Ken UrbanDAVID ATTWOOD, SHANNON FIELD, AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSONEXHIBITION: 25 JULY - 23 AUGUST 2015CONTEMPORARY ART TASMANIA GALLERY

Shannon Field, Convicts of the Apocalypse, detail 2015

Ken UrbanRhyming slang for suburban or the brother of Keith Urban?

Contemporary Art Tasmania presents the work of three early-career artists under the deliberately ambiguous title of Ken Urban. David Attwood, Shannon Field and Amber Koroluk-Stephenson each have a fascination with the paradoxical reverberations beneath the surface of suburban Australia.

David Attwood appropriates the merits of disparate Australian phrases in developing his own series of text based simile works. Handwritten and ‘coloured-in’ with lurid combinations of marker pen, these works are serious and sincere and at the same time absurd and playful. Attwood’s works bring a smile to your face as you ‘squirm in your boots.’

Convicts of the Apocalypse is a new installation by Shannon Field in which seven simply constructed wooden figures sit astride workshop supports commonly known as ‘horses’. The artist sets out to depict ‘Australian masculinity as a constructed performance held together with nails and bolts; desperately trying to outrun/outride the rags of gendered failure that emanate from our European convict beginnings.’

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson works through ideas of utopia, the suburban façade and the relationship between natural and man-made environments in her work. A new large-scale installation incorporates a mix of freestanding and reconfigured elements informed by images related to the commodification of an ideal Australian suburbia. The work offers a mise en scène that is both familiar and obscure, and overtly artificial.

Ken is supported by Lisa Campbell-Smith, Rob O’Connor and Geoff Parr who have contributed a text response to each of the artist’s work.

Developed by the CAT Program Committee: Pat Brassington, Michael Edwards, Kylie Johnson,

Jarrod Rawlins, Travis Tiddy and Matt Warren.

David Attwood, Simile #1, 2015

DAVID ATTWOOD

1: We Kill Time And Bore Ourselves To Death:

What came first: boredom or malls? By it’s nature, a utopia cannot include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring. As Lars Svedsen posits in The Philosophy Of Boredom, boredom is a modern privilege. While there are reasons for believing that joy and anger have remained fairly constant throughout history, the amount of boredom seems to increase dramatically with modernisation. The two are inextricably linked. Boredom is not just a state of mind but also a characteristic of the world we have made as we participate in social practices that are saturated in boredom. Yet boredom can be active and critical as it expresses the idea that either a given situation or existence as a whole is deeply unsatisfying.

2: Perspectives in Ornithology:

A rickety wire fence and thin strip of asphalt separate me from a giant mall. This might be boredom. I’m not doing shit, but I am watching my three magpies walk around the lawn, strutting, calling and responding. The thing with magpies, apart from their song, is their ability to mimic. Around 20% of bird species have been noted to copy sounds from sources other than their conspecifics. The accuracy of the mimicry is often startling, especially when imitating sounds very unlike those of their own species. I saw on one of those Attenborough programs a male Superb Lyrebird that mimicked everything from camera shutters to a Ford Escort ignition. He was an urbanised lyrebird.

3: Post-Robot divas:

“Urban” is a particular sub-category of “Pop” that refutes all acoustic instruments for their lack of slithery, alien polish. Thanks to Antares Audio Technologies, Auto-Tune is a now ubiquitous audio processor that can chop and shape a clumsy human voice, into something twinkly and airbrushed. The result is something pretty sinister. I remember when it happened: 1997. I was 12 and Cher was an elderly blue-haired cyborg with a song on Rage called Believe that actively sought to address a strange pop fetish for uniform perfect pitch.

Many years later, we have Rihanna and Miley Cyrus. Barely toddlers when Cher released Believe, they represent the first horrible wave of entertainers to have fully internalised the Auto-Tune device. The result is a vocal sense of detachment that is as sullen as it is bored. The coldness and strange mechanistic detachment of their vocal styles is the result of someone who has learnt to Auto-Tune their voice before the software is even applied. Urban Pop – where the spaces between technology and human performance continue to blur. It hurts.

5: She Perth, Mate:

Historically, picture making has been based on images produced by an artist’s optical skill played out on the surface of a picture. Optical directness and spontaneity were essentials. While David Attwood’s text works have a definite hand-made-ness about them, it is his strategic mechanical process that, like an Auto-Tuned voice, gives a sense of the urban, wholly internalised. Like Miley and Rihanna, he mimics what is present – the friendly, detached Helvetica of shopping mall information panels – as if learnt by osmosis.

Though almost certainly not his intention, Attwood’s work expresses the problem of boredom. It moves beyond conventional representation and exists in a new geography that redefines the distance between ritual and routine, original source and final work. Neighbors [2015] is an act of mimicry. Television is the number one killer of time and simultaneously entertains the viewer while sending them into a de-tuned state of boredom.

The thing with David Attwood is that he notices things. He notices bottle caps and biscuits that look a bit like politicians. He pisses on things. In Attwood’s urban world, detritus becomes treasure via his interpretive mechanisms. A collection of

things found, stitched together, and presented like a bowerbird’s nest.

