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Transmission Opening Night

For the Transmission show at Campbelltown Arts centre, artists were paired with musicians and asked over a relatively short period of time, with no distinct brief, to make something in collaboration. Co-curator Carrie Miller says that she felt her job was to bring the right people together, let them go for it creatively and be there to solve any problems that arose. This mutual trust and creative freedom reaped its rewards as is evidenced by a very strong show well worth the journey to Campbelltown, and I urge you to treat yourselves to a mind-boggling range of audio-visual delights.

On Friday night I was there for the opening. It was cold in Campbelltown and entering the warm arts centre felt a bit like travelling through a portal into another world. Although the Transmission show is not curated with a distinct theme in mind, this sense of altered reality is something that flows through the show like a substance taken at a concert. After all, that is why many people are drawn to live music and performance, to experience a transcendental moment, to witness someone being conduit to something other as performer – and to themselves be part of something greater as audience. There are no words that can precisely sum up this experience but most people will at some point have experienced it and agree that it is a powerful and seductive one. Even in the works that weren’t live performance I felt that there was an emphasis on this relationship between minds, transmission, reception and altered reality.

On the night, that suave crooner Renny Kodgers, complete with orange tan and large cowboy hat, interrupted the speeches to spread his unique brand of love. He did this with the help of the ‘Sweet Tonic Choir’, a group of older ladies and gentlemen who I believe are local to the Campbelltown area. I felt a moment of trepidation where I wondered what angle he would take, whether there would be a level of mockery which would have made me feel uncomfortable, but in fact he managed quite the opposite. He pulled it off with good humour, respect and sense of endearment for these people of another generation, whose tastes may seem anachronistic to a younger audience. It was a reminder of cultural and generational change and, if anything, fostered a sense of understanding between otherwise non-compatible worlds. It was quite sweet really.

Kusum Normoyle delivered a visceral performance of primal sound created with her voice; she sounded like an enraged animal, alternately yelling into a microphone, making a purring, panting sound, and deliberately creating feedback with the speaker. The level of energy and the way she gave herself over to the performance was impressive and potentially confronting. It brought to mind the effect on an audience member at a heavy gig where the primal energy is a release from the constraints of everyday convention. Where conventionally more confronting and primal feelings are trapped inside to enable the smooth running of society, who hasn’t at some point wanted to go totally animalistic?

The final performance on the night was from Justene Williams and Tina Havelock Stevens. What a mad cacophony of sights and sounds. So many references I’m sure I didn’t fully decipher but I was genuinely intrigued. What I did understand was the way in which, as performers, they became depersonalised in their karate uniforms, orange wigs and masks. In a sense, their performance was about all performances. They threw themselves into this role of conduit with a totally committed physicality. To me, there was something about the voodoo witch-doctor in the work, as though channelling the ‘other side’ through a sense of hypnotic and compelling ritual. Although I did not always understand in a rational sense, I think that was probably the point. It was more about being transported into a parallel place, I simply couldn’t look away and so became witness to something wild and other-worldly.

One of the questions which came up for me in considering this show was: what are the defining differences between musicians and artists? (Sorry, there is no clever punch line here.) The answer at first glance is that musicians work with sound and performance and artists work with visual media – but as is evidenced by this show, these categories are in fact very interchangeable. After all, even a career musician will almost certainly have some involvement in visual decisions – cover art, video clips and costume and set design. Conversely, as outlined in the description of the performances on the night, artists often inhabit territory one might assume is the realm of the musician. We do sometimes simply call them all artists though it’s true categories can make things easier to talk about.

A good example of this crossing over was seen in Rachel Scott’s video collaboration with Mick Harvey. He provided the atmospheric soundtrack but also some video footage shown alongside Rachel’s. There was an emotional undercurrent pulling one into this work featuring a lone female figure adrift in the night.

Another artist/musician combination took the more familiar form of a music video clip with the song a launching point for the visuals. Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s collaboration with Stephen Allkins, ‘Boytown’, is a beautifully executed ode to gay culture and the 80s. It uses the background of the Bronski Beat song ‘Smalltown Boy’ and pieces together a simultaneously poignant and self-referential narrative. It treads this line so carefully that neither meaning is lost. It brings to mind the way friends might share painful truths about themselves, particularly when young, hiding the rawness behind a little self-deprecation and parody.

So if they’re all simply artists, all I can do is tell you, in my humble opinion, what an artist is; someone who has a life-long commitment to their process and is able to incorporate personal experience and thoughtful interrogation into their work in an ever-evolving way. It is wonderful to see such talented artists feeding the fires of each others’ practice and I, like so many raving about the show on the night, thoroughly enjoyed it.

Group Show

I have a new work in the first show of 2012 for Flinders Street Gallery. The Show has a ‘tonal’ theme, so black and white or work that is mostly centred around using tone. The opening night will be held on Tuesday the 7th of Feb from 6-8pm. 61 Flinders Street, Surry Hills. There is also a solo show penciled in for October this year…I will be sure to post more about that when the date is set.

Phantoms Of Suburbia – artist’s statement

My next show, Phantoms Of Suburbia, runs from November 18th to December 11th. The official opening night is on Tuesday November 23rd, 6 – 8pm, at:

Flinders Street Gallery
61 Flinders Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010

Below is an artist’s statement about the show.

Phantoms of Suburbia

Places can embody our feelings and reflect back a sense of ourselves in a most peculiar and powerful way. My work focuses on suburbia and the built environment and explores the contradictory layers of meaning that can be found reflected there – home and dislocation, safety and danger, belonging and being the outsider, culture and wildness; the known, visible, everyday, and the unknown, hidden forces that pulse beneath the surface. I photograph and then paint scenes containing a tension between these contradictory meanings, using the play of light and dark at night to create a sense of mystery and unease.

