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RMIT SCHOOL OF MEDIA & SCHOOL OF ARTS
proudly support JOLT and the DARK LUMINANCE ARTISTS in:
DARK LUMINANCE//////
VISUAL AND SONIC ART EXHIBITIONS IN NEW YORK THAT SHOWCASE A RANGE
OF MELBOURNE ARTISTS WHOSE WORKS CONTAIN DARK LUMINANCE
"English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the ‘criminal class' but if possible to forget about it.
Australia was...remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious
to the conscious mind... No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun
on the afternoon of January 26, 1788." (Hughes, 1998, p.2)
JOHN DERRICK
JANE HALL
JULIE MIHALOVSKA
RENE VAN KAN
JAMES HULLICK
ABOUT DARK LUMINANCE IN NEW YORK
WHERE & WHEN:
Pratt Institute ![]() 4th August – 29th 2008, (opening night is the 4th at 6pm)
200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, New York, 11205. W: http://www.pratt.edu/
Gallery Sakiko 7th August – 29th 2008, 6pm. (opening night is the 7th at 6pm)
20 West 22ND Street, Suite 1008, New York, 10010. W: http://www.gallerysakiko.com/
DARK LUMINANCE is an exhibition that will celebrate and present the visions of six up and coming Australian artists working around the notion of DARK LUMINANCE to the people of New York at the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn) and Sakiko (Chelsea) galleries in August 2008.
Curators and artists for DARK LUMINANCE, John Derrick and James Hullick, describe the DARK LUMINANCE aesthetic as:
“an essentially dark or ‘empty’ aesthetic (either in colour palette or psychology) that can be manic, disturbing, vacant, haunting. Night-time can be beautifully captivating as well as terrifying. Emerging through this darker base are moments of bright luminosity and transparency (again either in colour/light palette or psychology). Considering contemporary Australia’s arts practice from a birds-eye view suggests that the dialogue between old and new technologies in art making practices is key to the core of this contemporary and localized sensibility that has fueled, in part, the DARK LUMINANCE agenda. The nature of this dialogue is loaded with quirky interpretations on the semiology and functional worth/worthlessness of technology.”
The DARK LUMINANCE artists in this show are:
John Derrick takes the tradition of portraiture and combines it with 3D digital projections. He is extending the role of figurative oil painting on canvas by harnessing the use of new technologies through the use of 3D gaming environments. Derrick is visual curator for DARK LUMINANCE.
James Hullick’s sound installations are dark and disturbing landscapes. He utilizes robotics in his installations to generate sound, and he seeks to describe the relationship between traditional and progressive technologies using the phenomenon of recursion in his work. Hullick is artistic director for JOLT and sound curator for DARK LUMINANCE. "he's been up to no good, with mayhem on his mind." Penny Web, THE AGE. “in the keenest listening to the application of the musical fabric, a highly reduced transparent psychogram, that shocks as much as electrifies the listener.” Rafael Rennicke, Südwestpresse. www.jameshullick.com
Lisa Dethridge will present a virtual exhibition featuring works from the DARK LUMINANCE artists. The Second Life component has been project managed by Dethridge and John Derrick but has been dependent on the the work of a team of Second Life developers. Dr. Dethridge is a Lecturer at RMIT's School of Creative Media and has worked developing virtual networks for organisations such as Telstra.
Jane Hall will show prints that are abstract and organic. She works intuitively making marks on paper and revealing relationships between each mark. Colour is used expressively to convey particular moods or feelings. Her work involves the creation of mono-prints through a specific use of printing technology that she has developed.
Rene Van Kan transposes the language of graffiti into the gallery setting, straddling the fine art world and public art in the streets. He works intuitively using his “tag” to construct a mural, and combines this with paint on canvas. New York is a base of aerosol art and it will an electric experience to see what similarities arise between Van Kan’s work and other local New York aerosol artists.
Julie Mihalovska will display oil paintings with the use of cultural icons such as churches, streets and historical monuments. She uses her poetry as text with the imagery to reveal universal emotions.
