Image: James Tylor Aotearoa my Hawaiki #6 2015, courtesy the artist and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne; GAG Projects, Adelaide; and Stills Gallery, Sydney.
CCP reopens this week for 2016 with exhibitions in four galleries and a new installation in the night projection window
Exhibition Dates: Exhibitions 5 February–24 March.
Opening Thursday 4 February 6–8pm
Free Artist and Curator Floor Talks: Saturday 6 February 2016, 12pm
James Tylor, Christopher Day, Janina Green, Naomi Cass, Pippa Milne and Caroline Garcia.
This is a great opportunity to hear the artists talk about their work first hand, ask questions and find out more about their practice.
GALLERY ONE James Tylor | Aotearoa my Hawaiki
Aotearoa, my Hawaiki explores the Polynesian Māori concept of Hawaiki. Hawaiki is the ancestral homeland and/or island where Māori people came from before migrating to Aotearoa (New Zealand). For New Zealand Māori people the actually physical place of Hawaiki is ‘Avaiki Nui’ (The Cook Islands). As an Australian of Maori descent I have always had an ideological connection to Aotearoa because it is the place where my Māori ancestors came from before migrating to Australia, so for myself a Maori Australian my Hawaiki or ancestral homelands is Aotearoa.
GALLERY TWO Christopher Day | New Reading Order
New Reading Order brings together imagery from the artist’s own photographic archive, combining myriad unexpected historical and contemporary ideas that do not function as a narrative or series. Rather than seeking to communicate one reading, the artist asks viewers to interpret each image according to their own reading of it without the need to find clear rationale or logical reasoning.
New Reading Order defies easy categorisation, presenting the viewer with images that sardonically resist glib understanding or summary appreciation. Photo-collages sit alongside photographs. Visual puns may be found. New Reading Order fosters a certain ambiguity through elements of surrealism and humour to form an allegorical vision with a sophisticated, nonsensical edge.
GALLERY THREE Janina Green | Dark Matters: Selected photographs by Janina Green, Curated by Naomi Cass & Pippa Milne
Photographic theorist, Ariella Azoulay speaks of photography as an event. For Janina Green, such events (rather than photographs of events) have lent structure to her life. From her vast oeuvre, this selection of images is representative of aspects of Green’s, eclectic and experimental practice over a 30-year period as she made observations about domesticity, motherhood, reading, teaching, sexual politics, theory and psychology.
To accompany the exhibition, Green has produced a candid set of notes, both technical and personal, which offer an unusual level of insight into the work and give context to the artist and her environment as she made them.
Janina Green is represented by M.33, Melbourne
GALLERY FOUR Caroline Garcia | Primitive Nostalgia
Caroline Garcia is a culturally promiscuous, performance maker. She works across live performance and video by borrowing tradition, sampling popular culture, translocating ritual, and blurring genres.
Garcia engages with a brown body politic that reimagines the complexities of her indigenous Filipino heritage and colonised ancestry. Her practice is shaped by alterity, cultural ambiguity and displacement, drawing from an abstraction of her dance practice in Afro-Latin and Caribbean, tribal South-East Asian and Polynesian methods of movement, as well as twerking aesthetics.
Primitive Nostalgia works with these ideas to proffer a video performance that sees the artist inserted into a range of dance performances, adopting costumes and moves so as to integrate into each scenario. A candid use of stereotypes and a chameleonic ability to assimilate allows to her to comment from within each cultural framework.
This work is present as part of the Virgin Australian Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program Project Series presented by Buro 24/7.
NIGHT PROJECTION WINDOW Kate Mitchell | Beyond Setting Suns
In the video Beyond Setting Suns the artist is seen infinitely jumping through large-scale prints of sunsets. The images, scans of picturesque holiday postcards, loom large as representations of perceived perfect moments. These idyllic locations, seen as rewards for toiling away at work, are presented as places where worries dissipate and stress is non-existent. However, all is not so in paradise.
In the artist’s quest to reach such a utopia, to get to the perfect sunset, the spell is broken, lost and seemingly beyond reach. She crashes through the paper not into the scene; leaving only the darkness beyond the fantasy to linger.
There is a subconscious analytical thread inherent in Beyond Setting Suns, a deep mining of internal worlds. However, in the face of disillusionment, there still remains hope that something wondrous will be revealed, in any given moment.
Kate Mitchell is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney and Melbourne.