The Museum of Contemporary Art is currently exhibiting some fantastic shows which I recently had the pleasure of immersing myself in. Hair frizzed and clothes dampened from an unexpected drizzle of rain, a friend and I clambered onto the first floor of the art museum and entered a spacious white-walled gallery holding an exhibition that brims with wondrous sights, sounds, and structures – Primavera 2013.
Now in its 22nd year, Primavera is an annual exhibition of young, emerging Australian artists aged 35 and under, showing until the 17th of November. From across the continent, this clever, daring group of 8 creatives have put together an excitingly eclectic show including video, photography, sculptural installations, drawing, and works which quite playfully splash across any pre-conceived categories. As the gallery states in the show’s media release, the themes of this year’s Primavera include “a moving investigation of romantic and family relationships, the creation of portals into fictional realms, a look at the role of language in the shaping of (and the breaking down of) the self and the ways sound shapes our physical and emotional worlds”. *
Juz Kitson
Changing Skin, 2013 (installation view)
Southern Ice Porcelain, Jingdezhan porcelain (pig fat porcelain), terracotta clay, paraffin wax, horse hair and goat hair, deer and cow hide, flocking, resin, natural found material, silk thread, tulle, polyurethane. Oxidised, PVD fired (physical vapour deposition), and lustre fired
Juz Kitson‘s extensive ceramic creations grow and delicately dangle from the corner of the gallery and adjacent walls; polished, ornate forms gleaming in a soft, angled light. Edging towards this looming shrine that radiates a rather spiritual stillness, Kitson’s beastly creatures are sombre and nightmarish yet simultaneously gentle and blossoming with life. A hauntingly beautiful portal to a surreal realm indeed, Changing Skin involves complex interplays of the abject and the alluring…the brittle and the furred…lingering deathly fragments and flowering, hybrid creatures which metamorphose into sexually transgressive structures. Kitzon, for this piece, has collected and worked with the skeletal remains of Australian roadkill alongside her own floral, anatomically-suggestive ceramic forms – dripped in wax or liquid porcelain, sometimes downed with hair or bejewelled, in deeply disturbing and frightfully gruesome yet sumptuously ornate and tender amalgamations. Powdery porcelain, fragile strings of beads, soft woollen furs and pastel pink shades perhaps connote notions of traditional femininity, while the lusciously succulent, repulsively hairy and fleshy forms; delicately detailed floral pieces, and dangling, lustrous organic bulbs reference sexual organs in a poetic, sculptural symphony of life, death and bodily transgression.
Juz Kitson
Changing Skin, 2013 (installation view)
Southern Ice Porcelain, Jingdezhan porcelain (pig fat porcelain), terracotta clay, paraffin wax, horse hair and goat hair, deer and cow hide, flocking, resin, natural found material, silk thread, tulle, polyurethane. Oxidised, PVD fired (physical vapour deposition), and lustre fired
Many of the works in this exhibition tested the limits of the gallery space and utilised the white walls in inventive new ways, responding to the MCA space specifically – dangling from corners as in Kitson’s installations, blossoming from walls, housed in specifically build shelters or scaling the walls and carpeting across the cold concrete floor of the gallery as Jess Johnson‘s installation so boldly does. In a shocking explosion of illusionistic, geometric designs, johnson has transformed a gallery corner into a strange, ‘Alice in Wonderland’-esque domestic interior lit by the radiant yellow glow of an overhanging beehive-like chandelier. Stepping onto the patterned carpet which sprawls from the corner across the floor, one is hypnotised by the black and white design painted directly onto the gallery walls on which large, intricate framed drawings hang. Highly detailed and deeply strange, again – like mystical doorways to an unearthly realm, phrases such as ‘Of course, things go bad’ disrupt the delicate beauty of the image and deeply disturb…teasingly lingering in the dizzyingly disoriented mind momentarily lost within this transcendent interior.
