SYDNEY.- Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is presenting a cross-generational exhibition, A Painting Show featuring new works by three of Australia’s most important painters working today. All three artists are expressive, gestural and considered in their mark making - masterful colourists conjuring up vivid, fantastical realms, yet their unique styles have paved their way as distinct voices within the Australian and international art world.
Paintings by Tom Polo, Gareth Sansom and Jenny Watson are exhibited within the unique context of the last month of 2020 where the fibres of society are strained. Within a social fabric of distanced inter-personal relationships, disconnection and technological interfaces dominating modes of communication, painting allows us to take space and stand still.
The process of viewing painting is an intimate act, enabling one to stop momentarily and lean in close, to pay attention to minute details. The act of viewing provides an antidote to the hurtling speed of advancement, a tonic to the over-saturation of visual noise and screen-time. A Painting Show becomes therefore, a call for togetherness, to connect through looking, ultimately an opportunity of introspection and reconnecting the dots.
Kites and planes come from the same family but the philosophy behind flying kites and planes are quite different. A kite is a flying object that inspires daydreams while locating you within a specific time and place. Like a pin stuck in a map, the tethered kite marks us within the here and now. Conversely, an airplane makes the yearning to be somewhere else completely, a possible reality.
We have reversed the evolution of manned flight by taking Australian Air Force surplus plane parts and with a bit of paint and string, turned them into Japanese kites. We have used traditional Japanese kite designs because a) they look really awesome and b) Japanese kites are not representative of a culturally hermetic system: Chinese Buddhist missionaries introduced kites to Japan during the Nara period (710-794 AD). We have in turn appropriated Japanese kite designs to create a body of work that is indicative of our own personal experience of COVID-times. The cessation of International flight cancelled our planned artist residency in Niigata. This residency was to be a period of research looking into the giant kite flying community of Shirone. Therefore 2020 was spent in our studio, daydreaming about kites. This body of work is indicative of the Iso-Age, a time when we have surfeit of global knowledge at our fingertips but we are literally grounded in one place. —Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, 2020
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro combine a playful sense of humour and an engagement with art historical precedents, their work is characterised by the deconstruction and reinvention of found objects and everyday items into extraordinary sculptures and large-scale installations. Healy and Cordeiro's practice reflects a preoccupation with the dynamics of global mobility in the modern era. Creating tensions between order and disorder, their works are shaped by traditional sculptural concerns such as mass, form and scale.
The duo have exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. Selected solo exhibitions include a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2012), and at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2013); 19th Rimbun Dahan Residency Exhibition, Kuala Lumpur (2014); Architects of Destruction, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco (2014); We Hunt Mammoth, Yorii-za in Kamiyama, Japan (2015); Harbouring, Te Whare Hēra, Wellington, New Zealand (2016); The Pizza Effect, Tenjinyama Artist Studios, Sapporo, Japan (2018); and an upcoming exhibition Post-haste at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (2021), and participation in the Oku-Noto Triennale 2020+. Healy and Cordeiro represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale; the 5th Auckland Triennale and the first Setouchi Art Triennale. In 2018, they participated in Adelaide Biennial and unveiled their latest public commission ‘Cloud Nation’ for the City of Sydney.
You Are Here is Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro's third solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
