Parramatta Artist Studios

45 Hunter Street

Parramatta, NSW

Elements from movies, comics, music videos, newspapers, TV, the internet and games will be used to look at deaths that are both real and imagined, permanent and temporary, ever present but distanced, the gothic.. the gory.. the romantic and the sentimental. 

  Artist list includes;  Linda Brescia, Jodie Whalen, Ben Quilty, David Griggs, Tracey Moffat, Brown Council, Alli S. Wolf, Soda jerk, Peter Madden, Tony Garaflakis and Jamil Yamani,   

Looking at Others - Stage one of the Death Project

Parramatta Artist Studios

45 Hunter Street

Parramatta, NSW 

13th June to 25th July 2008 

Death forms a background against which we project the limits of our understanding, the limits of our society and the limits of ourselves. Familiarity of death is not necessarily knowledge. Our own death can only be perceived as an eventuality, a possibility or an ambiguity. It is not something we have experienced ourselves. This inability to know in turn reflects back onto our understanding of the world.

The dying of the other is all that we can know. In this exhibition Looking at Others, stage one of the project, the central themes are issues of ambiguity and concealment particularly as it relates to the dying of the other. A common preoccupation of the artists is the absence, the idea that, what is not there, what is not said, is the centre. 

List of Artists and Works: 

Aaron Seeto

Library 2  2008 size variable

Seeto is an artist who practice includes installation, photography and curating. He is the Director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre/Gallery 4A, Sydney.  Recent curatorial projects include News from Islands an Asia-Pacific survey at the Campbelltown Arts Centre (2007); Otherworldsothernews, Starkwhite, Auckland NZ (2007) and Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2006).

The work is an installation/object piece of found books, photographic emulsion and images

Bridgit Anderson
Images 20 and 33 from the series Caring for the Dead - A photographic essay on the funeral profession 2005 -2006.  

Bridgit Anderson is a NZ photographer who spent many years working in London but has recently returned to live in Christchurch NZ. Anderson talks of these works in relation to the death of her mother when she was young. As was common at that time children were excluded from the funeral and talk of the dead. She talks as if her mother just disappeared and all talk of her just stopped. This photographic essay, while relying on the documentary genre, explores the imaginings of that absence and the images selected from this series focus on the idea of fragments of narrative within an unstated explanation.    
 

Fiona Davies

Memorial / Closing Movement 2008

video 3.30 minutes projected onto a black wall

Fiona Davies is a graduate of the University of Western Sydney and Monash University . She is a visual artist working across a wide range of media. She works with various forms of archives, ideas of narrative and the telling of stories often in the context of museum and gallery practice. This video/projection has been developed from a series of still images as above. These images document the death/decay of a yellow mop headed Chrysanthemum. In the video, the stills will be layered/faded in/faded out to create a slow rhythmic movement, almost a dance. This work explores the interrelationship between death and beauty, the development of the idea of the suburban momento mori, the dying potted plant where the momento mori is regarded as a means of reflecting on transience and death.

Jamie Eastwood

Not dead yet not ever will be  2008  wood, found objects, paper, wire, paint. 1000mm x 1000mm x 40mm 

Jamie Eastwood is a descendant of the Ngemba people of far northwestern NSW. He lives and works in Western Sydney. he has worked on many public art projects within Parramatta and Liverpool.  In his artist statement he has said; The 3d artwork I have created for ‘looking at others death project’ refers to the carnage, the out rages and the attempted genocide that has been inflicted upon us as Aboriginal people over the previous 200 years . The art work explores stereotypy  labelling derived from social Darwinism , and is a contemporary testament to our resilience , and survival as Aboriginal people .despite all off the past efforts to destroy us we have survived .

Kay Orchison

Grid of multiple images of roadside memorials - such as the image below.  size variable. 2003 – 2008

Kay is a print based artist who is currently working at the Parramatta Artist Studios. He talks about these images as War Graves describing how he first saw a roadside memorial in 1985.  It was on the corner of Minogue Crescent in Glebe and the on-ramp to the (then) Glebe Island Bridge. It was a simple white cross with a hand-painted name commemorating a biker called Norm Yee. His tin-pot helmet rested on top. Since then the number and variety of these memorials has been steadily and dramatically increasing. While a single images of these memorials can be interpreted as sentimental and didactic the use of multiple images in a grid can be seen as layering the individual grief and absence into the everyday experience of travel

Martin Smith

Ronald Desmond (2004)

Lambda Print, 145cm x 37cm

Framed with cut letters within at base of frame

Davies Collection, Sydney

Martin Smith is a Queensland based artist who works primarily with either physically or digitally manipulated photographs. Smith talks about this work in terms of his childhood experience of driving with his father while listening to 4KQ, the Brisbane country music radio station. He has linked the simply morality tales of Johnny Cash with this memory of driving with his father through the ' wide tree lined streets of the flat landscape of Sandgate   The years 2004 and 2005 had seen the death of both Johnny Cash and his father, Ronald Desmond Smith. In trying to articulate the loss of his father he looked to Johnny Cash. "I Walk the Line" speaks of the love, respect and loyalty that Johnny Cash had for his wife June Carter Cash. Smith says 'In Ronald Desmond 2004 I wanted to hear the tired, maudlin voice of Johnny Cash describe the respect my father had for my mother for 44 years, while she weeps.'
  

Sari TM Kivinen

Portrait of Carolina 2, Video 5 minutes

Sari is a Western Sydney based artist, a graduate of the University of Western Sydney, working primarily with video and performance. She works both collaboratively and as an individual. In this video a woman sits largely unmoving in a red car in the foreground. Our view of the woman is partially obscured by reflections from the car's windshield. In the background movement is speeded up, the trees are blown by the wind while buses, cars, trucks and trains zip past. The sound is the dull sound of that traffic as if next to a main road.  Sari describes her art practice as consisting largely of role plays that are realised both as random social interactions and more frequently in video art works. Everything about her work is personal yet she creates boundaries of distance through the employment of these roles, the dramatherapist Robert J. Landy (1992) states that: "in-role, a person is reduced to personae as he unconsciously or consciously separates out discrete, coherent aspects of his personality."