Occasional Space

Buildings and Infrastructure

Sadie Chandler – Buildings and Infrastructure

Charles Nodrum Gallery 30 April – 21 May, 2022

https://www.charlesnodrumgallery.com.au/exhibitions/sadie-chandler-buildings-and-infrastructure/

Buildings and Infrastructure

They say that they’re “building a better future” with huge road works, rail upgrades and other building projects. It’s very noisy and inconvenient but, they also say, it will all be worth it. Some of these major building works have been happening at night and keeping people awake. I thought I could hear machinery all through the night, till eventually I realised that it was my own heartbeat thumping, probably due to dreaming of all the modems, wires, remote controls, electric cables, plumbing pipes, and gadgets that surround me and complicate my life.

This exhibition, Buildings and Infrastructure, at Charles Nodrum Gallery, is about those fields of pipes, tubes, cables and drains; the bits that might be transformers, compressors and connectors. It’s the stuff inside the walls, under the floorboards, above the ceiling. It’s there all the time, but unseen.

We all want our own personal space and yet we crowd together in cities for safety, convenience and community and plan our ideal lives with infrastructure that connects everything with everyone. Cities, like bodies and technologies, depend on and provide this connectivity – but, to make things work, sometimes messy connections are necessary. Occasionally I’ll meet a plumber or an electrician and am amazed at the way they see and make things. Their work may often look messy but sometimes it’s elegant in both conception and execution.

I’ve been making hand painted and drawn wallpapers for the past 15 years. They are made from many parts that appear to form ongoing patterns yet there is no repetition as every part is unique. I like the way these works are large, covering walls from floor to ceiling and from edge to edge. Yet at the same time, they recede because, as background, wallpapers are part of a room. Made with a multitude of parts, these all-over wall coverings are ongoing or potentially unending accumulations. There is no singularity. Everything is related, inter-dependant and connected.

Sadie Chandler 2022

Elizabeth Day

Longford Prison Door On Rathdowne Street

19 Nov 21 – 4 Dec 21

window viewing 24/7, lights on 10 – 6

Elizabeth Day will be at Occasional Space Saturday 27 November 2 – 4 pm

or by appointment

Elizabeth Day, *Migratory Words/Migratory Worlds,* 2020, unravelled op shop garments on felt, 48 x 104 cm

Elizabeth Day, *Longford Prison Door On Rathdowne Street*, 2021

Elizabeth Day, *Door*, 2020, unravelled op shop garments on felt and muslin, 172 x 94 cm

Elizabeth Day, *Retaliation Made Things Worse*, 2021, unravelled op shop garments on felt, 51 x 101 cm

Elizabeth Day, nano particles, *They lacked an idea of personal property*, 2021, digital print, 47 x 59 cm

Elizabeth Day, nano particles, *The damage was passed on from generation to generation*, 2021, digital print, 47 x 59 cm ,

Elizabeth Day, nano particles, *Waste lands are there for the taking*, 2021, digital print, 47 x 59 cm

Longford Prison Door (1827) on Rathdowne St, Carlton

These works are part of the ‘prison on the landscape’ project that began when Elizabeth Day worked with female prisoners at a women’s gaol in Sydney on a garden project with Aboriginal and migrant women. They sought to metaphorically reclaim the land under the prison at Windsor by making designs that were a memorial to its pre-settlement history.

Day is currently working on a writing project that covers around ten projects that she has done in, and also referencing marginal sites of prisons and institutions. One of these was called Invisible Words/Invisible Worlds that began with a residency at Newcastle University, Department of Physics where she was enabled the possibility of looking at carbon nano tubes, one atom thick through an electron microscope.

The works here Longford Gaol Door (1827), MIGRATORY HIGHWAYS WERE BLOCKED, RETALIATION MADE THINGS WORSE, IT WAS PASSED ON FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION, show how she developed a poetic comparison of unravelled opportunity shop garments and carbon nano-tubes, attempting a forensic revision of our early history.

