Despite being very well known in New Zealand|Aoteoroa, including representing her country at the 2009 Venice Biennale, I Give you the End of a Golden Thread is only Judy Millar’s second solo show in Sydney. Millar is a contemporary painter who is interested in the honesty of paint and gesture. Unlike some of the oversized Biennale work for which she is best known, Millar returns here to a series of large paintings that envelop the insides of the white box. While Millar often avails herself of new technologies that literally contemporise her work, each abstract work in this show is painted in acrylic and oil on canvas. These ‘all-over paintings’ are colourful, expressive and reflect the authentic hand of the artist allowing them to communicate raw instincts.

It’s easy to be mesmerised by the swishes and whirls of these painterly canvases. So what do we make of the use of the first line of William Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ as the title for this show? As the poem is said to refer to an offer of escape and salvation, it seems Millar has used it as metaphor to encourage new ways of looking at art. She believes art can provide “a new spiritism that reconnects us to the profound”.

Until June 8
Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art, Zetland.
Pic: Judy Millar Snake Gate I (Detail) oil and acrylic on canvas, 160 x 129cm. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art.

Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture is perhaps the inevitable consequence of Google Street View – an entire photographic essay on the subject of the state of America produced without a camera or the artist ever leaving his studio. In essence, Rickard’s work is an engagement with the vast online archive of Street View – images that are stitched-together then carefully unstitched by Rickard to find the ephemeral landscape of America’s recent past. Like fellow archival excavsit Michael Light, whose repurposing of NASA and Atomic Energy Agency pictures gave new life to their unseen holdings, Rickard finds a kind of essential ‘truth’ in his found images, one that is secondary to their intended function, but a vision that seems all more truthful for their incidental and accidental nature.

Compiled over four years, Rickard purposefully sought out images that depicted “the forgotten, economically devastated and largely abandoned places” of America’s economic decline. Using a camera to rephotograph the images direct from his computer screen, the images have an ethereal quality as their colours are washed out and perspective is bent by Street View’s 360-degree panorama. Locations in the Bronx, Jersey City, Dallas and elsewhere depict a blasted landscape of dusty and empty buildings, broken-down cars and kids and animals navigating the concrete vistas of Middle America. It looks like the apocalypse, but it has already happened.

Until June 22
Stills Gallery, Paddington
Pic: Doug Rickard, #114.196622, Lennox, CA (2007), 2012. Archival pigment print, 66x105cm.

Rebecca Karageorgos has a dark mind even when the lights are on full blast. In two series of photographs produced in 2009 and 2011, the artist created stunning portrait-like studies of friends and family, up close images of her often-naked subjects, their vulnerabilities exposed in settings designed to evoke pre-Modern painting, and perhaps intentionally, creating a Lynchian vibe of haunted theatre.

For Paradiso, Karageorgos has ditched the literal darkness of Sturm und Drang for a colourful, Bollywoodesque over-the-topness that evokes the Baroque, albeit summoned up with Photoshop and special effects. In Adele (honeys get the money) there’s an echo of a Parmigianino Madonna [via Cronulla] the subject’s creed tattooed to her chest, while in Liam (2MA BOI) we find a Patrina Hicks-style boy infected with a Piccinini virus. The key work for the show is Genevieve [summa luv], where the Barque spirit of earthly, corporeal pleasure meets heavenly rapture. Paradise indeed.

Until June 6
Firstdraft, Surry Hills
Pic: Rebecca Karageorgos, Genevieve [summa luv], 2013. Digital print on gloss, 60x100cms.

Apparently it was a faulty ladder that stopped photographer Tyler Shields making it to the opening of his show at McLemoi Gallery. At the time the champagne was being opened he was busy lying in a Los Angeles hospital bed with a bandage wrapped around his head. Ironically Shields unfortunate accident, that saw him plunge from a high roof onto the ground, provided ideal evidence of both the danger involved in this work and the authenticity of these photographs.

Shields hasn’t shown his work in Australia before now. He is best known in the USA for his pictures of celebrities acting in unexpected ways. For the more recent images in Suspense Shields has attempted to catch his subjects in a series of “impossible moments”. Each is pictured soaring through the air or defying gravity – as if someone has hit the pause button in the middle of an action movie. Shields says he likes to push his subjects to do things they normally wouldn’t. While capturing the element of abandon they experience, he hopes to convey that same sense of freedom to the viewer. There’s also an element of mystery and intrigue in every image, which makes you wonder how Shields accomplished these shots.

