News
COMING SOON:
NEW SOLO EXHIBITION
Glimmer
Darren Knight Gallery
22 June - 20 July
Opening Saturday 22 June
840 Elizabeth Street
Waterloo NSW 2017
Tel +61 2 9699 5353
Chris Bond, Glimmer Issue 70, 2019, oil on linen, 102 x 76 cm
Glimmer is a return to painting – a reconsideration of the role of colour, surface, scale and application in a non-sculptural format. In making the works I’ve had to contend with the reality that they are what they are without reference to much in the world, trying to initiate a kind of possession in the process. Getting them to draw breath.
They manifest as enlarged painted facsimiles of covers of the journal ‘Glimmer’ (2001-16).
In January 2001, with the demise of the printed magazine at least a decade away, renegade Australian academic John Rutgers launched five new self-funded niche-interest journals. His hope was that each would contribute to a reawakening of interest in ‘peripheral pop academia,’ where marginal, often pseudoscientific fields of enquiry were exposed and popularised. He was ambitious in his reach but overestimated the potential readership for the specific concerns that each journal addressed, and a combination of rising debt and ill health led him to close four of them in the first year. The remaining journal, however, survived, limping along for the next fifteen years until it too was eventually abandoned in late 2016.
It was called ‘Glimmer.’ Rutgers positioned the bi-monthly publication to cover sensory phenomena that occur at the edge of perception, with a focus on visual distortions and irregularities. The journal’s title was inspired by Rutgers fascination with Tennyson’s poem ‘Merlin and the Gleam,’ which traces the passage of fleeting inspiration, and urges its following.
Late last year, after more than a couple of years spent guiltily squeezing my own books into empty spots in my son’s bedroom shelves, I decided to do a bit of a clean out. As I stood staring at the shelves not knowing where to start, I noticed an ungainly stack of decayed hardbacks perched right at the top. ‘Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology,’ ‘The Gate of Remembrance, and ‘For Sinners Only.’ I’d used them as props in the staging of the fictional museum exhibit ‘The Devil’s Spit’ in Ballarat a few years prior. I’d collected them for their titles, and they’d been left unread. My attention was drawn to one in particular, it had a coloured cloth cover that was probably once a brilliant turquoise, but because of its advanced state of dilapidation it was more of a ghostly grey. I could just make out its title embossed in a faint gold: ‘The Gleam,’ by Sir Francis Younghusband. Its rippled and yellowed pages held the beliefs of a man called Nija Svabhava, who the author had apparently met on his travels through India. Svabhava was a ‘follower’ of ‘The Gleam,’ here interpreted as ecstatic religious enlightenment. Svabhava, as it turned out decades later, was entirely fictitious, a voice for Younghusband.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RECENT NEWS:
Word of Mouth
Four fragments choreographed by Peter Hill
Venice, Italy
7-14 May 2019
Chris Bond, Gretel, 2016, oil on canvas, calico, 17 x 10 x 2cm
Echo Chambers: Art and Endless Reflections
Curated by James Lynch
Deakin Downtown, Docklands and Deakin University Art Gallery, Burwood, Vic
Curated by James Lynch
13 February - 19 March 2019
This ambitious exhibition brings together contemporary Australian artists who are working with mirrors, mirrored surfaces and reflections as the subject and materials of their work, transforming three separate gallery spaces across Deakin University, into a series of dizzying spatial encounters. Artists include Chris Bond, Leslie Eastman, Yanni Florence, Carlo Golin, Justine Khamara, Gian Manik, Kent Morris, Nike Savvas, Linda Tegg, Ebony Truscott, Lyndal Walker and Meng-Yu Yan and others. This project seeks to engage with audience’s increasing desire to see images of themselves reflected in exhibitions and explores how contemporary culture and social media, often mirrors, duplicates and doubles itself. Key historical examples will frame the exhibition inviting the viewer to speculate on what they see and how our experiences of representation have changed over time.
