This exhibition at UTS Gallery, curated by Holly Williams and Chris Gaul, brings together eleven artists concerned with the information we all leave in our wake, and reveals many different possibilities as to what can happen to this information once it has been discarded by its original creator or user. There are many anonymous and unwilling subjects portrayed in Trace Recordings. In some works, the audience unwittingly becomes the subject of the piece, as the work is activated through looking. In the works of Denis Beaubois, who uses low-fi materials including CCTV screens and mirrors, the viewer’s image is sucked into an infinite vortex. Memory 2013, by Shinsungback Kimyonghun, gradually forms a morphed portrait of everyone who has stood in front of it, via a tiny camera which records and superimposes likeness after likeness onto the screen.

Several artists in the show use anonymous and apparently unconsenting subjects to demonstrate the possibilities of surveillance culture. Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts turns the subversive nature of street art on its head, by reproducing life-sized images of people captured on Google Street View at the site where the image was originally taken. A fleeting, inconsequential moment in someone’s day is captured, providing a reminder about the gargantuan amounts of visual information (potentially featuring us) available online for anyone to use at will. Control has shifted to those who choose to seek and re-present this information.

One such person is Heather Dewey-Hagborg, whose work Stranger Visions 2012 uses recent innovations including 3D printing to construct portraits of people based on DNA found on discarded cigarette butts and chewing gum. These uncanny sculptures, with their life-like features abruptly ending at the hairline to reveal negative space behind, reveal much and very little about the person simultaneously. A small vitrine below each ‘head’, as well as containing the object from which the DNA was retrieved and a photograph of its original location, lists the subject’s genetic ancestry (raising questions such as the potential health implications that could be measured). From this quite specific information, still infinite conclusions could be reached about her/his life.

There are also many anonymous subjects of Benjamin Gaulon’s work 2.4Ghz, a small screen with antenna which tunes into unencrypted video on this particular frequency, common in baby monitors. Visitors are invited to borrow the work, exploring their city via its residents who have unknowingly left themselves open to surveillance via a profusion of these devices. Even as the object sits idle in the gallery, the image on its screen flits between images of unknown sites, where people move around unaware of being watched, often from the upper corners of rooms.

In contrast to this excess of broadcast noise, there is an eerie beauty to the work of Trevor Paglen, whose photograph They watch the moon 2010 depicts a secret NSA listening station in West Virginia, USA. This complex is located within a National Radio Quiet Zone, meaning that WiFi, FM radio and other transmissions are banned in order for the organisation to capitalise on the phenomenon of ‘moonbounce’, where communication signals can be captured and listened to post-broadcast as they return to earth. Paglen has also harnessed the moon’s power, using its light for this long-exposure image. The station appears as a massive glowing target in the middle of the wilderness, its clusters of satellite dishes un-camouflaged, much like the messages they intend to intercept.

Another artist examining the surveillance work of the US government is James Bridle. The subject of Bridle’s work is the Disposition Matrix, a tool designed to find connections within intelligence and surveillance information collected by the government, the alarming result being the automated generating of lists of targets for drone strikes.  A Quiet Disposition 2013 is, in turn, a system developed by Bridle to search online for reference to those involved with drone strikes and the Disposition Matrix. The resulting garbled text exposes the random and incorrect nature of the conclusions that can be drawn from such an automated system – it may be quiet but is potentially deadly.

Adam Harvey directly invites the viewer to interact with modes of 21^st century surveillance. His CV Dazzle Workshop 2010 teaches the audience about the possibilities of camouflage makeup for subverting facial recognition technologies. The black blocks placed geometrically and sporadically over the face are not only effective in distorting digital understanding of who is being watched, but also resemble war paint designs, imbuing the wearer with the feeling that they are arming themselves against this force of surveillance. In this sense, this work is not only active but activist, and provides an effective curatorial counterpoint to the more sinister works in the exhibition.

An important aspect of Trace Recordings is the wall texts accompanying each work. It is arguable as to whether reading wall texts should be necessary in exhibitions in general, however in the case of this show it enhances understanding of the pieces, and in this context it feels prudent – like reading the terms and conditions before consenting to yet another incursion into our private lives by some unknown entity. Trace Recordings drags Orwell screaming into 2013.

Trace Recordings – Surveillance and identity in the 21st century
22 October–29 November 2013
UTS Gallery, Sydney
http://www.tracerecordings.net/

All images courtesy UTS Gallery, Sydney.

At their essence Natalya Hughes’ paintings in Looking Twice are Japanese – simultaneously traditionally and contemporaneously so. However they effortlessly reach beyond this, into abstraction, psychedelia, psychoanalysis. Their Rorschach-like morphing surfaces are reinterpretations of the portraiture of 19^th century Japanese artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. The luxurious and sometimes clashing combinations of colours and patterns found on the clothing and furnishings in Yoshitoshi’s images (bringing to mind the designs of fashion house Kenzo) are as important to his works as the subjects themselves. Hughes adopts and adapts these visual motifs, using digital design programs to create symmetrical compositions in which the subjects of Yoshitoshi’s portraits are each subsumed into a vortex of colour and shape. These images are rendered boldly and flatly in acrylic on plywood, in contrast to Yoshitoshi’s delicate woodblocks. Resulting works such as Looking cute 2013 draw the viewer in with suggestions of imagined figures – not necessarily human, but perhaps arthropod or even alien.