Until July 6
McLemoi Gallery, Chippendale.
Pic: Tyler Shields, Leaner, 2013. Chromogenic print, edition of 3 in various sizes. Courtesy the artist and McLemoi Gallery.

"Persian Surgery Dervishes is a recording of two live solo electric organ concerts, the first held in Los Angeles on 18 April 1971 and the second in Paris on 24 May 1972, by avant-garde minimalist composer Terry Riley, following his A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C. The two very different performances of the same composition "Persian Surgery Dervishes" are meant to show the importance of improvisation in Riley's music. Riley plays a modified Yamaha electric organ tuned in just intonation. The original double-record version was released by the French label Shandar, then republished, first by Mantra Records, then by Dunya Records. There existed also a single-record version, also on Shandar, containing just the Paris concert, which had been sponsored by the label itself" - Wikipedia.

A group exhibition curated by Bronwyn Rennex and Josephine Skinner at Stills Gallery, The Big Picture confronts the pictorial plague of the digital age by interrogating the status and agency of the recorded image and questioning the way it mediates our experience of the world at large. Blinded by a surplus of visual stimulus, we often overlook what is right in front of us. Arresting the viewer’s gaze through playful acts of repetition and fragmentation, the photomedia, video and installation works on display in the gallery re-direct our attention to scenes that either pass by unnoticed or drown in overexposure. They teach us how to look.

Taking over an entire gallery wall, Penelope Umbrico’s ongoing project Suns from Sunsets from Flickr is a tessellating mural of photographic prints that appears at first glance as a vibrant — almost phosphorescent — latticed abstraction totally divorced from the real. And yet on closer inspection we realize that this grid is made up of small snapshots of the sunset, that faithful photographic cliché and the crown jewel of the picture postcard. Over-photographed, the setting sun is less a subject than a decorative motif. Umbrico knowingly exploits its ubiquity, creating an archive of repeated and interchangeable images sourced from the photo-sharing website Flickr. While each individual sun is a different colour and a different size (with some reduced to a pixelated haze), they collectively describe a single gesture and a shared photographic impulse.

But this collection of borrowed sunsets does more than just reveal staid pictorial conventions and the rampant compulsion to recreate images that already exist. It unearths a fragile temporality. All of these setting suns are on the edge of disappearance, about to dip below the horizon line. They linger in the ‘magic hour’. Yet however magical this moment may seem, it is a standardized interval of metric time that appears without fail every day (well, one would hope). The setting sun is a metronome. It keeps time.
Umbrico’s ever expanding grid of setting suns is a temporal index. It is a pictorial calendar and stock photography’s answer to On Kawara’s Today series.

Daniel Connell, Lightless, 2012, CRT TVs, multiple 4:3 videos, looped. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist

Daniel Connell’s video installation Lightless projects a similar metaphoric subtext. Looped footage of flickering lights appears on the CRT televisions scattered around the gallery’s mezzanine level. Filmed in underground car parks, tunnels, back alleys and lifeless interiors, these videos document the slow death of fading light bulbs. But the bulbs never really die. The videos loop, the lights continue to flicker. This is a pulse not a death knell.

These blinking lights follow their own rhythmic patterns and frequencies. As we walk amongst the jumbled arrangement of screens we move through a symphony of flashing light. We can almost hear the dissonant rhythms of these pulsating bulbs. It is noise written in light, a prolonged swansong caught on repeat. These looped intervals – hesitating on the edge between on and off, much like the setting sun — are the constituent parts of a temporal collage. Like Umbrico’s photographic mosaic, Connell’s installation constructs an image of time (the protracted moment, the interval) in spite of its immateriality.
The same idea animates Drew Flaherty’s video work, Loading Cycle. Flaherty uses the configuration and incessant spinning of the computer loading icon to re-enact the lunar cycle. The waxing and waning of the moon is synchronized with the mechanisms of the digital world. This deceptively simple visual pun conflates a digital time-keeper (though perhaps time waster is the more accurate description) with a natural one. In this way it participates in the ‘taxonomy of the temporal’ that unravels in the work of both Umbrico and Connell.