IMAGES FROM THE DARK LUMINANCE SHOWS
JOHN DERRICK
GALLERY SAKIKO
JOHN DERRICK
PRATT INSTITUTE
JAMES HULLICK
GALLERY SAKIKO: incubator (2008) PRATT INSTITUTE: leyz gerlz (2008)
LISA DETHRIDGE and the RMIT School of Creative Media Development Team:
SECOND LIFE VIRTUAL SPACE: DARK LUMINANCE (2008)
JANE HALL
GALLERY SAKIKO
JANE HALL
PRATT INSTITUTE
RENE VAN KAN
GALLERY SAKIKO
RENE VAN KAN
PRATT INSTITUTE
JULIE MIHALOVSKA
GALLERY SAKIKO
JULIE MIHALOVSKA
PRATT INSTITUTE
DARK LUMINANCE REVIEWED
THE CHELSEA CLINTON PRESS, AUGUST 2008
THE DARK LUMINANCE CATALOGUE ESSAY
by DR. LISA DETHRIDGE
Dark Luminance is an immersive, multisensory experience tracing boundaries between real and virtual objects, sounds and vision; past and future. Dark Luminance reveals us, enmeshed in the digital; permanent immigrants; our biological functions soon to be replaced by artificial forms. What can we aspire to now?
Gothic spires point to the heavens; to sublime, irrational and sacred states. Historian Simon Schama defines Gothic as the traumatic transition from classicism to modernity; of revolt against feudal tyranny, against religious superstition and the despotic power of priests and lords.
Curators James Hullick and John Derrick have forged an amalgam of old and new technologies. Both manifest an ironic, Gothic love of and simultaneous mistrust of the promises technology offer.
This exhibition brings together artists in new media; oil painting; the concert recital; sculpture; graffitti and print-making. Similarly, the engineers of pre-Renaissance Gothic cathedrals used many expressive techniques; technical mechanisms and engineering to create buttresses, towers, sculpture, stained glass and wondrous perspectives. They inspired passionate devotion in opposition to clerical, hierarchical order.
The works on show are also represented in the 3D virtual world of Second Life where viewers can enter cyberspace, digitise themselves as avatars and inspect the "digital artworks" via virtual cameras. How are we to compare the sublime rendering of paint and plaster by a man and by a machine?
The Dark Forest
The medieval Gothic habitat is the forest, reclaimed by pagan tribes - Celtic, Goth, Visigoth, Hun - after centuries of cultural domination by the Roman Empire. The key impulses are revolutionary, rustic and religious. Gothic romanticism hides a revolutionary impulse born of the arcadian forest and the pagan overthrow of Rome; born again by the torturous Spanish Inquisition, the French guillotine and the American revolution.
Hullick's installations recall a sacred glade, mysterious and dimly lit. They rustle with unearthly sounds, reflections and visions which are driven by robotics; the leisure and work tools of the future.
In INCUBATOR, the robots' compulsive jittering makes mechanical mockery of the biological. White pingpong balls are cupped in speakers, eggs in the nest. Their electric incubator sheds hopeful warmth that synthetic life may spring from within. Violins accompany the spectacle; they are "live" but still "canned;" uncanny. An eerie concert in a parallel world.
Over the past two or three years Hullick has been showing works that have engaged in technology - audio speakers, robotics, ancient instruments, mixing desks, and computers - to dissect themes of disembodiment, the spirit world, and the irrational mysteries of being alive. Hullick asks "what does it mean to have a spiritual self in a technological society?"
Hullick depicts nostalgia for the tribal past and anxious anticipation of a new future. Thus the mechanical sun shines on our future clones, born into the present by robotic wet-nurses and avatars who imitate life; who imitate us.
Hullick's installations update the 18th century Gothic novel with its focus on nostalgia, madness and phantasmagoria. Cultural historian Dale Townshend observes the 18th century Gothic worldview citing Mary Shelley, Matthew Lewis; the Marquis de Sade; Edgar Allan Poe; Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and other literary giants. Their shared themes include migration; gloom; incest; delinquency and sublime terror. These artists popularized Gothic devices including the counterfeit; gender-switching; blasphemy; torture and "the monster of abjection" such as Frankenstein, the abused innocent, the vampire and the madwoman in the attic.
In Hullick's recursively titled LEYZ GERLZ (2008), the audience is subtly invited to participate as the tribal talisman is mechanized. In a dimly lit room, a clutch of black wigs are suspended from the ceiling. A single disembodied black wig hangs separate from the group, perhaps an incest fetish; perhaps belonging to Miss Haversham or a shrunken head? The wig shakes as if possessed while a chattering audio speaker casts its weird, sonic aura around objects and viewer.
