I interviewed him about his current work and life. It’s nice to speak to intelligent, articulate artists who are passionate about their work. The exhibition opening is tomorrow, June 1st, so read quickly.

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+ What does the title ‘Asperatus’ mean? Ok, I’ll be fair, I googled it and it’s about cloud formations with a ‘wavy undersurface’ – but why did you choose it for the exhibition? What does it mean to you? What does it mean in terms of the exhibition? How did you choose it – where did you learn about it?
> I wanted something that captured this moment in time, both personally and as a visual metaphor for the zeitgeist. From where I am, the time and experiences I am surrounded by are very much of a ‘wavy undersurface.’ We are beginning to deal with consequences of actions long disconnected – global warming from consumer and lifestyle decisions over decades; homeowners affected by the global financial crisis and the bankers dealing with pixels instead of faces; even the modern form of terrorism and warfare. Our problems are abstract and their solutions demand a lateral thinking we are developing that is foreign to our history of zebra and monkey-mind thinking.

These clouds appear as though the sky will collapse over you – they’re dark and overbearing – and yet they often disperse without storming at all. These confusing signals and appearances disconnected from their meanings are a sign of the times.

For my exhibition, and myself personally, it is a marker for a distinct illustration series atmospherically and visually definable from the rest of my body of work. My process, choice of venue, distribution of the work, engagement with the audience and intentions all have a sense of something being ‘roughened’ or ‘agitated’, as its Latin translation suggests.

As for where I learnt about it, I have a keen interest in just about everything and think I read about it first in a science magazine. It’s something that I started exploring in my writing and I was drawn to illustrating them literally in my sketchbook before thinking about them symbolically for this series.

+ The show features 14 prints that have never been shown before. How old are these works, and what themes do they cover?
> These works were developed especially for this show; or rather this show was organised specifically to show this body of work. I laid down the first mark onto paper in March and have been working on the rest of the series consistently since, with the last image completed in May – so they’re all brand new and until this show have never been seen before.

This series was developed out of subconscious and unconscious stimuli – intuition, instinct, dreams, hallucinations (or rather stuttering of the eye?) and chance – rather than the deliberate and conscious scheming that goes into working towards a predetermined outcome, as is often the case with commercial illustration. This series is as much about the audience as myself. I wanted to leave a welcoming mat for the viewer’s input into the meaning and interpretation of the work. This was one of the motivations for showing my work to a select group of diverse people – a doctor, festival director, screen printer, parker artist, illustrator and copywriter – and filming their responses. I wanted to explore how their backgrounds and perspectives enriched the work and to open up a dialogue that usually is hidden inside someone’s head in a gallery.

+ Why have you chosen to hold the show in the Australian Museum’s Skeleton Gallery? It seems like an amazing space but I didn’t even know they did art shows there…
> You are right though, they do not hold art shows there! I had to really reach for it and make it happen. There’s a vast amount of organisation and customisation I had to do, but fortunately I had a lot of support and enthusiasm behind me for this project and we won against all odds. The museum itself had been fantastically supportive and nurturing, fostering this event through to its execution.

It would certainly have been easier to hold this show in a gallery, where the room is set up for exhibition display and lighting, where there is an infrastructure for these types of events and an established audience. However, I wanted an environment that could enrich the themes and tones within the work, carry them across the gulf between the easels and engulf the air surrounding the guests. Rather than a blank wall, they will see from their periphery symbols, lights and customised decor that will hopefully take the single notes my marks and lines make within the frames and send them roaring like a major chord or a choir reverberating throughout the gallery’s two storey above.

+ Is it important to you to find new and interesting and maybe even surprising places to put art in?
> Absolutely, it is a benefit to all. It helps my own work for it to be seen afresh, to be reinvigorated with new context. It love reaching for new audiences, surprising all manner of people with a comic or illustration series that I think is beautiful – that crosses all cliques and environments. Finally, it is important for the medium itself – comics may not be expected to be seen at the front of a fashion boutique; or a museum; a cafe, but each time it appears in this unexpected context, it proves its own resilience.

+ This is your first solo show in three years. Why haven’t you done shows over that time?
> I am quite particular about my shows, although I sometimes contribute to select charity or group shows for friends and my own interests and passions. My solo shows have in the past always doubled as launches for my books and comics, with my last major show being a combined show with illustrators and designers Wil Loeng and Haline Ly to launch our art book, Midnight Morning.

