of these guys are going to be huge.

end of rant.

start of photos.

Ross Taylor

Sally Blenheim 

Nicholas Ives

 

Michael Needham

John Barter

Ross Taylor

the long shadow cast by a needham

michael needham's a lovely chap. and he makes amazing things, amazingly well. he'll be one of the artists in the next show, which is being hung quite literally as i write this. he also has a big solo show on over at the La Trobe Visual Arts Centre in Bendigo - 'the VAC'. it's everything you want from a great show - clever ideas, executed skillfully. he can draw like nobody's business and he can produce sculptures you can't help but return to, your mind captivated with questions and engagement.

i was at the launch where it was opened by australian painting icon, Euan Heng who made some salient points about the development of an artist and the long road to achieve success. and the wonderful folk at Das Platforms have just published a review i wrote of the show. click on the image below to go on through:

Michael Needham, Unmarked #3. 2012. Dental plaster, steel.

Meet Your Maker - Michael Needham

Michael Needham is a Melbourne-based artist and academic. He lectures in Fine Arts at the Monash and Australian Catholic Universities. His practice primarily incorporates sculptural installation, drawing and increasingly, “architectural intervention”.

Right, 'Untitled diptych (for Moments of Being)', 2004.

‘Curious Duality’ is an exhibition of drawing, sculpture and “architectural intervention”, in which artist Michael Needham probes a relationship between representation and death, through a visual and spatial exploration of body-space and trace.

It will be on display in the Stockroom gallery from April 16 - May 15, 2011.

In the show, Needham will stage a conversation with his 'audience', around the site of the body and its potential to reveal a sense of both ‘wonderment’ and ‘lack’.

It's a new and recent body of work by the artist, where, in his words, "multiple forms of representation are proposed by which the parameters of ‘the self’ might be explored."

Curious?!

Michael Needham enjoyed answering some questions about 'Curious Duality' for Stockroom...

Stockroom: What inspired ‘Curious Duality’?

Michael Needham: 'Curious Duality' has come about after an exhibition I had late last year titled 'Contours of the Self' at Light Projects in Northcote, Melbourne.

This show was my first solo since finishing my PhD and while I was still keen to extend on some persistent themes I’d been looking into for several years, for me it signaled a slight shift in subject matter and an important development in my practice.

For the current show at Stockroom I am pursuing a similar line of enquiry, but the space is bigger so I can basically fit more works in the gallery.

As far as what concept has actually inspired this show, it is many things. Though perhaps it is most consistently about the limitations of representation through objects which invoke bodily absence. It is also inspired by a peripheral inquiry into the subject of melancholia, that is, as a kind of a melancholic predicament that progresses in relation to the main theme/s.

SR: Can you give us a bit more detail about the 'conversation' you are having with your 'audience' in this show?

MN: What I have tried to do in this body of work is to stage a conversation between the separate works in the show. This is something that always happens anyway with a group of artworks sharing the same space, but I’ve considered it more intentionally because the form and medium of the artworks vary quite a lot. In fact a relationship between several works is partially suspended, at least from immediate recognition.

I anticipate that for the audience this will strategically point towards an underlying dialogue between the works and encourage people to linger with them for longer.

Of course this would only work practically if the artworks are appealing both aesthetically and conceptually - which I believe I have considered on multiple levels.

For instance there are subtle motifs and design features together with a prominent monochromatic palette, that hold drawings, sculptural objects and an underplayed architectural intervention together.

At the same time each of these works are presented as careful responses to complex ideas in themselves, in this case pertaining to ‘the self’ and its limits of representation as understood in a particular stream of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

SR: And what does the title of the show mean exactly?

MN: Titles are often really tricky to get right and sometimes there are a few options that can work equally well or be equally as restrictive in terms of condensing a large body of thought into several words.

Right, 'Hauntings of the Imaginary' by Michael Needham.

For 'Curious Duality' I’d have to say that it mainly refers to all of the works individually and collectively ‘mirroring’ the viewer. However this is meant to be more psychological than literal, even though there are some distinctly physical echoes of the dimensions of the body together with a kind of figural transference between human and animal.

