MLC Gallery is located all on its lonesome at 449 Harris Street in Ultimo. It’s a cold and dusty part of town, even in blazing sunshine, and the cars and trucks whip up storms of grit and clouds of newspapers. MLC sits on the other side of the road from the old Government Printers building that was for a brief period a massive art gallery that no one visited, but for the moment at least, MLC is the only gallery in the area. Visiting the place it quickly becomes apparent that the gallery is the brainchild of some designers who use the upstairs area as their offices and, like countless other lawyers, architects, designers, doctors and café proprietors before them, they thought it might be a good idea to use their empty space for an art gallery. They claim to be dedicated to emerging artists, which seems like a great initiative, but when you look into it turns out the just another hire space.
Showing at MLC Gallery are Patricia Casey and Laura Stekovic and their joint effort show Silent Gestures. They may have also considered an alternative title like We Have A Rostrum Camera And We’re Gonna Use It, we’re not sure, and it’s difficult to tell whose work is whose. There are two sets of works – a lot of large photographs which feature nudity, old people, plants and paint-flecked walls sandwiched together into pleasing arrangements – and a second lot of work where photographs of flowers and weird plants have been printed life size, cut out and stuck on paper. This second lot of works were a lot more interesting than the first having a lot of visual appeal. The first lot? Hmmm. We’ve seen a hell of a lot of this sort of thing before but feel mean mentioning it. Casey and Stekovic are emerging artists, so let’s let them emerge some more and see what happens.
Down at UTS Gallery they’re exhibiting the UTS Design and Architecture Degree Show, which may be some sort of elaborate joke as the place is a complete mess. There are bits of paper everywhere and the gallery looks a lot like the floor of The Art Life office. They’re also showing a video with design students talking about the course saying things like “My career has gone off like a lead balloon” and, our favourite, “I dunno if this course is going to take me any further, but it was a fun ride, and I learnt a lot of things I didn’t know I knew.” Young people today!
We had no idea the School Hostilities had already begun, but we were down at Darling Harbour and the place was chockers with kids, the elderly and confused German backpackers. When Darling Harbour first opened, one architect dismissed the development as “just another place where you can buy hot chips.” That’s not true – you can get rosties, falafels, McDonalds, Gloria Jean’s coffee, you name it! We were at a place called Darling Walk and we have to tell you, the place is a stinking horrifying cesspool of human misery mixed with pigeons. With the ambience of a public toilet, we had no idea that the whole Darling Harbour experience had sunk so low – but we suppose that without Sega World the landlords are desperate. We were there to see a gallery called Australia’s Outback Gallery and our expectations were very low indeed. Housed inside a tourist trinket shop that sells didgeridoos, t-shirts and key rings, the gallery has some pretty good artists but we’re not going to name them. The place is an absolutely awful – and we’re not just talking about the shows in the outback theatre that feature live didge music accompanying a screening of film of the outback – it’s walking into a gallery and seeing copies of Australian Art Collector magazine prominently displayed on a table with pages marked with Post-It notes. When you open the magazine to the marked pages you discover they are the ads the gallery has taken out. Look, we advertise!
The Asian-Australian Arts Centre (known by all as Gallery 4A) are in the last few days of their annual fund raiser, an event that is to the artist run space as the group/stockroom filler show is to the commercial gallery.
The quality of work at Gallery 4A is unusually high and a testament to their reach – from the huge Liu Xiao Xian Jesus-Buddha-Buddha-Jesus pictures, the David Griggs drawing and Lindy Lee‘s Buddha’s in the first room, to Aaron Seeto‘s photo spoon, Gary Carsley‘s eye popping Draguerrotype and Astrid Spielman‘s video upstairs. Where some gallery’s might do a specially priced show to raise funds, Gallery 4A have rather mystifyingly charged full monty on the works – $18,000 for the Liu Xiao Xian, $9,300 for the Lindy Lee, and so on. Perhaps the aim was to bag the funds with just one or two sales?
While at the gallery we saw a piece by John Young. We know, we rained down hard when we reviewed his show at Sherman Galleries but we have to confess, this was a really good work. Looking like it might have been source photography for his paintings, Generic Studies: Flower, Figure and Seascape is a triptych of images printed so dark that you have to get very close to make out the pictures. Although Lindy Lee has staked out this territory, it was incredibly refreshing to see Young doing something different. He has an eye, he does great design. Now all he has to do is show this stuff at Sherman.