I love going to exhibitions and shows, I follow other creators quite closely and would love to see more in Sydney! However, I come from a different background and ethic than the exhibiting artist. Illustration is art for reproduction. Comics are made for publication – in this one sense, more akin to literature than visual art. Coming from this background and working in these disciplines, I don’t feel a particular loyalty or affinity to the idea of fetishised limited art runs or one-off pieces to be owned by a single gallery or home. If I could, I would rather have the same artwork on a billboard, a magazine, a jacket, in your pocket, on your mobile phone’s wallpaper. When work is intended to be loud and free, embrace prevails against entitlement.

+ You’ve used a variety of media to create these works, but you also do animation and probably many other things. How do you choose what medium in which to create a work?
> Conscience and content take precedent over technique, and the medium is a servant to the communication. I try to find the environment that’s most nurturing and features the least friction for the ideas to reach the audience – there are enough to get in the way and obscure intentions without a choice of a difficult medium!

+ What are some of the symbols and symbolic codes you are fond of, or that you find recurring in your work?
> I have an instinct for animals; and a repressed instinct to draw structures – whether it’s the skull beneath the skin, the scaffolding under a building or the stitching behind a jacket sleeve. I have long resisted featuring easily/highly charged symbols like suns, moons, flowers, clocks…but I’ve put that aside for this series…big symbols of time, nature and the universe – nets and threads, eggs and trees, fruit, hourglasses, the elements, shadows and movement.

+ You’re working on your graphic novel – what’s it about? Who are some of your big influences in terms of comics and graphic novels? Do you feel like there is a lot of pressure on you to be a writer as well as an artist in this project? Have you been dying to write this for a while?
> The graphic novel I’m working on is very Australian, fictional, quite fantastic…it’s about the ‘tyranny of distance’ – spiritually, emotionally, intellectually and physically. I think it is concerned with quite modern themes and ideas.

I love Paul Pope, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Marjane Satrapi, David B, Daniel Clowes, Rutu Modan, Art Spiegelman, Jillian Tamaki, R. Kikuo Johnson, Craig Thompson, GB Tran, Jeff Smith, Gipi, Moebius, Frank Miller, Peter Blegvad, Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, it goes on!

The roles of the writer and artist are inevitably intertwined in comics. Or more accurately, comics are its own visual language of symbols – almost a language before language. It is both non-illustration and illustration times a thousand. The writing is narrative driven, yet must have the economy of poetry. It is completely its own form!

I have been developing this for a long time, but the writing is only one challenge – there is a wonderful world of sequence and juxtaposition, careful composition that I’m trying to wrap my head around and make some sense out of. But you’re right, I am very hungry.

+ You were involved in Creative Sydney 2009 – or at least they named you as influential – are you involved at all this year?
> I am a very enthusiastic audience member this year! It looks fantastic, there are certainly talks I’ve dog eared to attend – the illustration agency and representation talk in particular. From the top of my head the creative sessions and the block party sound really fun too.

+ Who are some other local artists who you support, respect or are inspired by?
> Ben Constantine, Pat Grant, Mandy Ord, Leigh Rigozzi, Sonny Day, Biddy Maroney, Mel Stringer, Garry Trinh, Kevin Tran, Wil Loeng, James Jirat Patradoon, Adam Paquette, Tony Curran, Sonya Gee, Scribla, Craig Phillips, Lee Tran Lam, Chris Wahl, Marcelo Baez, Jonathan Zawada, Kate Banazi, Marcela Restrepo, Mitchel Spider, Morten Rowley. So many. I know I’m forgetting a million wonderful people.

+ What about gallery spaces?
> MOP, Firstdraft, Chalkhorse, Knot, Horus & Deloris, China Heights, Monster Children, Monstrosity, White Rabbit…these are a few of my favourite places.

+ Would you say your work is changing or developing in a certain direction? Where do you think you’ll go next?
> There is plenty that I love, I try not to think about directions or change, I think it is ever-changing, as am I. I just try to be as clear a vessel for the work as possible at any one snapshot in my life. I am certainly interested in more writing, poetry and narrative particularly. I am working on more comics in unusual contexts. I like the idea of illustration and comics of performance. I have dipped my toe into film and sound and love it, I would love to play with it some more.

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Matt Huynh’s solo exhibition ‘Asperatus‘ opens tomorrow, Tuesday the 1st of June, in the Skeleton Gallery at the Australian Musuem.

