damienm i n t o nga l le ry

13 – 30 MARCH 2013

ELAINE CAMPANEROF MIDDLE EASTERN APPEARANCE (THE VISUAL GUIDE)

Mosque, 2012. Previous, The Eye of the Needle, 2012.

Mother and Son, 2012.

Marble Screen, 2013.

Colonnade, 2012.

Falluja, 2012.

Doha, 2012. Previous: Tiles, 2012/3, 151cm x 402cm.

Souvenir thimble for the Liberation of Kuwait, 2012

Colour Field Painting, 2012.

We had a friend from Afghanistan when I was a child. He was a handsome, educated and cultured man, and a civil engineerby profession. He was a refugee from the Russian invasion, and while in Australia he worked as a cleaner in a Johnson &Johnson factory and lived alone in a bedsit.

My family met him while we were street-preaching the gospel. We were uneducated fundamentalist Christians and thought thatwe might “save” him. I remember how he came to bible study group, sing-alongs around the piano and remained respectfullyreserved while being open and tolerant to who we were as people. In a strange reversal to the usual stereotype, in our Chris-tian sect women wore hats or headscarfs to demonstrate their “submission” to men, while he came from a liberal Muslimsect where women no longer wore headscarves and were educated professionals alongside men. A couple of years later hemoved to the USA where he was reunited with members of his family and resumed his profession.

I often think of Ali and what he must have made of us all. I think of how he came on a road trip to Adelaide with us – my brother,sisters and some friends. The jokes we shared, the hilarious misunderstandings of language and culture. I think of how we allspent weekends sanding, painting, cleaning, as he and we helped my brother to renovate his house in Marrickville. I rememberthe flavours of the lamb and the carrots and spiced rice that he carefully made for us - as if he had been cooking for all of hislife. (What were the other details of his life, and who taught him how to cook?) I remember the smell of Camel cigarettes in histhick black beard and moustache, but mostly what I remember was the deeply shared humanity, despite him being a liberaleducated Muslim and we fundamentalist, sectarian Christians. I feel a love for this man, and the kind of liberal, cultured, ed-ucated Islam that he represents, and I feel so sad that his country of birth has been overtaken by the violent, ignorant fun-damentalism of the Taliban.

“…The fundamental function of art is to gather the contradictions and complexities of the life world. Being an ‘imago mundi’,the work of art helps man to dwell.”1

“I didn’t trust it for a moment.But I drank it anyway,The wine of my own poetry,It gave me the daringTo tear down the darknessAnd cut it up into little pieces”3

“They saw that ordinary [objects], especially uprooted from their practical functions, [in other contexts and relation to oneanother], contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable, meanings.”2

The Middle East occupies an enormous part of Western collective imagination. It appears daily on the internet with reportagefrom the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the Israel/ Palestine conflict, the Arab Spring, refugees and racial tensions in Europeancountries. The fatwa on Salman Rushdie (the Islamic Revolution), The Gulf War, 9/11, The War on Terror, The Call to Jihad,Osama bin Laden, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo have become the major historical/cultural markers of our time.

In this context, using minimal means and everyday objects, I respond to the politics and sociology of the phrase “Of MiddleEastern Appearance.” Some of the images are based on fleeting impressions from the internet or television and some arebased on deeply felt personal experience. I attempted to gather some of the rich and contradictory notions of the MiddleEast, like fragments of a complex mosaic. Literally many of the images come from a huge toy-box of stereotypes, which havebeen photographed to illustrate the unstable narrative of a menacing and exotic other.

Formally, my practice exploits the representational possibilities of manufactured things. It could be described as painting withreadymade colours, forms and textures, or ‘painting with objects’ in the traditional genres such as landscape or portraiture.I have found a remarkably wide range of Middle Eastern portraits and readymade affective states from my toy-box alone.

I love the texture, colours and morphology of moulded cardboard and its intrinsic architectural forms, particularly useful torepresent the mud-brick, stone and the cave dwellings found in the a vernacular architecture of the Middle East.

ELAINE CAMPANER

Elaine Campaner’s art practice involves creating dioramas of found objects which are then recorded by digital camera. Shepresents her work in limited edition photographic print format.

She has been acquired by both public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of NSW,Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Bank, University of Sydney, University of Wollongong, Deutsche Bank, MacquarieBank, NRMA, private collector Peter Fay, Hawkesbury Art One Group and other prominent Australian private collections.

1 Genius Loci. Towards a Phenomonology of Architecture. Christian Norberg-Schulz. Rizzoli, New York. United States Edition 19802 Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Early Work. Texts by Peter Galassi. Museum of Modern Art, New York. French edition 19873 Lalla 14th Century Female Sufi Poet

Elaine Campaner

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2012 A Place in the Sun McNamara Gallery, New Zealand

2011 Citizenship Damien Minton Gallery2009 Travelling North Damien Minton

Gallery2007 Holiday Damien Minton Gallery2007 Paradise if you can stand it

McNamara Gallery, New Zealand 2006 Internment Damien Minton Gallery2000 The New Testament as Understood

by Small Children Newspace Gallery

Selected Group Exhibitions

2012 Volume One: MCA CollectionMuesum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

2012 What goes around comes aroundHawkesbury Regional Gallery

2011 Imaginary Geographies Lightbox Project Wellington NZ.

2009 Cold Front, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery. Curated by Meryl Ryan

2008 Under Stars Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham

2007 Moving Still The Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland New Zealand.

2005-7 Regarding Retro: Reanimations of the Preloved Blacktown Arts Centre. Curated by Ingrid Hoffman Touring until 2007, Queensland Art Gallery

2005 Lapped Campbelltown Arts Centre. Curated by Peter Fay

2003 Home Sweet Home: The Peter FayCollection National Gallery of Australia

Selected Awards and Prizes

2012 Bowness Photography Prize.MGA Finalist

2012 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Finalist

2011 Bowness Photography Prize. MGA Finalist

2010 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Finalist

2009 Bowness Photography Prize. MGA Finalist

2007 National Photographic Portraiture Prize, National Portrait Gallery Canberra. Portrait of journalist Margo Kingston. Finalist

2007 Art & About, Sydney Life Photography Prize. Finalist

2007 National Photography Prize Albury Regional Art Gallery. Finalist

2003 Blake Prize Finalist

Education

1997-99 Bachelor of Visual Arts, (Honours) Sydney College of the Arts

1989-94 Bachelor of Science (Architecture) University of Sydney

1988 Scholarship to Brazil. Artes Plasticas, Universidade de RibeirãoPreto, São Paulo

Collections

Art Bank, Art Gallery of NSW, DeutscheBank, Hawkesbury One Maquarie Bank,Museum of Contemporary Art, NationalGallery of Australia, NRMA, Sydney CityCouncil, University of Sydney, University ofWoollongong, and private collections etc

Elaine Campaner is represented by Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney and McNamara Gallery, New Zealand.

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