Tim Webster, Flow, 2012, Digital video, duration: 8:04 minute loop. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist.

Tim Webster’s Flow, a video projection made of vertically composited footage of rushing waterfalls, provides the (silent) accompaniment to Connell’s symphony of flickering lights. These slithers of running water resist perspectival reasoning. Each segmented waterfall moves in a different direction and with a different intensity. This is a fragmented and discordant panorama where the flight paths of the birds that pass in front of the falling water are reduced to a sequence of jump cuts. There is no horizon to orient the viewer, just the hard edges of collision and the competing force of abutting cascades.

The slight schism between the speed and intensity of each waterfall fragment produces a mess of aberrant yet synchronized rhythms. Again, there is a silent symphony. The surging crash of the water vibrates out of the projection. In this work, as with Connell’s installation, we find the sonic buried in the visual.
This is another image of immateriality, another instance of the invisible made visible. We discover the same impulse — the same drive to visualize the immaterial — in Gemma Messih’s sculptural installations. She plays with the limits of the photographic image through rupture and superimposition. In I’ve only just realized how important you are (to me) a photograph of a mountain is propped up against a pile of rocks. The two layered objects — the photograph and the miniature man-made mountain — share a mimetic bond. Each echoes the form of the other in a quiet pantomime of Baudrillardian simulacra.

A different logic permeates Messih’s other work. In Untitled (way out) and Someone else’s horizon the photographed landscape has been punctured, in the first instance by a rock (that now lies dormant on the gallery floor) and in the second by the artist herself. Here, the image becomes a threshold — a screen to be passed through. What we are left with is the trace of a performance and the memory of a gesture. We look on as absence enters into the (big) picture.

Patrick Pound, Portrait of the Wind (detail), 2012, Giclee print on rag paper, 127 x 230 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery. Copyright of the artist

It is in Patrick Pound’s work that this line of thought reaches its apotheosis. His thematic arrangements of found photographs play out the poetics of absence. In Same place different people a row of photographs with the same background are arranged in a line. Each image frames a person mid-conversation as they occupy the same seat as their neighbour in the adjacent image. This row of photographs is disquieting. The backgrounds are the same but there are subtle compositional discrepancies in each. I found myself looking past the figure and into the edge of the image, trying to detect the differences. The figures become transparent, an absent presence that the viewer looks through.

In Pound’s Picture of the wind the pull of the absent and the immaterial is stronger still. Again, the figures in the photographs dissolve. Pound is not interested in these people, but in the space that surrounds them. He has composed an elegy to the wind that once rustled their skirts and ties and tussled their hair. Caught in the act, the wind inhabits a temporal threshold like that of the setting sun or the flickering light bulb. We see it briefly, on the edge of its disappearance, as it caresses and envelops these anonymous figures. They frame and mediate this composite portrait of an invisible force. Through them, we see the wind as form: as trace and imprint.

As the wind commands the gaze, the intangible and invisible takes centre stage. And with one fell swoop the exhibition asserts its thesis. For in the midst of a world overflowing with visual stimulus, an image still has the power to show us something we didn’t realize we could see.

Until May 18
The Big Picture, Stills Gallery

One of the country’s leading art awards is back for its 2013 outing. Known to all as “The Landa” its full title is now The Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013: The Space Between Us. This name change from the far simpler Anne Landa Award signals a course correction for the curated prize, now explicitly acknowledging the shifts in art practice and the difficulties of defining what is “video art”. So what does the Landa offer?

Curated by Charlotte Day, director of the Monash University Museum of Art, The Space Between Us takes in video documentation of Lauren Brincat’s endurance performance High Horse, Laresa Kosloff's video of people milling around in the Art Gallery of NSW’s grand courts, Angelica Mesiti’s four-screen video work of musicians from distant lands performing in Paris, Kate Mitchell’s video installation of the artist running through glass sheets and James Newitt’s video documentation of a staged protest rally. Alicia Frankovich will stage a performance with joggers in the AGNSW foyer while Christian Thompson's work is an immersive and meditative soundscape based on the sound of the djuldibha [bullroarer]. Is any of this work really new media? Not to worry, an iPad app will soon be available so punters can enjoy documentation of the show from the comfort of their homes.