Chris Bond, Twin Set (Pollock), 2008, oil on linen, 2 of 51 x 66 cm, private collection
Obsession: Devil in the Detail
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
30 November - 17 February 2018
Obsession: Devil in the detail examines a fascination with the meticulous and micro, the real and the hyperreal and brings together a range of historical and contemporary work under three broad themes of still life, portraiture and landscape. The exhibition features artworks that seduce us with the power of their realism and intricate detail and includes Natasha Bieniek, Chris Bond, Erin Coates, Audrey Flack, Juan Ford, James Gleeson, Sam Jinks, Jess Johnson, Anna Kristensen, eX de Medici, Tully Moore, Callum Morton, Jan Nelson, Sandra Selig, Vipoo Srivilasa, Ricky Swallow, teamLab, Eugene von Guerard and more.
Chris Bond, Arlo Alston, 2016, oil on linen, 40 x 28 cm
New Directions Art Auction
Gibson's Auctions
Sunday 17 February 2019
Raising funds for the Australian Prostate Centre
www.newdirectionsartauction.com
Chris Bond, My Side of the Mountain, 2018, oil on linen, paper, 18 x 11 x 1 cm, private collection
Analogue Art in a Digital World
RMIT Gallery
6 December - 19 January 2018
Chris Bond: New Media
Sydney Contemporary Art Fair
THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery stand
September 2018
Still Life Part. I
Curated by Adam Stone
Irene Rose Gallery
24th May - 16th June 2018
Annika Koops, Dane Lovett, James Deutscher, Anne-Marie May, Chris Dolman, Chris Bond, Olga Bennett, Kez Hughes, Adam Stone, Pia Murphy
Chaos and Order: 120 years of collecting at RMIT
RMIT Gallery
12 April - 9 June 2018
Sauced Material
Goulburn Regional Art Gallery
Civic Centre, 184 Bourke Street Goulburn NSW
2 March - 14 April 2018
Sauced Material brings together a group of artists (Chris Bond, Ricky Emmerton, Tara Marynowsky, Daniel Mudie Cunningham and Nicola Smith) who extend the narrative or form of existing media. Their works have been shaped, moulded and crafted from film, music, personal histories and literature but with flavour anew and enhanced. Memory is at play - but so is the politics of ownership and origin. Curated by Gina Mobayed, Director, who will be joined by all five artists for a floor talk at 1pm on Saturday, 3 March, followed by the curators of See: Phaedra Photography.
Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize
Adelaide Perry Gallery
Corner Hennessy and College Streets, PLC Sydney
Exhibition Dates: 3 March - 29 March 2018
KRAKEN
21 February–24 February 2018
VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 40 Dodds Street, Southbank
Kraken is the culmination of four years of research, the end-point of Bond's PhD study into dissociative practices in the visual arts.
At the centre of the research and exhibition is the character Kraken… a performance artist with an antagonistic bent. Together, Kraken and Bond create uncanny scenarios in which they think, feel and act from within the mind and body of the other, generating novel narrative, fictional documentation and source material. The exhibition showcases processes and outcomes of the relationship- video, performance remnants, text and painting.
Chris Bond, Kraken (makeup), 2015, digital image
BLINDSIDE B-SIDE
3-10 November, 2017
Blindside, Room 14, Level 7, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne
OPENING NIGHT: Thursday 2 November, 6-9 pm
For B-SIDE, BLINDSIDE will present a large scale exhibition of works for sale by our accomplished and significant alumni. Exactly half of the work in B-SIDE will be hidden. Each artwork on display in B-SIDE will be linked to a partner work (a b-side), which will be revealed only to the buyer.
As a fundraising exhibition B-SIDE will support the ongoing activity of BLINDSIDE into the future. For the past 14 years BLINDSIDE has provided a vibrant space for artists to test ideas and challenge conventions. B-SIDE will facilitate BLINDSIDE's continued program of experimental exhibitions, critical and engaging public programs, as well as support arts writers, curators and artists at all stages of their careers.
