A place to see a few photos and a few words about Sydney art exhibitions when you can't get there yourself. Or when you want to see photos of yourself on the internet.
when: Tuesday 13 July 2010. 6pm-8pm.
cost: free.
where: 263 Enmore Rd, Enmore.
See the Facebook Event – click here.
See more info at Hardware Gallery’s website – click here.
from Hardware Gallery:
Janette Hanrahan – From Roots to Riches (front gallery)
Janette Hanrahan’s versatile artwork is a series of documentation of her travels from her home in the Southern Highlands to the city and to the Northern Territory. Hanrahan’s artwork debates the shift and effects to natural environments in the course of development in our ever-expanding society. Her works illustrate how this once utopic wilderness is slowly diminishing, as developers endeavour for affluence.
There is a clear intimacy with the artist and her subject. There is particular personal reflection to the dying River Red Gums along the Murray River and outback Australia in her exhibited work. The beauty of the natural scenery and view of this changing world is the crux of Hanrahan’s creative release. Hanrahan’s work unquestionably reveals her love, appreciation and respect for her own environment.
The artist’s focus is on Australia’s raw vegetation where she has previously drawn particularly on the eucalypt that is so commonly found in the Southern Highlands region. The eucalypt serves as a metaphor for strength and explores the idea of growth from roots of the past and expanding branches into the riches of the future.
There is a consistent flow of concept, subjective response and stylistic innovation throughout her body of work. Organic, neutral and lineal imagery within Hanrahan’s work record the change of natural inhabitants. The artist experiments with different textures and effects to produce an original surface and piece of artwork. The artist has amalgamated abstract watercolour works on paper on canvas with linocuts, woodcuts and artist books. The individual works vary in scale, and as a complete body, Hanrahan’s work expels an earthy quality, detailed with sharp defined edges and ‘visually strong graphics’.
The artist states; “I have been a practising artist for over 30 years, specialising mainly in the area of printmaking, in particular linocuts & woodcuts…I also love using gouache, watercolour & acrylic in my exhibiting artwork.” Thus, making Hanrahan’s works of art attractive in their aesthetics and captivating in depth of concept.
Gregory Godhard – My Own Little Worlds (main gallery)
Gregory Godhard’s artistic practice is an extension of his childhood love of amateur model-making, combined with his adulthood passion for film-making. His new exhibition, My Own Little Worlds is a collection of miniature dioramas: fictional geographies of his own imagining, in which witty and whimsical narratives emerge, and hence unravel.
The diorama is a unique creative model in that it is capable of concurrently bridging and inhabiting the space between various physical and immaterial binary oppositions: namely art and craft, and fictional narrative versus recounted event. Godhard’s background in animation and film is made self-evident, as he playfully remixes these examples into carefully considered and subtly deranged mis-en-scenes.
He refers to his father’s architectural practice as an early creative influence, concerned as all design is with measured and precise representations of proposed plans and ideas. But unlike his architect-father (who necessarily utilised industry-standard modeling materials), Godhard has not-yet eschewed the kinder-ergonomic, material principles of his youth. Choosing instead to embrace the lo-fi aesthetic of “child’s craft”, he melds this with a now-mature sensibility for material, form and composition in snapshot-animations of imagined action, drama, horror and comedy.
The miniaturisation that occurs during the process of ‘diorama-fication’ has the dual-effect of distancing and drawing the audience. We delight in the distortion of scale and are drawn into the works as a result – yet we are distanced by our designated role as voyeur upon a series of staged proceedings. This is partly offset by his informal choice of materials: seashells, driftwood and sand conjure a space of leisure, rather than one of interrupted intimacy.
In re-contextualising the faux-aestheticism of kitsch paraphernalia and do-it-yourself model -making, the parallel realities of My Own Little Worlds materialise as self-enclosed domains, where stasis – both physical and narrative – is imposed by invisible, outside forces.
In allowing us access to these eclectically assembled objects, Godhard highlights his various roles as artist/director/animator/set-designer, and invites us to engage with and embark upon an investigation of his creative development thus far.