A Sydney Flower and Garden Show
07 - 29 July 2018
We live in a visually over loaded world where images bombard us via mobile, iPad, computer, electronic bill-board, television, street and transport signage, social media apps, those pesky sms received as you walk past shops.. (etc.), competing in a seemingly never ending visual cacophony for our attention.
Take a rest, shut your eyes - come and enjoy the experience of looking at one work at a time. Enjoy that first sighting, that moment of recognition when a painting calls, speaking directly to your senses and memories.
For this exhibition in the wintery unpredictability of July, and because that first experience of the texture and colour should be a visceral surprise, not dulled, second-hand via a flat screen, Artsite Contemporary Galleries and artists invite you to feel comfortable to visit, and revisit us again, and again. The work that you should take home will sing to you and bring you great pleaseure - painting and sculpture is always better experienced in the real.
With this exhibition we introduce you to four new artists:
Randall Sinnamon with his wonderful and somewhat cheeky birds... Of the Scissor headed Spoontail he writes "This deceptively placid and seemingly cute bird is one of the most dangerous of the spoontail species. They have been known to sever fingers from humans and remove ears from cattle. Found near paper mills and clothing factories."
Randall has exhibited widely in Sydney and the South coast.
He has been awarded the 2015 Shoalhaven Open Art Prize, Shoalhaven Regional Art Gallery; the 2011 Lady Ethel Nock Sculpture prize, Defiance Gallery, Sydney; the2011 Arts in the Valley Sculpture Prize, Kangaroo Valley; the 2010 Sculpture Prize, Blacktown City Art Prize; the 2009 People’s Choice Award, Sculpture on the Edge, Bermagui, NSW; the 2008 Emerging Sculptor Prize, 6x6 Sculpture Show, Defiance Gallery; the 2008 People´s Choice Award, Jervis Bay and Basin Arts Painting Prize; and the 2003 Robin Gibson Sculpture Prize.
Randall´s work is held in Public Collections including Shoalhaven City Council; Jervis Bay Maritime Museum, Bundanon; National Parks and Wildlife Service NSW; Trinity Grammar School; Pymble Ladies College and Candelo Hotel.Plus Private collections in Australia, Wales, Belgium, India, Scotland, England, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and New Zealand.
Billy Cooley, from Mutitjulu (NT) community,
has a passion for carving snake punu (nb: Punu can mean many things; from a tree, firewood, to objects made from wood). When he was working as a stockman at Mulga Park Station where he also met his Pitjantjatjara wife Lulu, and began living with her people, he remembers watching some of the older people craving snakes from flat pieces of wood.
With the idea of recreating something more of the drama of the liru (a venomous snake e.g. mulga snake and western brown snake) he studied the different scale patterns of desert snakes to make his work as lifelike as possible. "Over the years he developed four etching styles for different snakes, notes Stephen Fox, (curator of the Punuku Tjukurpa catalogue and Education Kit, ArtBackNT, West Australian Museum), in order to replicate with authenticity the snakes walka (meaningful marks or patterns burnt into the wood with wire heated on a wood fire).
Billy Cooley is one of the few central desert artists permitted to take live wood and it is Billy´s ambition to continue with his carving and passing on the skills and stories as long as he is able.
Billy Cooley walks the landscape, with a keen eye for interesting roots or peculiar twists of wood in which lie the sinuous coils of hidden movement.
The Wanampi (water snakes) in this exhibition all have their associations with the Tjukurpa, the stories of the Creation Ancestors and the activities which shaped the land, the people and their Law. Although these Wanampi are inspired by the desert species he lives with, he explains it´s from his mother´s country at Boorooloola (Gulf of Carpentaria) Water Serpent Dreaming.
Billy Cooley´ snakes are held in major public Collections in Australia and Internationally, including The National Museum of Australia, Canberra.
The exhibition continues to Sunday 29th July 2018.