Congress
BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award
25 August - 2 September 2017
Temperance Hall, 199 Napier Street, South Melbourne
Gallery Hours: 25, 26, 30, 31 August and 1, 2 September 12-5 pm
BMCAA recipient Chris Bond presents Congress, a multi-disciplinary work in which he operates under the guise of alter Louise Bryce, to recreate, perform and document Bryce’s imagined performance and sculptural practices.
After a meeting earlier this year at the State Library of Victoria with the historian Judith Weeks, Bond claims to have come into possession of an old ledger book said to have been used as a sketchbook by Bryce, who briefly hired the upstairs room at Temperance Hall as a studio space in 1975.
According to Bond’s narrative, Bryce used the room to develop a private performance practice, which she planned in detail in the book, titled Congress on the cover. The book contains pages of drawn plans for timber and fabric sculptural forms that Bryce envisaged installing throughout the upstairs area at Temperance Hall, and included notations on how they might be interacted with through performance – none of which, according to Weeks’s research, ever materialised.
Bond gives shape to Bryce’s ideas by carefully reconstructing her designs, paying close attention to scale, material, and position in space, while attempting to recreate the relationship of the performer’s body to the object through photographic documentation.
Congress plays with the legitimacy of documentation, questioning its role in performance practices, engaging with the politics of interpretive reconstruction and the awkward position of fiction in contemporary art.
Chris Bond, Congress (page 135), 2017, performance, photograph by Joanne Moloney
Drawing
Darren Knight Gallery
29 July - 26 August 2017
Chris Bond, Jon Campbell, Matlok Griffiths, Uji Handoko Eko Saputro a.k.a Hahan, Mark Hilton, Jess Johnson, Maria Kontis, Rob McHaffie, Noel McKenna, James Morrison, Louise Weaver
Chris Bond Kinetic Art 2017, graphite on paper, found book, 19.7 x 16.6 x 0.7 cm
BOOK CLUB
Curated by Meryl Ryan
26 August – 15 October 2017
LAKE MACQUARIE CITY ART GALLERY
First Street Booragul, NSW
T: 02 492103382
E: artgallery@lakemac.nsw.gov.au
W: artgallery.lakemac.com.au
Gallery open Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 4.30pm
Contemporary artists Chris Bond, Deidre Brollo, Simryn Gill, Julie Gough,
Stephen Goddard, William Kentridge, Archie Moore, Brigita Ozolins,
Patrick Pound, Cyrus Tang, Ahn Wells, and writer Naomi Riddle,
acknowledge the power of books through art.
Chris Bond, En cor rah ya sicht, 2016, oil on canvas, calico, board, 47 x 47 x 6 cm (detail call number)
Chris Bond wins the inaugural BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award
Established in 2016, the $10,000 invitation-only BalletLab McMahon Contemporary Art Award (BMCAA) is awarded each year to a contemporary artist who demonstrates a commitment to brave and innovative practice that contests and re-imagines the boundaries of contemporary art in new and significant ways.
The BMCAA provides a valuable opportunity for one outstanding Victorian artist to progress their practice through the creation of a new work inspired by and exhibited at South Melbourne’s Temperance Hall, home of Philip Adams BalletLab (PABL).
Max Delaney, Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art was the inaugural BMCAA Judge and selected Chris Bond from a shortlist of five Victorian artists.
The 2017 BMCAA shortlist panel included Serena Bentley (Assistant Curator, Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Michael Brennan (Independent curator and Artist), Hannah Mathews (Curator, Monash University Museum of Art), Patrice Sharkey (Director, Westspace) and PABL Artistic Director, Phillip Adams with philanthropist, Dr Marcus McMahon who share a committee seat.
Chris Bond will present his winning work 'Congress' at Temperance Hall in August 2017.