Jess Johnson
Of course, things go bad, (installation view) 2013
Pen, copic markers, collage, metallic paint on paper
Jess Johnson
Of course, things go bad, (installation view) 2013
Pen, copic markers, collage, metallic paint on paper
A very different and intense work by the artist Kusum Normoyle is placed around the gallery, screens and headphones mounted on the walls. Normoyle’s experimentally edited film documentation of a performance in which she screams through an amplifier in public, urban spaces echoes through the mind days after its viewing. The disturbingly distorted female voice of near-unbrearably shrill shrieks and raspy tones alongside sustained metallic sounds shatter and rattle violently through the industrial and urban environments in which the isolated artist expressively contorts and twists in a seemingly transcendent state. The film is completely compelling in its horrific depictions of a dull, concreted atmosphere, ominous black objects that spike and shake with electrified sounds, a thrashing bodily performance and deep-reaching shards of noise. As Deratz writes, Normoyle’s performance “creates a kind a fracture in the world, a fault-line where feminine expressiveness shapes matter into potentially new formations”. * Like an intensely anxious creature, mood, or thought…the sounds sinisterly brew and rapidly explode through the cracks of familiar grey landscapes.
Kusum Normoyle
Accord with Air Tjentiste, (installation view) 2012
Single-channel digital video, colour, sound
Jacqueline Ball‘s immense photographs – each referencing the dimensions of a doorway, panel the gallery wall in an overwhelming display of intricate fleshy caverns and ambiguous rocky formations. Only after reading the label on the wall does one realise that these sublime scenes were meticulously constructed by the artist in her studio…
Jacqueline Ball
Fluctuate #8, (installation view) 2013
Photographic print on 305gsm Hahnemühle archival photo rag
Jackson Eaton‘s photographs, interestingly displayed in rows of frames on tables in the centre of the space are equally beautiful, though in a very different way. The series presents an intimate insight into Eaton’s previous romantic relationship with a young South Korean woman, which we read ended in heartbreak – Eaton, perhaps in an almost therapeutic, slightly surreal response goes on to almost identically restage the fragmented memories documented in the photographs from his previous relationship with his father and his father’s Korean partner, who he married in the years following a divorce with Eaton’s mother. The posed couples are photographed in a sometimes quite vernacular style which renders the tender dialogue of two eerily echoed yet divergent lives and the stories of love and loss between Eaton and his father deeply touching.
Jackson Eaton
From the series Better Half, 2007 – 2012
Type C prints
Another set of really interesting, hilarious and absolutely absurd works in the exhibition are Heath Franco‘s short films, housed in a specifically made shelter – perfectly summed up by Frost as an enjoyable “madhouse”. * Franco’s more-than-slightly mental clips feature elaborate, gaudily costumed characters performed by the artist, playful special effects, and phrases repeated to the brink of lunacy – at which point words become devoid of meaning (and meaning becomes devoid of words) – which destabilise familiarity and render Australian suburban domesticity and mainstream television intensely strange and sinister. Standing for a long period of time before these fluorescently glowing split screens within the small, constructed space and becoming completely absorbed, one finds themselves laughing wildly at the exaggerated enactments…until, that is, the acts – drawn out and seemingly endlessly repeated consequently seep into a realm of nightmarish distortion, where comfortable connotations of domestic familiarity unravel a hidden, hostile hysteria.
Heath Franco
DREAM HOME, (still) 2012
2 channel digital video, colour, sound
Overall, Primavera 2013 was delightfully surprising, confronting and quite mind broadening with a real edge to it. This is definitely one to spend time in – it will undoubtedly entertain.
For more information on Primavera 2013, check out the MCA website at: http://www.mca.com.au/exhibition/primavera-2013-young-australian-artists/
* References: Primavera 2013 – MCA media release MCA Insight: Primavera 2013 – By Tristan Deratz Primavera 2013 – review – By Andrew Frost
Desiree Tahiri 