Kirsten Perry

Persona exhibition

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Persona_InvitationPersona is a group exhibition opening next week at the St John Street gallery in Prahran. Four Visual Arts colleagues at Melbourne Polytechnic are showing self-portrait projects framed by the word persona. My Dust and Scratches project is part of it, along with work by Karenne Ann, Sean Payne and Kirsten Perry. 

The word Persona describes the public aspects of character rather than the psychological, a social role or a character played by an actor. The long history of the self-portrait genre has not only involved portrayal of the “self” as in Van Gogh’s disturbing self-portraits or those of the German Expressionists.

A more expanded or system-based approach to the self-portrait runs alongside this tradition, for example Francesca Woodman‘s playful, performative nudes or Chuck Close‘s giant forensic paintings of his photographed face.

In our Persona exhibition we’ve adopted either “the impersonal, anonymously institutional image or essays the process of vision itself rather than its ostensible subject.”

To quote further from Sean Payne’s catalogue essay …

Karenne Ann’s sculpted and scanned heads are little death masks in plaster, commentaries on misguided illusions as they apply to women and to herself.

Greg Neville’s self-portraits are derived from his collection of identity cards dating back to 1974.

Sean Payne’s works are extrapolations from an anonymously taken school photograph. This found photo, printed from its original negative, is broken down into pixels

Kirsten Perry’s uses the technology of eye-tracking, giving the record an empirical basis and intentionally removing the the artist’s hand, the better to isolate and examine vision as a process.

The Persona opening is at 5-7pm on Tuesday April 12 and runs until Friday April 22. St John Street gallery is on street-level in building B of Melbourne Polytechnic’s Prahran campus, just off Chapel St and High St.

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Editions

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Editions, exhibition at Tacit Contemporary Art

Tacit gallery is opening 2013 with a group show of prints and works on paper called Editions.

The exhibition will feature several print artists, including me. I’ll be showing some pigment prints from my ‘id’ series that were recently shown in Face/Time. That was the exhibition I had in December with Kirsten Perry who is also showing in Editions.

Since Face/Time, Tacit has moved into a much larger space, four times larger, an ambitious step.

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Face/Time at Tacit

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Installation shots of my current exhibition, Face/Time, at Tacit Contemporary Art. It runs until December 23. Face/Time is a two-person show with my colleague Kirsten Perry, her image on the left above. The exhibition is a form of self portraiture as our own faces are the source of the imagery,

The word time refers, in my work, to the process of decay, literally through the time sequence that produced the images, repeated photocopying resulting in a form of information decay. Time is also present in the idea of physical decay implied in the fading, dissolving faces.

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In Kirsten’s work, the duration of time produced the faces through long ‘performances’ of gazing at an image of her face. A special camera recorded her eye movements and software plotted the lines. They are fine drawings of an abstracted face gradually gaining more detail in each print..

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Face/Time

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This is the invitation for my new exhibition Face/Time, a two-person show with my colleague Kirsten Perry. My half of the exhibition features my project Shroud, a series of graphic black & white representations of heads, derived from my passport photos going back decades. It’s a sort of self-portrait project but without reference to individuality. The heads are atomised by repeated photocopying, becoming abstracted forms like traces on a wall.

Kirsten’s images are from her Masters degree project, drawing the face using the saccadic eye movements captured by a special camera. She is displaying a sequence of prints showing the face image developing over time.

The exhibition is at Tacit Contemporary Art in Abbotsford. The website for the exhibition is face-time.net. The invitation cards were designed by Daniel Neville.

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5 Miles from the Sea part 2

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At the opening of 5 Miles from the Sea

The exhibition 5 Miles from the Sea opened on April 19 at Level 17 Artspace which is part of Victoria University. Twelve artists responded to the brief, creating new work in a variety of mediums: painting, photography, drawing and sculpture.

Curator Geoff Tolchard proposed the exhibition in the following terms: “Five Miles from the Sea is a look at the incursion of non-indigenous Australians and their resulting mark on the land. Who lives five miles from the sea? What does it look like though the eyes of twelve diverse artists, some from different parts of the globe, who have indeed made Australia their home? Each of the participating artists will visually interpret, in a medium of their choosing, a reference point that is five miles from the sea, illuminating what is now a multicultural land, a society that is twenty-first century Australia”

The artists have explored issues of Australian history and identity using a specific geographical location as a starting point. Terri Brooks has made a sculpture based on the site of the notorious treaty between John Batman and the local Aborigines in 1835. Caz Guiney has made jewelry from discarded plastic found at a various parks – “waste remains one of our most significant marks on the land.” And Kirsten Perry has explored Dights Falls as “a place where a number of forces converge and divide” – sandstone/lava, saltwater/freshwater, indigenous/introduced.

The website for the exhibition is www.fivemilesfromthesea.com, designed by George Alamidis. It contains images by each artist, as well as an artist statement explaining their approach to the exhibition concept.