Image: Chris Bond, Congress (construction detail), 2017, found book
Ways of Seeing
ARTER: Space for Art, Istanbul, Turkey
1 June – 13 August
Taking its cue from Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger’s critical text on visual culture, this group exhibition explores the various formalistic strategies that artists employ to re-configure our perception of the world. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, the exhibition posits the surface of the artwork as a space of encounter between the internal aesthetic deliberations of the artist’s creative process and the external often-conditioned gaze of the viewer. Ways of Seeing presents contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos, alongside artworks that span several centuries by artists such as Ghada Amer, Salvador Dali, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Grayson Perry, Cindy Sherman and James Turrell. It unfolds along a non-linear temporal thread whereby the viewer’s desire to 'understand through seeing' is constantly challenged through artworks that refuse to operate along the rigidity of styles, genres, and so-called 'isms'. In doing so, we are reminded that 'the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled'. It is in this inherently political process of searching, that we begin to discover several ways of seeing... The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 200 page, bilingual Turkish / English publication. It is co-edited by Sam Bardaouil, Süreyyya Evren, and Till Fellrath. With contributions by Mary Acton, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, and Stephanie Moser.
Chris Bond, slagen igg grotten figgur, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas, MDF, 2 x 25 x 20 cm (left side view)
A small show of imperfect paintings
Curated by Chris Bond
Trocadero Artspace Guest Curator Program
28 June – 15 July 2017
Artists: Colleen Ahern, Peter Atkins, Louise Blyton, Chris Bond and Drew Pettifer, Michael Brennan, Yvette Coppersmith, Craig Easton, Juan Ford, Julia Gorman, Stephen Haley, Irene Hanenbergh, David Hawley, PJ Hickman, Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Rob McHaffie, Jan Murray, Lynette Smith, Bryan Spier, Darren Wardle.
Full exhibition catalogue available for download by clicking here
A small show of imperfect paintings is a modest gathering of failed paintings by twenty one accomplished artists.
The works in this exhibition hover in a space where control over concept, aesthetics, motivation and technique has been lost or abandoned. This space is the domain of wabi sabi ‒ of imperfection, impermanence, irregularity, modesty, neglect, damage and incompletion.
Imperfection in a painting emerges from the uncertain condition of its making and reception. Paintings are hard to begin, difficult to stop and defy easy objective evaluation, and the unease generated by the absence of clarity during each stage can quickly spill into an overwhelming feeling of not-quite-rightness.
That feeling is the result of an acute awareness of the distance between the artist’s intention and the work’s material actuality, but it is not a feeling that necessarily needs to be reconciled, for once the painting has been designated as imperfect, it finds itself liberated from all of the things that it should be doing into something that simply exists by - and for - itself.
Imperfection, let alone failure, is of no value in the contemporary economy of the unblemished and the functional. A small show of imperfect paintings provides the lightest of counterweights to this bias, opening a forum for a reconsideration of what might seem unreasonable: the idea of a kind of freedom, or maybe even perfection, in failure.
Image: Chris Bond and Drew Pettifer, Untitled (Benjamin on my bed, cloaked), 2013, oil paint on chromogenic print, 60 x 40 cm
I am Wes Thorne
The National: New Australian Art
Carraigeworks, Sydney
30 March - 25 June 2017
A major exhibition partnership between three of Sydney’s premier cultural institutions, The National: New Australian Art is a six-year initiative presenting the latest ideas and forms in contemporary Australian art over three editions in 2017, 2019 and 2021.
Chris Bond is showing a suite of new drawings at Carriageworks made in collaboration with the character Wes Thorne. Also showing at Carriageworks: Richard Bell Karla Dickens; Atlanta Eke & Ghenoa Gela; Heath Franco; Alex Gawronski; Agatha Gothe-Snape; Alan Griffiths; Jess Johnson & Simon Ward; Richard Lewer; Archie Moore; Claudia Nicholson; Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran; Justene Williams; Jemima Wyman.
"This installation is a collaboration between Chris Bond and an identity named Wes Thorne, who Bond claims is actually himself. The installation comprises several pairs of thin paperbacks, related to ways of seeing, to portals, openings and networks. Bond and Thorne have subverted these forms by either adding scratched patterns or automatic scribbles to their covers.