SR: Why have you chosen the body as your primary site of exploration?

MN: It’s actually less about the body being a site of exploration than the site of the body being a crucial subject of exploration. This may sound like a trivial difference but it is enough to separate work that utilizes figurative representation or work that is about adornment of the figure, from work that essentially plays with either disfiguration or absence of the human figure.

For example a gravesite is an archetypal site of the body. It carries everything that is associated with the body, from its practical dimensions to its memorial function to its presage of mortality to even pictorial representation (of the deceased). But each of these features still point to an absent figure. They all define a space loaded with memory and therefore a space charged with the imaginative image. It is a space that facilitates – as much as is possible – an imaginative, commemorative, reassembling of the body that has become immaterial.

For me, that’s why this subject of the ‘site of the body’ is so closely related to death and the process of mourning. And that’s also why the very humanistic ideal of seeking a means of transcendence (or representation claimed as a marker – or means - of transcendence) from these basic limitations is never far away as an interconnected subject.

SR: And how many months have you been working on this show?

MN: Truthfully, every show I make is in some form or another a result of many years of an ongoing exploration. Although if I include the 'Contours' exhibition for which this show is a more direct extension, I guess it’s been about 18 months.

SR: Is it a difficult balancing act, teaching and continuing to practice as an artist?

MN: Not really, no more than being an artist with living expenses like everyone else. I find that teaching actually keeps me engaged with the experience of investigating, making and generally articulating ideas through creative means.

Above, 'Contours of the Self'' by Michael Needham.

Sometimes it would be nice not to work away from my own studio work but I can’t complain because as a sessional lecturer I have a lot of time off during semester breaks. And the pay rate is usually just enough to scrape through.

SR: What do you enjoy about teaching?

MN: I’d have to say the most enjoyable part about teaching is when there is genuine interest maintained by the student’s own dedication and teach-ability. Whether they struggle or not with their technique or expression, if they are focused and driven by an innate desire to learn and create, there is usually the most progress made and the rewards are clear for the student and teacher/s.

SR: And from being an artist - could you imagine your life without making art? What would you be doing instead?

MN: I can vaguely imagine not making art in the ‘fine art’ sense, although I’m not sure how happy I’d be. If I weren’t an artist I’d definitely be doing something practical or something with the freedom to explore, imagine and problem solve. Possibly this would be archeology.

SR: Is it difficult making a career from being an artist in Australia?

MN: Well, yes, if you mean making a living from it. Commercially I believe it is quite possible to make a living if one is prepared to strategically adapt their creative urges for the art market. But to make a satisfying career and to sustain this throughout one’s life, I think this is a necessarily idealistic pursuit.

SR: Where do you see yourself in five years time?

MN: I hope to be in a similar position only with more experience. If my artistic career has afforded me further creative opportunities in Australia and overseas, while sustaining a relatively simple family life, I certainly won’t be complaining.

SR: What kind of experience do you hope those who see 'Curious Duality' will take home with them from Stockroom?

MN: I’d like them to be 'curious' (as the title suggests!), to remember something from the show, for something to linger in their mind, whether that be a simple image or a more complex idea.

Right, 'Splash' by Michael Needham.

I hope they are haunted by something they saw, in a good way. I hope they take some idea, inspiration or rumination away with them, something that impresses on their mind. I like to think this is what a successful artwork or show does for viewers.

SR: Are you looking forward to this show at Stockroom?

MN: I am. Having moved to Kyneton mid-way through last year just before Stockroom had opened, it’s been quite exciting to follow what Jason and Magali have done. As an artist, it’s also plain to see that Stockroom - as a well considered and professionally presented contemporary art space - is definitely an asset to Kyneton and Regional Vic. It’s great to have the opportunity to have my work showcased here.

'Curious Duality' opens at Stockroom on Saturday April 16 at 4.30pm and continues until May 15.

Visit Michael Needham's website here.

Words: Megan Spencer & Michael Needham. Thanks to Michael Needham for the interview and pictures.