The graphic quality of Hughes’ work also speaks to the contemporary Jap-anime aesthetic, not only through intense colour and hard-edged shapes, but also in the undertones of eroticism inherent in the morphing symmetrical forms. The artist has turned her hand to animation recently and it is not difficult to see how the development of these striking paintings could work in tandem with such a practice. Hughes’ practice also incorporates wallpaper, carpet and fabric designs which she has used to create trippy total environments in which her paintings pulse.

Abstract 2013 contains a percussive repetition of triangles, the geometry of which deliberately resists the narrative-charged readings of the other three paintings in the show. However the acid yellows and greens of this work harmonise with the other paintings in the exhibition while resonating with Western modernist traditions, and ultimately this small but rigorous exhibition is all the better for its inclusion.

Natalya Hughes – Looking Twice can be viewed at The Commercial, Redfern until 9 November 2013. – http://www.thecommercialgallery.com/

All images courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Redfern.

Red Dose is an independent arts organisation recently formed to foster cross-pollination between Asian and Australian art communities. Their debut exhibition Red-Volution is taking place in association with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, within the historic Hong Kong House building in Sydney’s central business district. Red Dose Artistic Director Kathy Leung has used the significance of the colour red in Asian cultures as a curatorial springboard, drawing together artists working across themes of nature, family and spirituality.

Traditional Chinese aesthetics ran through the show, exemplified by the paper cutting works of Tianli Zu, whose installation Infinite Universe (2009-2013) dominated a wall of the exhibition. Although this work was indeed red, the colour acted as more of a symbolic thread through much of the work. Australian artists Keith Lane and Brett Bailey both drew on Asian imagery executed in surprising techniques – Lane’s painted plaster and fibreglass sculptures referencing the Chinese ceramic tradition, and Bailey’s paintings of familiar natural phenomenon (such as Dry Riverbed) bearing striking resemblance to Japanese ink on paper works, despite being painted on canvas. Likewise, Laurens Tan’s small-scale sculpture of a chair, The Depth of Ease (Lounge) 2007 used fibreglass and auto paint to produce a red glossy surface akin to lacquer ware.

However the works which resonated most strongly within the elaborate heritage interior of Hong Kong House were not necessarily the most traditional.  Douglas Cham’s ceramic sculptural series Banana-kids (2009) depict white crocodiles emerging from banana skins. Cham explains: “Banana-kids is the nickname given to ethnic Chinese, born and raised in Australia, by first-generation Chinese migrants. The term means ‘white’ inside and ‘yellow’ outside.” [Artist’s statement from exhibition catalogue.] These slightly menacing white creatures slithering out of their pop-art banana skin cloaks were intriguing in their boldness.

As well as the work of ten visual artists, the exhibition also includes three short films. While the exhibition itself is a rather diverse selection of work, the short film programme is quite strong. Each film explored the isolation of life within a busy metropolis, in very different ways. Pako Leung’s Still on the Bridge (2011) observed the quotidian of a widowed snack vendor, attempting to go about his business as his neighbourhood fades around him. In Case (2012) by Ivana Lai, follows a young man living with degenerating eyesight and a hoarding grandmother. Highly saturated colours (the duo live in an apartment dominated by green décor, including a green fridge) are accompanied by the man’s tape-recorded journals as he attempts to hoard his own memories of what will soon fade from his vision. The third short film in the exhibition, First Light (2013) by Lilian Fu, is a charming animation, whose protagonist loses her home amidst the relentless progress of a modern city. Her search to recover where she belongs is revealing and ultimately beautiful.

Still on the bridge (2011) – Pako Leung

Red Dose is an example of a new model for bringing contemporary art to wider audiences. It will be interesting to see its forthcoming projects as contemporary Asian art practice continues to be closely observed by audiences here and overseas.

Red-volution continues until 14 November 2013.
More information:  http://reddose.com.au/exhibition-red-volution/

Heath Franco – Dream Home

Galerie Pompom, Chippendale, Sydney

19 June – 14 July 2012

Simultaneously repellent and compelling, Heath Franco’s video work draws the viewer in with its references to suburbia and keeps us there through exaggerated grotesquery and repetition. Epitomised by one bully caricature beating up a freaky, burn-marked toy with the repeated phrase “Stop hitting yourself”, the viewer may find they are unable to look away, effectively punishing themselves over and over. The wood-panelled interior of the gallery, rather than providing a sense of warmth which wood often gives, instead exudes a sickly yellow sense of suburban claustrophobia, as if we’re stuck in the kitsch kitchen cupboard of the Dream Home in question, forced to observe the goings-on in all their repetitive glory. Franco himself relishes the multitude of roles he adopts within this surreal pseudo-narrative. With a nod to the panto tradition, his not-fooling-anyone drag personas queasily chant their lines to the point of abstraction. These performances take on an element of endurance as we begin to notice Franco fatiguing while he imbues effort into every line. The non sequiturs in the work add to its surrealism, which regularly spills over into the realm of nightmare as we struggle to grasp for meaning within this foreign landscape. There is also humour in these motifs, perhaps because as a conscious viewer we are aware of our ability to separate ourselves from this scenario rather than become confused or controlled by it. Nonetheless there is still a compulsion to stay through the duration of Dream Home, to make some sense of it as one endeavours to make sense of one’s own dreams.

Images courtesy the artist and Galerie Pompom, Sydney. Please visit Galerie Pompom for more information.