The experience of these book pairs is quite magical for the viewer – while they were created in collaboration with a pseudonym, the objects make subconscious artistic commentaries on the sciences of perception, relativity and psychology. For the pair titled In Praise of Shadows (2016) the covers have the appearance of grids of micro-lenses from a light-field camera. After their transformation, they could also be read as large-scale astrological lenses. Scratched into the front of these books is a globular cluster of stars, and to the side of the grid there is a meteorite depicted travelling at a great speed. On closer viewing, we can see the cluster’s middle has been scratched with such intensity that a hole has been created. Such imagery conjures in the viewer thoughts of black holes and parallel universes of space and time. It is as though Wes Thorne is making an artistic adjustment to the sciences of time and perception with what he perceives to be true or complete.
The second book in each pair is a mirrored facsimile that is drawn with graphite pencil and read from left to right. The fact that Bond has created these in partnership with Thorne comments on how the self is a fluid construct made up of our past experiences, and brings to light ideas of coincidence and intersubjectivity.
For the pair titled Mondrian (2016) we see a thick black automatic-marker scribble on the cover of a book about modernist artist Piet Mondrian, who used a uniform and colourful technique of abstraction, drawing the viewer’s sight to a series of highly ordered opposites. The scribble adds an unmediated element of mayhem to Mondrian’s abstract painting beneath. For the facsimile of this pair, the Mondrian is drawn in greys so that the black scribble dominates. All that is left of Mondrian’s original work is a shadowy in-between area, a space of oblivion.
Bond includes similar techniques of adjustment to the book covers throughout the entire installation, but in different tones of black and grey that continue this sense of oblivion for us. In contemplating this scene, the viewer sees a reconciliation of the oppositional forms that exist within Mondrian’s compositions. From here the audience can perceive an end, a place where our sense of human order is subsequently destroyed, leaving room for transcendence as well as a corruption of human pattern."
Penny Trotter, 2017
Chris Bond and Wes Thorne, I am Wes Thorne (Intruders), 2017, marker on found book, graphite on paper, 11 x 18 cm, 2 pieces
ARCHIBALD PRIZE 2016
Chris Bond is a finalist in the 2016 Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, with his self portrait 'The Restless Dead (portrait of the artist)', 2016.
.jpg)
Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Hawkesbury River, NSW – 19 May to 2 July 2017
Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, NSW – 7 July to 20 August 2017
"In my practice I invent fictional identities and alternate versions of myself to assist with the creative act. In The Restless Dead (portrait of the artist), I appear in the guise of the invented Norwegian artist Tor Rasmussen. Tor is a difficult character to inhabit- he has a wild and oppositional disposition, but since his first appearance in 2014 he has gradually wormed his way under my skin, to the point where the two of us have become inseparable. The Restless Dead is, effectively, a self-portrait.
Tor has featured in much of my work of the last two years, as a figure in photographic and textual documentation, and importantly, as a creative force who I’ve used to generate imagery and text for my practice. Once in character, ideas and forms spill out that would otherwise be unlikely to appear, which I save and use in future work.
Increasingly, the clear separation of identity that once existed between the two of us has broken down and he has become a comfortable presence, less threatening, less malicious, and less useful. In the backyard, on a moonlit night under a jacaranda tree, I get into character intending to get rid of him altogether. I plunge a carved wooden stake, a left-over from a previous sculptural installation, into my/his heart. This scene is documented in the painted book, but with a ripple, a kind of last gasp from Tor that forces the stake upwards, distorting my name and the title of the work. The result of the attempted exorcism is ambiguous.
Painted books have been a part of my painting practice since 2004, either self-authored or under pseudonym, giving me room to play with authorship, intention and meaning.
The Restless Dead recalls early 1980’s occult pulp-horror novels, where threatening, illusory forms creep at the edge of the real."
