Curatorial and Exhibition -Death 3, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore at Parramatta Artist Studios from 9 July to 9 September 2012.
This was the last of three curations at Parramata Artist Studios that explored ideas around death. In this final exhibiton the selected artists including myself are focusing on the dead body whether by exploring the materiality of the remains, reexamining the sequence of events leading to a death, or interceeding on behalf of the dead. The exhibition space is three small rooms and a short corridor space. Death somehow forces a closeness between the works with the development of visual and auditory conversations.
The selected artists were Marian Abboud, Roohi S. Ahmed, David Capra, Fiona Davies, Spring Hulburt and Abdullah M. Syed. Images from the exhibiotn are below. Quotes about the works are taken from the catalogue essay written by Ann Finnegan and this quote from a review by the art critic Carrie Miller.
Carrie Miller wrote in her July 20, 2012 article in the online publication The Art Life;
A number of interesting local artists, including Marian Abboud, David Capra and Abdullah Syed, confront the inevitable in a variety of ways. David Capra’s video works, for example, involve the artist performing acts of Intercession on behalf of the departed, including speaking in tongues, banner waving, praying, and dancing badly, all in an outfit that includes tight white tights. These series of actions are performed both at a public pool alongside bathers and next to an Anzac statue in spiritual concert with the war hero. In typical Capra fashion, what sounds like bad camp or parody is in fact a sincere, entirely human, gesture of care that embodies the awkwardly comic nature of our existence and the simultaneous futile yet necessary drive to give it meaning, even after it’s all over.
Fiona Davies Blood on Silk; Death 3, 2012 Silk paper 2000 x 1000 x 2400mm photo credits Alex Wisser
The critic and academic Ann Finnegan wrote in the exhibition room sheet that
Fiona Davies’ funereal shrouds, of cobwebby, white, handbeaten silk cloth, hanging in uneven shards, is such a veil, shielding and protecting from this horror of the dead. The corpse in its winding sheet, the hospital curtains, the sheet pulled up: already the body is far from us, even in this liminal proximity, tainted with dread, with mourning. Davies has no need to present us with a literal corpse. The winding sheet is already enough. Death makes us trade in signs. The body tarted up by the mortican, in an open casket, has already become a sign.
But there’s something else in Davies’ funereal drapes, a ghostliness, a presencing as if there were something more behind the veil The same cloths which seperate and protect, like Turin’s famous shroud, seem to carry the imprint of a trembling liveness, an uneasy promise of contact. It seems that through those drapes we mediate a kind of relationship with the dead, somewaht akin to the proximate distance of gloved hands. We will never quite touch again what lies on the other side of the veil, and yet, the shroud. paradoxically seems to keep death close, tabooed at close quarters.
Davies understands the trade in signifiers, however subtle, and how the marks and strands of silk beaten unevenly into matted submission in her cloth, seems to correspond to material, earthly struggles. Her shrouds stand in for, and displace, the dead in a medicated relationship, in which a chain of substitutes- clothes, and wrappings - protect us, proximatley , whilst placing us in a zone of near communication. Were the dead to whisper we would hear them through these shrouds of silk.
Marian Abboud, The Weeping Room, 2012, mixed media installation with high definition digital video, Installation dimensions variable.
Roohi S. Ahmed, Untitled I and II, 2009 emboss and colour roll on BFK Rives paper, edition 3/18 160 x 160mm unframed ( diptych)
and Premonition 2012 Silkscreen on BFK Rives paper, edition 3/7, 560 x 760mm
David Capra Intercession ( Newcastle Pools) 2012 high definition digital video and audio, 16.9 3 min 53 sec
Spring Hurlbut, Airborne, 2008 digital video 19 min 40 sec
Abdullah M.I Syed
The world knows sorrows other than those of love: Fragrant Roses 2012, found target paper face and mixed media including acrylic, acrylic ink, gold gouache, white ink, graphite, ink stamps, needle tool and sandpaper 820 x 920mm
The world knows sorrows other than those of love: Virtuous Lotuses 2012, found target paper face and mixed media including acrylic, acrylic ink, gold gouache, white ink, graphite, ink stamps, needle tool and sandpaper 820 x 920mm
The world knows sorrows other than those of love: Singing Nightingales 2012, found target paper face and mixed media including acrylic, acrylic ink, gold gouache, white ink, graphite, ink stamps, needle tool and sandpaper 820 x 920mm
All photo credits Alex Wisser