Wednesday, October 24, 1990

SITES UNSEEN 1 & 2 - CCAS Gallery 3, Manuka ACT - 24th October to 15th December 1990

SITES UNSEEN were 2 exhibitions curated by Janet Garcia Coleman, Sue Lovegrove and Caroline Gray.  Both exhibitions showed 2 Sydney artists with 2 Canberran artists as an exercise in stimulating an ongoing dialogue within alternative and regional art networks.

" 'Sites', in the context of this curatorial aim refers to the actual geographical locaton of artists and 'Unseen' refers to the lack of interaction between regional art practices."
JG Coleman, S Lovegrove, C Jervis 1990

I exhibited 5 works.  Each work was of the same image - a re-creation of a Romantic Classical Ruin with a Garland of flowers taken from a wallpaper sample.   Each image was the same except for the colouring.  The paintings were created by a series of stencils that built up the image in a similar way to a screenprint.  The imagery was chosen as a response to the exhibition rationale.  I was attempting to suggest that the relationship of the Regional art spaces to Sydney art spaces was analogous to the relationship of Australian painting to European painting.  I used the culturally debased imagery of wallpaper that had taken its imagery from historicized European art.  The five colour-altered versions referred to the way that we in Australia got to view these paintings - always slightly different depending on which book we were looking at.

I have just discovered that I showed these paintings in the back room at First Draft WEST as part of my 'Grammar of Ornament' exhibition  in 1991 and I have a video of the 5 paintings in that show.

No.2 of  'One to Five', oil on canvas, 38cm x 30cm each, 1990