We’ve invited him into our blog to review something special every couple of weeks. This week he puts his High Culture Pants on, for the Art Gallery of NSW’s retrospective of work from the late 19th century Aussie cultural refugee, Rupert Bunny. He also gets his Ostentatious French Underthings on, we guess because of ‘when in Rome’ and all that…
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Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales until February 21
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Rupert Bunny’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is not a knock-out show. It’s a nice show. It doesn’t have any pioneering work that you’d recognise as being at the fore-front of any major art movements, nor are the works in it typically Australian.

Shown for the first time in Australia, many of these painting depict the flamboyant prosperity of France at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Bunny left Australia and went to Paris to become one of Australia’s first cultural refugees. While you can see a lot of inspiration from many other modernist movements, Bunny never really succumbed to any aesthetic ideology – each painting looks different from all the others. In many instances it’d be difficult to characterise a Rupert Bunny painting; his techniques change from one painting to the next. The way he paints grass is characteristically different between works, and whole aesthetics principles appear and disappear when he embraces modernist styles over realism and neo-classicism.

A little bit John Singer Sergeant and a little bit Bollywood-Gaughin, the reason Bunny’s exhibition is so pleasant is that unlike so many Australian artists, Bunny pursued his own artistic ambition without over Australianising his work. Rather than make his work southern-exotica for the European art market or paint “Australian” scenes that’d appeal to Australian galleries and institutions, Bunny painted universally Western images which vary in subject matter throughout his career; a little gift to audiences who, like me, suffer from a bit of culture cringe stirred by some John Bracks or Sidney Nolans, or whenever I see a Ned Kelly portrait or Southern Cross tattoo.

My favourite works of the show were a series of playful mythological monotypes including the Classical figure and Siren. I hadn’t seen prints made like this before where the brush stroke was emphasised, and blocks of thick brushy colour made the image jump out. These prints stood out from the rest, more playful and feeling a bit like a children’s book illustration. (One work even looked like a scene from Where the Wild Things Are.)

As you exit the exhibition there’s a nice little surprise – the gift shop for Bunny’s show is maybe as spectacular as the show itself. There are Parisian brollies, frilly dresses and underwear and some incredibly ostentatious boxer shorts, which I may or may not be wearing as I write this article. Feel-good exhibition of the decade… (so far).

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Rupert Bunny – An Australian in Paris is running at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for $15, until February 21. Don’t miss the gift shop, either.

We’ve invited him into our blog to review something special every couple of weeks. This week it’s Icelandic art star Olafur Eliasson’s new exhibition at the MCA – Take Your Time – running until April 11 2010. And: those photos up there are by Alexander Krauss, courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

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Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time

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Appreciating Danish-born Icelandic art star Olafur Eliasson’s work from a book, DVD or website would be near impossible, because unlike many art practices Eliasson’s work is not a portfolio of two-dimensional or three-dimensional still or moving images. They’re larger than life immersive time-based installations that couldn’t be represented photographically, or even through video footage. In fact the works depend heavily on how the context of the physical installation affects the mechanics of the audience’s visual perception and experience.

It’s experience that Eliasson delivers in his exhibition titled Take Your Time currently on show at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art until early April. The works in this show evolve over time, some subtly and some dramatically and they are experiential rather than image based.  Participation could be one way to describe it, but not the kind where you actually have to assume a role.  Eliasson abandons the figurative and the abstract, allowing narrative to be told through the subject, his audience, and his media – be it through his lights, filters, architecture or sculpture.

The exhibition highlight, 360° room for all colours is, as the title suggests, a 360° room where fluorescent coloured lights are programmed to change, sometimes quickly and other times gradually.  The work feels like a 3D Mark Rothko at times, massaging your eyes’ colour receptors and offering periods of fully immersive moods, temperatures and environments.  The large environments from Eliasson forces the viewer to reconsider our relationship to colour and colours’ relationship to time and place, whether it be lights changing or the audience’s perceptions changing to adjust to the intensity, rhythm, and colour of the environment. The works force us to place ourselves in a greater context and question environmental normality.

A simpler but even stronger example is Room For One Colour (1997), a bright room lit with yellow-orange fluorescent lights which do two things: make everything look like a Warhol screen print, and offer up retinal afterimages (impressions left on your vision from an intense visual stimulus). We begin to use our eyes to feel the environment, as well as to see it.

Make sure you consult the map you get with your ticket so that you don’t miss any of the pieces (I missed two).  I’m planning on checking it out a second time – the first visit felt so good.