Invisible Words/Invisible Worlds here at the Occasional Space are approximately sandstone block size. The comments relate to the yet to be reconciled processes embedded in our country’s history. For other iterations of these works please see:

www.elizabeth-day.com

www.elizabeth-day.com/projects/invisible-words-invisible-worlds

Mark Galea

One Thing Leads to Another

Mark Galea – *One Thing Leads to Another* – Occasional Space

http://www.markwgalea.com

Callum Perry

A Vision of the Rapture

Callum Perry, *Southerly,* oil on polycotton, 173 x 101.4 cm, 2021

Callum Perry, *Spreading the Gospel of Love in Hell,* oil on polycotton, 81.4 x 71.3 cm, 2021

Julie Davies

Memory and Matter – Albert Street Archive

Julie Davies, *Memory and Matter –* Albert Street Archive,
a fragment from Mary Rizkalla’s collection #1, 2021, inkjet print on archival rag paper, Exhibition print, 140 x 80 cm, Small print 70 x 40 cm. Ed. 7 + 2 AP

Julie Davies, *Memory and Matter –* Albert Street Archive
a fragment from Mary Rizkalla’s collection #2, 2021, inkjet print on archival rag paper, Exhibition print, 140 x 80 cm, Small print 70 x 40 cm. Ed. 7 + 2 AP

Julie Davies, *Memory and Matter –* Albert Street Archive
a fragment from Mary Rizkalla’s collection #3, 2021, inkjet print on archival rag paper, Exhibition print, 150 x 100 cm, Small print 75 x 50 cm. Ed. 7 + 2 AP

Julie Davies

alex-julie@optusnet.com.au

Corner of Paris- 1905

Sadie Chandler. *Untitled*, 2017, ink marker and acrylic on museum and supermarket catalogue paper, 140 x 70 cm

Sadie Chandler, 2018, *Corner of Paris, after Bonnard- 1905*, ink marker and acrylic on museum catalogue paper, 65 x 55 cm

Sadie Chandler, *Children – After Vuillard – 190*9, 2018, ink marker and acrylic on museum catalogue paper, 65 x 55 cm

Sadie Chandler. *Paris Buildings*, 2017, mixed media

Jordan Marani

HEADS

David Jolly

93 20

Mark Hislop

The social limits to growth

October 2020

http://www.markhislop.com

Elvis Richardson

Settlement & The Gatekeepers

September 2020

Elvis Richardson, *Settlement & The Gatekeepers,* 2020, Occasional Space

Fieldwork

I can’t wait for spring so I’m arranging the flowers to brighten up the room.

The original sketches for these flowers were drawn in Flash, an early computer software for drawing simple lines and animations. I used only my finger on the keypad of my first laptop and came up with simple shapes filled with flat areas of colour. Flash allowed for layering of images where photos can float under graphics as in old-fashioned animation layering.

In 2003 I was in Germany and playing with this new drawing tool when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Der Speigel magazine published an article on the invasion that compared the Baghdad bombing to that of Dresden in 1945, showing photos of the destruction. These images clearly compared the awful consequences of the past to what was happening right then in Iraq.

The photo from der Speigel became the background for my Flowers. These flowers are cute and cartoon like but they also remind me of war.

Later I made these flowers into installations of cut-outs that have been shown in various places. The cutouts are part painting and part object, 3D but flattened.

Sadie Chandler, *Wutzburg and Flowers*, 2003, digital print

Sadie Chandler, *Flowers,* acrylic on canvas and board

Sadie Chandler, *Field*, installation Charles Nodrum Gallery

Sadie Chandler. *Field,* installation Canberra contemporary Art space

House Bound

Lockdown 2020

Occasional Space – 516 Rathdowne St Carlton North

http://www.sadiechandler.com

Sadie Chandler, *House Bound*, Occasional Space

Over the years I’ve made a lot of paintings of houses as well as cut-outs and wall paintings. Some are based on real houses that I’ve lived in, others on dolls houses that I’ve imagined, or seen in shops and online. Unlike ordinary dolls houses these have inaccessible interiors, there are no doors and the blackened windows suggest that you can’t get in or that the inhabitants might be sleeping. They are idealised dolls houses, dream houses, stereotypical and vacant, inviting an imagined child’s game or adult’s desire. The simple geometry of these paintings presents the house as minimal and formal.

Flash drawings and animations

Sadie Chandler Bad girl in Crumbling Corner

I’ve been going through old CD ROMS, looking at archives of works from the 1990’s.

Back then a friend suggested I should try the Flash animation software for drawing. The software was very basic and had a more limited interface than other drawing programs. I liked the fact that there were limited options. Later versions of Flash became more sophisticated, which I found too complicated. The native platform for Flash is the computer screen and it seemed an interesting tool to draw with at that time as we entered the digital era.