Chris Bond
Call
Art Basel Hong Kong
23-25 March 2017
A new series of paintings created for Art Basel HK are twice life-sized replicas of imagined library books authored by one of Bond’s invented characters Tor Rasmussen,
For Art Basel Hong Kong, Chris Bond has produced a new body of sculptural paintings that draw on the energy of his long-standing alter-ego Tor Rasmussen. Part monochrome painting, part trompe l’oeil sculpture, the spines of these facsimiles of tattered hard-back library books contain titles generated by their apparent author Rasmussen. They have been made uncannily large, too big for the shelves of any library, impossible to hold or read, and contain meticulously replicated signs of wear and tear, hand painted text and library call numbers. Each work reveals Bond’s fascination with perverting existing systems of meaning, creating his own library, and within it, a new language.
Chris Bond, Bergt vin leir ri agsteroch, 2016, oil on canvas, calico, board, 43 x 31 x 6 cm
Call, installation view, Art Basel Hong Kong 2017
Tricking the eye - contemporary trompe l'oeil
Geelong Gallery
26 November 2016 - 12 February 2017
Little Malop Street, Geelong
Chris Bond, Vogue Hommes September 1986, 2014, oil on linen
COLOUR | Shift
Chris Bond, Melinda Harper, PJ Hickman, Kez Hughes
Curated by PJ Hickman
Five Walls
lvl 1/119 Hopkins St, Footscray
The colours and subject matter used in the paintings by these artists are undeniably ‘of our time’, yet they suggest a diversity of art historical and cultural references. In doing so they maintain a connection with the art of the past, notably Modernism and contemporary art in Europe, America and Australia.
The colours used are not identical to those referenced, there is a colour shift.
image : Chris Bond, Sun and Moon, 2015, oil on linen, 13 x 20cm
Tormentor
LUMA Latrobe University Museum of Art, Bundoora
5 October to 9 December 2016
La Trobe University
Ground floor, Glenn College
Melbourne Campus
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm
www.latrobe.edu.au/luma
Free admission
%2C%202015%2C%20ink%20print%20on%20archival%20paper%2C%2041%20x%2041cm.jpg)
A major exhibition of documentary and pseudo-documentary forms related to Chris Bond's character Tor Rasmussen.
PDF catalogue available by clicking here
In late 2014 Bond invented a Norwegian artist by the name of Tor Rasmussen (also known as Kraken), who stayed at his house for a six week domestic residency, as part of a larger international program. During this time he caused significant upheaval - threatening, annoying, tormenting, disabling and frustrating. Bond plays Kraken, as well as himself, in documentary photographs, video, text and sculptural forms that attempt to dissolve and expand the self. Primary motivation for assuming an alter persona rests in the possibility of imagining new ways of being, acting and making.
R & M McGivern Prize: Text
17 September 2016 to 20 November 2016
ArtSpace at Realm
Ringwood Town Square, 175 Maroondah Highway, Ringwood
Gallery Hours: Mon-Tues 9am-5pm, Wed-Fri: 9am-8pm, Sat-Sun 10am-5pm
Given the rapid developments in the way we communicate, it is timely to consider the role of text in art.
Muriel McGivern was both a published author and practicing artist, so it’s apt that the 2016 R & M McGivern Prize should harness the power of the painted word.
There is a vast reach throughout history where text is incorporated into painting as an aesthetic component. In contemporary painting, the use of text finds its origins in Pop Minimal and Conceptual traditions. In painting today, it assumes many forms; as found object, marker, descriptor, defacement or formal surface.
