ALISON KENNEDY - 'The Blob'
Kings Artist Run Space - 3rd – 23rd August 2019
The Blob consists of a
thirteen-minute (approx.) video and suite of eight silkscreen prints squeezed
onto an adjacent wall at the modest Kings Artist Run space. The collective,
perched improbably in the heart of Melbourne’s business district is now in its
fifteenth year as a respected independent venue and Kennedy’s show is a good
example of its enterprise.
Untitled video (The Blob) (2019) approx 13 minutes,
installation view
Untitled (2019) suite of silkscreen prints, each 60 X
40 cm on acrylic sheeting, installation view
The show continues the artist’s interest in digital imagery, its variety
and combination, the glitches and inconsistencies that arise through
computation, their unexpected meanings for representation. A key development
since 2018 has been her use of 3-D modelling and animation, in particular
Autodesk’s ReCap Pro, in which photographs may be combined into a
three-dimensional space or volume, derived from overlapping cues within the
source photography. It is a process not unlike the more familiar merging of
photographs sharing contiguous content to create panoramas, found in
applications such as Adobe Photoshop. The technical term for the 3-D process is
photogrammetry. ReCap is generally used to convert aerial or satellite imagery
for architectural purposes. The constructed volume may then be traversed by a
software camera and its motion recorded as an animation, much as in other 3-D
modelling programmes.
Installation view
Untitled (2019) production still
The camera continues to circle the half-finished figure, but for some reason the programme has been unable to complete an assembly of the photographs. This puzzling accident remains a matter of almost fatalistic resignation to the artist and leaves the intended self-portrait as not much more than a blob – perhaps prompting the show’s title. The work is available online in two shorter versions, a 2.28 minutes one and a 10 minute one.
A similar work, also online is worth viewing as well. Selfie:Flag 4.42 demonstrates an interesting overlap in concerns. It too deals in a self-portrait in her painting studio and here - courtesy of You Tube - one can study more closely the strange ragged edges that result from the programme tentatively anticipating additional ‘bites’ of information to edges of planes, of the expected size and shape of contributing photographs and of the incoherence of mismatching content. Here there is no crash to the compilation, merely an inability to resolve the range of supplied photographs into an accurate 3-D model of the content.
A similar work, also online is worth viewing as well. Selfie:Flag 4.42 demonstrates an interesting overlap in concerns. It too deals in a self-portrait in her painting studio and here - courtesy of You Tube - one can study more closely the strange ragged edges that result from the programme tentatively anticipating additional ‘bites’ of information to edges of planes, of the expected size and shape of contributing photographs and of the incoherence of mismatching content. Here there is no crash to the compilation, merely an inability to resolve the range of supplied photographs into an accurate 3-D model of the content.
Production still of Selfie:Flag 4.42
The work acquires something of a painterly flow and simplification and
one begins to see the point in locating the figure within a painter’s studio –
to prompt comparisons between the kind of stylistic flourishes available to the
painter’s repertoire of techniques and those derived from software process. Yet
the contrast is also between a private scheme at the command of a painter and a
computational process at large or within the public domain. Crucially, the
animation dwells upon the incompleteness to the surroundings above and below
the figure and to the figure’s volume, established only for roughly the front
and distortions wrought in particular to the face in sustaining a plane. Vacant
areas to the modelling register as a flat black space so that the figure, when
viewed where the surrounding studio has not been supplied; is rendered in a
stark isolation. Indeed, toward the end of the animation the camera tracks into
the face from the back of the figure – so the face is now viewed in reverse -
and blurred in a Bacon-like transience. These aspects surely suggest a
psychological dimension to the self-portrait, to the issue of personal identity
more generally. Just as importantly, the equation between painting and digital
imaging suggests an intriguing division in meaning and realm. One fails where
the other succeeds, one makes sense while the other breaks it. One is private when
the other is public or social. Painting, in other words, is anchored in quite subtle
and unexpected ways with the digital world.
All this is both surprising and accomplished for an artist currently
completing an MFA at the VCA. And it is not simply a matter of a younger
generation with a surer, more adventurous grasp of recent technology. On the
contrary, Kennedy is a mature age student who obtained a first degree in
architecture in 1997 (RMIT) and subsequently worked as an architect and on
related design projects until 2012, when she turned to painting more fully,
seeking more expressive and direct engagement. Her concerns there ran to
gestural abstraction and she remains committed to the practice although it has
stalled somewhat by her own admission (her exact words: “unfit for human
consumption”) awaiting her experiments with digital imaging. These are, if not
strikingly original, certainly unusual in the current scene and significantly
draw upon her extensive background in design, incidentally, one wants to add, urging
the value of undertaking post graduate research after a period outside of
academia. It is surely no coincidence that an architectural application such as
ReCap should appeal and serve as novel means for tracking the vagaries of
two-dimensional depiction once mapped within additional dimensions of space and
time. The issue - as with so much recent painting - is really the relation of
figuration, or concrete depiction, to abstraction. If one were to tie the two
sides to her practice to broader trends, it would lie upon this nexus.
Some clues to a resolution lie in the suite of silkscreens. Like most of
the artist’s work, they are frustratingly untitled, all 60 X 40 cm, notable
firstly for their novel support, a high impact poly-acrylic sheeting with a
high gloss finish. Again this is usually a trade or industrial product but here
applied to fine art ends.
Untitled (20119) silkscreen on acrylic sheeting
These works are derived from a larger work, again untitled (to be shown
at the end of August at the McLelland Gallery) in which a 3-D model of a tree
is placed upon a nominal grass plane and perspectival grid. Here the artist wrestles
the imagery away from a photographic source and a more literal reading and in
confining the works to black and white, make the black background far more
ambiguous as a ‘null’ setting for the model, make for an altogether darker
mood, and prompt a far more abstract reading of notional depth or
perspective.
Untitled (Virtual Oak Tree) (2019) 250 X 300cm
silkscreen on acrylic sheeting [NOT IN SHOW]
Untitled (2016) 160 X 120 cm digital print
Untitled (2015) 169 X 100 cm digital print
These works proceed as fairly standard Photoshop compositing, offering a range of source imagery, from art history to online games and a dense range of layers rather than a more integrated picture plane. Indeed, the structure really appeals to an allegorical or symbolic reading, of the flow and deluge of culture upon a female life. This interest in a more iconological arrangement and grander themes soon prompted the artist to visit Leipzig in 2018 as a private initiative and to work in the famous Spinnerei studio complex, home to Neo Rauch and the New Leipzig School. Yet, for all the School’s focus upon painting, Kennedy persists with her Photoshop composites, expanding her photographic sources to include digital ‘painting’ or graphics ‘brushes’, while retreating somewhat from her starker figurative and feminine themes
Untitled (2018) 110 X 90 cm digital print
But while these changes give the work a measure of gesture or touch,
they do not bring any notable breakthrough in her painting.
The real change comes upon returning to Australia later that year and
adopting ReCap. This offers a more sustained picture plane and in place of
brushstrokes a ragged fragmentation to the assembly of photographs. The theme
of the female figure beset by surrounding forces is now neatly fused with
technical issues, giving the work far greater impact and suggesting a number of
promising directions, concerning more dynamic tableaux, more elaborate
soundtracks, multiple channels or screens. The Blob video confines the
soundtrack to the occasional quiet breath, while Selfie:Flag 4.42 offers a quiet piano loop, but these seem only
starting points. In any case, for the moment we have a work of unusual and
promising directions.
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
My thanks for her time in preparing this review
Installation views of the video by Chris Bowes
Installation views of the silkscreens by
Michael Blamey