Flash seemed to be a very intuitive interface and as I was already playing around with making a website and had a basic idea of drawing on screen and how links worked, somehow I took to Flash easily. Vector lines meant that the lines and shapes could be scaled infinitely and retain amazingly perfect edges. Flash allowed me to play around with simple drawings that move a bit. They are not quite still and not quite animated, hardly doing anything except wink and wiggle. Later some of these images became large prints and were also painted on canvas.

Most of these drawings were made on my first laptop and were drawn using my finger on the keypad. This meant that I had very little control. Having such constraint meant that I was often surprised with what appeared, and I let the medium do what it wanted. I submitted to the medium. It was a bit like making a thumbnail sketch with a big piece of charcoal on a tiny matchbox to jot down essentials.

Sadie Chandler – Lockdown 2020

Works from the Attic

During lockdown I’ve had time to sort out some of the boxes crammed in the attic so I’ve been going through old works dating back to the 1980’s.

Some of the smaller works have been unwrapped, dusted off and hung in my studio. Most of them are remnants of larger bodies of works. Many of the larger paintings are still rolled up and stacked in the attic for another time.

I’ve been using the lockdown time to take stock of what I’ve made and to think about what to do next.

I thought it might be interesting to hang all of these works together, with old works alongside recent ones.

Sadie Chandler – Lockdown 2020

Paperworks 2018

Sadie Chandler, Paperwork, 2018, ink marker on paper on canvas, collage, 150 x 150 cm — Sadie Chandler, *Paperwork, 2018*, ink marker on paper on canvas, collage, 200 x 150 cm

The Paperworks are collections of hundreds of original individual ink drawings pasted one on top of the other and covering entire surfaces from edge to edge. The drawings are done with felt tip pen or brush on paper in black ink and then cut out and pasted with wallpaper paste creating a seamless surface of images – portraits, landscapes, still lives, and other art historical references.

My work has mostly involved painting and drawing and out of these the Paperwork has evolved. They are a way of making a lot of images culminating in one very large work without taking up too much space and without a lot of material. I think of this work as a storage system for all the art that I would like to make, or want to look at, or that has stuck in my mind. I always feel like there is never enough, and I have to make just a few more. It’s the drive that makes an artist keep on producing.

The latest Paperworks, compared to the earlier ones, have become more dense and the amount of material is more layered, also, the references are a bit more specific. Earlier works from this series had more imaginary imagery, and the latest ones have more references to other artworks and studied images.

Recurring themes are art historical genres and the history of representation, as well as the way that we accumulate images, gestures and styles to tell our stories in a culture already saturated with images.

Things that I’m interested in looking at are paintings of all sorts, but mostly figurative, classical Greek sculptures, reclining nudes, images of women. Studies of works by the old masters and contemporary artists are found among the doodles with recognisable references, from Renaissance art to abstract paintings, portraits, disasters from the newspaper and all the paintings that were once popular that now stack up under the stairs.

The really good reference images are easy to draw. My jotting is a test of sorts. If it translates well in a quick sketch, then I think that it has got more chance of being an image that stands the test. The quick ink drawings are each an examination of an idea, gesture or composition, intensely scrutinized if for only a minute or two.

http://www.sadiechandler.com/wallpaper.html

Framework

Framework is a sort of filing system or archive of all the art works from all the museums at once — a massive and immersive collection. The ink on paper sketches are based on framed historical artworks, pasted one on top of the other, creating a simultaneous view. The eye wanders from one image to the next as if the whole of the history of art could be there, coded and compressed. In a way, that’s how the images are stored in my mind. I can recall them without much detail, just the outlines of their general components as economical thumbnail sketches.

I’ve spent years looking at collections in art museums, thinking about how we’re caught in a circuit of image reception and reproduction. It’s impossible not to be influenced by these selections and presentations. I’m aware of being trapped but also propelled by these images and histories.

In making these studies, I’m engrossed in them for a few intense minutes without focusing for long on a particular piece — as if playing the role of the tourist, moving through collections of ‘great’ art works, immersed in the context of the museum and its arrangement of objects and images, including plinths and frames in grand crowded galleries. This is the experience of the spectacle that informs my work.

Sadie Chandler

January 2020