As with INCUBATOR, sound is an important part of this work. Two speakers are suspended from the ceiling, one by the group of wigs, another by the solitary peruke. A simple call and response ‘sounding out' like whales at sea takes place, testing the bridge between the one and the many.
Digital Painting
Just as Hullick reinterprets the fetishes of nature and technology; John Derrick captures the Gothic disjunction between analogue and digital painting. Derrick hangs lush, "real," impasto portraits in the Sakiko Gallery space, and projects their digital doubles around the room and into cyberspace.
Derrick positions his painterly portraits within large-scale projections of 3D graphics. The artist forensically examines and captures the oilpaint textures which are digitized and re-rendered by a 3D game engine Unreal Runtime.
In this way, the artist allows us inside the dark interiors of the canvas which are projected outward so they fill the environment like a miasma.
Erwin Panofsky and more recently Hanneke Grootenboer illustrate how Renaissance perspective overturned the Gothic, providing a default setting for artistic composition that has infiltrated the vision of painters, draughtspeople and photographers since 1500 (Grootenboer, 2007.)
The artist generally uses invisible sightlines to take the viewer inside the picture-world via a Cartesian grid that maps its inner recesses. Derrick extends the Renaissance grid outward into the spectator's space where it is impossible to distinguish the edges of the painting from the coloured textures that fill the gallery. This "mixed reality" environment merges the "real" flat 2D picture plane with the multidimensional 3D virtual space.
Derrick achieves a further level of digital abstraction by importing textures of the original 2D painting into the 3D virtual world of Second Life. When viewed "InWorld," the Second Life portrait becomes another Gothic ghost or double of the original. This ironic, triple-distancing effect brings the digitized painting "up close and personal" to an avatar who inhabits an artificial world. So which is more ‘real'? The ‘real' painting in the gallery is bathed in digital projections. Is it more substantial than its fully digital double, webcast across Second Life in 3D virtual form?
The 3D projection of Derrick's work reveals each brushstroke on the canvas as a trace of time passing. Digital vestiges of a real painting are projected in a time-based display that slowly builds a complete image of the finished painting. We observe layers of paint as they are captured and applied by digital projections.
This raises questions around the definition of both the material and genre. Let's remember that Derrick made the original marks which are now reconfigured by technology in a process the artist calls "digital painting." The digital painting is no longer a fixed and static form. Is this painting or is it 3D animation? Is traditional painting about to become just another texture amongst the limitless menu of photoshop applications?
Print and Graffitti
Jane Hall also investigates old art technology within a fresh framework. She uses now largely defunct forms of lithography to produce delicately layered, minimalist, abstract prints. Her focus is monoprinting, a rare form of offset printing where each work is unique and cannot be repeated. They are produced on a lithographic press, "an old dinosaur" says the artist, which allows her to paint with the printing inks with the offset roller as brush.
Hall lived and studied in Japan for several years where the minimal aesthetic was firmly established in her work. She has been exhibiting her work in Australia, Canada, Finland, Korea and Japan. Hall's Japanese sensibility is purist, complex and essential, enforcing a twentieth century, modernist approach to colour, space and form.
Like stained glass windows in a gloomy, vaulted chapel, Hall's prints refer to a spiritual journey and transport our gaze into clear, white, infinite space. Layers of transparent colour float free, then overlap and eclipse each other, planets, gems or entities of light; the sublime feminine Gothic.
Rene Van Kan draws from the vernacular of street graffiti and transposes its raw energy into sly and subversive doublespeak. His latest works exhibit a Gothic nostalgia, looking back toward the traditional craft forms of street graffiti. Van Kan's graffiti is polite, well-groomed, well-hung and slightly official-looking. It displays an ironic and irreverent scepticism for the gallery setting and for the corporate system that coopts and recuperates folk art as a form of advertising and propaganda. His camouflage-style motifs also suggests the military as a focus for ironic subterfuge.
Grained, wooden panels (taken from the forest) fit together on the gallery wall (not the street) as modular parts of a larger, perhaps pre-fabricated structure. The grey emblem sits squat, like the dark monolith of Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The emblem may represent a mausoleum, a bunker, a museum or a temple; monumental and important in its bottom-heavy gravity. Possibly sinister, it could be headquarters for an organization that is rigid, classical, authoritarian and inward looking; a natural target and inspiration for Gothic revolt!
