Tuesday, 17 June 2014
Panoramic landscapes, delicate and dramatic Korean art and prints of all personalities are on show at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery until 12 July.
In 1792, the Scottish entrepreneur Robert Barker merged the Greek word pan (all) with hórãma (view) when he was searching for a word to describe his 360 by 180 degree painting of the city of Edinburgh. Like all successful inventions, the panorama was of its time and reflected the growing interest in communing with the natural world and travelling to exotic places.
The exhibition panorama examines the impact of the panoramic format from the early years of the 19th century to current work by contemporary artists and scientists.
The panorama format enabled photographers to convincingly present a view as if you were standing in the landscape, and ‘being there' was one of the panorama's tempting lures. The sense of ‘being there' is the catalyst for many contemporary artists who use the panoramic vista to enmesh their audience in the stories they are telling.
A feature of panorama is Robert Dale's panorama of King George Sound produced in 1834 as a kind of prospectus to attract new investors. Alice Blanch uses an old Box Brownie to record a panoramic sweep of the Tasmanian landscape that draws the viewer into its seductive beauty. Taking a similar stance in a very different landscape Ian North reminds us that beauty is where you find it, even in the familiar jumble of fibro fences and suburban streetscapes.
Rodney Glick and Lynette Voevodin illustrate the space and time continuum in their extraordinary video Earthquake , which documents the traffic hurtling along Great Eastern Highway over a period of 24 hours.
Duration is also a feature of Jacopus Capone's To love in which he records, through photographs and collected objects, his five-month walk from Cottesloe to Wollongong, carrying water from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean.
The campus partner for panorama is iVEC , Faculty of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics.
An exhibition presented by the Berndt Museum , Transcending Borders gives visual form to the developing cross-cultural relationships between Korea and Australia. It is hosted by the LWAG and is in collaboration with campus partner, Korean Studies.
Using the Museum's significant collection of historical Korean material as a catalyst, contemporary Australian and Korean artists have been invited to venture beyond real and imagined borders using performance, moving image, photography, painting and sound.
This is the first time the Berndt Museum's Korean collection has been on public display and provides a unique opportunity for audiences to see works by participating contemporary Korean artists never before exhibited in WA.
From 7th century Silla Dynasty ceramics to web art by Seoul based collaborative Heavy Industries, Transcending Borders aims to highlight how traditional and contemporary ideals permeate one another.
Traditional ink painter, Soohyang Lee, paints scenes of her North Korean hometown as a method of recreating childhood memories, enabling her to visit these unreachable places again through her art. Lee moved to Sydney around 30 years ago and, in adopting her new environment, she also paints Australian landscapes using traditional Korean Southern School ink techniques.
Worldwide Backyard tells two stories: one, about how images of our ‘home turf' in the 20th century have been shaped by global influences, and another about what printmaking can be and do.
Showing in conjunction with Japanese prints from the Berndt Museum, the exhibition presents a ‘capsule collection' of works from Australian artists that run the gamut of print medias and formats.
The exhibition juxtaposes historical and contemporary works and macro and micro perspectives. Intricate, picturesque woodcuts rub up against posters for environmental activism and conceptual explorations of mapping or global satellite imaging.
Curator Gemma Weston said Ethleen Palmer's post-war Japonist serigraphs provided the inspiration for the exhibition.
"It was interesting to compare Palmer's images of Australian landscapes to the Berndt Museum's traditional Japanese prints," she said.
"I also enjoyed the idea of these delicate prints next to something large-scale, contemporary and conceptual, like Simryn Gill's iconic Forest series. The contrast makes the framework of the way that we look at the environment, and the way we position ourselves globally, more visible."
Tags
- Groups
- UWA Forward