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Reviewed by Tony Curran

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When Art Is Correct: Daniel Crooks’ Train No. 1

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I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be able to see the world omnisciently.  Like a fly or a spider, having a 360-degree experience of the world is something that I can’t even begin to imagine.  To image it you really have to play mental tricks and strategise how you could read and make sense of the visual information to derive meaning from the fractured, fragmented and distorted (?) depictions of reality.

When I first experienced a work by Daniel Crooks about a year back, that’s how I felt.  I saw a piece where Crooks had filmed different locations at Martin Place in Sydney and compiled the footage into a digestible yet formless multi-perspective where each point of focus would bleed into the next.  The view of Martin Place had figures disappearing and reappearing as if through vortexes of time-space where holes and blind-spots reveal something “else” about space.

On October 28, 2009 I stumbled into the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  I noticed a little room with an Adam Cullen and a work by Daniel Crooks titled Train No.1. I walked right past the Cullen and stared at Crooks’ for about four rotations. Train No.1 is one of those stellar works where I can’t look away. I always refuse to walk away from a work of art until I can understand how an artist could construct it but on this occasion I was baffled.  Crooks’ piece features what at first appears a distorted stop motion animation of a train where the screen is split into columns of segments of an overall image. These segments add up to make a complete picture, but something is wrong.  I don’t want to leave a work until I feel like it reveals itself to me so I had to find out what was wrong with this picture.

Train No.1 is shot from the side window of a train carriage and begins at an unnamed station platform.  A figure on the train platform exits the train, walks forward but for some reason moves backward on the screen, despite the fact that everything else is as it should be.  The other big “mistake” is that as objects move across the screen they appear flat and formless as oppose to the natural exposure of three-dimensional point of view shifts.  The angle of view of the objects never changes, but it should because as you change the angle you look at something, your view of that object changes also.

Crooks’ work makes you think about that.  It makes you see visual clues that aren’t there. Presence is depicted by absence. Crooks work Train No.1 subtly demonstrates the visual language that we take for granted.  In moving image there are certain expectations about spatial movement and in still-images there are certain expectations about the absolute and privileged point of view determined by the placement of the artist in relation to the subject and there-in lay the clue to Crook’s big mystery.

Train No.1 is actually made up of slices of still images, which move from one column to the next creating the movement of the train journey.  I would describe it as a moving digital photo-collage and I want it on a giant wall in my future mansion.

Train No. 1  is showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Level 2 Contemporary Projects Space, until March 2010.

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Reviewed by Tony Curran

Online we’ll be reporting via our blog and twitter about what’s happening to the map so that people at work can see the beauty and mayhem evolve. We want people to be tweeting us photos from King St, stories or even just kinda strange/wild/adorable experiences they’ve had. Hopefully we get some requests for certain things to be added to the map and I’d like to see people online somehow having some influence over the people controlling the map. I’ll be on a laptop all day sending artistic “progress updates” on the blog and twitter. All the documentation will the final map of King St, which can get confusing – we have an actual map which will be developed by the community, but the real map is everything that happens online and physical and photographically. Put yourself on the 2042 Map of King St! It’s important to note that although we’ll be onsite on the 24th and 25th, the project has actually started.

+ Would you consider Newtown an artistic hotspot in Sydney? Why/why not?
> Newtown gives birth to so many artistic people. It supports students and young people and I think out of anywhere in Sydney, Newtown does it the best. You don’t see as many actors, musicians, artists, and designers in any other community so close to the city. I suppose Newtown’s big claim to fame, as an artistic hotspot, is all the street art. It’s so easy to get lost in the winding maze as you explore the elaborate and colourful walls that surround the neighbourhood. Unfortunately recently my favourite wall was painted over. That had some of the most incredible stencil art I’ve ever seen. Also Newtown is inspiring. I’m tossing up completely scratching the next project I was going to do because I had a good long walk around Newtown cemetery and I was filled with ideas. Places like that and the smoke stack over near St Peters are such interesting places to walk around and watch.

+ How can people get involved before the 24/25th?
> Follow us on twitter, facebook, RSS the blog, send us photos and stories – let’s map King St and also come down to check out the place. If you want you can stick your own photos and colours to the map. Bring your kids, this will be a non-toxic event.

