The Armory Show 2002
20 February 2002
The Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has been showing Australian contemporary art at international art fairs for over a decade, having participated regularly at ARCO, Basel, Cologne and the Armory Show in New York. For The Armory Show 2002, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery will be presenting the work of six artists, with selected works displaying the depth and diversity of Australian contemporary art.
DESTINY DEACON has shown in exhibitions including the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Das Lied von der Erde at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, the 2000 Biennale of Sydney and the 1995 Havana Biennial. Using people and objects close to her - friends and family, dolls and other toys - the artist creates strange, unsettling images that address some of the most difficult aspects of contemporary Australian life. Cultural stereotyping, domestic violence and the status of Aboriginal women all inform Deacon’s photography, and her gift for storytelling and biting sense of humour provide her work with a compelling edge. With her series Forced into Images (a title taken from a poem by Alice Walker), a dramatic narrative unfolds, following a girl’s troubled life from birth to womanhood.
JACQUELINE FRASER, a New Zealand artist, combines locally and international sourced materials in a way that effects the site of each installation. She articulates ideological and theoretical assumptions by highlighting concealed cultural bias and ignorance via her poetic and sensual visual language. Her tableaux and emblematic figural ‘drawings’ address themes of loss and sadness. Fraser represented New Zealand at the 2001 Venice Biennale and has recently had a solo show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
One of Australia’s leading photographers, BILL HENSON is often compared to an Old Master painter for his rich, dramatic images. However, his work is powerfully contemporary, its youthful subjects on the verge of adulthood, living on the city’s fringes, surrounded by roads, bridges, fences and canals. Henson’s masterful control of light, shadow and colour give these large prints a rare depth and grandeur. Having represented Australia at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Henson has exhibited extensively since 1975. His work is held in all major collections in Australia, as well as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and has been shown throughout Europe, Asia and the United States.
TRACEY MOFFATT is arguably Australia’s most prominent contemporary artist. Her work has been shown in over 80 solo exhibitions since 1995, including a recent successful tour of Korea and Taiwan and an upcoming retrospective in New Zealand. Other exhibitions have been held at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, and Fundacio ‘la Caixa’ inBarcelona. Moffatt’s work brings together the history of photography, painting and film, with references to literature and popular culture, creating images that address desire, fantasy and despair. Moffatt’s most recent work Fourth features images taken from television coverage of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. With a typical Moffatt twist, the artist has focused on those athletes who came fourth, so close yet so far from victory, the disappointment on their faces a tragicomic expression of defeat.
The young Melbourne artist DAVID NOONAN, currently working in New York, was recently included in the 2001 Istanbul Biennial. Having shown in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Britain, Europe and the United States, Noonan was also featured in a project room at ARCO in 2001. Working primarily with video, which is often displayed within elaborate installations that encourage the viewer’s involvement as an actor in the scenario, Noonan’s work is rich with cinematic and pop-cultural references. Film genres such as science fiction and horror inform Noonan’s videos, which use loops to repeat dramatic events to the point of absurdity, as in The Likening (2001) which uses the horror film cliché of a woman alone in a large house, drawn toward a mysterious figure in another room.
PATRICIA PICCININI, also a young artist based in Melbourne, has received an enormous amount of critical praise in recent years and is producing some of Australia’s most exciting and covetable contemporary art. Piccinini’s work is where bio-genetics meets industrial design. She creates grotesque hybrid beings –synthetic organisms–which she gives a veneer of cuteness. She calls them ‘truck babies’, ‘giblets’, ‘car nuggets’ and ‘Lump’. She represents these ‘monsters’ in free-standing sculpture, wall panels and computer-generated prints.