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Nana Ohnesorge
Emma Thomson
Monika Behrens
Rochelle Haley
Jonny Niesche
Drew Bickford
Adam Norton
Harriet Body
Ron Adams
Coordinated by George and Ron Adams
MOP
14.09.2011 - 01.10.2011
ZOOPLASTY
Zooplasty at Helen Gorie Galerie assembles a group of eight artists and collaborative
duo associated in varying ways with the artist-run initiative from Sydney, MOP Projects. Zooplasty refers to the surgical grafting of animal tissue to a human. If the diverse group of artists showing here relate to this word at all, it is through work that
loosely riffs on ideas of transference and exchange. And surely all artists relate to such
ideas as the act of art making fundamentally involves invention and inversion, conversion and conversation. Fittingly, this exhibition is part of an exchange between two galleries from different states and whose purposes (aside from showing art) are built on
dissimilar models. Unlike a commercial gallery ‘stable’ of artists, the roll-call of artists
in Zooplasty have been involved with MOP as directors, committee members, exhibitors, volunteers, and friends. Fufilling this exchange, Helen Gory Galerie are presenting a group exhibition of artists plucked from their stable at MOP in September 2011.
So who’s who in the zoo? Nana Ohnesorge recasts historic portraiture through
a stylistic hybrid of Romanticism and Pop. Her recent investigations into the iconography of Australiana was prompted by a pivotal moment in 2010 when the artist
realised she had lived as long in Australia as she had in Germany before migration.
This sense of cultural exchange animates her portraits of Ned Kelly – a figure widely represented in Australian art. Ohnesorge uses the image of the infamous outlaw to
question Australia’s overarching white view of history regarding invasion and settlement, along with our somewhat uncritical tendency to celebrate the white underdog
while issues arising from our relation to Indigenous Australians remain unresolved.
If Adam Norton’s work also could be said to engage an idea of historic portraiture,
the history evoked refers as much to the analogue technology of paint as it does
the subject of the portrait. Painters are our last bastions of the analogue, using pigment to speak a world now eclipsed by the pixel. In Norton’s universe the pre-digital
machine is as important as the trace of the hand that engineers it. Space visionaries P.K Dick (Sci-fi writer), Jill Tarter (UFO researcher) and Allen Hynek (SETI director) are for Norton, ‘heroes of the recent technological past whose contributions to
the public discourse go above and beyond the normal limits set by empirical science’.
Emma Thomson connects with ordinary suburban folk by placing newspaper classifieds
calling for amateur models. Thomson works closely with her sitters to realise portraits that
occupy and transcend the humdrum of daily life. Pictured in backyards or interiors with
loved ones and pets, Thomson’s subjects unselfconsciously welcome our gaze. In an age
where celebrity is bred from the most commonplace realms, Thomson’s work elevates
banality by shining a light on otherwise unknown lives. Coded in the gloss of shopping
centre glamour photography, Thomson’s work collapses authenticity, artifice and anonymity without compromising the ethical exchange maintained with her willing subjects.
The devil is in the detail for Drew Bickford whose intricate ink drawings are resplendent
with rotting flesh and tendrils. As much as a godless disregard permeates his monstrous forms, Bickford conjures theological doctrine about the ‘mortification of the flesh’
where Saint Paul instructed believers to put earthly desires of the flesh to death and
to live by the spirit. Cavorting organic creatures – bored of staid battles between good
and evil – rupture into parasitic fiends enraptured by their surreal capacity to disgust.
Harriet Body engages a less fleshy, though undeniably material facet of surrealism – automatism. The psychogeography of quotidian bus rides are documented through line drawings and audio recordings that ‘questions the autonomy
of the artist in the act of creation and renders the mechanized physical journey into
the material object’. The performative and time-based labour of an artist’s work
melds with the flights of fantasy and imagination absent-mindedness can bring.
Atropa belladonna is a toxic plant that has been dubbed Deadly Nightshade or Devil’s Berries. Historically its poisonous extract has been used for as hallucogens, surgical anasthetic
or as murder weapon. Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley’s Belladonna Bitch draws
on ancient witchcraft practices, among which include the use of belladonna as a ‘flying
ointment’when vaginally applied with a dildo. Meaning ‘beautiful woman’ in Italian, belladonna elicits a host of connotations about seduction, eroticism, enchantment and évocation
that counters pervasive stereotypes of witches as bitchy old hags capable of castrating men.
Self-professed ‘stylistic wanderer’ Jonny Niesche makes work that insinuates
(without scissors and glue) a collagist’s knack for uncanny amalgamation. Surface, style and substance – loaded as these terms are with art historic nuance – implode as figures with strange otherworldly faces activate the lurid chaos of the
picture plane. The various influences on his work are irrelevant, they have been absorbed and incorporated; rendered somewhat invisible by being made his own.
The process, he says, is like ‘humming someone else’s melody until you forget
that you are humming, until it becomes your own work and the work makes itself’.
Ron Adams is a ‘reprobate modernist’. Geometric abstraction’s potential catatonia competes with the jaunty motifs of Kandinsky and Miro, advancing modernism’s lineage in
a present that revokes its purism. References to songs adorn the titles of his paintings,
recalling modernism’s scorn for pop culture and the ironic use of modernism today as
the stuff of production design. King Crimson’s song The Great Pretender (from the 1974
album Red) becomes the title of his painting series The Great Defender. With an art
practice that straddles pretence and defence, Adams reinforces and denies a continuing
place for modernism in 21st Century painting and his place in this sonorous, manifold zoo.
Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Ron Adams Photography by Silversalt
Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley
Emma Thomson
Drew Bickford Photography by Jenni Carter
Nana Ohnesorge Photography by Craig Bender
Harriet Body
Adam Norton
Jonny Niesche
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Helen Gory Galerie
25 St Edmonds Rd Prahran VIC 3181
(03) 9525 2808 gallery@helengory.com
www.helengory.com
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MOP Projects
2 / 39 Abercrombie Street Chippendale Sydney NSW 2008
(02) 9699 3955 mop@mop.org.au
www.mop.org.au
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MOP Projects is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.
ISBN: 978-1-921661-20-4