What's on at 2 Danks Street

This year features the work of Senden Blackwood, Mark Booth, Walter Brecely, Robert Bridgewater (courtesy Niagara Galleries, Melbourne), Ewen Coates (courtesy Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne), Will Coles, John Cox, Jim Croke, Marguerite Derricourt, Corrigan Fairbairn, Todd Fuller, Kelly-Ann Lees, Angela McHarrie, Emily McIntosh + Marcus Dillon, Mylyn Nguyen, Leslie Oliver, John Petrie, Jimmy Rix, Fatih Semiz, Vanessa Stanley, Oliver Tanner, Peter Tilley, Caramel Wallace and Jacek Wankowski.

This annual event was established by Brenda May in 1998 and continues to be an important platform for the promotion of sculpture.

Carol Dance: Future Ancients

Exhibition of works by two Sydney artists
at The Depot II Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo, Sydney - 31 Jan-11 Feb 2012
A new exhibition opens at The Depot II Gallery on 31st January 2012. The show features a number of new, unusual and inspiring works.

Carol Dance
www.caroldance.com

'Future Ancients'
Carol is exhibiting paintings of ancient figures juxtaposed with a modern person. There are paintings of many significant ancient cultures including Greek, Egyptian, American Indian, Indian, African and Incan. For example, a statue from the famous Khajuraho Temple in India morphs into a tourist; a wall painting of Egyptian goddess Nefertiti morphs into a student admiring the ancient fresco; and, an Aztec bronze statue watches over a modern city. Carol's first solo exhibition was exactly ten years ago at The Depot Gallery. In the interim, she has been the artist-in-residence in the Port Douglas Gallery, painted works for theatre and shown her work in New York.


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Dana Lundmark
www.danalundmark.com

'Paris Rooftops: nested lives' and 'Icons: portraits of faith'
Dana's quaint, rustic and charming rooftop views from her studio in Paris inevitably inspire to contemplation: what lives are played out under those roofs, perching and nested one on top of another in a maze of crazy angles?
Another kind of contemplation is evoked by Dana's exquisite icons, created using traditional techniques and materials learnt from Eastern European monks, including egg tempera and gold leaf on handcrafted linden-wood boards.
Dana Lundmark is a five-time finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Portrait Award and has had her work exhibited in the Salon des Refuses, as well as group shows.

Elger Esser, born 1967 in Stuttgart, Germany and raised in Rome, is a graduate of the ‚Becher class‘ of the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie. However one can not detect the formal strictness of Bernd Becher in Essers landscape and architectural photography. They seem to be more related to the earliest photography in their romantic static's.

Theses in faded yellow dipped landscapes, mostly taken in France and Italy, are in strange kind of transition; all the details are correct, nothing has been retouched, but still everything seems to be unreal and remote. Just as after a dream, there remain no concrete landscapes but vague impressions and memories of travelling through peaceful scenes, especially river landscapes and coastal regions. Essers merging picture zones of water, sand, snow and clouds create their un-insistent suction by extruding mainly one thing: calmness.

Sculpture 2012 brings together five innovative artists who are at the forefront of the contemporary art practice in Australia: RAE BOLOTIN, ANNA EGGERT, SHERRIE KNIPE, DENESE OATES & BRUCE RADKE. Each artist has a distinctive style and creative process; the diversity of their works is emblematic of the range of mediums and many languages of sculpture.

Julia Middleton, a recent graduate of Whitireia Polytechnic New Zealand, explores the realm of abandoned technologies, offering up the dismantled structural remains of our precarious civilization.
Middleton takes inspiration from sources both empirical and cultural. Recent geophysical events in Christchurch, and worldwide, are referenced in the (de)structure of the pieces presented here. She hints at dereliction, of wreckage.
The pieces writhe and buckle. Metallic powders coat these artefacts suggesting ash or fallout, erosion and corrosion.  The rings, like remnants of a long abandoned lunar mining colony, are contorted and aged, suggesting a kind of ‘future past’. ‘Con’ is pure cultural criticism on a finger. Middleton’s work is infused with a dark sense of humour and an uncanny newsworthiness.
The works are crude yet exude a simple grace, dual histories fused, redundant technologies are given new life. These are meditations, artefacts of paradox, anachronisms, naive and techno-talismanic.