The wall behind the painting is revealed by a sexy, cut-away panel in the centre of the work; a window to infinity that reveals the workings beneath the surface. A cloud or bubble around the image recalls the tags of classic, 1980s New York street and subway graffiti. Now reconfigured for the gallery space, it is graffiti tamed; made portable; made conscious of its own devices.
Van Kan shows a restless ambivalence and anxiety about the present balanced by an elegaic nostalgia for the urban jungle as a kind of lost arcadia whose nooks and crannies and tribal daubings are increasingly replaced by corporate spaces and monolithic structures like those depicted here.
Van Kan's graffiti are awe-inspiring totems for techno-humanity or perhaps the logos for some hyper-corporate entity?
Julie Mihalovska brings us to the heart of the Gothic arts; the architecture of memory. Her canvases recall the Italian surrealist De Chirico with empty, classical monuments and echoing spaces. But these streets are aflame; the buildings of the ancient regime in an eternal holocaust devoid of human occupants. The artist handpaints her mantra in quiet protest against universal injustice:
"I once was a somebody; I was once a someone to you..."
"These memories won't leave me alone..."
"My home exists in these ashes, my home lives in my dreams..."
These are the feverish outpourings of the Gothic spirit trapped in the past and the future; keening for a home that's burning down. The artist's nostalgia for the past is balanced by a looking forward. Mihalovska deconstructs and reconstructs aspects of her Macedonian heritage; reorganizes the experience of crisis; acknowledges the memory of past conflagration in order to build a new future in a new land.
Whether as economic or post-war refugees, many Australians have been traumatized by migration to a vast, arid continent. While the Americans and the French were in the midst of revolution, the British were exporting their impoverished masses to Australia;
"English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the ‘criminal class' but if possible to forget about it. Australia was...remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind... No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788." (Hughes, 1998, p.2)
Inevitably, Australians descend from either convicts or immigrants. We read traces of their trauma in the work of these Melbourne artists who offer new coping mechanisms to sooth Gothic anxiety.
This simultaneous backward and forward glance is also evident in techniques used to generate the work. Traditional analogue forms such as painting, sculpture and music are recuperated by the mechanical and the digital. The work appears to be "doing itself" though traces of the artist's intelligence remain in the brushstrokes; in the robot gestures; in the layers of the print process and in the programming codes that reconstitute the sound and vision.
We recognize Gothic flourishes which recur across history in the wake of war and revolt. One key difference? The artist's memory and gesture is now encoded digitally. As Lev Manovich points out in The Language of New Media, the database itself is now part of the artwork. Real artistry is in ordering the huge number of variables that are available for use within these systems.
In addition, the co-synchronous use of multiple galleries at Pratt Institute; Gallery Sakiko in Chelsea; Second Life and the Jolt blogsite allow us to explore aspects of "the double", the ghost and "the other." Artworks and visitors are manifest in real space; in digital 3D space and projected across cyberspace. Even the viewer is offered a gothic double of themselves in Second Life. The avatar acts as a kind of robot; a digital you, an imitation of nature.
In this implosion of analogue and digital perspectives, we become Frankenstein; product of a fetishized urge that is both biomechanical and human. The Gothic lives on in the homely, familiar origin of everything that technology embraces; in our nostalgia for the secular and the sacred; in our drive for permanent revolution.
THE CURATORS
John Derrick is a PhD. Candidate in the School of Creative Media, RMIT University. He is exploring the integration of 2D figurative oil painting in a 3D virtual reality space. Awarded a Samstag Scholarship in 1998, Derrick did his in Newe York at Pratt Institute. He curated an exhibition of emerging New York artists in 2005 at Melbourne's Kings' Artist-Run Initiative. He has had solo shows at fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne, and Pratt Institute, New York.
James Hullick Artistic Director for JOLT Arts Inc. www.jameshullick.com
REFERENCES
Everett, Anna and Caldwell, John (eds.) (2003) New Media, theories and practices of digitextuality New York: Routledge, New York.
Haneke Grootenboer (2006) The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting Chicago: University of Chicago.
Hanneke Grootenboer (2008) The rhetoric of perspective The university of Chicago Press : Chicago.
Hughes, Robert (1988) The Fatal Shore, London: Pan Books Ltd.
Lev Manovich (2001) The Language of New MediaT Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press,
Simon Schama (1995) Landscape and Memory New York: Alfred Knopf.
Dale Townshend (2007) The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing 1764-1820 New York, AMS Press.
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2008