The winner of the The Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2013 will be announced on June 20.

Until July 28
Art Gallery of NSW, The Domain.
Pic: Lauren Brincat, High Horse, 2012. Documentation of an action, Single-channel High Definition video, 16:9, colour, sound, 26 seconds; looped. Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery.

The public perception of Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, commonly known as ‘The Shire’, has been shaped by popular culture. First came the 1979 novel Puberty Blues. A decade later, the ground-breaking ABC TV series Sylvania Waters brought ‘reality TV’ to Australian homes and last year it was followed by a revamped TV ‘dramality’ named The Shire. The exhibition Home and Hosed, a show of new art by emerging and mid-career artists – all of whom have ties to the area – tells a very different cultural story of Sydney’s southern suburbs.

Ceramicist Lynda Draper sources ideas for her sculptures from junk shops and is interested in exploring the connections between domestic objects and memory. Home and Hosed examines that idea with particular relevance to the period of her adolescence in The Shire. The outlandish performance artist Anto Christ, co-founder of ‘The Colour Parade’ of fashion and wearables, displays examples of her psychedelic crochet sculptures, which viewers will be invited to look at as well as try. Christopher Dolman says his interests lie ‘in the obsolete, the outdated and the unpopular’. His video in this show explores the apparent split between sport and art and ideas of failure common to both. Other artists include John A. Douglas, Gemma Messih, Marc Etherington, Nicole Kelly and Sieglinde Karl-Spence.

During the same period, photographer Marian Drew will also exhibit her latest series of photographs entitled Ornamental (Royal National Park) at the Gallery.

Until June 30.
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Gymea.
Pic: Christopher Dolman, jumprint, 2012. Digital video. Courtesy the artist and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery.

In Paul Snell’s show Chromophobia the artist has taken on a complex task: questioning the image as a self-referential object. The works in the show are colourful and large, most are rectangular with two circular and two square pieces. Their titles offer few clues on how we’re meant to interpret their meaning - Lull, Trace and Drift – and with their densely arranged stripes there’s a suggestion that these patterns have been made with computers, or perhaps capture some kind of movement, like a time-lapse photograph or a vector diagram. Everything else is just guesswork.

The abstract image, like the abstract painting or sculpture, is a strange object. There’s the meaning we associate with them – decorative patterns or spiritually significant mandalas perhaps – and that meaning is associative. How much of the meaning of these works is inherent to the object itself? An educated guess might be none -we can simply enjoy these works for the optically dazzling fields they present. Or maybe they do have some inherent meaning, and it’s our job to work it out. Either way, Snell’s exhibition achieves what it sets out to do.

Until June 1
Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills.
Pic: Paul Snell, Pulse, 2013. Lambda metallic print, face mounted plexiglass, 120 x 120cm. Courtesy Rex-Livingston Art Dealer.

The Queensland Centre for Photography is currently on a mission to bring Queensland photomedia artists to the attention of new audiences. As part of the QCP program, selected works from four series by artist Michael Cook are currently on exhibition at Depot Gallery. Cook only held his first solo show in 2010 and is generally described as ‘emerging’ although the Through My Eyes, Undiscovered, Civilised and Broken Dreams suites each illustrate accomplished post-colonial themes and narratives.

In Undiscovered, the ironically named artist has centred his project on the discovery and settlement of Australia by Great Britain. Using inkjet print on paper an Aboriginal man is pictured on the ocean shore in various orchestrated situations involving sailing ships, Australian native animals and the Union Jack as props, while in Broken Dreams a stunning Aboriginal woman is the protagonist. Both imaginary sequences are suggestive of the discord between notions of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ and revisit the claims of terra nullius most famously resisted by Eddie Mabo. Civilised, the most recent, returns to the seashore with Cook’s models this time engaged in speculation on which of the four colonial powers might have just as easily have become the eventual rulers of this country. In addition to their enigmatic qualities it’s the seductive beauty of Cook’s images that results in their subtle, but powerful, claim.

Until May 25.
The Depot Gallery, Waterloo.
Pic: Michael Cook, Civilised #13, 2012. Inkjet print on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane.