Proof of New Vitality
Proof: Contemporary Australian Printmaking
Where: The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia
Until: April 1, 2007
Reviewer: Jeff Makin
Herald Sun December 18, 2006
Extract
‘Proof: Contemporary Australian Printmaking' is a selection of works by 11 print-based artists, most of whom are pushing the burin beyond the traditional boundaries of printmaking
Foremost among these are two artists working with digital imagery, Milan Milojevic and Julie Silvester.
Both have reached back in time to find images. Silvester explores the voyages of discovery in the 18 th century, and Milojevic looks at 19 th century wood engravings.
Silverster has taken a colonial panoramic view, depicted in the pictorial style of the time, and cropped, re-phased and morphed it through computer technology.
It's as if her emus, kangaroos, native flora and topography have become time-travellers from the Manual Age to the Digital Age.
The manner of installation reinforces the then-and-now message of the print with the back reading as a computer echo of the front.
Milojevic has taken a page from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, with his monsters consisting f cut-and-paste parts from real beings.
The sheer magic of his huge horizontal Terra frieze blends with the bland machine-made stains of the digital print with the ancient hand-made textures of woodcut.
Two-headed pigs, headless dogs and hybrid flora travel through Milojevic's mythical forests with a delightful sense of the imaginary that is breaking new ground in printmaking.
Milan Milojevic
Imaginary Worlds
Recent Prints
Port Jackson Press Gallery
7 October – 5 November 2006
Exhibition Catalogue
While researching the life of lord Byron in Venice in the late 1980's, Australian writer James Cowan discovered a journal containing tales of travel and reports of the exotic and unfamiliar in newly discovered lands written by sixteenth-century Monk and cartographer Fra Mauro. It revealed that Fra Mauro was engaged in the creation of a map of the world and that this was taking form from the contents of its pages. It also revealed that, having never ventured beyond the walls of his Monastery, Fra Mauro was giving form to a world he himself had not seen. His knowledge of the world was secondhand, gleaned from letters from roaming informants and visitors to his cell.
Cowan found that Fra Mauro soon came to the realization that his map was not entirely grounded in reality. It had strayed from being an objective depiction of the world, as he had originally intended, and had taken on another dimension – that of personal and cultural subjectivity. 1 What he ends up describing is how others have internalized their experience of the world – their encounters with strangeness, their experience of exile and their search for paradise.
One visitor to the Monastery, a Jewish man who had fled his home in Rhodes, revealed to Fra Mauro that he was no longer sure if what he had seen with his own eyes was the result of outward or inner impressions.2 Fra Mauro observed this to be the result of his sense of displacement, that having been ‘separated from his origins as both a man and a Jew, he had discovered in his rootlessness how to inhabit a region of his own mind.3
Fra Mauro's map, inspired by the lived experiences of others, was drawing drom an imaginary realm. However, its artifice was not soley the work of his informants; it was equally his own projection as he too stated that he had no way of knowing whether he was reflecting the earth's existence or his own.4
Cowan's particular fascination with this discovery was bound to Fra Mauro's intimation of ‘the possibility of making a journey to the very limits of the way we imagine our world' and to the idea of ‘an invisible geography affecting the way we think about place', and this led to his translation of this medieval journal in his book A Mapmaker's Dream .5
Milan Milojevic's work presented in Imaginary Worlds also explores the world as it is constructed in the mind. Driven by his own experience as a first-generation Australian born of German and Yugoslav parents, he looks to determine his own location in the world, positioned as he is between and within different cultures. This work draws from mythology, fiction and truth, and describes an imaginary geography and its inhaditants, giving form to fictitious creatures and live-out the struggle inherent in hybrid identities on the very surface of their being.
Constructed from an array of incompatible body parts and second skins, Milojevic's beasts and their habitat remind one of the imagery produced during eighteenth century scientific voyages of discovery, where the artist, employed to faithfully observe and record, clearly struggled to find the visual language with which to objectively render their first encounter with unknown and highly curious species. Depictions of the Kangaroo half rodent-like for example, while clearly suffering from the artists' lack of familiarity with the animal and the lack of any artistic precedent, employed what was known rather than what was seen as a strategy for dealing with difference. Here, as in Milojevic's prints, the boundary between outer and inner worlds also starts to give way.
While Milojevic's beasts are not of this world, they are nonetheless revealing of his experience of the world and thus reinforce the subjectivity of experience in all of us. As an exploration of the unfixed and multi-faceted nature of identity, his work is testimony to the negotiation of the conflict between language, culture and history that he and others who share in this cross-cultural positioning face. Furthermore it gives rise to the question: how does one give form to the space created by the difference between cultures?
Dr Karen Lunn is an artist and Associate Lecturer in printmaking at The Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania .
- Cowan, James A Mapmaker's Dream, Sydney , Random House, 1997, p.59
- Cowan, p.28
- Cowan, p.27
- Cowan, p.61
- Cowan, pp. 150-151
Milan Milojevic
Imaginary Worlds
Recent Prints
Port Jackson Press Gallery
7 October – 5 November 2006
Exhibition Catalogue
While researching the life of lord Byron in Venice in the late 1980's, Australian writer James Cowan discovered a journal containing tales of travel and reports of the exotic and unfamiliar in newly discovered lands written by sixteenth-century Monk and cartographer Fra Mauro. It revealed that Fra Mauro was engaged in the creation of a map of the world and that this was taking form from the contents of its pages. It also revealed that, having never ventured beyond the walls of his Monastery, Fra Mauro was giving form to a world he himself had not seen. His knowledge of the world was secondhand, gleaned from letters from roaming informants and visitors to his cell.
Cowan found that Fra Mauro soon came to the realization that his map was not entirely grounded in reality. It had strayed from being an objective depiction of the world, as he had originally intended, and had taken on another dimension – that of personal and cultural subjectivity. 1 What he ends up describing is how others have internalized their experience of the world – their encounters with strangeness, their experience of exile and their search for paradise.
One visitor to the Monastery, a Jewish man who had fled his home in Rhodes, revealed to Fra Mauro that he was no longer sure if what he had seen with his own eyes was the result of outward or inner impressions.2 Fra Mauro observed this to be the result of his sense of displacement, that having been ‘separated from his origins as both a man and a Jew, he had discovered in his rootlessness how to inhabit a region of his own mind.3
Fra Mauro's map, inspired by the lived experiences of others, was drawing drom an imaginary realm. However, its artifice was not soley the work of his informants; it was equally his own projection as he too stated that he had no way of knowing whether he was reflecting the earth's existence or his own.4
Cowan's particular fascination with this discovery was bound to Fra Mauro's intimation of ‘the possibility of making a journey to the very limits of the way we imagine our world' and to the idea of ‘an invisible geography affecting the way we think about place', and this led to his translation of this medieval journal in his book A Mapmaker's Dream .5
Milan Milojevic's work presented in Imaginary Worlds also explores the world as it is constructed in the mind. Driven by his own experience as a first-generation Australian born of German and Yugoslav parents, he looks to determine his own location in the world, positioned as he is between and within different cultures. This work draws from mythology, fiction and truth, and describes an imaginary geography and its inhaditants, giving form to fictitious creatures and live-out the struggle inherent in hybrid identities on the very surface of their being.
Constructed from an array of incompatible body parts and second skins, Milojevic's beasts and their habitat remind one of the imagery produced during eighteenth century scientific voyages of discovery, where the artist, employed to faithfully observe and record, clearly struggled to find the visual language with which to objectively render their first encounter with unknown and highly curious species. Depictions of the Kangaroo half rodent-like for example, while clearly suffering from the artists' lack of familiarity with the animal and the lack of any artistic precedent, employed what was known rather than what was seen as a strategy for dealing with difference. Here, as in Milojevic's prints, the boundary between outer and inner worlds also starts to give way.
While Milojevic's beasts are not of this world, they are nonetheless revealing of his experience of the world and thus reinforce the subjectivity of experience in all of us. As an exploration of the unfixed and multi-faceted nature of identity, his work is testimony to the negotiation of the conflict between language, culture and history that he and others who share in this cross-cultural positioning face. Furthermore it gives rise to the question: how does one give form to the space created by the difference between cultures?
Dr Karen Lunn is an artist and Associate Lecturer in printmaking at The Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania .
- Cowan, James A Mapmaker's Dream, Sydney , Random House, 1997, p.59
- Cowan, p.28
- Cowan, p.27
- Cowan, p.61
- Cowan, pp. 150-151
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