Work included: Gretel, oil on linen, calico, 2016
A Stranger in the Mirror
8 October - 5 November 2016
Darren Knight Gallery
840 Elizabeth Street, Waterloo NSW 2017
Telephone: +61 2 9699 5353
PDF catalogue available by clicking here
.jpg)
.jpg)
'A Stranger in the Mirror' takes its title from a painted book made by the artist for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. A selection of works from that exhibition, alongside two new painted books form his second solo show at Darren Knight Gallery. Each work has been made under the guise of his muse and master, the invented Norwegian Tor Rasmussen. Three painted library books, each authored by Rasmussen, feature titles and imagery that Bond has created while in character. They contain invented publishers, ISBN and call numbers, and have apparently been borrowed from the collection of the Le Vitt College Library. These three painted books appear to be embedded into the wall. Other painted books offer narrative support: charting the burning and rebuilding of the Le Vitt library, referencing the power of the invented call number seen on the embedded library books, and three painted paperback novels, including 'A Stranger in the Mirror' that romanticise the perversity of the process under which the works were made.
Material
A solo exhibition of new paintings by Chris Bond
9 August - 3 September 2016
PDF catalogue available by clicking here
For enquiries about available works please contact THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery
THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery
108-110 Gertrude St
Fitzroy VIC 3065
Australia
T.+61 3 9417 7172
E.info@thisisnofantasy.com
W.www.thisisnofantasy.com
Material is an exhibition of paintings featuring four invented artists and an artist collective, profiled in the 2002 edition of the fictional visual art and performance magazine ‘material’. The closely worked paintings, each seemingly torn from the pages of the magazine, explore the potential of embodied characterisations to foster new ways of seeing, thinking and expression.
Although the characters Catherine Crouch, Martin Meeks, Arlo Alston, Rebecca Rodrigues and the Magic Mountain Art Collective are entirely imagined, they have a tangible presence in the mind of the artist. Each of the characters began with the invention of a name, around which a small world gradually grew. The names spawned imagined biographies, which assisted Bond in figuring out how they might interact with the world, and in turn suggested the kind of artistic practices they may be involved in, which he acts out in the works.
The focus of this particular issue of material magazine is, fittingly, on acts of transformation. Bond has literally inhabited each of his characters: he has photographed himself working as them, written quotes on their behalf, and edited these into a plausible magazine profile format. He remains present in most of the works, almost identifiable in some, but changed - sometimes cropped, sometimes blurred, sometimes disfigured, and sometimes missing altogether. Although his characters remain somewhat like him - sharing particular traits, exaggerating others - they perform actions at a remove from his ordinary existence, allowing him to reach out to the world in unexpected ways.
Spring 1883
Windsor Hotel, Melbourne
August 18-21
The SPRING 1883 art fair is back at the Windsor Hotel, Melbourne from August 18-21. Darren Knight Gallery will be presenting a group exhibition by gallery artists Chris Bond, Jon Campbell, Matlok Griffiths, Mark Hilton, Jess Johnson, Noel McKenna, James Morrison, Michelle Nikou, Kenzee Patterson, Ricky Swallow, John Ward Knox and Louise Weaver in Room 224.
SPRING 1883 is free and open to the public:
Thursday 18 August – 12pm to 6pm
Friday 19 August – 12pm to 6pm
Saturday 20 August – 12pm to 6pm
Sunday 21 August – 12pm to 4pm
Included works: ver neut vor in glast, 2015, oil and acrylic on canvas, MDF, 29 x 3 x 8 cm; A Stranger in the Mirror, 2016, oil on canvas, paper, card, 18 x 11 x 2 cm
Quiddity | Unpacking the RMIT Art Collection
1 July – 20 August
RMIT Gallery
344 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Ph : 613 9925 1717
rmit.gallery@rmit.edu.au
www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery
Taking its name from the Latin meaning ‘the essence of a thing’, Quiddity (1 July – 20 August) explores the idea of thinking about artworks as physical objects rather than seeing them as items invested with meaning or expressing emotion.
Drawn entirely from the RMIT University Art Collection, the exhibition will display new acquisitions alongside some of the University’s older treasures which have remained largely unseen for decades. Quiddity features a diverse range of artists including Chris Bond, Helga Groves, Hisaharu Motoda, Anthony Pryor, Klaus Rinke, Ah Xian, and Ken and Julia Yonetani.
