GARY CARSLEY: SKIRTING THE ISSUE

22 April - 14 May 2005

Cross conversations/ texts and links

Skirting The Issue: The 235th Anniversary Of Cook’s Landing At Botany Bay
With Gary Carsley, Keith Vincent Smith & Ace Bourke

15 May 2005 at 2PM

Skirting the Issue comprises grand images of parkscapes in Europe and Sydney. Carsley’s perfected nature takes on narrative qualities to portray significant cultural and historical strategies. Images are oddly inverted. A picturesque view of Botany Bay National Park sits beside an image of a stand of gum trees planted in London’s Kew Gardens by Sir Joseph Banks from seeds collected in 1770.

Carsley names his works Draguerreotypes after the first photographic technique, Daguerreotypes. Just as drag takes on a different gender that is presented and performed, upon closer inspection, these works dissolve into complex wooden veneer inlay (intarsia). Each colour, every form is made from composites of wooden veneer floor pieces. Carsley’s Draguerreotypes are ‘Lichtbilder’ that take on the material characteristics of photographs and playfully engage in questioning physical and cultural appearances.

Parks are specific forms of place making; they are curated nature. Plants are organised in a spatial context to present combinations of species not found in nature. Similarly, in Carsley’s works, the park motif and the elaborate intarsia coincide as visual incidents of equal importance. 

With such eloquent irony Carsley reflects upon continuing cultural transfers between the Old and New World. The wood laminates themselves, purchased at D.I.Y stores around the world, are a vivid reminder that while we watch, Eden, like Botany Bay and old growth native forests, is besieged by commercial and political opportunism. Skirting the Issue is a timely reminder that the most important issues are still local.

Sydney viewers are familiar with Carsley’s long-term art and curatorial investigation of Drag’s contribution to performance, visual culture and politics through his curatorial projects such as the acclaimed The Art and (larger than) Life of Leigh Bowery for the Museum of Contemporary Art (2003–04), and Parthogenesis (Ivan Dougherty Gallery, UNSW, 2003) and Cerebellum (Performance Space, 2002).

Draguerreotypes from Carsley’s ‘Second Nature’ project have been recently exhibited at Sabine Schmidt Gallery (Cologne) and Torch Gallery (Amsterdam). They feature in a major international survey show of post-camera photography, Surfaces Paradise, now at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem (featuring works by Thomas Ruff, Vik Muniz, Gary Carsley and Carrie Yamaoka). Carsley’s Draguerreotypes are already in collections such as the Stedelijk Museum for Modern Art in Amsterdam and the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation in New York. He lives and works in Sydney and Amsterdam.

Botany Bay is the Birthplace of Modern Australia — the site of the first profound meeting of European and Aboriginal cultures. Captain Cook’s landing is re-encountered at a now traditional annual ceremony in Botany Bay National Park in late April. This conversation between an artist, curator and historian, looks at the tenor of these enactments — from tragic to drag — as a mirror to Old and New Worlds

WITH GARY CARSLEY’S EXHIBITION SKIRTING THE ISSUE

Skirting the Issue comprises grand images of parkscapes in Europe and Sydney. Carsley’s perfected nature takes on narrative qualities to portray significant cultural and historical strategies. Images are oddly inverted. A picturesque view of Botany Bay National Park sits beside an image of a stand of gum trees planted in London’s Kew Gardens by Sir Joseph Banks from seeds collected in 1770.
Carsley names his works Draguerreotypes after the first photographic technique, Daguerreotypes. Just as drag takes on a different gender that is presented and performed, upon closer inspection, these works dissolve into complex wooden veneer inlay (intarsia). Today Eden, like Botany Bay and old growth native forests, is besieged by commercial and political opportunism.

SPEAKERS

GARY CARSLEY founded the Society4Beautification with Rafael von Uslar over a decade ago to promote visions of a more equitable and alluring future through a project based exhibitions. Carsley investigates Drag’s contribution to performance, visual culture and politics through curated exhibitions like The Art and (larger than) Life of Leigh Bowery (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003–04) and his own artwork.

KEITH VINCENT SMITH’s pioneering research into first contact is published as Bennelong: The coming in of the Eora: Sydney Cove 1788-1792 (2001) and King Bungaree: A Sydney Aborigine meets the great South Pacific explorers, 1799-1830 (1992). His exhibition Eora: Mapping Indigenous Sydney 1770-1850, co-curated with Ace Bourke, opens in June 2006 at the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

ACE BOURKE was one of the curators who pioneered the contextualizing of Aboriginal art in a contemporary urban context. His exhibition Flesh & Blood: A Story of Sydney 1788-1998, presented at the Museum of Sydney, was acclaimed as one of the first personal colonial exhibitions and the first combining colonial and Aboriginal narratives. Eora was conceived as a ‘reply’ exhibition.

Publication

Skirting the Issue: Gary Carsley exhibition catalogue with essay by Rafael von Uslarand Tony Clarke, The Cross Art Projects, 2005. (colour, A1 folded to 8pp.) Available at Cross Books: enquiries@crossbooks.com.au. www.crossbooks.com.au

Links

Torch Gallery, Amsterdam: www.torchgallery.com

Sabine Schmidt, Koln: www.sabineschmidt.com

Arnhem Museum of Modern Art (Surfaces Paradise): www.mmkarnhem.nl

Contact