art crush- Juergen Teller

Things I Wish I'd Known- West Space

"Things I wish I’d known"
Ross Coulter, Melody Ellis, Brad Haylock, Veronica Kent, Sanné Mestrom, Lillian O’Neil, Patrick Pound, Ben Sheppard, Utako Shindo, Tai Snaith, Kieran Stewart and Dominic Redfern, with essays by Phip Murray and Kelly Fliedner
West Space
6 November - 28 November 2009

What would you do differently if you had your time over? Many people will say ‘nothing’ in defence of their impeccable past choices, but i think that it is okay to be wrong. ‘Things I Wish I’d Known’ is a group of works that hone in on this lament of hindsight.

Ross Coulters video work (above), ‘The 2007 VCA Graduation Video’ recalls a dream Coulter had in which an art mascot, or ‘the coach’, berates him, and in turn, the viewer with moral boosting affirmations, en masse, on loop.

Tai Snaiths collages meld short personal proverbs of advice ( ‘get over yourself’ and ‘go into yourself’) with a literal, visual translation of the phrase ‘double vision in hindsight’ by adding an extra pair of eyes to black and white fashion portrait photography from a past era, allowing the subject to see the future in colour, and supposedly twice as well.

Brad Haylock states that whatever you expect, will surely always end up coming to fruition, and resulting in disappointment, in his case, marching in the streets and getting nothing but a lousy placard.

Melody Ellis passes on her thoughts to the audience, in the form of small cards with a single instruction or piece of advice on each that the audience is invited to take. As opposed to having the cards printed, Ellis has typed them out herself using a typewriter onto the coloured card, thus reliving her own advice in the repetitious act of typing and also demanding she type it correctly; there is no room for error using a typewriter and coloured card.

This is the 'advice for those undertaking a BFA’ exhibition. Good luck in your future pursuits exhibiting artists, your past selves did okay knowing what they did.

http://www.westspace.org.au/program/things-i-wish-i-d-known.html

James Callahan

James Callahan's work is the result of an outside fringe culture turned into advertising illustration, a decade after the fact. It is pure 1980’s skate culture aesthetic distilled into screen prints and fine lined drawings: pure barf (which is also the artists moniker), death, sex, violence, gross-out, ugliness, evil. The advantage of using the imagery, archetypes and icons long after the scene has changed and mutated aesthecially is that it can be viewed retrospectively and consequently, edited ruthlessly in the process of re-creation to formulate a newer, more defined and more potent version of the predecessors that it is climbing onto the shoulders of.

Callahan blends styles, a semi real illustrative tone of thick line-work is fused with the imagery of comic book sensibilities. Essentially everything is about failure on some level and to some degree. A tagline on the faux comic covers claims that it is ‘semi-sensationalish’. ‘Sensationalish’ is of course not a real word, its only half a word, an attempt at creating a word, a failure of a word, a semi-word.

The shocks are 90% nostalgia and tradition, like listening to Christmas carols in the month of March or rifling through boxes of Halloween paraphernalia or costumes mid-year for an out of season party or practical joke. His images depict the rotting corpses of cheerleaders play gridiron using a member of the teams dismembered head in lieu of the pigskin, in another a bat flies toward the viewer in a howling frenzy with two flick knives protruding from its chest, whilst in another picture plane anonymous and menacing figures wearing authorative hazchem suits are attacked by muscular mutants of a future toxic apocalypse in a style that pays tribute to Troma. Fail, fail, fail. Fail is cool. Again.

There are a few high brow references hidden within the imagery of the screenprints. In one small circular bordered area of a poster, prongs of a fork move in toward an open starring eye ball (see above), not unlike the infamous Dali eyeball slicing, except less professional and more punk, in the sense that the mutilation doesn’t come from a precise, determined and slow, methodic, purposeful movement using a pristine surgical scalpel, but from a presumably fast, aggressive, thrust with a common piece of cutlery that shares a likeness to the devils pitchfork.

Callahan wants to raise hell in his intricate line drawings but only to perfectly capture its shortcomings to make fun of it in the process, and, of all entrepreneurial pursuits that turn a dollar, drawing pictures of the gross and macabre seems better than most.

art crush- Oliver Laric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wNZZIqxYyQ

art crush- Valentin Carron

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2010/10/valentin-carron-at-praz-delavallade/