Gary Carsley, artist, is a Capricorn. The light side of the typical Capricorn personality is manifested by a well developed sense of humour, a will to create a sense of order out of the world and the wise management of resources. Capricorns are also unique members of the Zodiac as they the only ones who can abide long term repetitive tasks thanks to their perseverance, reliability and self discipline. These personality traits are in abundance at Carsley’s latest show at the Cross Art Projects.
Better known in Australia for the shows he’s curated like the Take A Bowery exhibition at the MCA and various other projects around town, it’s easy to forget his pedigree as an artist in own right. An upstart painter of the 1980s post modest generation, he upped roots and went to Europe for the intellectually sunnier and more hospitable climes of Amsterdam. Working through his painting with a conga line of figures and decorative elements derived from a range of unlikely sources – [anyone remember the VD posters that used to hang in Sydney’s train stations?] – Carsley eventually gave up the brush for hours of paper cut outs.
Leaving town for more than a decade is not exactly the way to go to build a career in Sydney. Not only are you out of sight and out of mind, when you come back, people get all resentful about your high falutin’ ideas and funny Euro attitudes. We really hate people coming back to the gated community of the Australian art world with something like a worldly wise experience and knowledge of things that are being done, you know, over there… Not only that, but your absent minded dealer might actually forget that they represent you and when it’s time to come and look at the new work, they just don’t have a gap in their diary to fit you in.
Gary Carsley, Japanese Garden, Leyden I, 2005.
We’ve been looking at Carsley’s work for a long time now and to be honest, we’ve been at times a bit confused by it. We could see and really love the intense decorative qualities of the work but our problem has been the density of the framing theory that Carsley had constructed around his projects. It all fitted and it all made sense, but the pleasure part of our brains were getting short circuited by the meaning part. We found it incredibly difficult to articulate a response to his writings on, for example, the relationship between Australia and Holland and the way the landscape here and there echo one another in our colonial architecture.
His last show at Roslyn Oxley Gallery was one step short of greatness. The paper cut outs that he was making at the time – a paper mirroring of Dutch lace and Paddington wrought iron – were fantastic but the coloured pebbles and stones he arranged around the room seemed a little superfluous. We kept getting the sense that Carsley’s natural ability to create beautiful things was being overly complicated by his framing ideas and concepts. Then something unexpected happened. Using a computer version of his paper cut method, Carsley began creating a series of large scale photographic works that conflate Australian and European landscapes with a sophisticated versioning of their representation. For example, a park in Sydney that was planted with European trees was neither entirely Australian nor European but rather an admixture of both. Carsley’s big step was to formulate a way of representing that idea and he’s done it by photographing these types of environments and then creating a computer aided collage of the images using generic wood grains to substitute for trees and space.
The most persuasive argument for Carsley’s recent work is made simply by looking at them – no matter what goes into these works, no matter how they are made – they look stunning and the effect is a sublimation of a complex idea into a work that creates a series of ghost meanings, a shadow of these fecund landscapes. It’s all there if you want to see it, and more if you want to engage with them. Pity then the dozing art dealer who has passed on Carsley’s latest offerings which have recently exhibited in the Netherlands alongside the work of Thomas Ruff and Vik Muñiz. The Sydney show at the Cross has already sold two pieces, one for $20,000 to a US collector and that has to be some sort of record for an artist run space.
It’s said that revenge is a dish best served cold. The weather is getting mighty chilly indeed.