ROB O’CONNOR

David Attwood, An Iced

VoVo nibbled into the shape

of Kevin Rudd’s head, 2015

Photo Carla Adams

SHANNON FIELD

Low Speed Collision

A few weeks ago I witnessed a low-speed car accident in a semi-rural, suburban Woolworths car park. The accident was between two men, one backing out without looking, the other driving forward without looking, neither were quite sure who was at fault. It’s almost shameful the excitement one feels when watching a scenario like this, but the heightened expectation of witnessing something awkward or confrontational is irresistible. It was instantly apparent who the dominant male was. He leapt out of his car immediately, eye-balls bulging, chest protruding. The other man simply sat in his car, groaning over the steering wheel, defeated. Neither of these men were acting out of any kind of personal agency or with any real conviction – they were engaged in a masculine performance ritual.

Watching an argument in public between Australian men is all the more complex due to the weight of history and mythology since white settlement. It’s as though if a man backs down from confrontation, or shows any sign of weakness or appeasement, he fails to live up to the ‘do-or-die toughness in the face of adversity’ myth that has been pedalled since colonial times.

Shannon Field’s new artwork Convicts of the Apocalypse draws attention to a dominant identity in this Country – the heterosexual white male. Examination of this arena through the production of sculptures using materials such as plywood and recycled timbers draws connection to the sacred male space of the tool shed. Field positions his subjects in the landscape of the suburban sprawl, wrought as they are from the spoils of Bunnings Warehouse. In this sense the wooden male figures and horses create a kind of perverse shrine to the failing discourse of the hard masculine foundations Australian National identity was built upon. That, and the harsh landscape of the bush personified this ideal.

Does Field’s work question the sanctity of such culturally hallowed myths? Or is the abject and the ‘adolescent’ presented for exaggerated effect? Perhaps following in the tradition of such artists as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy and their contributions to abject art (bodily function, repulsion and desire) appears to be key in Field’s modus operandi. It must also be said that the impact of feminism in the 1970s on such male artists extends to inform their contemporaries in terms of expressions of masculinity, the patriarchal social order and identity politics – whether that be gender, racial, sexual or class-based through art production.

These are complex issues that Field discusses in relation to his practice, which lends itself to art as social transformation, or the study there of. The scene in the Woolworths car park is the exact arena that Field imagines, dislocated and broke – socially, economically and culturally. Field suggests that it is within these environments we ‘engage with the positive potential embedded in discourses of the monstrous.’ Any kind of meditation on these ideas is a step towards undermining the limited mythology we have inherited.

LISA CAMPBELL-SMITH

Shannon Field, Convicts of the Apocalypse,

detail, 2015

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Paradise Dreaming, detail, 2015. Photo Aden

Natkowicz

AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSON

In 2014 at the Bett Gallery, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson showed a coherent group of Tasmanian painting depicting suburban spaces that were located between the distant rolling hills and an equally distant CBD skyline. That body of paintings marked the artist as an aspiring urban storyteller and virtually chose Amber for an early-career artist exhibition entitled Ken Urban.

In the setting of each painting multiple clues are used to construct an identity of the conscientious homemaker. The incorporation of carefully detailed home and garden layouts, manicured attention to plants, lawns, pathways, lawns and edges and associated accoutrements formed portraits of people in places. It was the very continuity of these suburban fables, which introduces a surrealist element to the artworks that not even the homeowners of Hobart’s iconic Arthur Circus would be able to match.

The artist chose to push this ‘beyond reality’ element a little further with foreboding titles given to some of the works and she gives this quality a further nudge when she writes about ‘social constructs creating stereotypes’. There is coherence here between the artist’s concept and her choice of content. Together they compose the narrative.

Amber Koroluk-Stephenson is a Tasmanian artist making paintings about social factors in greater suburbia. Given the considerable influence upon Tasmanian artists of the always close-at-hand natural countryside, this ‘in my street’ series re-presents subject matter common to most town folk.

Then a late visit to the artist’s studio provides new insights into the preparation for a large canvas, which the artist intends to complete for the Ken Urban exhibition only a few weeks hence. Immediately evident was the extensive preparatory work, the monochrome sketches and the full-colour sketches and the 3-D models all testing the properties of the content and composition for this major work, presently at the underpainting stage.

As a measure of the considerable care that Amber puts into the preparation of her artworks, the studio visit was most impressive. Meticulous preparation also explains the continuity of storytelling so apparent in Amber’s practice. Even at the preparatory stage this new project retains that same ‘beyond reality’ elements evident in the earlier artworks, only now the symbols of suburbia will be carefully laid out upon a magic carpet and so mobilised are destined to visit their country counterparts: the symbols of Australia’s bushland.

GEOFF PARR

Contemporary Art Tasmania is supported by the

Australian Government through the Australia

Council, its principal arts funding body, and

by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an

initiative of the Australian, State and Territory

Governments, and is assisted through Arts

Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.

Contemporary Art Tasmania

27 Tasma Street, North Hobart, Tasmania 7000

03 6231 0445

info@contemporaryart.org.au

www.contemporaryarttasmania.org

© Contemporary Art Tasmania, the artists and authors, 2015

LIST OF WORKS

DAVID ATTWOODSimile #1 - #9, 2015

Coloured marker on card, 550mm x 440mm each.

Courtesy of the artist.

SHANNON FIELD Convicts of the Apocolypse, 2015

Installation, dimensions variable

Courtesy of the artist.

AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSONParadise Dreaming, 2015

Installation, dimensions variable

Courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery, Hobart.