PixelARTed 3: Beyond - exhibition launch
On 14 November 2024, the Pluspix Collective launched our third annual exhibition. We held this at The Front Cafe/Gallery in Canberra.
This year, 5 artists exhibited: Bobby Graham, Judy Hutchinson, Anne McDermott, Michael Smithson and Peter van Rens.
Dr David Court launched the exhibition. This is what he said:
WHERE IS ART?
I work a lot with filmmakers and sometimes artists. But the work I do is on the business side – specifically, teaching the business of art. Of course, the business sits behind, or perhaps beneath the art. It’s the invisible work that allows the visible work to go on. So asking me to speak at the opening of an exhibition is a bit like asking a builder to talk about architecture. Yes I have a point of view. But I may not say the rights things. I hope I can say something useful.
What is art, anyway? Or what may be a better question – Where is Art? If you ask people, they’ll mostly say it’s the stuff collected in the Major Art Galleries. Those treasured works, bathed in expensive light, and hemmed about by bored security guards. Or the big pieces they crane in, to perch there, waiting confidently on the public’s confirmation of their importance. Or the works transacted for fantastic sums at the big auction houses. But these are just the tip of an enormous iceberg.
When I was small my family used to go and stay on a farm in the north-east of Tasmania. My father was an architect, and an amateur photographer. He’d spend hours at a time taking just one photograph. We kids had no patience for it but I remember once standing with him in a bush clearing, near the farm, while he laboriously composed a shot. He said: his interest was in the small things. The detail. Not the big things. Which reminds me now of the architect, Mies van der Rohe, who famously said:
‘God is in the details.’
Of course, we also say, ‘The devil is in the detail’. So we have God and the Devil contesting the details. There must be something there!
And this leads me to Michael Smithson. His work, he says, has a deep fractal rhythm. ‘Fractal’ meaning a pattern that looks the same at any scale. Like a coastline. Or the branches of a tree. Or a snowflake. Fractal means you can enter the picture at any scale. Doesn’t matter. You can comprehend the largest structure by examining the smallest. Michael has dispensed with framing, exhibiting the works on aluminium sheets. No frame, no scale, just the fractal rhythm refracted through the artist’s process.
Art is in attention to the smallest things.
Or consider the work of Judy Hutchinson. Abstracting from real botanical shapes, through iterated squares, moving freely away, in the flow of inspiration. Bursting into flame or folding and unfolding like an origami bird.
Art is in the flow and the steady hand.
The theme of this exhibition is ‘Beyond’. For artist Peter Van Rens that conjured dystopian visions. But then these fell away and he reflected that ‘beyond’ could mean just stepping through a door. And so we have these vistas, of places visited, and visited again through the door of memory.
Art is in reflection and paring back.
Photographer Anne McDermott found herself fascinated by condensation. The dewy drops that form and slide on the side of a glass of wine. Through collage and iteration, she has recreated cities – New York, Toronto, Cassis – from the ephemera of tiny bubbles and smears of colour.
Art is in conjecture and iteration.
And finally, we have Bobby Graham’s lovely work. ‘Slow art’, she calls it. But it is slowness delivered in quick strokes by a free and confident hand. Responding to the moment and the emotion.
Art is in the quick and the slow.
This is a remarkable group of artists. Remarkable not least for their embrace of technology. Together, they have leaned into the possibilities of digital technologies. And found ways to push their art further. And it’s true: Art and Technology are family. Always helping each other out. Famously, when American painter John Goffe Rand invented collapsible metal paint tubes in 1841, he opened the way to painting out in the open – en plein air, as the French say – instead of being stuck inside a studio. As Renoir observed: ‘Without paints in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no . . . Impressionism.’ Now we have generative AI and once again it is artists who are the pioneers. Using tools like Dall-E2 and Deep Dream Generator. So I fully expect the PLUSPIX Collective will be back next year with further and greater innovations.
Art is in the embrace of technology’s possibilities.
Something else about the PLUSPIX Collective: their age. There is I think something rather beautiful that emerges when people, after long life trajectories, come together in a small school, to practise together. This collective, though just a few years old, draws on that great well of experience. Which between them, amounts to centuries.
Art is in the late work and the well of experience.
And one more thing. We like to think of art as something quick and intuitive. And so it is, or can be. But as every artist knows, the challenge is to keep going, despite the setbacks, the necessary failures, and the insults of time. To go forward, with an unchecked belief in the value of the work.
Art is in persistence and a patient confidence in the work.
Let me close now with this short reading from William Butler Yeat’s poem, Lapis Lazuli.
Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Thank you
David Court