Included works: Abyss, 2014 and Ruin, Decay, Collapse, 2014
CLIMARTE POSTER PROJECT 2016
CLIMARTE has commissioned eleven artists to design posters that engage the community on climate change action and convey the strength, optimism and urgency we need to move to a clean renewable energy future.
Artists: Angela Brennan, Chris Bond, Jon Campbell, Kate Daw, Katherine Hattam, Siri Hayes, Martin King, Gabrielle de Vietri & Will Foster, Thornton Walker, Miles Howard-Wilks
During April-May hundreds of AO posters will be printed and displayed on poster sites around Melbourne.
An exhibition of the posters will be held at
Lab-14 Gallery at the Carlton Connect Initiative
700 Swanston Street(cnr Grattan St), Carlton
Opening night Thursday 5 May 6-8pm
Exhibition runs 5 - 28 May 2016
Monday-Friday 10am-5pm, Saturdays 12-5pm
www.climarte.org @climarteaus #climarteposter
Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial, 27 Feb - 15 May 2016
Titled Magic Object, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australia Art takes inspiration from the Wunderkammer, delving into a world of wonder and enchantment through the eyes of Australian contemporary artists.
Magic Object will offer a space where free associations and insights are made possible by artists and audiences, where artists’ interests in the talismanic, in cultural rituals and material riddles enchant the viewer. This enchantment however, is not without caution – the Wunderkammer offers itself up as tool with which to not only view the world, but to critique it.
Inviting us into their own ‘cabinets of curiosity’ through photography, painting, performance, sculpture, installation and the moving image, will be artists Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (WA), Glenn Barkley (NSW), Chris Bond (VIC), Pepai Carroll (SA), Tarryn Gill (WA), Louise Haselton (SA), Juz Kitson (NSW), Loongkoonan (WA), Fiona McMonagle (VIC), Danie Mellor (NSW), Clare Milledge (NSW), Tom Moore (SA), Nell (NSW), Ramesh Mario-Nithiyendran (NSW), Bluey Roberts (SA), Gareth Sansom (VIC), Robyn Stacey (NSW), Garry Stewart & Australian Dance Theatre (SA), Jacqui Stockdale (VIC), Heather B Swann (ACT), Hiromi Tango (NSW), Roy Wiggan (WA), Tiger Yaltangi (SA) and Michael Zavros (QLD).
Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia and curated by Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery, Magic Object runs from 27 February to 15 May 2016 as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Chris Bond has made a new sequence of paintings and documents under the guise of his muse and master Tor Rasmussen. Five painted library books, each authored by Rasmussen, feature titles and imagery that Bond has created while in character. They contain invented publishers, ISBN and call numbers, and have apparently been borrowed from the collection of the Le Vitt College Library. These five painted books appear to be embedded into the wall. An email from Rasmussen to Bond is also included, in which he chastises Bond for his fictions. A burnt book from the ruins of the Le Vitt library is sent by Rasmussen in the mail as a reminder of the power of the real. Three painted books offer narrative support: charting the burning and rebuilding of the Le Vitt library, referencing the power of the invented call number seen on the embedded library books, and romanticising the perversity of the process under which the works were made.
Don't wait for Godot
Australian Prostate Cancer Research Art Auction 2015
Mossgreen, Sunday November 15, 5 pm
Included work: Seven Strikes, oil on linen, 2013
The 3rd Bus Projects Editions Exhibition
Opening Tuesday 22 September, 6-8pm
Tuesday 22 September — Saturday 26 September 2015
Included work: Kraken (movement), 2015, ink print on archival paper, 30 x 42 cm
http://busprojects.org.au/2015/08/17/the-3rd-bus-projects-edition-exhibition/
Kraken: sixty six emails, a face and a gesture
Solo exhibition
Opening Wednesday 2 September, 6-8pm
2-19 September 2015
BUS Projects
25-31 Rokeby Street,
Collingwood,
VIC 3066 Australia
Gallery hours:
12-6pm Tuesday – Friday
10am-4pm Saturday
Included works:
Kraken, 2015, ink prin