Photography

Photography

Voice of Nature II

Nepal is much acclaimed the world over for its geographical features and cultural incomparability. But we are now in such a phase in time that a need to expand this vision of Nepal has become really essential. The most important thing that can elevate the identity of Nepal is, in my opinion, the contemporary art because art has the power to show a blend of?the cultural and geographical specificity of Nepal as well as its ever evolving modernity. Our legendary artists have already created a bridge through which we can commence this creative dialogue. However, effort is surely needed from the young generation of artists to further on this noble act. The 1960s saw the advent and transformation of modern art in Nepal. The exhibitions that were held around 1962 by legendary artists helped the modern art to flourish here. However, the western art tendency had already entered in the country earlier than that; but it had not taken clear beginning. Few artists, upon returning to Nepal after gaining formal training in art introduced natural realism and romanticism here. However, the authentic styles that mark the modernity in art such as expressionism, hyper realism, abstraction etc took off in Nepal only from 1962. Afterwards, the modern tendency in Nepali art expanded in such a massive proportion that it is still affecting the upcoming artists as far as their concept and technique are concerned. This exhibition attempts to introduce the legacy of the creative Nepal.

My name is Sarita Dongol and I am a freelance visual artist from Nepal. I also run a gallery and coordinate art events in order to promote art and create social awareness in the society. In my twenty years of career I have found that so much can be done through creativity to uplift the surroundings, culture and the overall social awareness in the country. Through various art events and especially by conducting community art projects for little children inside and out of the Kathmandu valley I have attempted to achieve the objective of promoting art and raise social awareness through creativity.

I have done 11 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions in Nepal and abroad. I have also participated in art residencies in Japan 2002 and S. Korea 2006. I have coordinated various art projects for artists and general public, especially for community children through various art organizations. Presently, I run a community children art school, which is an organization completely dedicated to uplift the creative imagination of the young ones.

This exhibition "Voices of Nature" is one of my ambitious projects, because showcasing my artworks in Australia is like blending with a new perspective towards life. The attitude, culture and art phenomenon here are different from what they are in Nepal. And, as an artist, I have a nature of finding the creative fragments in my surroundings and rearranging them in order to reveal and express the hidden and deeper purpose of my life. So, since this is my first exhibition in Australia I believe it will make me a better artist. Here, through this event I want to take this opportunity to introduce the art and the aura of Nepal from a creative viewpoint. The foremost objective of this event is to create a platform for creative dialogue between Nepal and Australia. Immobile objects really fascinate me?- objects like plants, fruits and vegetables. I feel that nature is part of our life and that we, as human beings, share a special bond with it. What I feel towards these objects has motivated me and has influenced my creativity, has filled me with a sense of enthusiasm, which explains why I prefer these subjects over others. I believe that immobile objects also go through various sensations and emotions such as happiness, pleasure, pain, fear and satisfaction just as we humans do - ?the only difference being that they don't have the ability and the capacity to express them. Basically, my art is an effort to link the hidden yet significant messages that these immobile objects are trying to share with us. And through my own language of art, I have tried my best to portray it.

I want art lovers who come to the exhibition to go home with a positive message. I feel nature is more powerful than us. With their unique character, color, forms and different tastes, natural objects stand out. Unlike humans, they aren't selfish?- they provide us with food to fill our stomach and fresh air to breathe. In various ways, they try to give a positive message to us but we tend to ignore it. Through this exhibition, I hope to convey this message to art lovers and maybe make them acknowledge the fact that we are here because of them.

In this series of artworks I have made an effort to link the hidden but significant interrelation between various immobile and mobile life forms. I have expressed this relationship through my personal language by assorted colors, shades and images, composing all of them on my canvas.

The exhibition will be opened at The Depot Gallery, Sydney on the 31st of January.

For centuries, bronze has been used to make everything from cannon balls to statues of kings! Artists still use this living metal to make permanent otherwise temporal forms.

In this exhibition Tony Coleing uses found timbers, Marea Gazzard clay, Christopher Hodges and John R Walker Walker use wax. It is when the work is placed in the hands of the master castor at the foundry that the transformation into bronze renders these often delicate objects into permanency.

Coleing works with satirical political subject matters in his sculptures, an approach that can also be found in his digital prints and drawings. Coleing's series of bronze boats from the mid 1990's titled ‘Refugee - Refusee' were cast from driftwood that he found whilst in the Torres Straight, washed up on the Australian shore after long sea voyages.

The surfaces of Gazzard's minimal and elegant sculptures in this show reveal gentle depressions from fingerprints and fine crosshatched marks, etched into the clay before casting. The hole at the centre of each form presents an interesting engagement with the dynamics of positive and negative space.

Hodges works across a range of mediums, from paintings and prints to sculptures in steel and using light. Hodges's bronze pieces represented in this show could be understood as drawings in space - lyrical compositions of curving lines that, like Gazzard's works, explore form as both positive and negative space.

Walker's figurative bronze sculptures are an interesting addition to the oeuvre of the artist well known as a painter of landscapes. The nude has also been a frequent subject in Walker's paintings, and his nudes in bronze incorporate the tactile, painterly quality of his canvases.

Shown together at Utopia Art Sydney, the works of each artist present a unique response to the medium and its possibilities.

A collection of small treasures from gallery and invited artists featuring works by 2011 Dobell Prize Winner, Anne Judell and  2010 Dobell Prize Winner Suzanne Archer