The Phantoms of the title refers to the traces of many people and their histories that one imagines left behind in any suburban environment. It also references the effects of one’s own memory and experience on this environment, one which by its very nature can be seen as a symbol for all things to do with the home. When taking the photographs which form the basis for my paintings it is always with an eye for a scene that is visually suggestive of many possible stories, and the idea that they may in fact have an almost physical presence.

My interest in the psychological effects of the environment can be aligned with a sensation Freud described as the uncanny. A disturbing subversion of the idea of home in which a brooding sense of unease is experienced. If homeliness can typically be described as a sense of safety, comfort, belonging and the mundane, then the uncanny is its opposite – a sense of danger, dislocation, anxiety and potentially a feeling that some unknown presence has invaded the security of the everyday.

Another phantom presence in any suburban environment is that of a nature long lost to the human landscape – roads, homes, power lines, footpaths, carports, letter boxes, balanced only by the token plantings of the garden. One has a greater sense of the potential for wildness and danger at night, as though somehow ‘nature’ gains some small advantage over ‘culture’ at this time, that it creeps back to stake out a foothold in our conveniently constructed world. We attempt to hold darkness at bay with an abundance of lighting, but sometimes this only succeeds in making shadows deeper and more impenetrable. This play of light and dark can also resonate with our tendency to feel more at home with the visible, the known and the rational, and to fear the depths of the subconscious.

For this show, I have focused on Melrose Park, the suburb I grew up in. It is in fact the second time that I have visited the area to source photographs to work from, simply because I felt I hadn’t exhausted it as a subject. It acts, after all, as a store for my own layers of memory, a personal topography of my childhood. It is directly across the Parramatta River from Homebush, skirted by the river, a golf course, Victoria Rd and the Wharf Rd factories. A tiny suburb of post-war brick bungalows where one can sense a nostalgia for the idea of home that suburbia once ideologically embodied. There is also the presence of other forces – the river with its pungent smell of mangroves, its sense of remnant wildness and another peoples’ history far predating the red brick, and the factories which hum with industry even at night. Considering the concerns within my work it became apparent that my own childhood home would be an interesting place to explore. I am aware of the fact that anyone viewing this work will not have in their mind the particulars of my experience, they will come to it with their own. What I have found, however, is that our experiences, although arising from different circumstance, significantly overlap. Who, for instance, wasn’t scared of the dark at some point in their lives? It is my hope that, as I found this area a rich hunting ground for imagery, it would translate into interesting works.

It is my intention with this work to create a suggestive environment, yet one that allows for a fluidity of meaning. The sensation of the uncanny exists where a familiar environment takes on an unfamiliar life, its usual meaning becoming obscured. Freud points out , however, that it is the individual’s subconscious that creates this meaning. According to him it is the “return of the repressed” that gives rise to a sensation of the uncanny; that it is a resistance to the other, opposite meanings that can invade the idea of home which fuel the uncanny experience. The environment only acts as a mirror to the subconscious with all its unacknowledged fears and desires.

I am interested in the way that this idea of dual meaning is played out at night when the familiar surroundings of home are made mysterious by darkness. Darkness makes the known visible world unknowable and it is human nature to fill in the void of darkness with all sorts of fearful imaginings. On the other hand the sense of mystery this evokes can work to make the banal strangely arresting and beautiful, as though the known limits of our everyday existence become expanded to include things more magical and exotic. The night seems to have a secret life of its own.

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Show – Phantoms Of Suburbia – Opens 23rd November 2010

My latest show, Phantoms Of Suburbia, is going to be on at Flinders Street Gallery from November 18th to December 11th, with the official opening night on Tuesday November 23rd. All the details are below. Click on the invite for a bigger version. Please come along and tell anyone you think might be interested.

Phantoms Of Suburbia by Halinka Orszulok
November 18th to December 11th
Opening night on Tuesday November 23rd, 6 – 8pm

Flinders Street Gallery
61 Flinders Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010

Call: 02 9380 5663

Email: [email protected]

Director: Jason Martin.

Exhibition at Flinders Street Gallery, November 23rd 2010

I will be having an exhibition of new work at Flinders Street Gallery, opening on Tuesday 23rd November. I’ve added some of the new images to the Gallery page if you’d like a sneak peak. There will be a few more paintings to see on the night. Hope to see a lot of people there – watch this page for further details.

Flinders Street Gallery
61 Flinders Street
Surry Hills NSW 2010

Call: 02 9380 5663

Email: [email protected]

Director: Jason Martin.

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My work in SCA Alumni Show

I’m very pleased that two of my paintings have been included in an Alumni show at Sydney College of the Arts.

The show is called “An Oeuvre both Abundant and Diverse” and is curated by Brad Buckley. Artists featured in this show are Su Baker, Debra Dawes, ADS Donaldson, Julie Fragar, Beata Geyer, David Griggs, Billy Gruner, Kyle Jenkins, Lindy Lee, Stephen Little, Fiona Lowry, Elizabeth Pulie, Robert Pulie, Ben Quilty, Rachel Scott, Gemma Smith, Rolande Souliere, Jelena Telecki-Starcevic, Teo Treloar, John Young and myself.

You can visit the show until Friday 28th May at SCA Galleries. All the details here.

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2010 Show at Flinders Street Gallery

I am working very hard towards a show later this year at Flinders Street Gallery. The show should be in October or November, so keep an eye on the website here for further updates.

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