+ How much does 2042 rely on volunteers and how have they helped you this year?
> We have had massive help from volunteers. From marketing and media, helping out on the day, and the construction of the actual work has come from amazing efforts of the volunteers and 2042 wouldn’t have happened without them. We’re extremely lucky in that nearly all of our volunteers are experts in the field in which they’ve helped us. Lots of local artists have helped create the huge King St design and we’ve had marketing professionals donate their time and efforts and we’re so lucky that people get together like this for community arts projects.

+If Newtown didn’t exist, what would happen to Sydney (artistically)?
> I think the artistic side of Sydney would be in diaspora. So many creative people in all sectors of the arts live in Newtown and they network and party and study together. Take Newtown out of that equation and I think there’d be a disconnect within youth culture.

+ Tell me a secret about art & Newtown…
> The I have a dream mural was actually painted by Martin Luther King…

Real Perspective works with this kind of art: new, crazy, multimedia, exciting art that challenges the somewhat “disaffected” art scene with new concepts. Tony Curran, who runs the organisation, helped us with the Throw Shapes launch party and got us interested in what he does.

“It is a unique artistic and curatorial ideology,” says Tony. “It involves new and innovative methods and beliefs in describing the world around us through attempts to develop accessible media which fills the gaps of contemporary visual culture’s representation from a photographic perspective. There is no attack on photography from Real Perspective but there is a strong belief that photographic media is as distorted as any other visual medium. Unlike post-modern discourse, Real Perspective believes that culture can progress to find new and innovative ways to represent what it sees by questioning how it sees.”

Real Perspective’s show at our launch party (for you suckers who didn’t come) involved a multi-sensory input which produced a selection of images as output projected on to a wall. Sure, it didn’t quite go as planned but it still functions as a good example of what Real Perspective is all about. The gallery space, the methods of displaying work and the work all combine to become the artwork itself – a conglomerate of all parts of the art process that were previously seen as peripheral.

The artist and the artwork have often crossed over, as have the artwork and the audience. But for Real Perspective it’s the art space and the art curation that can now be part of the artwork as well. Which leaves not much as Not Art, but that’s OK. “What this means for the art world is a new direction for contemporary art which invigorates new gallery audiences without alienating them from the artistic process, substance, skill and reliability of the artworks integrity,” says Tony. “It does this because the only way to interact with the image is to interact with its physical presence.”

In a way, Real Perspective is hard to document. The very mediums that it shuns tend to be the only way it can be kept track of. But don’t take the blog at face value – the best way to get some Real Perspective is definitely by going to an art event that they are a part of.

Check out WATCH THIS SPACE – a “poly-venue artist run space” and keep your eye out for some Real Perspective shows. Who knows where, when, or what they might be – but we promise they’ll be interesting.

Everyone who came was supportive, attractive, witty, polite and dancefloor-friendly. At one stage we even saw a baby there and what she lacked in dancefloor-friendliness she totally made up for in being A REAL BABY.

And the art! Watch This Space had put together a huge group of talent, and a ridiculously high-tech sensory system. While it’s possible that the two didn’t work together exactly the way they were supposed to, we got treated to the best of both worlds in two different rooms. Win! The team also delighted Amelia right off the bat with conversation about how to turn a projector on (“Sweet talk it? Stroke it gently?”) Double win! The awesome interactive projection performance by Luke Tipene kept way more people upstairs for way longer than we anticipated, credit for which also goes to the fantastic DJ skillz of Greedy Hen and We Buy Your Kids. They kept everyone happily distracted while one of our projectors kind of exploded, and didn’t play a small amount of Paul Simon in the meantime.

And then came the bands. Steph’s totally amazing at booking bands. (Steph wrote that.) We were actually a little bit dorky and overwhelmed by Danimals, standing at the front and doing that look-around-at-everyone-like-”Woah-Are-These-Guys-For-Realz” kind of thing. Then we found out it was one of their first ever shows as a full band, and we almost started a label.

Megastick Fanfare were next. These guys are basically a consistent wow, but are actually somehow getting better and better every time we see them. So they’re playing tonight again, after midnight at a late night party called “Witching Hour” at OAF. We’ll be the ones right up the front with the happy dancey shoes on.

And unfortunately for him, Spod knows how to make a party that we don’t ever want to end. We secretly dragged the stage manager into a locked vault while Spod played, which (whoops!) trapped him in front of the decks for way longer than we agreed on. We wanted to keep dancing, and we’re sorry. (Not really sorry. It was worth it.)

Thanks so SO much to everyone who came, played, arted and danced. Thanks so much to the Wall and to the World Bar too. We love all of you. And your baby as well.

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